On Saturday, Breitbart News contributor Ken Klukowski wrote a story claiming that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito “has reportedly been moved to an undisclosed location for safety, after leftwing radicals attempting to intimidate conservative justices for considering overruling Roe v. Wade… listed conservative justices’ home addresses online.”
This story seemed to have been sourced partly from Ilya Shapiro (a Georgetown Law School senior lecturer) who had spoken in a few of interviews including one on Fox News about a “rumor” he’d heard about Alito and his family allegedly having to go into hiding after the outrage mobs threatened to (and eventually did) descend on the private homes of some of the conservative Supreme Court Justices including Alito’s.
Alito, as readers will recall, was the Justice who wrote the draft majority opinion that leaked last Monday in which it was declared that “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled.”
It was reported that the story was so frightening by multiple conservative-leaning sites, such as Townhall.com. The reporters were also bull-horned further by Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, prominent Republican Senators.
For that same reason, smug legacy media outlets like the Washington Post and The Politico (along with their allies at the left-wing Media Matters website) eagerly sought to discredit the story because the idea that a Justice was in the level of danger it would require to shuttle him and his loved ones to an undisclosed location would not convey pro-abortion protesters as the “compassionate liberals” the MSM wants readers and viewers to think they are.
These headlines give an indication of how desperate the reporters were to discredit the rumor.
WaPo – How baseless rumor about Alito and ‘undisclosed location’ spread
Media are important – Right-wing media manufactures rumors of Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito going into hiding
Yahoo News – Fox News hosts and Republican lawmakers are pushing a baseless rumor that Justice Alito has gone into hiding for his safety
Business Insider – Fox News baselessly rumors that Alito has gone into hiding for safety
In the WaPo’s piece, noted Democrat apologist “reporter” Aaron Blake referenced Townhall web editor Rebecca Downs a number of times, including in a tweet she wrote in response to Students for Life America president Kristan Hawkins, who also shared the rumor. This amplification led to Downs being subjected to a torrent of harassment online and threats by The Usual Suspects, who apparently were struggling with how they were going about intimidating conservative Justices.
Katie Pavlich, Townhall.com’s editor, updated this story and said that Alito was not at home.
. @RebeccarosegoldI have been receiving threatening phone calls from people who reported that Justice Alito needed to move out of his home following the Roe-v. Wade leak. Tonight, I spoke to someone who claimed that Justice Alito isn’t home. A local police official also confirmed that he needed to go.
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) May 11, 2022
Downs tweeted the same news:
The harassment, voicemail threats, and phone calls to harass me over the past few days have been a constant occurrence. This was also highlighted negatively by WaPo (POLITICO) and MeidasTouch (among others). Because I was truthful in reporting on the “reports”, and, lo and behold! https://t.co/K9jPK1BNNp
— Rebecca Downs (@RebeccaRoseGold) May 11, 2022
As far Blake and all the other so-called “reporters” who sneered at the reporting from conservative websites on the Alito rumor – which as it turned out had a lot more validity than a lot of “reporting” that comes out of the likes of the WaPo, there have been no updates to their stories as of this writing, although the word “baseless” has – conveniently – disappeared from the Washington Post’s story page without explanation.
Also left unexplained by the WaPo is why the majority of Americans who distrust the media should nevertheless trust them over conservative news websites, considering the WaPo’s – and other legacy media outlets like CNN, for instance – routine overblowing or manufacturing of “scandals” about Republicans out of whole cloth. Sadly, it appears they haven’t yet gotten the memo.
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