Correction: Apparently, the part about Gorsuch creating a “Fascism Forever Club” is a falsehood! Well, that’s what we get for using the Daily Mail. (In my defense, I originally rejected this story when sent to me because of the source, but then USA Today picked it up. Even thought USA Today was still citing the Mail, the truth is, the Mail is not always wrong, so I assumed USA Today journalists had some verification. Silly me.)

Gorsuch is still to the right of Scalia, but he apparently didn’t have this club.

I quickly add that the source I have that this is a falsehood is not necessarily 100% reliable, but it does look like that part of the story does not pan out.

The rest is accurate, but way less interesting now.

When was a kid, I started an organization called the Nature Conservation Club. NCC for short. It had a badge, and a membership card, was free to join, and our objective was to stop civilization from paving over all the forests. The very first member was Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie promised to join too, but never got to it. Then a few of my friends joined, my family. But then it kind of petered out and civilization went ahead and paved over a lot, not yet all, but a lot of the forests. Kids do the darnedest things.

When I went to high school, I didn’t start a club, but Moe and Larry did. They started a “Hallway Monitor” club. They recruited a few people and volunteered to patrol the hallways, keeping the other kids in line. Their offer was refused by the administration. By the way, the administration of this school, a public version of a private prep school if you can imagine that, were politically and socially all over the place, but most of them were college professors and at least two of them were men with long sideburns (during Viet Nam that was a meaningful symbol) and one of them had a picture of Chairman Mao on his office wall, for real. Anyway, Moe and Larry (not exactly their real names) were rebuffed.

Then the fire alarms started ringing. Every day, there would be a fire alarm. Or two. Somebody was pulling the fire alarms. The fire department, we were told, indicated that they would have to close the school if the alarms kept going off because too many false alarms itself constitutes a danger. Next thing you know, the Hallway Monitor Club gets recruited by the administration to guard the fire alarms.

Most of them wore brown shirts, one of them wore lederhosen.

A few weeks later, many of us, me included, found our names on the wall, on the bulletin board, in a memo. “The following students will report to the principal.” It was a long list, and included all three or four of the ruffians we had in that school (there weren’t many).

So, we all dutifully reported to the principle, and were sat down one at a time and told how it was not OK to traffic marijuana in or near the school yard, so just in case you were doing that, please stop.

And, in their hubris, the Hallway Monitor Club founders could not resist letting it be known that they had supplied the list of names with the accusation. A few days later, Moe stopped coming to school and Larry showed up in a cast. That was the end of that.

Kids do the darnedest things.

Oh wait, I’ve got another story. This one is about the “Fascism Forever Club.”

This is reported in the Daily Mail, not the best source, and repeated in USA Today, not much better. But it looks real.

According to this information, Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch …

… both created and headed the “Fascism Forever Club” at Georgetown Preparatory School, which he graduated from in 1985, The Daily Mail reports. The school is a selective all-boys Jesuit prep school, and now reportedly costs day students $30,000 annually and boarding students $50,000.

“In political circles, our tireless President Gorsuch’s ‘Fascism Forever Club’ happily jerked its knees against the increasingly ‘left-wing’ tendencies of the faculty,” a Georgetown Prep high school yearbook states, according to The Daily Mail.

Kids do the darnedest things.

I’m not going to say anything about this at this time, other than to ask the following question. Why are the disqualifying things disqualifying only to Democrats and not to Republicans? Why?

Write your answer in the box below. Thank you very much.