SAN FRANCISCO (TND) — San Francisco officials on Saturday took down a flag from its city hall flown by some protesters during the Jan. 6, 2021 riots.
The city replaced the flag, which featured a pine tree with the motto “An Appeal to Heaven,” with an American flag. Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for the San Francisco mayor's office, told The National Desk (TND) the decision stemmed from the "An Appeal to Heaven" flag being recently "adopted to represent a different meaning by extremists who led the insurrection."
This was an abhorrent and disgraceful moment in our Country’s history that threatened the very fabric of our democracy and continues to affect those who lived through the violence and the assault on our fundamental values," Cretan said.Cretan noted there is no legislative requirement pertaining to removing the flag. He told TND the city also removed the Confederate flag after it was raised in 1964.
Some Jan. 6 rioters flew the flag to support former President Donald Trump’s efforts to protest the results of the 2020 presidential election. The flag dates back to 1775, when George Washington commissioned the symbol to fly on ships intercepting British vessels, according to former Vice President Mike Pence. The motto's origin purportedly traces back to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, when he outlined a right to revolution.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s New Jersey vacation house flew the flag in 2023. In response to calls to recuse himself from cases surrounding the Jan. 6 riots, Alito said his wife raised it without his knowledge of its connection to the protests.
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“She may have mentioned that it dates back to the American Revolution, and I assumed she was flying it to express a religious and patriotic message,” the justice wrote to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. “She did not fly it to associate herself with that or any other group, and the use of an old historic flag by a new group does not necessarily drain that flag of all other meanings.”
Sen. Durbin, who is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, argued Alito’s refusal to recuse shows why the Supreme Court needs a code of conduct.
“The Committee has been conducting a thorough investigation into years of ethical lapses by some justices on the Supreme Court,” he said. “At the end of the day, the Chief Justice can end this spiraling decline in America’s confidence in our highest Court by taking decisive action to establish a credible code of conduct.”
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