Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said something terrifying, infuriating, and obviously true. The subsequent online reactions have ranged from baffling to horrendous, highlighting the failure of our media in reporting facts that cut against their own biases.
Alito on Wednesday spoke about the May leak of the Dobbs decision, in which the six conservative justices struck down Roe v. Wade, thus throwing the abortion issue to elected legislatures. Alito said: “The leak also made those of us who were thought to be in the majority and supportive of overruling Roe and Casey targets for assassination because it gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us, and we know that a man has been charged with attempting to kill Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh.”
DEMOCRATS’ VERY BAD DEBATE NIGHT
The reaction in media and social media ranged from disbelief to: “Well, you deserved it.”
Here, the liberal Talking Points Memo slaps the word “claims” on Alito’s statement.
Washington Post: Alito claims leak of abortion opinion made majority ‘targets for assassination’ https://t.co/fqk1DtieKM
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) October 26, 2022
Here are large-following or blue-check accounts attacking Alito for saying this.
Play the victim to reclaim the moral high ground.
Pathetic.https://t.co/eYi202cGXO
— ?? John Anthony Castro (@realJohnACastro) October 26, 2022
JFC can this guy be any more annoying?
Sam Alito—who destroyed our reproductive rights—said the leak of his draft overturning Roe made him & his ChristoFascist colleagues “targets for assassination”
Gimme a break
The only ones getting killed are the women & girls you betrayed
— Lindy Li (@lindyli) October 26, 2022
Many people don’t understand why Alito specifically blamed the leak.
Yeah, it’s the leak that made people angry. Not the loss of bodily autonomy
— ??????’? ??? ? ??? (@FreeGirlNowNYC) October 26, 2022
The ubiquity of these responses, doubting that the leak led to assassination attempts, reflects a media failure. The major media largely ignored the horrifying story here: After the leak but before the decision, a left-wing man traveled from California to the Washington, D.C., area with the stated intention of assassinating Supreme Court justices in order to try and prevent Dobbs and thus save Roe.
Left-wing extremist Nicholas John Roske wrote his intentions online: “im gonna stop roe v wade from being overturned.”
An interlocutor asked, “What u tryna do[?]” Roske responded, “Remove some people from the supreme court.”
His original plan was to assassinate three justices, but at a minimum, he “could get at least one, which would change the votes for decades to come.”
Again, “change the votes.” He actually said that.
He flew to D.C. and then made his way to Kavanaugh’s neighborhood with “a black tactical chest rig and tactical knife, a Glock 17 pistol with two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, screwdriver, nail punch, crowbar, pistol light, duct tape, hiking boots with padding on the outside of the soles, and other items,” according to a federal indictment.
The evidence paints a clear picture: Roske learned of the leaked draft and decided that he could save Roe by assassinating Kavanaugh and maybe two other justices.
So, yes, unless the facts in the federal indictment are wrong, the leak of the draft led directly to an assassination attempt.
The left-leaning major news media gave very little attention to this story at the time.
12 days ago, an armed man was arrested outside Brett Kavanaugh’s house. @NYTimes ran 1 story on it, mentioned it in passing twice in conjunction w/ articles on Supreme Court security legislation, zero on the indictment & one opinion writer has mentioned the assassination attempt.
— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) June 20, 2022
And the scant media attention there was elided over the details, offering only vague claims that Roske planned the assassination because he was “upset” about the forthcoming ruling. The result is what we see on social media today: Liberals disbelieving reality — in this case, the totally true statement by Alito.
