You can only stare at the numbers so long before they start to feel fake.
One hundred sixty-two federal judges threatened in the first fifteen days of May. Two hundred seventy-seven over six months. One-third of the entire federal bench, marked and stalked and harassed into silence or worse. These aren’t statistics. They’re warnings. They’re sirens dressed up as spreadsheets.
And still, almost nobody is talking about it.
Judge Esther Salas is. Because she has to. Because her son is dead.
He was murdered in 2020 by a man obsessed with grievance, by someone who thought the courts were part of the problem. Who showed up at her home pretending to be a delivery man. Who pulled the trigger. And now, four years later, when Salas saw the data, when the U.S. Marshals refused to release the full scale of the crisis, she leaked it herself. She had to. The system wouldn’t.
It fits. Everything fits.
Judges aren’t just interpreting the law anymore. They’re dodging bullets. Reading pizza boxes addressed to their dead children. Watching their homes get swatted in the middle of the night. And why? Because they ruled against a man who once called for the death penalty against five innocent teenagers. Because they didn’t bend.
That’s the only crime now: refusing to bend.
We have a former president who calls judges scum on Memorial Day. Who accuses the judiciary of treason any time a ruling doesn’t serve him. Who surrounds himself with spokespeople like Stephen Miller, parroting phrases like “judicial coup” or “unelected tyrants” until the words metastasize in the minds of those already wired for violence. Then the threats come. The calls. The messages. The pizzas.
Not just one judge. Not just one court.
A third of the federal judiciary.
You start to wonder what it feels like, day to day. To wear a robe and know that doing your job might get someone you love killed. To sentence someone and think, will they find my home? To write an opinion and flinch at the sound of your doorbell.
They don’t talk about it, most of them. Not out loud. But there are whispers now.
Federal judges floating the idea of forming their own armed security force. Not through DOJ. Not through the Marshals. Independent. Because they can’t trust the branch that’s supposed to protect them. Because they’ve seen what happens when enforcement becomes partisan. When silence becomes complicity. When even the law bends under pressure.
Some still stand. Judge Murphy. Judge Bates. Beryl Howell. Sweeney. Salas. The names blur after a while but the pattern doesn’t. The ones who hold the line get the backlash. The ones who dare to say: due process isn’t optional find themselves in the crosshairs.
And the rest?
Some have gone quiet. Some hesitate now where they wouldn’t have before. You can feel it in their rulings. A softening. A pulling back. Not always. But enough. Because who wouldn’t pause if the wrong word could mean your kid never comes home?
That’s what this is.
Not just collapse. Not just fascism. This is the slow terrorizing of the neutral ground. The weaponization of fear at the judicial level. A reality where judges, the last theoretical backstop of the rule of law, are being pushed until they break. Not by arguments. Not by ethics. By death threats.
And maybe that’s the goal.
Make the courts afraid to act. Make the press too wary to probe. Make the people too numb to care. So that one day, when a judge rules the wrong way and no one hears from them again, it doesn’t even make the front page. Just another flicker of outrage buried in the feed.
There used to be a time when the law meant something beyond politics. Beyond party. A time when judges were invisible, not because they were cowards, but because they didn’t need to be visible. They ruled. The system held. No more.
Now it’s all cameras and crosshairs. Leaks and lockdowns. Courtrooms that feel less like halls of justice and more like glass boxes in a firing range.
And still, most people scroll past.
But if we lose the courts — if we let this happen quietly, normally, without marking it — then that’s it. There’s no backup. No final appeal. No higher power watching over the wreckage.
Only the silence of the bench.