Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson gained bipartisan support Monday, essentially guaranteeing that the Senate will narrowly confirm her later this week. In response, the right-wing discourse has only crashed further into the gutter, as a smear campaign emanating from the QAnon conspiracy theory movement has become the norm for conservative thought.
Right-wing pundits responded to Jackson’s historic nomination by falsely accusing her of being lenient toward child pornographers. Now, in a last ditch attempt to derail her nomination, these pundits are accusing the public officials who support her of also being soft on pedophiles, or of being pedophiles themselves.
On his radio show Monday night, Fox News host Mark Levin made the outrageous claim that President Joe Biden was himself a “sicko” and had selected Jackson for the Supreme Court because of her supposed “weak sentencing” of pedophiles. “The whole thing is sick and creepy. It’s hard to understand if you're a rational human being,” Levin continued, before plugging his weekly Fox program Life, Liberty & Levin, where listeners could hear more about his anti-Biden conspiracy theories.
Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist and a Fox News contributor, claimed that Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) newfound support for Jackson was “super interesting” and “weird” in light of her purported “soft-on-pedos” rulings. (Romney had previously opposed Jackson’s nomination a year ago to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.)
