Amid the Senate confirmation hearings for President Joe Biden’s radical U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson this week, the left has been working overtime to take down Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, and it’s obvious why: The Missouri Republican’s questions about Jackson’s lenient track record on child porn offenders threaten Democrats’ goal of transforming the high court into a bench of reliable leftist activists.
Even before Jackson’s confirmation hearings officially began on Monday, the left’s information operation designed to discredit Hawley for daring to question Biden’s self-admitted affirmative action pick ramped up. When Hawley pointed out that Jackson has a history of going easy on criminals who possessed and distributed child pornography, he was smeared by the propaganda press, White House, and Democrats.
“Judge Jackson has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policymaker. She’s been advocating for it since law school. This goes beyond ‘soft on crime.’ I’m concerned that this [is] a record that endangers our children,” Hawley tweeted last week.
Immediately, despite Republicans’ promises that they would maintain “a fair, thorough hearing” unlike the one given to now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the left rushed to accuse Hawley of maligning Jackson’s character and record.
Hawley told his colleagues during Monday’s hearing that he enjoyed his time talking with the “enormously thoughtful” and “enormously accomplished” Jackson. Yet the same dishonest outlets and Democrats who worked to destroy Kavanaugh’s life and chances of becoming a justice have teamed up to bury Hawley’s concerns despite his constitutional duty to evaluate presidential nominees to the Supreme Court.
As The Federalist’s Rachel Bovard noted, “Democrats are already claiming that Hawley’s critique of Jackson’s judicial record rises to the same level as, say, entertaining completely unverified gang-rape allegations against a Supreme Court nominee.”
Corrupt Media Takes Its Cue
The White House first signaled its desire for Hawley’s explosive tweets to go away last week when it claimed that Jackson’s scandalous treatment of child porn offenders was just “cherry-picked elements of her record out of context,” language later wielded against Hawley by The Washington Post.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki disparaged Hawley in her daily press briefing, and Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates called the evidence of Jackson’s “soft on crime” track record “toxic and weakly-presented misinformation.”
Bates also amplified a tweet from pro-Biden Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who accused Hawley of “going full QANON.”
It wasn’t long after the administration expressed disdain with Hawley that the corporate media piled on. Leftist media figures, from Joy Reid to the conspiracy theorists at The View, jumped at the opportunity to launch false, politically motivated attacks against a Republican who openly opposed their choice for the court.
The media insulted Hawley personally and even lied that his apprehensions about Jackson were “baseless” and stemmed from right-wing “extremism.”
Democrats Employ Press Propaganda
Even print outlets such as The Washington Post and National Review issued fake fact-checks that tried to rationalize lowering sentences and minimizing punishment for child porn offenders to make Hawley look bad. This negative Hawley coverage was in turn amplified by the White House and Senate Democrats.
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain tweeted WaPo’s article to justify calling Hawley’s worries “false attacks.”
This Vox article, which Bates tweeted, accused Hawley of “leveling a false and astonishing charge” against Jackson but later admitted that she “did, indeed, sentence these seven offenders to less time in prison than these sentencing guidelines recommend.”
CNN, Reason, and HuffPost used similar tactics to justify Jackson’s lenient sentencing history and attack Hawley. And even National Review pushed against Hawley in an article then used by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin and Democrat Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
“Judge, there have been several news organizations that have taken a look at the Senator from Missouri’s charges. ABC News, CNN News, The Washington Post and others have concluded that they are inaccurate and unfair to you in their conclusions. In fact, one writer has said they are ‘meritless‘ to the point of unacceptable levels,” Durbin claimed during the confirmation hearing on Tuesday.
Even before Jackson’s confirmation hearings began, the White House, Democrats, and the corrupt press were gearing up to take down and yell racist at anyone who scrutinized Biden’s nominee.
Hawley’s concerns are valid and deserve to be examined in Jackson’s confirmation hearings, but the left doesn’t like the opposition. When its foremost goal of radicalizing the nation’s highest court is threatened by Republicans digging up inconvenient information, it predictably resorts to coordinated attacks from Democrats and cronies in the media. Hawley is in the way, and so he must be flattened.