Politics

Gorsuch Spent Prep School Years Trolling Left-Wing Jesuits

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Kevin Daley Supreme Court correspondent
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Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, used his senior yearbook as a platform to troll left-wing Jesuits running his tony prep school.

The Daily Mail’s Alana Goodman reports Gorsuch’s 1985 senior yearbook credits him as the founder and president of the “Fascism Forever Club,” an anti-faculty student group polemicizing against Georgetown Preparatory School’s Jesuit taskmasters, whose boundless enthusiasm for Karl Rahner, left-wing politics, and slipping the binds of orthodoxy reached a fever pitch in the 1980s.

“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 yearbook reads. It’s not clear if the text was the product of Gorsuch’s hand, or the rascality typical of prep school yearbook editors. The book also features a picture of Gorsuch at leisure in a smart collar and rakish grin, reading William F. Buckley’s “Up From Liberalism.”

Members of the faculty, and the school itself, insist the yearbook credit was an inside joke.

“There was no club at a Jesuit school about young fascists,” said Steve Ochs, a veteran history teacher at Georgetown Prep who advised the school’s student government in the 1980s. “The students would create fictitious clubs; they would have fictitious activities. They were all inside jokes on their senior pages.”

The school itself was equally emphatic. “No such club ever existed on Georgetown Prep’s campus,” they said in a statement.

“We are proud to have a son of Georgetown Preparatory School, a Catholic, Jesuit school founded the same year the United States Supreme Court was established, nominated to the nation’s highest court,” said the school’s president, Rev. Scott R. Pilarz, S.J. “All of us at Prep send our prayers and best wishes.”

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