The recent stealth interview with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was shameful—not for what Alito said, which was fairly innocuous, but for how the interview was obtained, how Alito’s statements were edited and interpreted, and, especially how the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and other mainstream media outlets chose to play it.

At the center of this tawdry episode is Lauren Windsor, whose Wikipedia bio does indeed evoke a rolling stone: political consultant, film documentarian, liberal activist, and “advocacy journalist.” Her m.o. as an “advocacy journalist” is to secretly tape conversations with conservative public figures while pretending to share their views.

Windsor’s most notorious “get” occurred on June 3, when she crashed the Supreme Court Historical Society’s fiftieth-anniversary party in Washington, D.C. During cocktail hour she ingratiated herself first with Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, and later with Chief Justice John Roberts by pretending to be a pro-life conservative Catholic. The private conversations with the two Justices were brief. They were also surreptitiously recorded and subsequently posted in edited versions on Windsor’s YouTube page. From there they were picked up by Rolling Stone and eventually by a host of media outlets including the Washington Post, CNN, NPR and the New York Times.

It’s a good thing for Ms. Windsor that her stunt took place in the nation’s capital. Had it occurred across the state line in Maryland (or ten other states), she could be found guilty of a criminal misdemeanor for recording a conversation without first obtaining the consent of the other party. Journalistic ethics demands no less.

Rolling Stone, claiming an exclusive, gave the deceitful interviews a slanted and misleading headline: “Justice Alito Caught on Tape Discussing How Battle for America ‘Can’t Be Compromised.’” In fact, as the audio recording demonstrates, Alito was pestered repeatedly by Windsor’s leading questions into commenting on a subject he didn’t want to talk about. The New York Times, writing about Windsor’s “interviews” a week later, topped its report with an equally misleading headline that pitted Alito against Roberts, as if the two Justices had been asked to explain their world views: “In Secret Recordings, Alito Endorses Nation of ‘Godliness.’ Roberts Talks of Pluralism.” In fact, the two justices were responding to very different questions. A follow-up feature story in the Times sought to tie Alito to “a broader Christian Movement,” but tripped on its own assumptions in the very first sentence: “It’s a phrase not commonly associated with legal doctrine: returning America ‘to a place of godliness.’” Alito did not discuss anything remotely related to legal doctrine, and “godliness” was Windsor’s word, not his.

I intend no brief on behalf of Samuel Alito’s jurisprudence. But I but I do recognize when quotes are harvested to gratify ideological expectations. This incident deserves attention as a classic case of all involved wanting to publish a story where none exists. Listening on YouTube to the edited recordings—Windsor has so far refused to release the unedited versions—it is clear that she was pressing both Justices with loaded questions, and that Roberts shrewdly if politely brushed her off. Pressed by Windsor to agree that the court should put the country on a “moral path,” the Chief Justice replies by questioning the questioner: “Would you want me to put the country on a moral path? That’s for people we elect. That’s not for lawyers.”

Not satisfied with that answer, Windsor tries another tack. She pretends that she believes that the United States is “a Christian nation” and that the Supreme Court should be “guiding us in that path.” Roberts disagrees, and after noting that America is also home to Jews and Muslims, he declares, “It’s not our job to do that. It’s our job to decide cases the best we can.”

Alito was more forbearing. Asked about the nation’s raging culture wars, he remarked that “once side or the other is going to win.” He also expresses the hope that “there can be a way of working, a way of living peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”

Not getting what she’s after, Windsor presses on. “I think that the solution really is like winning the moral argument,” she prompts. “Like, people in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that, to return our country to a place of godliness.” “I agree with you, I agree with you,” Alito replies, sounding for all the world like a party guest desperately trying to escape the drunk who won’t get out of his face. Perhaps Alito had begun to suspect that he wasn’t talking to a Catholic after all. Catholics readily talk about holiness, especially in saints, but “godliness” is nineteenth-century Protestant lingo.

