Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

T R E 4 5 O N

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

You are here: Home / Politics / Activist Judges! / Excellent Read: ‘What Friends Are For’

Excellent Read: ‘What Friends Are For’

by | 165 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Excellent Read: 'What Friends Are For'

(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)

Garry Wills, at the New York Review of Books:

Men can be measured by their real or imaginary peeves. The longer one carries them around, they more they shrink one down to the size of the continuing peevishness. Clarence Thomas has long had a deep resentment, on and off the judicial bench, against affirmative action. He was humiliated by what he considered Yale Law School’s program for favoring Black applicants, because of which he decided that his diploma “bore the taint of racial preference.” For years he wanted to get his revenge on Yale, until finally he thought of a way. In his autobiography (a common vehicle for vengeance), he said he took a fifteen-cent sticker from a store item, stuck it on the frame of his degree, and hung it in the basement. At last, after longing to all these years, he had pissed on Yale.

For someone who does not feel gratitude for favors done, Thomas, like Donald Trump, expects loyalty from those he did something for. He wrote that he got Anita Hill her job in the Reagan administration. And what was her response? In effect: “Didn’t need it, dude.” As her high school’s valedictorian, a graduate with honors from college and Yale Law, the first tenured Black faculty member at the University of Oklahoma Law School before the Thomas hearings, and a revered teacher at Brandeis to this day, she would clearly not have chafed if any school was lucky enough to do her favors…

Some favors, on the other hand, will indeed define Thomas’s legacy. He did Mitch McConnell a favor by showing how to turn the confirmation process into a greasy slide…

In [Harlan] Crow—the billionaire real-estate developer and major Republican donor to the Federalist Society, with whom Thomas became close soon after his confirmation to the highest court in the land—he found someone who does not underestimate his talents but makes a valuation of them to match his own. What is that value? Directly and indirectly, as ProPublica’s new investigation has shown, in goods and services, year after year for nearly three decades, by plane and yacht, at feast and retreat, for him and his, for his allies and his causes, with cognate or cooperating other purchasers, it mounts into the millions. (So much for you, Yale, and your petty fifteen cents.) Even millions is a bargain price for a human soul. But this human soul was always purchasable at a low price.

Reader Interactions

165Comments

  2. 2.

    bbleh

    Well, I’m sure Justice Thomas, given his accomplishments and position, of which he should entirely justifiably be very proud, won’t be bothered by this at all …

  3. 3.

    Josie

    More of this, please.​
    ETA: Also, I hope this inspires other journalists to take a closer look at others on the bench. Who knows what they might find?​​

  4. 4.

    Keith P.

    he said he took a fifteen-cent sticker from a store item, stuck it on the frame of his degree, and hung it in the basement.

    Yeah, sure.  Harlan Crow has that thing sitting on a replica Ark of the Covenant in his private library.

  5. 5.

    Nora

    Thomas strikes me as a small, bitter man, entirely consumed by his grudges and his sense that he deserves better than he’s gotten. A seat on the highest court in the country, with lifetime tenure, isn’t enough to assuage his hurt feelings.

    A former boss of mine used to talk about “judicial temperament.” Clarence Thomas doesn’t have it and never did.

  7. 7.

    sukabi

    I’m of the opinion that the Chief Justice can’t be trusted to investigate ethical and / or other breaches of his fellow justices, therefore an independent team of investigators should be dispatched to review / vet / and report to the DOJ any and all breaches made by any member of the SC.

  9. 9.

    Kay

    @Nora:

    Thomas strikes me as a small, bitter man, entirely consumed by his grudges and his sense that he deserves better than he’s gotten. A seat on the highest court in the country, with lifetime tenure, isn’t enough to assuage his hurt feelings.

    There are public lawyers and judges who believe, with really no evidence, that they would have done spectacularly well in the private sector and they have somehow sacrificed that money they would have made (you know- theoretically) to “public service”. I think that’s why Thomas and his wife feel justified in taking these lavish gifts- they spend all their time with really wealthy people and they think they too would have been really wealthy had they not gone to the public sector. It’s fairly common and often leads to the sort of bitter resentment Thomas displays.

  10. 10.

