America is getting dangerous. And no one is safe.
Because police rushed to this Supreme Court Justice’s home for a scary reason.
Someone Called Police To Justice Barrett’s Home. It Wasn’t Real — But The Pattern Is.
The threats keep coming. And Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the latest target on Wednesday evening, when someone placed a swatting call to Fairfax County police reporting the sound of gunshots at her Falls Church, Virginia, residence — the kind of calculated fake emergency designed to send an armed law enforcement response to the home of someone the caller wants to terrify, injure, or k*ll.
Fairfax County police responded to the call, coordinated immediately with the Supreme Court Police personnel assigned to Barrett’s security detail, and “quickly determined that the report was fictitious.” A partial audio recording of the police dispatch that surfaced Thursday confirmed officers were sent to the “high-priority resident’s” address after a call came in for “sounds of gunshots.” No one was harmed. No additional resources were deployed. Barrett was on the bench Thursday morning, reading summaries of two opinions she authored, without mention of the incident.
But the lack of physical consequence should not be mistaken for the absence of a genuine threat. Swatting calls are, as Sen. Mike Lee stated directly on X, “an attempt to get an innocent person k*lled.” That is not hyperbole. When police respond to reports of an active shooter or a hostage situation, they arrive with heightened readiness and compressed decision-making timelines. The intent of a swatting call is to manufacture exactly the kind of charged, chaotic conditions under which a tragic outcome is most likely. That it failed does not mean it wasn’t serious.
A Pattern That Is Escalating — And A Justice Who Is Not Surprised
Barrett is not the first member of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to be targeted. The pattern traces directly to 2022, when the leaked Dobbs draft opinion sent abortion-rights protesters to the homes of Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, and others in the conservative majority. California man Nicholas John Roske made the now well-documented trip to Kavanaugh’s Maryland home in June 2022 carrying a gun, knife, zip ties, duct tape, and other items in what authorities called a planned assassination attempt. He was sentenced to eight years in federal prison.
More recently, the threat landscape has expanded well beyond the justices themselves. This spring has brought three assassination attempts against President Trump, multiple death threats against other conservatives, and a climate of political violence that the FBI has publicly acknowledged is under sustained investigation. FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed last week that the bureau is tracking a rise in swatting incidents targeted at conservatives specifically.
“Swatting is an attempt to get an innocent person k*lled — in this case, a sitting Supreme Court Justice,” Sen. Lee wrote. “The proper response will be putting the offender in prison for many, many years.”
That is the correct response. Finding the person who made the call and holding them fully accountable under federal law — which does impose serious sentences for swatting-related offenses — is the appropriate institutional reaction. So is honest acknowledgment that the targeting of conservative public figures is not a random or diffuse pattern. It is organized, it is escalating, and Wednesday night’s call was the latest installment in something that deserves far more sustained attention than it typically receives from the institutions responsible for addressing it.
What It Says About The Current Moment
There was a time when the notion that a sitting Supreme Court Justice would need round-the-clock armed security at their private residence — and would still be the target of swatting calls through that security — would have seemed unimaginable in the American context. That time has passed.
The political atmosphere that produced the Kavanaugh stalking, the WHCA Dinner assassination attempt, and Wednesday night’s call at Justice Barrett’s door is one that has been built and sustained by years of rhetoric characterizing conservative public officials not merely as wrong, but as existential threats to democracy, women, minorities, and the planet. When political opponents are framed in those terms often enough, the gap between “he must be stopped” and someone picking up the phone to manufacture a potentially fatal police confrontation shrinks considerably. Nobody who made that call on Wednesday will be celebrated publicly. But the ecosystem that produces people willing to make it is still very much operating at full strength.