What went unreported in Rolling Stone—as well as in the subsequent articles in the Times, the Post, and elsewhere—was the following exchange:

Windsor: “I think it’s taking us to the brink, you know, of very serious, perhaps, like, un-repairable rifts in the country. And I for one am someone, like—I support your ruling on Dobbs, I support, like—I am very prolife, but, like, you know, I don’t know how we bridge that gap. You know, like, how do we get people…”

 

Alito: “I wish I knew. I wish I knew. I don’t know. It’s not—I don’t think it’s something we[the Supreme Court] can do.”

 

Windsor: “But the court can’t do anything to—”

 

Alito: “We have a very defined role. We need to do what we’re supposed to do, but this is a bigger problem. This is way above us. So I wish I knew the answer. I really do.”

Chief Justice Roberts used fewer words, but they both said making America moral again is not the business of the court.

Who is Lauren Windsor, really? The short answer is this: she is what happens when anyone with a digital recorder or a smartphone can claim to be a journalist. On “The Undercurrent,” her YouTube page, Windsor calls her long-term “undercover” project “Gonzo Democracy.” But this project would have no relevance without the cooperation of journalistic organizations that pretend to higher ethical standards.

For example, at the end of its initial article about the  Alito-Roberts recordings, the Times appended opinions from two experts on media ethics, both of whom thought the way Windsor operated failed to meet accepted journalistic standards. Was the Times trying to have it both ways by exploiting the results of a faux journalist’s deceitful ploy while covering its own ethical behind? We know the editors of the Times are aware of Windsor’s history of stealth interviews. In an admiring profile published in 2021, a Times writer described her as “a liberal activist who has turned a hidden camera, a Tennessee drawl and a knack for disarming her targets with words of sympathetic conservatism into a loaded political weapon.” The profile recounts how Windsor has “duped” various Republican office holders into saying what they might not otherwise want to say in public. And while the Times writer admits that “her methods fall beyond the pale of mainstream journalism, where reporters generally shy away from assuming false identities and secretly recording conversations,” the article contrasts her work favorably with Project Veritas, a conservative stealth group that preys on progressives using similar ruses. Might there be moral equivalence between two organizations deploying the same tactics? Not to the Times, which dismisses Project Veritas as a “gotcha squad.” The implication of both this profile and the Times article that piggybacks on Windsor’s recorded conversations with the Justices is that, while the Times would never use such sneaky methods itself, but it is willing to indulge those who use them for the right cause. With enablers like these, Lauren Windsor has nothing to fear from real-world journalism.

Which brings us back to Samuel Alito and what he had to say about the nation’s “culture wars.” He did not endorse cultural warfare; he merely acknowledged that it exists. And although the term “culture wars” has become a hoary journalistic cliché, its original meaning speaks powerfully to the present moment and is worth recovering.

The term originated as the title of a 1991 book by the distinguished sociologist James Davison Hunter. For Hunter, America’s cultural warfare is rooted in the tensions between conflicting systems of moral understanding and the authority on which those systems rest. At one conceptual extreme are those who regard moral values as objective and transcendent. At the other are those who understand values to be subjective and malleable depending on the reigning zeitgeist. In practice, Hunter recognized, most Americans were a mix of both.

In Secular Surge, published in 2021, three political scientists put recent data on the bones of Hunter’s concepts. Political polarization, they argue, follows a “fault line” separating religious from “secularist” Americans. Secularists—defined as those who explicitly affirm their non-religiosity, as opposed to “Nones” who are simply individuals practicing no religion)—represent 41 per cent of all Democrats, according to their data, and a clear majority (57 percent) of white Democrats. Most Secularists also tend to be better educated, more liberal, and more ideologically driven than other members of the contemporary Democratic coalition.

So yes, it should be obvious that religion and opposition to it are woven into the nation’s current cultural conflicts. Deep-seated values, with very different sources, are at stake. That party affiliations now track these differences so closely makes this election cycle particularly fraught, especially with the antic presence of Donald Trump. But no one needs to be tricked into acknowledging these facts—or shamed for doing so. Meanwhile, the blinding fierceness of the nation’s deep-seated social and political divisions that we need more, not less, rigorous ethics and restraint in the practice of journalism. We need real reporters doing real reporting, not activists out to mug their enemies.