    Kay

    I think it’s hard for me (and tons of other people, I assume, since a lot of us found Anita Hill credible) to get that worked up over Clarence Thomas’s latest lies because whatever else Thomas is, he is a liar and has been the entire time he’s been on the national stage. It’s the least suprising thing in the world. The first time I encountered “Clarence Thomas” he was lying his ass off to get confirmed. I guess nothing about him has changed since then.

  11. 11.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    All the recent revelations are making me question whether Roberts is really just calling balls and strikes up there.

  13. 13.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Kay:

    I think that’s why Thomas and his wife feel justified in taking these lavish gifts- they spend all their time with really wealthy people and they think they too would have been really wealthy had they not gone to the public sector.

    In a way, the gifts aren’t the biggest problem. It’s all that time spent with those super-wealthy people.

    It’s hard not to absorb a lot of the values of the people you spend time with.  If you weren’t at least somewhat amenable to them, you wouldn’t have spent time with them in the first place.  But if there significant differences, either you get tired of challenging your companions on them and go your own way, or you wind up seeing the world as they do.  There are people who are exceptions to this, but not many.

  14. 14.

    Steeplejack

    I missed this (from Friday):

    The artist Edward Koren, who produced more than a thousand New Yorker gags, illustrations, and covers, died this morning, at 87. “He was a philosopher of the form, but he never stopped marvelling at the miracle of its creation,” Emma Allen writes. https://t.co/Ad5nbzQmSU

    — The New Yorker (@NewYorker) April 15, 2023

  15. 15.

    japa21

    @Kay:

     

    @lowtechcyclist:

    I really think that Thomas and his wife think all the gifts, etc., are because people like them.  It isn’t, it’s because of what he is.  Crow didn’t give Thomas the time of day until he was confirmed.

  17. 17.

    zhena gogolia

    @Kay: That’s exactly how I feel. No, I’m sorry, she did not make up the pubic hair on the Coke can. Or Long Dong Silver.

  19. 19.

    Kay

    @japa21:

    When you spend a lot of time with wealthy people and you are not wealthy you start to resent that you are not wealthy. Thomas and his wife have huge egos so they think the only reason they are not wealthy is they sacrificed that lifestyle to work in the public sector.

  20. 20.

    Josie

    @zhena gogolia: ​
     So true. Just the fact that those of us of a certain age remember those details so clearly shows how true they were. I was younger and somewhat more innocent then and was appalled that he had done that to her.

  23. 23.

    Kay

    @zhena gogolia:

    It all just rang true to me and I’ve become really familiar with that puffed up, red faced outrage from Right wingers who are furious someone is getting in the way of their promotion. I think they do it when the allegation is true.

    I saw an interview with her about ten years ago and I remain convinced- he’s a liar, because she’s not.

  26. 26.

    AlaskaReader

     
    The military loved Discord for Gen Z recruiting.
    The WaPo lets us know that the military recruiting efforts are geared towards the wrong demographics.

    …the U.S. military has pushed to meet prospective Generation Z recruits on Discord, the online group-chat tool where many spend their time. It even runs a 17,000-member chatroom there for service members to talk about first-person shooter games, meet with career counselors and participate in what one sergeant in 2019 called the “Army of tomorrow.”

    So the ‘Army of tomorrow’ is basically recruited from within racist and bigoted chat rooms.

    What could possibly go wrong?

  27. 27.

    jackmac

    Deep, deep down the resentful Thomas also must know that while he succeeded the great Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, he will never match Marshall’s eminence.

  28. 28.

    Dan B

    @lowtechcyclist:  Since Harlan Crow is Chairman of the Board at the American Enterprise Institute we don’t have to guess at his politics.  They’ve had eight cases at the Supreme Court and Thomas has voted in their favor eight times.

  30. 30.

    zhena gogolia

    @Kay:

    I’ve become really familiar with that puffed up, red faced outrage from Right wingers who are furious someone is getting in the way of their promotion. I think they do it when the allegation is true.

    See Kavanaugh, Brett.

  31. 31.

    Baud

    @AlaskaReader:

    So the ‘Army of tomorrow’ is basically recruited from within racist and bigoted chat rooms.

