Alaska Man Arrested for Threatening Supreme Court Justices and Calling for ‘Mass Assassinations’

This morning, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest and indictment of an Alaska man for allegedly threatening to injure and kill six U.S. Supreme Court justices and some of their family members. According to court documents, between March 10, 2023, and July 16, 2024, Panos Anastasiou, age 76, sent more than 465 messages to the Supreme Court through a public website the court maintained.

“Six U.S. Supreme Court justices” should be your first clue as to the worldview of this nut job. The language in Anastasiou’s messages is horrific, with many references to lynching, specific descriptions of the torture he wanted to inflict on the justices, and insisting that assassinating the justices would be patriotic.

The indictment does not specify which justices he threatened, but we can read between the lines, particularly in his message sent on May 17, 2024. Pardon the language:

“I’m going to call and urge my fellow Vietnam veterans… to drive by the [Supreme Court Justice 2]’shouse with their AR15’s and when f***ing [Supreme Court Justice 2]and his f***ing PIECE OF S*** C*** WIFE are HOME spray the home of these disrespectful mother f*****s with hundreds of rounds… hopefully killing these SCUMBAG C*********S. Hopefully N*****[Supreme Court Justice 1]and his white trailer trash n*****loving insurrectionist wife are visiting.”

Or his message sent on July 1, 2024:

“ASSASSINATING THESE C*********S IS THE ONLY PANACEA… that includes the CONVICTED CRIMINAL, [Former President 1]. Again as an AMERICAN and to defend the constitution and democracy I want the assassinations by any ENTITY of the government or even a PATRIOTIC AMERICAN to commence. And PLEASE start with the assassination of the N*****and HERMAPHRODITE. As a Vietnam veteran and if I had the means and way I’d assassinate them myself. These f*****s are NOT ABOVE THE LAW.”

I think you can figure out who “[Former President 1]” is. Two days later, he sent a message declaring, “WE NEED MASS ASSASSINATIONS.”

This guy does not seem like a MENSA candidate, sending the extremely explicit and specific threats to the Supreme Court website and daring the justices to visit him after the FBI came to interview him about the messages.

According to a court filing, the US Supreme Court Police reviewed Anastasiou’s messages in the spring of 2023 and found them concerning enough to warrant an investigation. After FBI agents in Anchorage contacted Anastasiou about the messages, he allegedly sent another one referencing the interview “and ‘daring’ the Justices to personally visit his house.”

Among hard-core lefties on social media, there’s been an odd insistence that both would-be assassins of Donald Trump were, on some technical level, Republicans, pointing to old voter registrations or past social-media comments. The Butler shooter sounds like a garden-variety angry young nut who was perfectly happy to assassinate either Joe Biden or Trump — read the FBI special agent in charge describing his web searches — and the Palm Beach would-be shooter may have once supported Trump but had turned into a fervent, unhinged opponent of him and an ActBlue donor. This insistence that Trump’s would-be assassins must be Republicans reflects a worldview that all good, and only good, must reside on the left side of the spectrum, and that all bad, and only bad, must reside on the right side of the spectrum.

But there is left-wing violent extremism in this world, just as there is right-wing violent extremism in this world. Some frothing-at-the-mouth rageaholic up in Alaska is just further grim proof of the former.