Why Some of Us Can't Dine in Peace

Michelle Malkin
Tue, 12 Jul 2022 19:51:43 -0700
Opinion

Fifteen years ago, when I still lived in the D.C. swamp, I took my elementary school-daughter and toddler son out for one of our regular weekend breakfasts at IHOP. But we couldn't be left alone to enjoy our meal. As my kids dug into their funny-face pancakes, a fuming-faced liberal marched to our booth and started ranting about my anti-open-borders commentaries on Fox News. The incident occurred not long after Geraldo Rivera told a Boston Globe reporter that I was the "most vile, hateful commentator I've ever met in my life" and that "it's good she's in D.C. and I'm in New York" because "I'd spit on her if I saw her."

Fifteen years later, I'm blacklisted by the "fair and balanced" network, while fork-tongued cable news reptile Geraldo Rivera remains a heavily promoted Fox News contributor who regularly attacks everyone else (including his former friend Donald Trump) for inciting violence. File under "chutzpah."

Fifteen years later, organized mobs in the nation's capital are targeting Supreme Court justices in their homes.
Updated: Tue Jul 12, 2022

Fifteen years ago, when I still lived in the D.C. swamp, I took my elementary school-daughter and toddler son out for one of our regular weekend breakfasts at IHOP. But we couldn't be left alone to enjoy our meal. As my kids dug into their funny-face pancakes, a fuming-faced liberal marched to our booth and started ranting about my anti-open-borders commentaries on Fox News. The incident occurred not long after Geraldo Rivera told a Boston Globe reporter that I was the "most vile, hateful commentator I've ever met in my life" and that "it's good she's in D.C. and I'm in New York" because "I'd spit on her if I saw her."

Fifteen years later, I'm blacklisted by the "fair and balanced" network, while fork-tongued cable news reptile Geraldo Rivera remains a heavily promoted Fox News contributor who regularly attacks everyone else (including his former friend Donald Trump) for inciting violence. File under "chutzpah."

Fifteen years later, organized mobs in the nation's capital are targeting Supreme Court justices in their homes.

Fifteen years later, the goons of ShutDownDC, leading instigators of "direct action" (translation: domestic terrorism) against the far left's political enemies, have now offered bounties of up to $200 on Twitter to stalk and harass Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts. In a Twitter post that brazenly violates the social media giant's own rules against targeted harassment and incitements to violence, ShutDownDC called on D.C.-area service industry workers to expose the whereabouts of the conservative justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. The call to arms came after Kavanaugh was hounded out of Morton's steakhouse in D.C.

In a rare display of business defiance of the mob, Morton's responded in a statement that Kavanaugh and other patrons "were unduly harassed by unruly protestors" and that politics "should not trample ... the right to congregate and eat dinner."

Or to eat an IHOP breakfast with children!

One outlet characterized the latest intimidation campaign against the SCOTUS judges as a "troubling escalation." But I know from both professional and up-close-and-personal experience that all this ugliness is a continuation of years and years of abuse of, and violence against, conservative public figures in both public and private spaces. See, for example, my 2006 encyclopedia of left-wing loons, "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild."

Naturally, militant abortion zealots cheered the Morton's ambush and mocked the justices who are under siege — even as Kavanaugh's would-be assassin faces attempted murder charges after flying from California to the judge's home in the D.C. area to kill him. On cue, the Biden administration defended and encouraged more such protest for abortion on demand. But ShutDownDC's summer of staged rage isn't about any sincerely held despair over the right to murder unborn babies, just as the attacks on Trump officials at their homes and in restaurants in 2018 weren't really, in the end, merely about Trump or America First populism or borders.

Remember: ShutDownDC is a full-time, deep-pocketed front group for wealthy woke heiresses like Aileen Getty and Rory Kennedy who hop from "progressive" cause celebre to cause celebre. As I've reported previously, their compadres in the invasive Sunrise Movement are a parallel disruption outfit backed by the Sierra Club that agitated for the Green New Deal, Black Lives Matter and the Defund the Police movement before mobilizing to attack the private homes of Senate Republicans who confirmed Trump's judges. Even more alarming: the presence of ShutDownDC subversives embedded in federal government agencies including Takoma Park Mobilization, Alt U.S. National Park Service, Alt Ed, Alt FDA, Alt NOAA, Alt U.S. Forest Service, Alt EPA, and BadHombreLands National Park Service.

Reminder: The Sierra Club (annual budget: $100 million; top donors: Michael Bloomberg, George Soros) provided five-figure initial seed grants to Sunrise's educational arm, as well as Beltway office space. Other original funders of Sunrise: The Rockefeller Foundation and Wallace Global Fund (which also contributed to the George Soros-subsidized Tides Center, Color of Change cancel culture guerilla warriors, and far-left legal policy groups Alliance for Justice and the Brennan Center for Justice). The Sunrise Movement's co-founder, Evan Weber, is a former Occupy Wall Street organizer. Two others, Sara Blazevic and Varshini Prakash, are Green New Deal zealots and Sen. Bernie Sanders activists. Prakash serves as an advisory board member of Climate Power 2020 along with Soros-funded Center for American Progress head John Podesta, former Obama administration environmental czar Carol Browner, former Obama administration science czar John Holdren, former Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry, former Obama administration EPA head Gina McCarthy, and former Obama administration U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power.

Some of us can't dine in peace because our simple existence is a threat to the "liberal world order." If you can't be controlled, you must be de-personed. "Tolerance" is only for the intolerant. The rules of civility don't apply to the self-righteous monsters sporting "empathy" bumper stickers on their cars and "love is love" banners in the windows of their homes and businesses that will always be safe from pot-bangers, Molotov cocktail-hurlers and billionaire-funded dissent-crushers.

Bon appetit, end-stage America.