It’s not uncommon for America’s propaganda media to deploy personal attacks against their political opponents to achieve their desired outcome. But what is extraordinary — and particularly vile — is these bad actors exploiting their opponents’ children to do so.
That’s what happened on Tuesday when Washington Post reporter Julian Mark clearly attempted to use Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s kids to bully her into ruling against the Trump administration in an upcoming immigration case.
In his article titled, “A Supreme Court justice’s personal ties to Haiti highlight stakes in asylum case,” Mark noted the high court’s plans to hold oral arguments this week in consolidated cases Trump v. Miot and Noem v. Doe, which center around President Trump’s revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Syrian and Haitian migrants residing in the United States. The justices agreed to hear the cases after several activist judges blocked the president’s actions — despite SCOTUS pausing similar lower court injunctions.
Where Mark’s “reporting” crosses into outright left-wing activism is when he dragged Barrett’s two adopted children — both of whom are from Haiti — into the mix.
After noting the “violence and natural disasters” that have plagued Haiti and the origins of Barrett’s adopted kids, the Post lackey obviously tried to spin up a “controversy” where there is none. He suggested that, because Barrett adopted two of her seven children from Haiti, her “lived experience” will become a factor in how she handles the TPS issue.
Per usual, Mark deployed the media’s long-used tactic of citing “experts” and “scholars” to push such a narrative.
“Now Barrett will join her fellow justices in deciding whether the Trump administration can remove temporary immigration protections for 353,000 Haitian migrants, all given temporary status because of the earthquake and its aftermath,” Mark wrote. “It can be risky to predict a justice’s views of a case based on their life experiences. But some legal scholars argue that the role of justices’ lived experience is often given too little weight by court watchers.”
If you’re wondering what evidence there is to support the Post’s narrative, you won’t find it in Mark’s article. Unlike the Supreme Court’s Democrat appointees, who have clearly allowed their personal views to guide their actions on the bench, Barrett has been emphatic that judges must separate their own views from their judicial work.
“My office doesn’t entitle me to align the legal system with my moral or policy views,” Barrett wrote in her book Listening to the Law. “Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is. If I decide a case based on my judgment about what the law should be, I’m cheating.”
In case it wasn’t already obvious, Mark’s article isn’t about providing good-faith “reporting” on the TPS matter before SCOTUS. It’s about attacking Barrett and using her adopted children as a cudgel to bully the justice into giving the left the outcome it wants in Trump v. Miot.
We know this is true because Mark himself all but admits as much.
Several paragraphs into his piece, the Post writer openly admits that the way in which Barrett’s adopted children arrived in the United States isn’t even remotely related to the TPS issue at play in Trump v. Miot. While recognizing that the justice’s kids are U.S. citizens and the Haitian TPS holders are not, he noted that “[t]here are major differences in how Barrett’s children and the Haitian migrants covered by TPS entered the United States, and the laws governing international adoptions and TPS do not intersect” (emphasis added).
Once again using the media’s “But the experts say!” trope, Mark added, “But Barrett’s adoption of children from Haiti could play into how she approaches the case, according to academics who have studied Supreme Court justice behavior.”
There are only two reasons any legacy media “reporter” would feel the urge to tie Barrett’s adoption of Haitian-born children — a process which the Post acknowledges has no ties to the TPS issue — to the Trump v. Miot case. And neither of them is good.
The first is that, like its fellow media propagandists, the Post wants to undermine Barrett’s credibility in the eyes of the public. As the outlet paints it, by virtue of simply being the mother of two adopted kids from Haiti, she’s incapable of putting her personal views aside to execute her duties as a fair judge on matters involving Haitian migrants.
The second — and most obvious — is that the Post is leveraging Barrett’s “lived experience” to pressure her into ruling in favor of thousands of foreign nationals.
Corporate media hacks have never been shy about trying to use their waning influence to bully the court’s conservative justices into ruling on cases in ways they find favorable. Mark and Co.’s hatchet job against Barrett is the latest example of that.
The Post has shown that it has no problem participating in this media-wide effort to attack and vilify the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. And now, it’s demonstrated just how low it’s willing to go to do so — even if it means dragging a justice’s kids into the fray.
