Culture of complaint

Sam Alito, Bitchmaster General

U.S. Supreme Court

New York Times, November 13, 2020: In an unusually caustic and politically tinged speech, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told a conservative legal group that liberals posed a growing threat to religious liberty and free speech…

“You can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” Justice Alito said. “Until very recently that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.”

Washington Post, Sept. 20, 2021: Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Thursday defended the Supreme Court’s actions in letting a controversial and restrictive Texas abortion law go into effect, and said criticism of the court’s recent decisions in emergency cases was an attempt to intimidate the justices…

“The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways,” Alito said. “And this portrayal feeds unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.”

Washington Post, Oct. 25, 2022: Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said Tuesday that the leak of his draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade made his colleagues in the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court “targets for assassination.”

The leak last spring before the court eliminated the nationwide right to abortion was a “grave betrayal of trust by somebody, and it was a shock,” he said. The threat to the justices, he added, was not theoretical because it “gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us.”

New York Times, January 20, 2023: Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said in a speech before the Federalist Society in Washington that liberals had “put cash bounties” on the heads of conservative members of the Supreme Court and “planned to hunt us down like in that story, The Most Dangerous Game.”

Justice Alito offered no evidence for his accusation, but claimed that such actions followed naturally from the criticism he and his fellow conservative justices received in the wake of their recent Formite decision, which invalidated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its entirety on the grounds that it had been “enacted capriciously in an excess of enthusiasm for Negro rights with no regard for the will of the Founders,” as Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his majority opinion.

Alito’s concurrence with that decision was essentially a series of long quotations from Thomas’ opinion, with each citation of Thomas’ name followed by the phrase “who is black.”

At one point in his speech Alito appeared to break down in tears — or, if some witnesses are to be believed, to squirt his eyes from a bottle of Visine hidden in a handkerchief. “I’m so frightened to go out for a walk even in my all-white suburb,” he told the Society members, “knowing those horrible people are laying for me with their spears and their bows and arrows — they say it’s more sporting that way, also they don’t believe in the Second Amendment — and laughing about how nice my head would look over their fireplace, oh my!”

After he had composed himself, Alito continued in a stern voice: “I don’t see how they can be allowed to talk like that about us. A friend of mine told me that someone on Twitter effaced my official portrait, and referred to me in the most blasphemous terms. Can’t the Republicans in Congress do something to make it illegal? Because I swear we’ll back that up in a heartbeat.”

Washington Post, July 18, 2023: Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. charged in a rambling address leaked from a private gathering of the Bohemian Club in Monte Rio, California that “a cabal of liberals, socialists, and a twisted former civil engineer dying of cancer” planned to capture conservative members of the Supreme Court and “inflict horrible, elaborate tortures on them and show these tortures in movie theaters.”

Justice Alito’s charge followed a firestorm of criticism the Court received after it issued a “shadow docket” decision on Friday night invalidating Social Security. That decision, though unsigned, is widely thought to be Alito’s work, in part because the letters that begin each of the first eleven lines in the decision, when read top to bottom, spell out “Samuel Alito.”

Alito sketched the outlines of the alleged planned mass abduction: “We’ll all wake up one day in some fetid chamber… there’ll be a grisly voice on a loudspeaker… we’ll be confronted with riddles and enigmas, and told we must pay, pay for our sins, but what sins have we committed but to do the will of the Founding Fathers?”

The Justice ended his speech with a vow of revenge: “It is I who really have the power of life and death,” Alito cried, raising a ruby-encrusted goblet before his audience of fellow Bohemian Club members – who, like himself, were completely naked – “and one day the fools will learn! Ah ha ha ha ha ha! “

New York Times, February 12, 2024: In the first address by the New Court after last week’s siege of the State of the Union Address that decimated the federal leadership and returned Donald Trump to power, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., broadcasting from an unrevealed location and wearing the billowing robes, face powder, and British judge’s wig Trump now requires of the five remaining Justices, announced that he had replaced former Chief Justice John Roberts, whom he portrayed as “in timeout.” Chief Justice Alito said he and his colleagues were all well but that “the ladies have retired,” and that the court had “stopped coddling criminals,” offering yesterday’s summary execution of former Vice President Mike Pence as evidence.

Alito then confirmed that all the government officials who died in the siege had been “retroactively condemned by this court,” and closed by saying that his “fondest wish in this new era is that we can put an end to the bickering and incivility that we saw in the Before Times.”