Last week, the Justice Department announced that an Alaska man had been arrested and charged with threatening to torture and kill six Supreme Court justices and their family members. Which six is not difficult to guess, as Jim Geraghty’s piece excerpting some of the offender’s atrocious messages makes clear. By Attorney General Merrick Garland’s description, the motive of the culprit, Panos Anastasiou, was “to retaliate against” the justices “for decisions he disagreed with.”
Attempts to intimidate the Court have brought it to a dark place. Specifically, the six Republican-appointed justices have found themselves and their families in an increasingly dangerous environment over the last several years. I have discussed many times over this decades-long pattern of vilifying and threatening Supreme Court nominees and justices, including bone-chilling rhetoric spewed by Democratic senators like Chuck Schumer’s menacing words directed at Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh in 2020: “. . . You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
But I am in the minority.
Since the leak of the Dobbs decision in 2022, the intimidation has evolved into more than just words. We have witnessed illegal demonstrations at the homes of the conservative justices, protesters targeting Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s church and children’s school, and the necessity of stepping up the jurists’ personal security. The low points were the attempt to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh on June 8, 2022, and now this.
Yet the mainstream media has not had much to say about either episode apart from initial reporting of the incidents. The weekend following the Kavanaugh assassination attempt, the Sunday morning shows Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and This Week with George Stephanopoulos did not even mention the episode while Fox News Sunday stood apart for discussing it. This past weekend, the only one of those shows to mention the Anastasiou threats was This Week—briefly and without details as to which justices were targeted and why.
Contrast 60 Minutes, which ran a segment entitled “Attack on the Judiciary” in February 2021 that focused on an attack at the home of Esther Salas, a district judge, in which her son was murdered and her husband wounded. Prominent in the interview was the revelation that the killer had a dossier on Justice Sonia Sotomayor, suggesting a plot to kill her. CBS highlighted that aspect of the story—justifiably. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for plots against conservative justices to get the 60 Minutes treatment.
Coverage of today’s Supreme Court is mired in the cascade of pseudo-ethics attacks with journalists doing the bidding of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and organizations like Demand Justice. Incidents including assassination plots that do not help promote their left-wing agenda meanwhile recede into the background of news coverage. We are living in an age of malicious and shoddy Supreme Court reporting, and we can only pray that tragedy will not be the price the nation pays for it.