When the far-left protests outside the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices, the media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) think that's freedom of speech in action. The Washington Post published a puff piece on a woman disturbing the peace outside Brett Kavanaugh's home: "We’re about to get doomsday, so I’m not going to be civil to that man at all.” The Trump era made disturbing conservative dinners at restaurants a tactic that's "not going away."
But turn the target around to Biden's Secretary of State, and Politico on Friday found an "ugly" protest trend:
Antony Blinken’s Family Is the Latest Target of Washington’s Ugliest Protest Trend
Yelling at Antony Blinken’s kids does not help Gazan children.
Under a photo of women pouring out plastic gallon jugs with red liquid in it, the caption reads: "Hazami Barmada (left), holding her one-year-old son, Kayden, and Fatima Showkatian pour fake blood in front of a vehicle carrying Secretary of State Antony Blinken as it arrives at Blinken's home in McLean, Virginia, Feb. 14, 2024."
Michael Schaffer. a columnist for Politico's Magazine staff, set the scene:
“Entire neighborhoods have been bombed to the ground with children missing under rubble,” Hazami Barmada, the encampment’s organizer, told me. “Why are those children forced to understand the brutal, barbaric realities of war, when his children should be sanitized from it?”
As the car carrying the kids rolled up, the group took their places. Some shouted: “YOUR FATHER IS A BABY KILLER!” Some waved signs: “WAR CRIMINAL BLOODY BLINKEN LIVES HERE.” Another poster featured a blown-up image of an old Blinken tweet of him and Ryan holding the children as infants. It was annotated with a chilling stat from the Gaza war: “10,000+ fathers have lost their children.”
Schaffer does acknowledge in this article that this happened to Trump cabinet members and conservative Supreme Court justices, and that "The great majority of these demonstrations involve progressive causes like the environment, abortion rights and opposition to the Gaza war." But he makes no attempt to fact-check the idea that Israel is committing "genocide" or that Blinken's supporting "genocide."
We should note this isn't he first time Michael Schaffer expressed his distaste for protesters outside homes. But the headline under a July 2022 article was different: "The Real Reason Washington Ignored Kavanaugh’s Would-Be Killer." This was about Nicholas Roske, who arrived in Justice Brett Kavanaugh's neighborhood with the intention of killing him. Most of that article was a lecture about how right-wing media critics clumsily oversold the idea that this shooting-Kavanaugh story was underplayed. But he also wrote:
It’s also easy to miss how much of a change this represents. Until quite recently, the norm in Washington was that everybody got to be a civilian sometimes, going out to dinner or walking the dog in peace. This had its downsides (it surely abetted the bubble-thinking of the establishment) but it also meant that moments of intimidation or threat were truly shocking.
This change is dangerous, whether or not the Kavanaugh gunman was.
