UPDATED: Neil Gorsuch’s “fascism forever” club was nothing but a yearbook in-joke
Listen, we were all young once. (Except for those of you who are young now, in which case please click on this article twice so we can get that sweet millennial traffic, please and thank you.) And who among us hasn’t done something stupid we’d later regret, like set off fireworks on someone’s patio as a gag, or get too drunk and throw up on the principal’s shoes at homecoming, or found and serve as president of a “fascism forever” club to troll the pinkos on your high school’s faculty before trolling even had a name?
That last one is something Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch may live to regret, as The Daily Mail has dug up evidence that Gorsuch did that exact thing as a student at Georgetown Preparatory, an elite (like $30,000 a year for locals and $50,000 for boarding students elite) all-boys’ private school in Bethesda, Maryland.
To be fair, Gorsuch seems to have conceived the whole thing as a big old Republican joke. In his senior yearbook, it says, “In political circles, our tireless President Gorsuch’s “Fascism Forever Club” happily jerked its knees against the increasingly “left-wing” tendencies of the faculty,” implying that the future Supreme Court nominee was simply poking a bit of fun at self-serious liberals. You know, kind of like the way the man who just gave him a judicial rose was just joking about putting Hillary Clinton in jail, or about Barack Obama being the founder of ISIS, or any of the other vulgar and uncivilized things Trump says he was just joking about when people get upset about how vulgar and uncivilized they are.
The Henry Kissinger quote in Gorsuch’s Columbia University yearbook was also a joke. At least, we hope so:
UPDATE: As it turns out, the whole thing was a big old Republican joke. While the line about the club did appear in Grosuch’s high school yearbook, fact-checking website Snopes.com clarifies that the “Fascism Forever” club was never anything more than that—a yearbook in-joke. The club never met, and had no members. As America magazine puts it, “The mention of it in the yearbook was a tongue-in-cheek attempt to poke fun at liberal peers who teased him about his fierce conservatism.” Consider us corrected.