Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, founded and led a student group called Fascism Forever Club while in an elite high school, according to a report.
The 49-year-old conservative Republican tapped to succeed the late Antonin Scalia launched the right-wing club as a freshman at the Jesuit all-boys Georgetown Preparatory School near Washington, DC, the Daily Mail reported.
He served as president of the group until he graduated in 1985, according to his yearbook, the paper reported.
“In political circles, our tireless President Gorsuch’s ‘Fascism Forever Club’ happily jerked its knees against the increasingly ‘left-wing’ tendencies of the faculty,” said the yearbook.
Gorsuch — the youngest Supreme Court nominee since 43-year-old Clarence Thomas in 1991 — is seen in a yearbook photo reading William F. Buckley’s 1959 conservative tome “Up from Liberalism.”
He listed other school activities as “President of the Yard, Student Government” and president of the “Committee to reform The Beast” — and branded himself a “Lousy Spanish Student.”
In another photo, he leans over a railing — tie undone — as he sticks his tongue out at the camera.
Among the alumni of the prestigious Georgetown Prep are Sen. Chris Dodd, several congressmen and members of the Kennedy clan.
“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. All of us at Prep send our prayers and best wishes,” the school’s president, the Rev. Scott R. Pilarz, said on the school website.
The staunch conservative has been lauded by prominent right-leaning groups, including the Faith and Freedom Coalition and the National Rifle Association.
But his nomination has drawn the ire of top Democrats, who have vowed to fight the appointment of the fourth-generation Coloradan who sits on the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) promised to stage a filibuster on the Senate floor even before the pick was announced.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called Gorsuch “well outside the mainstream” of American legal thought.
“Elections have ramifications, and here is a living, breathing example of it,” Pelosi said at a town hall on CNN.
“The president, in his first appointment to the court, and hopefully his only appointment to the court, has appointed someone who has come down on the side of corporate American vs. class-action suits,” she said.
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