Two weeks ago, someone called police to report gunshots at the home of Justice Barrett. The call was a hoax—a swatting attempt designed to send an armed law enforcement response to the justice’s residence. Local officers coordinated with the Supreme Court police detail assigned to her home and quickly determined the report was fictitious. No one was hurt.
This time. But swatting is not merely a prank—at minimum it constitutes serious harassment, and it triggers a rapid law enforcement response that can easily turn deadly.
Yet just this week, Senator Raphael Warnock—an ordained minister—sat down with The New York Times for a lengthy interview and accused the Supreme Court of “commit[ting] violence against the ways in which ordinary people can have a voice in our system.” He was reacting to the Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. He characterized Chief Justice Roberts as someone who “despises the Voting Rights Act.”
Did Senator Warnock know what just happened to Justice Barrett when he gave that interview? Did he care? Saying that the Court “committed violence” in a ruling you disagree with for political reasons is exactly the type of irresponsible rhetoric that has put several of the justices in harm’s way.
Such rhetoric goes back years. Remember Senator Chuck Schumer in 2020, howling in front of the Supreme Court to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price! You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” But the pattern of intimidation, threats, and attacks against the justices has only grown worse since the Dobbs leak. And we cannot forget how Justice Barrett’s address became public knowledge in the first place: The pro-abortion group “Ruth Sent Us” doxxed the Republican-appointed justices after that leak. The Biden Justice Department, led by Merrick Garland, did absolutely nothing to hold Ruth Sent Us or other extremist groups accountable for their doxxing and protests outside the six conservative justices’ homes. That abdication of law enforcement responsibility created the conditions we live with today.
Since Dobbs, the pattern has been relentless: protesters descending on justices’ neighborhoods; an armed man arrested outside Justice Kavanaugh’s home carrying a pistol, knife, zip ties, and burglary tools with intent to kill him; an Alaska man who pleaded guilty to sending over 465 threatening messages calling for the murder and torture of six justices and their families. As Mike Fragoso wrote, the message behind every one of these tactics is simple: “Rule the wrong way and we’ll make your life miserable.”
The campaign against the justices goes beyond physical threats. It has metastasized into a coordinated effort to destroy the professional lives of their family members as well. The recent baseless attacks on Justice Alito’s son Phil’s work at the Treasury Department follow the same playbook as the scurrilous post-Dobbs campaigns against the spouses of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett—talented lawyers in their own right—designed to make firms and clients think twice about doing business with them. That is economic lawfare, and its purpose is identical to the swatting call: to make serving on the Supreme Court so personally and professionally costly that good people simply refuse to do it.
The Left’s intimidation campaign targeting the Court’s Republican-appointed justices is a fundamental threat to judicial independence. The attacks have only gotten worse since Dobbs. It is on all of us to stand up against these attacks—and to lower the temperature before someone gets hurt.