SCOTUS Nominee’s High School ‘Fascism Forever Club’ In His Name Was a Joke

Neil Gorsuch Image by Getty Images

By Helen Chernikoff February 3, 2017

The “Fascism Forever Club” that the Daily Mail stated President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch founded in high school was actually a joke, according to fact-checking website Snopes.com.

A spokesman for the school told Snopes that such a club never operated there, and Snopes also quoted America, a Jesuit magazine, which stated that the seniors graduating from Gorsuch’s elite Catholic prep school had a habit of making up fake clubs as jokes. This one, the magazine’s source said, was Gorsuch’s way of poking fun back at liberal classmates who teased him about his conservatism.

The yearbook also showed him reading William F. Buckley’s 1959 book “Up from Liberalism.”

The yearbook described the young man who would become the SCOTUS pick to replace Justice Antonin Scalia as, “our tireless President Gorsuch”; whose “‘Fascism Forever Club’ … happily jerked its knees against the increasingly ‘left-wing’ tendencies of the faculty.”

Orthodox Jewish activists hailed Gorsuch’s appointment for his willingness to allow expressions of religion even at the expense of lowering the wall separating church and state. Liberal Jews look at his opinions on these issues, as well as on those relating to women’s rights, labor and environment, with a mixture of concern and dismay.

American citizens and observers of its politics who are critical of President Donald Trump have voiced concerns since his election that he and his followers have authoritarian tendencies. This week, a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum poster listing the warning signs of fascism went viral on Twitter, attracting hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets.

Contact Helen Chernikoff atchernikoff@forward.com

Helen Chernikoff is the Forward’s News Editor. She came to the Forward from The Jewish Week, where she served as the first web director and created both a blog dedicated to disability issues and a food and wine website. Before that, she covered the housing, lodging and logistics industries for Reuters, where she could sit at her desk and watch her stories move the stock market. Helen has a Master’s of Public Administration from Columbia University and a BA in History and French from Amherst College. She is also a rabbinical school dropout. Contact her at chernikoff@forward.com and follow her on Twitter at @thesimplechild.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO