Media Blackout On ‘Alito’ Shows They Couldn’t Hate The Constitution More

Mollie Hemingway’s new book on Justice Samuel Alito, released last week, explosively revealed that the liberal justices on the Supreme Court intentionally delayed the release of the Dobbs decision — even as their conservative colleagues’ lives were at risk after the unprecedented leak of the majority opinion in May 2022.

The media outlets that feign concern about SCOTUS propriety and accountability — only insofar as it harms conservatives — have unsurprisingly shrugged off this clearly political behavior of the Democrat-appointed members of the high court. They don’t care that the liberal minority put their conservative colleagues’ lives at risk in a seeming attempt to preserve the so-called “right” to murder babies. In fact, they cheered the threats on.

According to Mollie Hemingway, the draft of the Dobbs majority opinion overturning the devastating abortion precedents of Roe and Casey was penned and circulated by Justice Samuel Alito by early February of 2022. Three whole months later, after a draft of the opinion was leaked, the three dissenting justices — Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — were reportedly still “nowhere near done” with the dissent. It had been months since they had the opinion — not to mention the 50 years they had to decide how they felt about Roe. Despite urging to get their dissents in after the leak, the liberals on the court slow-walked all the way to June 1.

However, that was not the end of the delay. As Hemingway noted, they included an “evil Easter egg” in the dissent — a footnote reference to another decision that was not yet released, thus delaying Dobbs by another three weeks. Meanwhile, the conservative majority faced angry protestors outside their homes, threats against their families and children, and a literal assassination attempt. Hemingway also reported how, although Justice Breyer was the “most willing” to speed things up for his colleagues’ sake, Justice Kagan “screamed” at him so loudly not to accommodate them that observers said the “wall was shaking.”

But you won’t find this story in legacy outlets that have previously rushed at the opportunity to perpetuate smear campaigns against the conservative justices they deem a “threat to democracy.”

Hemingway’s book, Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution, was released April 21. Many of the aforementioned bombshell details in the book were reported days earlier. More than a week later, a search of New York Times articles using keywords “Alito,” “Kagan,” “Dobbs decision,” and “Mollie Hemingway” on Friday morning revealed the outlet did not run a single headline on the explosive reporting between April 18 and May 1. There is, however, a headline from Wednesday smearing the conservative justices as “partisan” for their decision to effectively block unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. Notably, Hemingway’s book is already an NYT bestseller.

A search for the same keywords in Politico, CNN, and ProPublica revealed similar blackouts, although the censorship certainly goes far beyond them as well.

Targeted Hypocrisy

Although the media’s suppression of this major story is unsurprising, it is an important reminder of how these outlets operate on a double standard that not only benefits a left-wing agenda, but ultimately seeks to undermine the integrity of the Supreme Court. Democrats and their media friends have spent decades unabashedly smearing Supreme Court justices who don’t fit into their progressive molds. Within the last decade in particular, they have stopped at nothing, including disregarding common sense and reality, to smear them as predators, radicals, insurrectionists, or corrupt.

For Trump nominee Justice Brett Kavanaugh, it was the egregious rape hoax. The media relentlessly peddled unsubstantiated, salacious claims during his confirmation hearings that Kavanaugh had committed sexual assault — even though there was no proof he and his primary accuser actually ever met. Then came the allegations that, somehow, after “favorably” going through six FBI background checks, the husband, father of two, and former D.C. Circuit judge was “the secret leader of an underage gang rape cartel that roamed the streets of suburban Maryland.” Meanwhile, when Joe Biden, a presidential candidate at the time, was accused more credibly of sexual assault, outlets like the New York Times comparatively ignored it.

Mollie Hemingway helped expose the media for its role in perpetuating the hoax, although they have yet to be held accountable for their criminal conduct. As Hemingway indicated, the media’s effort to derail the confirmation of the Trump appointee and ensure the allegations follow him around forever reveals their ultimate goal was not just to harm Kavanaugh but to undermine “an originalist understanding of the Constitution” and “delegitimize the Supreme Court.”

This same goal is seen in how Clarence Thomas — who also endured questionable allegations against him during his confirmation back in the ’90s — was dragged by propaganda outlet ProPublica for having a rich friend or giving a perfectly normal speech at a nonprofit. Or the subject of Hemingway’s new book — Alito — who the NYT and other outlets painted as an insurrectionist following Jan. 6 because historic and otherwise widely flown flags were spotted at his private residences.

To the Times, et al., the fact that Alito’s wife flew an upside-down American flag at their Virginia home amid a tense standoff with a neighbor means the justice was prepared to overthrow the government. But Elena Kagan screaming at a colleague who was concerned about the safety of his co-justices is not news “fit to print.”

These outlets not-so-subtly seek to pressure originalist justices into recusing from particular cases where leftists did not want them to rule a certain way. More specifically, as evidenced by the Kavanaugh hoax, their clear aim is to undermine conservative legal philosophy that seeks to uphold the Constitution.

The double standard with which the media treats the liberal and the conservative justices has perhaps never been more evident than now, when major outlets like The New York Times have apparently decided to completely ignore the explosive report that the liberal justices were willing to put their colleagues’ lives at risk — seemingly for radical political reasons. But then again, why should we ever expect anything different from legacy media? After all, these same outlets were complicit in the “horrific” fallout of the Dobbs leak, essentially cheering on the protests and the threats against a conservative majority brave enough to side with the Constitution over activism.

Maisey Jefferson is a staff editor at The Federalist. She graduated from Gordon College in the greater Boston area with a degree in English and Professional Writing. You can follow her on X at @jeffermaisey.