Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent series of hospital visits began when she took a tumble in early November, breaking three ribs. That first visit was a short one ‐ she fell on Thursday, was released on Friday, and returned to work on Tuesday ‐ but the reaction was dramatic nonetheless. Actress Leslie Grossman took to Twitter: "If Ruth Bader Ginsburg needs any of my bones or internal organs I don’t need mine." Stephen Colbert made a similar offer: "No! Does she need ribs? I’ve got ribs. She can take mine!" Laypeople joined in, calling for witch spells to protect Ginsburg and demanding that she don an inflatable sumo suit for protection.
Though it’s not always serious, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has an intense fan following that no political figure can match. It’s nothing short of a pop-culture phenomenon, complete with merchandise, movies, and a recurring Kate McKinnon impression on Saturday Night Live. For many, RBG is simultaneously a fun rock-star celebrity and the final bulwark between us and a future resembling The Handmaid’s Tale. The reputation and the reality of Ruth Bader Ginsburg have often clashed, but they have also transformed each other ‐ in five short years, she has became "notorious," a radical feminist, and a legendary dissenter.
Justice Ginsburg’s fan following exploded thanks to a combination of timely cases, Supreme Court trends, shifts within progressivism, and of course the Internet. Its most immediate spark was the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder. In Shelby, the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that singled out certain states and counties for extra federal scrutiny. The decision in Shelby was 5‐4, split along partisan lines, and responsibility for the dissent fell to Ginsburg, who’d been the Court’s senior-most liberal since John Paul Stevens’s retirement three years earlier. The majority had reasoned that the conditions justifying a then-decades-old standard for federal scrutiny had changed and that the states in question remained under scrutiny for voting-rights violations that they hadn’t committed in decades. Ginsburg characterized this logic as punishing the Voting Rights Act for being successful ‐ like "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."
Ginsburg’s characterization of the ruling caught fire on social media. Countless young people embraced it as a witty rebuke to what they saw as unintelligent, racist conservatism. One such person was Shana Knizhnik, a New York University law student spending the summer at a law firm specializing in advocacy for death-row inmates. On Facebook, a friend had shared Ginsburg’s opinion with the hashtag #notoriousRBG, "as a comment on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s amazing writing style and force in that opinion." The hashtag caught Knizhnik’s attention. "It immediately clicked with me," she explained in an interview for the NYU website, "that this must be a thing."
The same day the Shelby ruling appeared, Knizhnik opened Tumblr and started a blog that she named "Notorious R.B.G." Her first post was Ginsburg’s "umbrella" line from Shelby. It didn’t take long for the blog to establish its identity: a mix of quotations by and about Ginsburg, links to news articles, merchandise, GIFs, and myriad images ranging from a painting of a nude Barack Obama riding a unicorn while holding RBG to a photo, captioned "Squad Goals." of the female Supreme Court justices.
