FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

The VICE Guide to Right Now

Apparently Trump's SCOTUS Pick Ran a 'Fascism Forever' Club in High School

The 'Daily Mail' reported that Gorsuch started the right-wing club as a freshman at his prestigious all-boys prep school.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Update February 3, 2017:Steve Ochs, a former history teacher at Georgetown Preparatory School, told America magazine that the club didn't actually exist and that students could make up fictitious clubs for the yearbook as "inside jokes." 

Judge Neil Gorsuch, Trump's pick to fill Antonin Scalia's vacant Supreme Court spot, apparently started a student organization called the "Fascism Forever Club" while a high schooler at the DC-area Georgetown Preparatory School in the 1980s, the Daily Mail reports.

That's not to say that Gorsuch—a lifelong conservative and the youngest SCOTUS nominee since Clarence Thomas—was actually flying the fascist flag as a freshman. The whole thing was mostly just a way to troll his left-leaning teachers. But still.

"In political circles, our tireless President Gorsuch's 'Fascism Forever Club' happily jerked its knees against the increasingly 'left-wing' tendencies of the faculty," the Georgetown Prep yearbook states. The yearbook also includes a photo of a young Gorsuch lounging with a copy of William F. Buckley's Up from Liberalism.

Gorsuch's nomination has already come under fire from Senate Democrats, who have threatened to filibuster the pick. Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have spoken out against Gorsuch, with Warren blaming his nomination on "far-right activist groups that were financed by big business." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the conservative judge's beliefs "well outside the mainstream of American legal thought."

"[Trump's] administration, at least at its outset, seems to have less respect for the rule of law than any in recent memory, and is challenging the Constitution in unprecedented fashion," New York senator Chuck Schumer said Wednesday. "There's a special burden on this nominee to be an independent jurist."