The unspoken competition among legacy media outlets to see who can produce the most asinine propaganda is pretty fierce this week. On top of a debunked hatchet job involving the Pentagon and Vatican, The Washington Post decided to throw its hat in the ring with a particularly dumb hit piece of its own — this time, against the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a Thursday article titled, “Supreme Court remade by Trump ushers in historic defeats for civil rights,” Post reporter Justin Jouvenal attempted to convince readers that the court’s conservative justices have waged an all-out war on “civil rights” in “cases involving women and minorities.” Naturally, he attributed this to “President Donald Trump’s three appointees” — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — who he said have “remade” the court to be “sharply conservative.”
“The court has also entered a new era of extreme partisanship. None over the past seven decades has been as starkly polarized,” Jouvenal wrote in melodramatic fashion.
The entire premise of the piece is based on an “analysis” by Washington University and Penn State professors, who, after reportedly examining 270 of the court’s decisions from 2020-2024 and a Supreme Court database they maintain themselves, concluded that “the share of cases won by the side advocating an expansion of civil rights fell to 44 percent” since Trump’s appointees joined the court. “In all the other time periods going back to the early 1950s,” Jouvenal wrote, “the Supreme Court issued rulings in favor of expanding civil rights in a majority of such cases.”
So, how exactly do Jouvenal and the study’s authors determine whether SCOTUS is “rejecting” or “expanding” so-called “civil rights” in any given case? Going off the decisions provided by the Post, it seems the (unsurprising) answer to that question is based on whether the court’s decision gave leftists the outcome they wanted.
As examples showcasing what he portrays as anti-“civil rights” decisions, Jouvenal cited the Supreme Court’s 2025 U.S. v. Skrmetti and Mahmoud v. Taylor rulings, which upheld a Tennessee law prohibiting harmful “trans” procedures on children and parents’ right to opt their children out of school lessons promoting LGBT ideology, respectively. He further referenced a 2023 decision (303 Creative LLC v. Elenis) shutting down LGBT activists’ attempts to force a Christian web designer to create websites for same-sex weddings.
Jouvenal introduced the rulings by writing, “In recent terms, a number of the civil rights cases before the court have involved protections for gay and transgender people, and in most cases, the court has ruled against them.”
The Post “reporter” went on to ominously warn that the high court seems “poised to go further” during its current term. He specifically noted a recently released decision in which the court ruled against Colorado’s ban on so-called “conversion therapy” for minors. Conveniently, Jouvenal declined to mention the ruling was 8-1, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joining their conservative colleagues in siding against the Democrat-run state.
But it’s not just the Supreme Court’s upholding of Americans’ free speech, parental rights, and protections for children that the Post clearly takes issue with. The outlet also tried to characterize the court’s 2023 decision (SFFA v. Harvard) ending racial discrimination against white and Asian Americans in college admissions as “par[ing] back civil rights,” and deemed its recent rulings upholding Americans’ religious freedoms as “striking.”
Jouvenal finished his diatribe seemingly lamenting the court’s production of proper jurisprudence after Republican presidents have sought to replace moderate and left-wing justices with originalist ones. In doing so, he concluded that the analysis “shows a court of ideological extremes, with increasingly dug-in factions of liberals and conservatives.”
[READ: This New Study Shreds A Phony Media Hatchet Job Against The Supreme Court]
There’s two key points to be made about this ridiculous hit piece.
For starters, any “study” that purports to classify “civil rights” in the way this one reportedly did is an absolute joke. And the same goes for any “news” outlet moronic enough to give it oxygen.
Under the Post and Co.’s “civil rights” standards, racial discrimination is OK as long as it’s against races that don’t check the left’s “victimhood” box; stifling speech is OK as long as it’s speech the left doesn’t like; and infringing on religious liberty is OK as long as it’s against faithful Christians.
And don’t forget decisions upholding laws protecting children from trans-obsessed psychos seeking to mutilate their bodies with destructive surgeries and chemicals. That’s apparently anti-“civil rights” too.
Secondly, the notion that the Supreme Court’s conservative justices and their jurisprudence are “extreme” is utterly laughable.
In many of their majority decisions, the court’s conservative justices are interpreting the Constitution and laws as they were written at the times they were written (that is, originalism). In doing so, they’re not haphazardly inventing new legal rights out of thin air the way past Supreme Courts have done (see Roe v. Wade and the made-up “right” to abortion).
In running this “analysis” and adopting the framing it did, the Post has shown it is clearly upset that Republican presidents have gotten better at picking SCOTUS nominees. Not solely originalists, but those who also recognize the proper role of a judge in the American system of government.
With leftist control of the Supreme Court out of reach for the time being, the Post and its fellow media propagandists are doing to the conservative justices what they regularly to do all their perceived political enemies: lie, smear, and lie some more. After all, that is what they do worst of all.
