Justice Samuel Alito on Thursday became the latest conservative member of the Supreme Court to push back on the notion that most of the American public now views them as a bunch of “partisan hacks,” to quote fellow conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

But Alito went beyond the recent protestations of Barrett and Justice Clarence Thomas to paint the conservative majority as victims of a coordinated effort to discredit the court.

“The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways,” Alito said in a speech at University of Notre Dame. “And this portrayal feeds unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.”

Alternatively, perhaps overturning a 50-year-old precedent on abortion via an unsigned opinion in the dead of night was a tinge sneaky and improper. Maybe that’s part of what has “damaged” a high court that is now wildly out of step with mainstream America.

This week’s Daily Kos/Civiqs poll found that 57% of voters say the Supreme Court has gotten “too partisan” while just 30% viewed it as “generally fair.” In the survey, only a slim majority of Republicans (52%) viewed the court as fair, while a paltry 31% of independents and 12% of Democrats said the same. Most Americans simply don’t see their views reflected by the high court’s increasingly fringe-worthy rulings. That’s why they are losing faith in a high court packed with conservative ideologues after Mitch McConnell and Republicans stole two seats that should have been appointed by Democratic presidents.

The Daily Kos survey added insight into a rash of polls showing the Supreme Court’s approval rating plunging to 20-year lows since it greenlit the Texas abortion ban, effectively overturning constitutional rights codified in the court’s ‘70s-era Roe v. Wade decision.

In some ways, Alito was bristling at the characterization of his own colleagues. As the Washington Post notes, Justice Elena Kagan’s dissenting opinion in the Texas case charged that the majority opinion on the ban “barely bothers to explain its conclusion—that a challenge to an obviously unconstitutional abortion regulation backed by a wholly unprecedented enforcement scheme is unlikely to prevail.”

“In all these ways,” Kagan continued, “the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow-docket decision-making—which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.”

That dissent, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said the majority should have suspended the law while the legal issues were adjudicated.

Instead, the majority allowed the law to go into effect while it was under review by an appeals court, disenfranchising the women of Texas of their constitutional rights.