From James Taranto, writing in The American Spectator, we learn:
Before this year I never had much of an opinion on the perennial debate over cameras in the U.S. Supreme Court. I had a vague aversion to the idea, but no clear argument to back it up.
That changed in February, after the court heard oral arguments in Octane Fitness v. Icon Health and Fitness, a patent dispute. It was the sort of case that would normally make no headlines outside specialty publications. But the proceedings were interrupted when a spectator, Noah Kai Newkirk, rose and allegedly delivered a “harangue or oration” in violation of federal law. (He entered a not-guilty plea the next day.)
In the alleged harangue, Newkirk denounced the court’s 2010 free-speech ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and demanded that the justices rule in favor of the government in the then pending case of McCutcheon v. FEC, which challenged certain statutory limits on campaign contributions. (McCutcheon won, as it so happens.)
Newkirk belonged to a group called 99Rise, whose website describes its aim as getting “big money out of American politics.” The “longtime progressive activist” told Reuters that “99Rise was formed by a small group of people in Los Angeles who were inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests.”
Newkirk’s disruption was illicitly captured on video, apparently by a confederate who had smuggled a camera past court security. What Reuters accurately described as a two-minute “shaky, low-quality video” was uploaded to YouTube. In addition to the February disruption, it showed what was purportedly a scene from the McCutcheon oral arguments last October.
In The New York Slimes, er, Times, Jesse Wegman, as Mr. Taranto reports, cheered-on this behavior.
I think what we’re seeing here is the start of a more pronounced phase of a practice that has been going on in smaller venues and on campuses for quite some time.
We will be seeing more disruptions of formal events and meetings by political activists [which, of course, will be recorded and uploaded - The Revolution is being televised] because the Left In America believes that the momentum is on their side. They see themselves are winning the war for Power And Control in The United States.
So, they feel no compunction about using disruptive intimidation tactics to attack those institutions and people they feel are Enemies Of The State, those who are UNMUTUAL.
They also believe that the vast, vast majority of the people are morons who are easily swayed by the Enemy’s ‘nonsense’, so they are compelled to prevent their foe’s message from getting out or they must show it up for the ‘idiocy’ it is.
Further, being Leftists, they are also frightened of hearing any opposition to their Ideology because, deep down in their neurotic, messed-up Souls, they know their systems of ideas cannot withstand any questioning.
This latter fact shows us how to attack them…
We have to hit the Left’s insecurities, exploit them.
We have to cause them to breakdown mentally.
And half-hearted measures will not work. We have to Hiroshima them psychologically. Break them.
We have to reduce them to blubbering incoherence, to where they curl up in a fetal position and weep uncontrollably.
The time for niceties has long passed.
As Andrew said: ‘Fuck you: War!’
