U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2019 (Creative Commons)
Conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has been making the rounds to promote a new children's book with what Salon called "one of the friendliest media tours imaginable." As innocuous as that all sounds, the tour has continually backfired on him, with MAGA commentators tearing him apart for "insufficient nationalism."
Gorsuch — who was appointed early in President Donald Trump's first term after Republicans stonewalled Obama's final nomination of Merrick Garland — has been conducting interviews with exclusively right-wing outlets to promote his book, Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration. During one of those talks with the libertarian publication, Reason, he made comments about the U.S. not being founded on a unifying culture that prompted heated conservative backlash online.
"The Declaration of Independence had three great ideas in it: that all of us are equal; that each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God, not government; and that we have the right to rule ourselves," Gorsuch said. "Our nation is not founded on a religion. It’s not based on a common culture even, or heritage. It’s based on those ideas. We’re a creedal nation.”
Numerous conservative commentators on X ripped into Gorsuch over this idea, with some worrying that it was signaling a loss for the Trump administration's attempt to end birthright citizenship. The administration has been arguing its case before the Supreme Court in a long shot bid to save their plans, with their rationales often running counter to Gorsuch's "credal nation" stance.
"[There] is something almost darkly ironic about watching Gorsuch embark on one of the friendliest media tours imaginable — one carefully routed through the movement that elevated him and celebrated his confirmation to the Supreme Court as one of the signal achievements of the modern conservative project — only to discover that even this is no longer enough for today’s right," Salon senior writer Sophia Tesfaye wrote on Monday, before highlighted some of the more confrontational comments.
“Give us the precise creed, and let us know the consequences citizenship-wise for rejecting it,” Sean Davis of The Federalist wrote in a post to X.
"Cuck energy generated in the loins, flows up toward the toupee, releases externally in these fleeting microexpressions," Curtis Yarvin, the far-right commentator favored by Vice President JD Vance, wrote in his own post. "There are three kinds of cuck: charm, top and strange. The Justice feels their warmth as he gives away your country to South Sudanese..."
"Here was a Republican-appointed justice appearing almost exclusively before sympathetic conservative audiences, promoting a children’s civics book steeped in reverence for the Founding Fathers, defending originalism — and still getting denounced as insufficiently nationalist by the movement he was effectively marketing himself to," Tesfaye added. "Under Donald Trump, delivering an utterly conventional articulation of American civic nationalism is apparently akin to surrender."