Over the last 18 months, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court have found themselves in the corporate media’s crosshairs. Justice Samuel Alito, in particular, has faced a coordinated attack from the left ever since he wrote the majority opinion that struck down Roe v. Wade.
Alito’s 2022 opinion was leaked to the media and published by Politico before the Court’s ruling striking down the nationwide abortion law. The justices’ addresses and personal information was shared online afterward and they needed increased security after threats from outraged abortion activists.
The attacks haven’t slowed in the two years since, though they have gotten sillier. Last month, leftist journalists demanded Alito recuse himself from all Trump-related cases because his wife flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside their vacation home. And this week, a liberal activist filmmaker working for Rolling Stone misrepresented herself as a religious conservative in order to gain access to Alito and his wife. Alito’s supposed bias revealed in her secret recordings is his admission that he is annoyed with the media, and that he believes that the country is divided by “fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”
“I marvel at all the nonsense that has been written about me the in the last year,” Alito said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last summer. After two years of nonstop attacks, Alito and Thomas are finally defending themselves and refusing to heed calls for their resignations or recusals from cases involving Jan. 6 or Donald Trump.
It’s good that the justices are speaking out. But conservatives need to understand that there is nothing to all the media stories concocting ethics complaints about the justices —they are simply being targeted by coordinated “oppo research” campaigns.
Oppo or “opposition research” is used in politics to destroy political enemies. Genuine ethical questions usually involve things like bribes and the abuse of power. Opposition researchers, on the other hand, find people you dated when you were 16 years old and get them to say nasty things about you. They then try and use those things to stir up controversy. They feed it to the media then try and personally destroy the targeted person to get them to step down from public life.
It baffles me that by now conservatives are still fooled by this tactic. They assume that where there is smoke, there must be fire—when the left makes the smoke up out of thin air.
I have been warning about the left’s plan to do this to the conservatives on the Court for more than five years. I first brought it up in 2018 while talking to an old friend over lunch in Georgetown. I had been oppo researched, almost to death, to prevent Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a high school friend of mine, from taking his seat on the Court. I told my friend that even though Brett made it, the oppo was just getting started. She laughed in my face. (She did not laugh when she read my account of the Kavanaugh hit in my book The Devil’s Triangle.)
Since then, I have spent hours, days, weeks, and months trying to warn the political right. They are going to go after the friends and family of the justices. They are going to dig up all kinds of nonsense. They are going to secretly record them.
MORE:
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-left-has-been-doing-oppo-research-on-conservative-justices-for-years/
