WATCH: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch Tells Fox News About the ‘Greatest Danger’ Facing America

How can a conservative jurist come across as both undeniably wise and hopelessly Pollyannaish at the same time?

Allow Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch to demonstrate.

In a “Fox & Friends” interview last week with co-host Lawrence, Gorsuch identified the “greatest danger” to the United States as “itself” — then prescribed a remedy that showed both timeless wisdom and a disconnect from the realities of modern American politics.

“You know, this is one thing my colleagues and I really agree on, is the importance of bringing civic education to our children,” Gorsuch said in a clip posted Thursday to the social media platform X,

Gorsuch then bemoaned the current state of said education.

“Over half of Americans can’t pass the citizenship exam we expect people who come to this country to pass,” he said. “Most Americans cannot name the three branches of government.”

From the perspective of a longtime history professor, that does qualify as a crisis. Indeed, I would agree with Gorsuch that the “greatest danger” to the United States is “itself.”

“We have to learn how to talk to one another,” he continued. “We need to know our d history. And I think if we do that, we’ll come to realize that all the things that separate us pale in comparison to the things that unite us, those three great ideas in the Declaration [of Independence]. And so, yeah, I wanted to be part of America’s celebration in bringing us together again.”

🚨 BREAKING: Conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch says schools MUST bring back a focus to American civics education and the Founders💯

The Democrats did a great job purging all of that.

“The greatest danger America faces? Itself.”

“Over half of Americans can’t pass… pic.twitter.com/igSf8GxZGm

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 13, 2025

Gorsuch’s appearance on Fox was to promote his new illustrated children’s book, “The Heroes of 1776,” written with co-author Janie Nitze. (Nitze has served as law clerk to both Gorsuch and the liberal Justice Sonya Sotomayor.)

The “three great ideas in the Declaration” appear in that document’s second paragraph: Equality, natural rights, and government by consent of the governed.

(To these I would add the oft-ignored fourth: The sovereign people’s right to “alter” or “abolish” a “destructive” government.)

No true American, of course, could argue against Gorsuch on principles. In fact, in a nation of (legal) immigrants, belief in those “three great ideas” defines what it means to be an American in the first place.

Furthermore, no patriot would deny the need for strong civics education. The Founders themselves understood that an ignorant population is a more easily controlled population.

To cite one of numerous examples, in 1765, the young lawyer John Adams opposed the Stamp Act imposed by the British Parliament. He did so, however, not purely or even primarily due to “taxation without representation.”

“There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America,” Adams wrote.

“It seems very manifest from the [Stamp Act] itself, that a design is form’d to strip us in a great measure of the means of knowledge, by loading the Press, the Colleges, and even an Almanack and a News-Paper, with restraints and duties; and to introduce the inequalities and dependances of the feudal system, by taking from the poorer sort of people all their little subsistance, and conferring it on a set of stamp officers, distributors and their deputies,” Adams wrote.

In other words, Parliament, according to Adams, hoped that by taxing printed materials, it could keep Americans ignorant.

Replace “stamp officers, distributors and their deputies” with “teachers’ unions and bureaucrats,” and you have, in essence, a description of the American public education system.

And that leads us to the one area in which Gorsuch betrayed a Pollyannaish misperception of the problem.

With regard to Americans’ “d” history, leftists done more than merely neglect “the things that unite us.” Many leftists have openly rejected them. They hate being Americans. They put trigger warnings on the Declaration. And they behave — in some cases openly — like Maoists bent on destroying the past.

Thus, while Gorsuch told the truth about the need for renewed civics education, he underestimated the obstacles to that renewal.

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