HOT TAKES: 'Elitist Snob' Mocks Riley Gaines' Education Over Criticism of Justice Jackson, and Hoo Boy

As RedState previously reported, some pretty face-palm arguments are being put out there by some of the liberal Supreme Court Justices in U.S. v. Skrmetti, a case that revolves around Tennessee's 2023 law that bans "gender-affirming care" for minors and whether it's a violation of federal discrimination laws.

One of them came from Justice Sonia Sotomayor who, incredibly, compared the mutilation of the human body that happens during these surgeries to "the medical risk" of taking aspirin.

Then there was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who put forth an argument we hear a lot from transgender rights advocates, that banning trans surgeries is no different than the discrimination faced by interracial couples back in the day.

It was Justice Brown's comments in particular that caught the attention of Save Women's Sports spokeswoman Riley Gaines, who had the following response:

KBJ is wildly unqualified to be a Supreme Court justice. How in the world did she ever get confirmed?
— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) December 4, 2024

As per the norm, Gaines' remarks triggered some woke leftists, including Atlantic writer and Yale Review editor James Surowiecki, who was aghast that Gaines was attacking Brown in such a way considering in his view Gaines' educational pedigree was allegedly far less prestigious and remarkable than Brown's.

"Riley Gaines, who has a BA from the University of Kentucky, thinks she's qualified to judge the legal chops of a judge who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and cum laude from Harvard Law School," he wrote.

It... did not go well for Surowiecki in the aftermath, with some who have a similar educational background to Jackson agreeing with Gaines. Others blasted back by appropriately referring to him as an "elitist snob" and questioning whether a Harvard education was really something to brag about these days:

Hey, Harvard Law grad cum laude here. She's wildly unqualified to be a Supreme Court judge, and makes a mockery of herself on the bench regularly. https://t.co/caZt0jzCBW
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) December 5, 2024

Riley is 100 percent correct. Harvard is a joke! Its grade inflation, DEI, and willingness to harbor plagiarists prove it is no longer an intellectual powerhouse. @Riley_Gaines_ https://t.co/ke67TuwiVM
— Dr. Carol M. Swain (@carolmswain) December 5, 2024

Do you have any idea what an elitist snob you sound like? You can hear the derision dripping through you clenched jaw as you say “Kentucky.” https://t.co/z9gj6WvBnL
— Marc Thiessen 🇺🇸❤️🇺🇦🇹🇼🇮🇱 (@marcthiessen) December 6, 2024

I remember this guy once wrote interesting columns on economics for @NewYorker. Now he spends his time mocking women who didn’t go to Ivy League schools https://t.co/F6NOFVzm7n
— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) December 6, 2024

If I had a dime for every time a leftist questioned my educational background (so they could determine whether I was "qualified" to have an opinion on any given topic), I could probably buy a small island in the Caribbean. It's something they repeatedly do for two primary reasons: 1) To intimidate you and have your opinion dismissed as irrelevant because your education (supposedly) didn't make the cut, and 2) To try and demonstrate their supposed intellectual superiority over you.

And sometimes it's not even your education that seemingly "disqualifies" you from having a valid viewpoint in their eyes. I remember way back when failed former CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien tried to dismiss my opinion on women who juggle motherhood and careers because I wasn't a mother:

Oh. You don't have kids. So your opinion is somewhat uninformed then on this particular issue, right? Ciao. https://t.co/kfncyohRGy
— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) September 28, 2015

The funny thing is that these types of snobbish dismissals of the opinions of supposedly inferior conservatives have the exact opposite effect that their critics want them to. It fires conservatives up to want to speak even louder, which is exactly what Gaines did in reacting to Surowiecki's slight: