A bill has been posted on roadside poles and walls in midcoastal Maine under the headline “By Land or By Sea.” It’s the latest left-wing effort to harass officials who refuse to buckle as militant madness sweeps the nation.
The bill invites malcontents to pester Chief Justice John Roberts, who, after a hectic Supreme Court session, is taking a break at his summer home on Hupper Island, just offshore at Port Clyde, Maine.
It urges right-on lefties to paddle kayaks or row boats out to the island, or stand on the harborside in support for half an hour once in July and once in August. The idea is to have a flotilla shouting abuse at Roberts or just embarrassing him by their presence when he’d hoped to enjoy a mid-morning cup of coffee while contemplating what would otherwise have been a tranquil scene of sparkling blue waters, cloudless sky, green shade, and a delicious onshore breeze.
“By Land or By Sea” invokes the line from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” in which the Americans agree to signal with one lantern if the redcoats are coming by land, but with two if the enemy is coming by sea:
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”
Two hundred and fifty years later, the grumpy gray-hairs of 2026 — they all seem to be fading baby boomers vainly trying to recapture the giddy protests of their 1970s heyday — claim patriotic descent from the 18th century; by so doing they might con some people that they’re rescuing the United States we know and love from the predations of a fascist president in cahoots with lickspittle officials such as Roberts.
The supposed offense of Roberts and the court is “complicity in executive abuses.” But a brief survey of Supreme Court decisions shows there is no pattern of help from the bench for President Donald Trump. The president recently said the court’s decision on birthright citizenship, for example, was “insane.” It has ruled for and against him in about equal measures last term, which suggests that its decisions don’t fit a political agenda but are made according to what it thinks is prescribed by statute or the Constitution.
The six conservative justices don’t vote as a bloc, which might have suggested political cohesion. Again, in the birthright citizenship case, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority, as did Roberts, and Brett Kavanaugh wrote a separate opinion that partly concurred and partly dissented. So the six “conservatives” produced four separate opinions — hardly the behavior of a monolith. Evidence of a cohesive bloc is much stronger in the frequent unanimity of the three “liberal” justices nominated by Democratic presidents.
So the Maine paddlers will be peddling falsehoods. This should not surprise, for the flotilla that will lurk like a comedic naval squadron off Hupper Island is not a grassroots or organic protest. It is organized by Audacity Creative Action Together, which is affiliated with Indivisible, the group responsible for No Kings protests and Tesla Takedowns and gets money from billionaire financier George Soros.
Far from coalescing naturally, the anti-Roberts protest is a gathering of dull, dyed-in-the-wool left-wingers who’ve been manipulated into thinking they’re standing bravely and for principle against something dark and evil. Instead, they’re the dupes of dark money, so willing to be agitated that they’ll turn out in numbers to support whatever the latest radical fad is.
The proximate cause of the protest can be patently false — there is no Supreme Court complicity in executive abuse (just as there is no genocide in Gaza and no plot to steal the next election, to name a couple of the Left’s commonest grievances). But the surface complaint is a cover for a deeper political and ideological goal. The brains behind the Left’s constant demonstrations want to habituate the nation to attacks on any institution upon which it is founded and which allows it to run smoothly.
The barracking of Chief Justice Roberts is small beer, a minor irritant, compared to the doxxing of justices that has escalated to a literally murderous level. It is just a little thing that a few local radicals can offer to further the end of undermining their country and its successful functioning.
PLATNER EMBODIES DEMOCRAT HYPOCRISY
The kayaktivists, as they call themselves, are doing what their demagogic leaders have told them for several decades to do. The cry of “No justice, no peace” has become, “No, Chief Justice, you ‘ll have no peace.” It’s the ugly way demanded by Saul Alinsky and his ideological descendants, such as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), who infamously demanded that when Trump officials were present, “you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome.”
They claim to believe they are protecting the U.S., but they are undermining it in whatever little way they can.