[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

They say that people hurt the ones they love, but leftists like to hurt the ones you love.

Even as the media was lambasting former President Trump for attacking Judge Juan Merchan over his conflict of interest, it was also busy investigating the flag waving habits of Justice Samuel Alito’s wife and eventually wiretapping the Supreme Court justice’s spouse.

Bringing up Judge Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, working as a progressive political consultant whose clients had raised $90 million off the trial, resulted in a gag order from papa, media ‘fact checks’ and general outrage. But Justice Alito’s wife getting into an argument with a neighbor and then hanging an upside down flag was an urgent breaking news item that had to appear on every single one of the dozen CNN screens still being watched for three weeks.

Senate Democrats, one of whose number is on trial and accused of accepting gold bars as bribes from foreign countries, are demanding an ‘ethics code’ from the Supreme Court. Or at least that part of it that was appointed by Republicans. The Democrat part of it can go on signing book deals, accepting free tickets and generally doing whatever the hell it wants.

But Senate Dems are less clear on which part of the ethics code allows secretly recording the wives of justices for political gain. Or why the wives of justices should be fair game at all.

After years spent hounding Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, leftist ‘investigative journalists’ with ties to leftist activist nonprofits, have decided to go after Justice Alito’s wife. What’s next, the wives of Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Gorsuch? Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s husband? Their children and their grandchildren? Justice Clarence Thomas’ 94-year-old mother and grandnephew were already targeted so no relation is too distant.

But Hunter Biden making a fortune from foreign business partners who had meetings with his father is off limits. It’s not like he was doing something as serious as hanging a flag.

Family, most agree, is off limits. Except when it’s Republican families.

The same media that bemoans targeting Hunter Biden for smoking crack, soliciting prostitutes and getting into bed with foreign criminals has spent the last 8 years obsessed with the business affairs of Jared Kushner. The problem was not that Jared was a high-profile Manhattan investor married to the daughter of a presidential candidate, like Hillary’s son-in-law Marc Mezvinsky, but that he was married to the daughter of the Republican presidential candidate.

The double standard says that family members of the party supported by the media can’t be discussed even when there are disturbing materials unearthed involving a president’s conduct.

An Ashley Biden diary, which at the very least implied that she had been showering with dear old daddy, resulted in an FBI raid and convictions of the people involved who had they done something minor like publish national security secrets would have been protected by the full weight of the First Amendment.

But what it did not result in was a single frame of media coverage of the showering allegation. Not a single media outlet will even mention the story that was behind the entire diary case. It’s as if all the media’s coverage of the Pentagon Papers consisted of nothing except explaining that they were papers that came from the Pentagon. And taking them was a very bad thing.

As opposed to spying on and privately recording the wives of Supreme Court justices.

While Ashley Biden’s views on her father showering with her can’t be discussed, the media felt it absolutely vital to air a leftist activist covertly wiretapping Justice Alito’s wife saying she would love to fly a flag saying “Shame” in response to the ‘Pride’ flags.

The media misleadingly described the leftist activist, Lauren Windsor, last seen taking part in a Lincoln Project operation to falsely stage the world’s smallest white supremacist rally in front of a Gov. Glenn Youngkin bus, as a “filmmaker”. No one in the media ever described Project Veritas as “filmmakers.”

Family members of elected officials and judges are entitled to privacy. Unless they’re conservatives in which case they’re absolutely fair game for any sleazy publicity stunt.

The massive amount of media coverage directed at Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Don Jr. and Eric Trump stands in sharp contrast to the media’s studied disinterest in the lives of Ashley Biden and Hunter Biden. The media had access to a storehouse of the filthiest and most disturbing photos, videos and texts involving a presidential scion which also showed clear illegal conduct, and tried to change the subject or dismiss the whole thing as a Russian forgery.

Similarly the media strongly implied that the Ashley Biden diary was also some sort of hoax. And if we know anything about the media, its journalistic integrity would never allow it to pass along unverified allegations about the disturbing sexual habits of elected officials unless they’re Republicans. That’s why the same media that wouldn’t touch the Ashley Biden diary, which turned out to be real, did triumphantly spread bizarre Moscow urinating prostitute allegations from the Hillary Clinton’s campaign Steele dossier which turned out to be false.

The pursuit of family members, like everything else once deemed beyond the pale, has become routine by a political establishment that insists on selectively flouting and maintaining the old virtues. The deconstruction of these virtues is invariably blamed on conservative reactions to their abuses and never on the original abuses themselves. What is virtue or vice changes rapidly depending on the party of the party involved. A Democrat crackhead loaded with foreign lucre is an object of sympathy whose serial misconduct does not in any way reflect on his father but a justice’s wife hanging up a flag somehow requires her husband to recuse himself.

Even as the media pursues the wife of every Supreme Court justice who doesn’t rule in accordance with its politics, it lectures us on the sanctity of the privacy of the Biden family.

Good men and women enter the public square to protect their families and our own. Bad men and women enter it to enrich their families. The Left, from the Bidens to Bernie Sanders to the ‘Squad’, does not object to a little (or a lot) familial enrichment, but objects a great deal to those who protect families without any hope of personal gain. Like common criminals, it wants to keep their family corruption off limits while preying on our families. And that cannot be allowed to be.