Had a black-clad, right-wing nut traveled across the country with firearms and tactical gear, burglary tools, and padded boots, hoping to assassinate Justice Sonia Sotomayor at her home at 1 a.m., the incident would be the only topic of media coverage, even now, weeks after the fact.
https://twitter.com/JerylBier/status/1538846699820658688The fact that many major outlets have brushed this very serious assassination attempt under the rug is more than just a depressing instance of media bias. It’s frankly shocking — yes, they tried to assassinate a justice, but it was a justice we don’t like very much, so it almost doesn’t count.
Setting aside this galling exhibition of our cultural collapse, it’s important to focus on an aspect of this story that has been largely ignored: What was the would-be assassin trying to do?
The Washington Post has a fairly typical description: “Roske was upset by the leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion, supported by Kavanaugh, signaling that the court could be positioned to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
The New York Times puts it this way: “Mr. Roske told the police that he was upset about the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and about a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion suggesting that the justices were poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that guarantees the right to an abortion.”
But I think being upset that Kavanaugh was siding with conservatives on babies and guns is not the most likely motivation here.
In addition to mentioning the leaked Dobbs draft opinion, the FBI’s affidavit states that “ROSKE indicated that he believed the Justice that he intended to kill would side with Second Amendment decisions that would loosen gun control laws. ROSKE stated that he began thinking about how to give his life a purpose and decided that he would kill the Supreme Court Justice.”
So Roske was considering future gun cases. And there’s no reason to believe Roske saw Dobbs in the rearview mirror either — as something to be simply “upset” about, like a blown call by an umpire in last Sunday’s game. A draft of the Dobbs opinion had been leaked, but the decision had not (and still has not) been issued. There could be a 5-to-4 vote to strike down Roe. The most reasonable assumption, then, is not that Roske was venting anger about past events or court decisions but that he was trying to change the outcome of future decisions, including Dobbs. By killing Kavanaugh, he hoped to render the vote 4 to 4, thus saving Roe v. Wade.
That is how this crime would “give his life a purpose.” He’d be saving, in the Times’s wording, “the landmark 1973 decision that guarantees the right to an abortion.”
None of the major liberal outlets have entertained this motivation, to my knowledge. But they should, because it shows the depths of our cultural sickness.
