Liberal Bill Blum's unreasoned hit piece against conservative Justice Samuel Alito

24 July 2026

Is the pot calling the kettle black?

So, we can solve purported psychological 'hang-ups' on the Supreme Court by adding more of the same — but in the politically opposite direction?

Bill Blum (at TruthDig) wrote a typically 'liberal' example of an empty-headed, intellectually lacking attack piece. This one aimed at Supreme Court justice, Samuel Alito.

Blum's essay begins and concludes with the following excerpted words:

You might think that an arch-conservative who has used his lifetime seat on the Supreme Court to send U.S. law back to the 1920s would take a victory lap and maybe chill just a bit.

Despite his success in helping to dismantle abortion rights, attacking public-sector labor unions, elevating gun rights, promoting “religious liberty,” and destroying the Voting Rights Act, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. is still seething mad, motivated by ideological extremism and a stack of personal grievances, some dating to his childhood in Trenton, New Jersey.

Like most extremists, Alito has views that derive not just from his abstract political beliefs, but from his lived experiences growing up in a predominantly white Christian community as the son of deeply religious Catholic Italian immigrants, and later as an out-of-place right winger at Princeton University and Yale Law School.

In a revealing new biography, Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement, journalist Peter S. Canellos offers a compelling psychological portrait of Alito as a man dismayed by the demographic and secular changes that have transformed and, by his estimation, degraded the country of his boyhood.

The problem is not that Alito has personal hang-ups — we all do — but that so many of his hang-ups have become the law of the land.

Presumably . . .

We are to conclude that 'conservatives' like Alito should be barred from positions of power.

This being so, based exclusively upon those conservatives' purported psychological 'hang-ups'.

Liberals, evidently, being free of similar obstructions to allegedly correct thinking.

Hmm

If Bill Blum's political and legal perspective is not itself blatant ideological discrimination against people he personally disagrees with — supported only by Blum's peculiarly circular and not-at-all explicated legal reasoning — what is?

Blum scuttles his own argument . . .

. . . in one strikingly thoughtless passage:

What’s behind Alito’s fury and habit of issuing norm-breaking invective?

As Georgia State University law professor Eric Segall told The Wall Street Journal in an article published this month, “Alito thinks of the other side as the enemy.”

And true to Segall’s observation, Alito unwittingly admitted as much at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner in 2024, when documentary filmmaker Lauren Windsor asked whether there was any way the country could overcome its terrible polarization, then surreptitiously recorded Alito’s answer that “there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”

Despite Blum's use of Alito's statement as a bludgeon, Alito's conclusion is inarguably true. For example, genocide and slavery are evil and have to forcibly opposed.

From Blum's poor choice of Alito statements to tender as proof of malevolence, we might tentatively conclude that Blum is the kind of person, who could also maintain that humanity comes in an indefinite variety of genders.

The moral? — Is Bill Blum arguing that . . .

. . . he wants someone who is intellectually incoherent and judgmental as himself on the Court?

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson already provides a reasonable facsimile of that.

And her brand of (debatably unhinged) legal reasoning is not faring at all well in non-partisan legal analysts' estimations.

To my mind, Blum's anti-Alito hit piece is an example of why knee-jerk liberals are such annoyances in society's behind. These (intellectually unmoored) folk are seemingly incapable of evidence-based reasoning and rational persuasion therefrom.

Instead, they choose to fly on the wings of emotions that are just as 'hung-up' as — and much less well supported by explicated reasoning of any kind — as the psychic mind-winds that they criticize in conservatives.

Even though I think that the Supreme Court should not exist — given its absence in the Constitution and the Court's continual avoidance of dealing with genuinely major Constitutional questions — I nevertheless should point out that, historically speaking, most of the Court's justices have tried to work within a paradigm that respects reasoning and operates within a (somewhat rationally constructed) framework of jurisprudence.

Merely calling Justice Alito a maladjusted relic from the past does not persuade fair-minded folk that he should not be on the Supreme Court bench.

One might more effectively have attacked Alito by critiquing the Constitutional substance of even one of his opinions and the reasoned (or not) manner in which he got to it.

But who takes the time and thought to do that anymore in our ragingly dumbass culture?

PeteFree.com

Liberal Bill Blum's unreasoned hit piece against conservative Justice Samuel Alito