Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) must have been surprised that 200 protesters targeted his personal home in Brooklyn on Tuesday night, demanding that he block military aid to Israel.
What did he do to deserve this intrusion on his privacy? Hadn’t he denounced the Israeli government recently, demanding new elections to oust the left’s bogeyman, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Hadn’t he been attacked by Jewish leaders, and Israel itself?
Perhaps somewhere, in the recesses of memory, Schumer might have recalled that he led a protest to the Supreme Court in early March 2020 — defying the risks of the coronavirus pandemic, and its looming restrictions on public gatherings — to warn the newly-installed conservative justices that they would face personal retribution if they dared to overturn the weak precedent in Roe v. Wade (1973) that purported to establish abortion as a constitutional right.
Schumer declared: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you, if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Chief Justice John Roberts issued an extraordinary response: “Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous.”
Schumer tried to backtrack, claiming that he was not threatening the justices. Yet when mobs of protesters gathered outside the homes of conservative justices in 2023 in anticipation of, and in the aftermath of, the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, Schumer said and did nothing. Nor did the Biden administration, even though such protests were prohibited under existing federal law.
Schumer was content to see the justices targeted, as he warned they would be.
Now Schumer is the target of the left-wing mob that he helped to unleash.
So, too, are other Democrats who once championed restrictions on free speech and defended the mobs who shut down conservative voices. As Jonathan Turley has pointed out, those on the left who backed “censorship and blacklisting of people with opposing views” over the past several years “are finding themselves the subjects of the very anti-free speech tactics that they helped foster.”
Turley noted that left-wing, anti-Israel mobs are shouting down Democrats who are perceived as being supportive of Israel in any way.
Such mob behavior has veered into antisemitism.
At Columbia University, the radicals who have taken over the campus openly support terror against Israelis. At Yale, a Jewish student journalist was jabbed in the eye with a flagpole. At Harvard, Schumer’s alma mater, the mob has set up camp, shouting “intifada revolution!”
Schumer is now the target of the mob — notably, a section of the mob that calls itself “Jewish,” yet which has no use for Jewish identity except to trash Israel, and which violated the Passover holiday to stage its anti-Schumer action.
This sort of mob action against any public official is deeply objectionable — and, yes, dangerous. But while Schumer does deserve the protection of police against the mob, he does not deserve any sympathy from the rest of the country.
This is the “whirlwind” he sought to unleash against the Supreme Court, and against conservatives in particular. He bought himself no protection by following the left into the anti-Israel gutter.
To quote Shakespeare’s Fool in King Lear: “Thou hast pared thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing i’ th’ middle.”
Schumer’s party is expected to lose the Senate, and he will lose his power. The electorate will have its say, peacefully. Until then, he faces the mob alone.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
