This F*cking Guy: John Roberts

**Erin Ryan** (0:01)
Welcome to another episode of This Fucking Guy, the series where we highlight one fucking guy making America worse and explain why they suck. I'm Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media's Hysteria podcast.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (0:12)
And I'm Alyssa Mastromonaco, the other host of Crooked Media's Hysteria podcast. Today, we're going to celebrate the merciful end of another very stupid Supreme Court term by finally letting it rip on the man whose photo should appear alongside the Wikipedia entry for banality of evil.

**Erin Ryan** (0:28)
Yes, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts embodies America's version of the family in the Zone of Interest, living in a bubble of aftershave and Catholic mass as his decisions are directly responsible for the pain and suffering of millions, and perhaps the collapse of the American experiment.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (0:43)
But I am sure his lawn looks great.

**Erin Ryan** (0:45)
John Glover Roberts Jr. was born on January 27th, 1955 in Buffalo, New York. He was the second of four children and the only boy. His dad, John Sr., worked for Bethlehem Steel. Little John, or Jackie, as he was called when he was a kid, was a serious, striving dork who was extremely gifted academically. Think the conservative male equivalent of Lisa Simpson derogatory. One family member who biographer Joan Biskupic spoke with said that one of his childhood nicknames was Sober Puss.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (1:15)
In the era of the Carvel Cookie Puss, he was a sober puss, but alas, an apt nickname as John Roberts is both serious and a pussy.

**Erin Ryan** (1:23)
When Roberts was 10, his father moved the family to Long Beach, Indiana, a tiny beach town on Lake Michigan in order to take a job as an executive at a nearby Bethlehem steel plant in Burns Harbor, which is about 40 miles south of Chicago.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (1:35)
Long Beach was one of those towns that was specifically founded for white people, and for years, property deeds stipulated that the homes were not to be sold to black or Jewish folks. According to author Lisa Graves, deep into the 20th century, Long Beach advertised itself as a vacation land within a highly restricted home community where all residents are Caucasian gentiles. Oof.
Fun.

**Erin Ryan** (1:59)
Which leads me to wonder, is Clarence Thomas John Roberts' first black friend?
Seriously, it might be. Roberts grew up in a lily white town, and then he left the safety of his parents' large Tudor-style house to attend high school at an all-boys private Catholic school called La Lumiere.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (2:17)
La Lumiere was one of those schools that was founded in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that desegregated public schools Brown v. Board of Education. A lot of private religious schools were founded during that time with the implied intent of allowing white families to send their kids to schools amongst only other whites.

**Erin Ryan** (2:32)
The 30 Rock joke version of this is when Jack Donaghy references a fictional Catholic school called Our Lady of Reluctant Integration. While in that spirit, the separate but equal mother was smiling down on La Lumiere as the first black student to ever attend La Lumiere didn't arrive until 1970 when Roberts was a sophomore.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (2:51)
La Lumiere, which is French for the light, and not a reference to the wacky Jerry Orbach character from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Roberts was a superstar student. He loved Latin so much that he took five years of it during his four years there.

**Erin Ryan** (3:05)
Dork.
There were only 20 boys in his class and because students were expected to play sports, Roberts ran track, wrestled, and played football. He was a pretty good wrestler winning all but one match his senior year in 132-pound weight class. He was not a very good football player though due in part to the fact that he weighed 132 pounds. Roberts' snobby school would travel in blazers for sporting events, showing up to play at public schools looking like the rich kids from a PG-rated 90s sports comedy.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (3:33)
Over the summer, he worked for a special program for executives' kids at the steel mill where his father was an executive, earning between $12 and $16 an hour, which would be the equivalent of $104 to $138 per hour today.

**Erin Ryan** (3:47)
That's so crazy. We are getting hosed. Oh my God.
In case you're wondering if Roberts was a ladies man, the answer is a resounding no. In fact, he seemed to harbor a specific animus toward girls. In a 1972 issue of his school newspaper, The Torch, Roberts came out swinging in an editorial against the preposterous idea of being educated alongside girls. Here's part of what he wrote, Alyssa. Quote, the presence of the opposite sex in the classroom will be confining rather than catholicizing. I would prefer to discuss Shakespeare's double entendre and the lattice rectum of conic sections without a blonde giggling and blushing behind me.