TPM’s Kate Riga reviews Mollie Hemingway’s new book on the right wing firebrand Justice and it’s so revealing:
At first glance, Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway’s Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution is certainly delusional, but not in a way that’s particularly interesting or insightful for a MAGA movement rooted in a cult of personality.
The hagiography of the Court’s most openly partisan archconservative, premised on insider access to the justices and those in their orbit, reads like the gushing raptures of a K-pop stan.
“Years before the attacks on the Court intensified and conservative justices could still be seen in public, Justice Alito and his wife attempted to get brunch in New Haven, Connecticut, after a speaking event at Yale. Turned away because of a long line and lack of reservation, they ‘calmly walked away and went down the street,’” she writes, his not forcing himself into a packed restaurant apparent proof of a rare moral rectitude.
But as I reread, the humor in her labored attempts to dredge up proof of the curmudgeonly justice’s humanity — his devotion to the Phillies does much of the heavy lifting — curdled into something much darker.
Hemingway seeds her book with the omnipresent threat of leftist violence from its opening pages, where her treatment of anti-Kavanaugh protesters (with no mention of why they were protesting his nomination) puts them on par with the January 6 insurrectionists.
“One woman scaled the gigantic statue Contemplation of Justice on the left side of the main steps and perched, first raised, on the marble lap of the seated female figure. The activist later justified her lawbreaking by declaring, ‘This is our court, these are our steps, these are our institutions!’” she writes.
That harrowing anecdote, page 3, is around where her examples of left-wing violence untether from reality completely.
Right. A woman scaling a statue and claiming the court belongs to the people is far worse than beating up police, and storming the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power, not to mention the chanting of “hang Mike Pence” with a gallows conveniently assembled outside on the lawn. Certainly the fact that the president of the United States invited them to do it no big deal compared to the alleged leftist violence that has Republicans terrified of being dragged from their beds and lynched on the spot.
Riga totally gets it:
Paeans to Alito’s brilliance and humility can only produce so much juice; this book, like the MAGA movement, needs at least the threat of violence to justify its sense of being under siege.
In her telling, the still mysterious leak of Alito’s Dobbs opinion, which would overturn Roe v. Wade, is less a shocking piercing of the Court’s well-insulated bubble and more an open declaration of war on the conservative justices.
“Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome,” she writes, straight-faced.
Fergawdsakes. Get over yourself Mollie.
She actually goes on to name the liberal clerks she suspects are the ones who leaked it. Nice.
Alito is a far right ideologues badly infected with Fox New brain rot, barely able to contain himself. His wife can’t. To paint him as the middle of the road, dispassionate jurist battling the forces of far-left extremism is kind of hilarious. But it’s a perfect example of how they think.