Neil Gorsuch's media tour backfires with 'darkly ironic' twist: columnist

Right-wing figures' responses to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's recent book tour have revealed how vast ideological shifts have altered the conservative movement, an analyst reported on Monday.

Salon's Sophia Tesfaye discussed how his remarks while promoting his new children’s book, “Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration,” on "Fox & Friends," Megyn Kelly's podcast, National Review, and conservative presidential libraries were "threatening" and led to a backlash among MAGA followers. The Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, whose organization is behind Project 2025, has called Gorsuch's approach "completely divorced from our founding," and Fox News’ Will Cain suggested a debate with the justice over Gorsuch's argument that the United States was founded as a "creedal nation."

"So 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," Tesfaye wrote.

The reality was different than what the conservative justice might have expected, the writer argued.

"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 explained.

"Under Donald Trump, delivering an utterly conventional articulation of American civic nationalism is apparently akin to surrender," Tesfaye wrote.

Gorsuch might not have known just how much the MAGA movement has influenced the Republican Party and right-wing media, the columnist argued.

"Gorsuch made a bet that he could maintain credibility with the institutions and media properties of mainstream conservatism while the ground shifted beneath him," Tesfaye added. "He went to the right outlets. He appeared before the right crowds. He spoke in the careful, optimistic language of civic nationalism that has animated American conservatism from Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush — the shining city on a hill, the proposition nation, the idea that anyone who believes in the American creed can become an American. And he discovered, probably not for the first time, how far the modern right has drifted to a vision of America defined by blood and soil."