     
    I didn’t see that in the article. I have never used discord, but I don’t have a reason to believe that it has more fascists than any other large social media.

  32. 32.

    Ruckus

    Aww the bitter resentment of a life well lived if only someone didn’t dislike him for some reason.

    I wish I knew how many people didn’t actually make any real use of a life and still had no resentment that everyone else was screwing him. I think that number would be a rather small one.

  35. 35.

    Redshift

    Christ, what an asshole!

    Thomas, certain that he would have gotten into Yale Law without affirmative action, resents Yale for “devaluing” his accomplishment, which is particularly rich since he chooses to associate with the ideology that promotes that whole idea.

  38. 38.

    Roger Moore

    @japa21: ​
     

    I really think that Thomas and his wife think all the gifts, etc., are because people like them.

    People who have studied the matter have found it doesn’t matter what someone’s motivation is. They will be corrupted by gifts, even if they believe the gifts are just an ordinary part of the job. The gifts don’t even have to be big. Something as small as a logo T-shirt or a cheap pen and some Post-It notes can be enough to make people remember the giver favorably, especially because they’ll be reminded of their generosity every time they use them. Discovering this is why so many businesses have tightened up their ethics rules. People who genuinely think they’re immune to influence are still influenced.

  40. 40.

    Baud

    @Jay:

    Yes.  I also remember Trump on Twitter and now Elon, and all of Facebook’s shenanigans, and Reddit.

  42. 42.

    Kay

    @zhena gogolia:

    Or Alito:

    But at the end of the day, the Democrats’ plan of attack proved to be too much — at least for one member of the audience.
    The nominee’s wife, Martha Ann Alito, broke into tears after Republicans expressed their disapproval of how Alito was being treated.
    One White House official later said that Mrs. Alito viewed the attacks on her husband as disgraceful. “She was very upset that a good and decent man would get attacked,” the official told ABC News. “It’s outrageous.”Perhaps the tensest moments arose over Alito’s past membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton, or CAP, a conservative group that opposed admitting women and minorities to the university.Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., got into a spat with Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Penn., when he demanded that the committee subpoena documents about the group from the Library of Congress — though later Specter announced that Kennedy’s staff would be allowed to view and distribute those materials. Alito has said repeatedly that he did not even recall belonging to the group, and suggested his membership must have reflected his feelings about the university’s decision to expel ROTC from the campus during his senior year. He also said he disavows what the group stood for.
    But some Democrats have questioned the truthfulness of that response, since Alito chose to list his membership — 13 years after he left Princeton — as part of a job application in the Reagan Justice Department

    He forgot he belonged to that organization- the one he listed on his application for the Reagan Justice Department.

  43. 43.

    Redshift

    @AlaskaReader:

    You evidently missed the reporting all week long that Discord members, and specifically the leaker himself, were also on record for their racist and bigoted postings.

    None of us missed that. You apparently missed the fact that the combination of these guys being on Discord and the Army recruiting on Discord doesn’t add up to “the Army recruiting where the Nazis are” any more than if you substituted Facebook for Discord.

    Discord is a distributed service like Mastodon (or email, etc.) Anyone can set up a Discord server, it isn’t a central thing you’re “on” where moderation can be done.

  44. 44.

    Kay

    @zhena gogolia:

    a conservative group that opposed admitting women and minorities to the university.

    A sitting justice. in 2023. Jesus. Of course he lied about it- he had to.

  45. 45.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Josie:

    ETA: Also, I hope this inspires other journalists to take a closer look at others on the bench. Who knows what they might find?​​

    I know I sound like a broken record on this, I’ve mentioned and wondered about it so often, but I would still give a lot to know the full story behind Anthony Kennedy’s resignation (thus clearing the way for Beer-Boy Brett), including the role of Kennedy’s son in securing loans for TFG (and Jared?), and WHAT EXACTLY TFG SAID TO KENNEDY that caused the retiring Justice to look stricken and halt dead in his tracks. There is some enormous story there, and I wish some well-respected well-connected investigative journalist would dig in and write about it. I want every detail.

  46. 46.

    Jay

    @Baud:

    while Discord has a fairly good Community Safety Team, Discord has a large number, (massive actually) number of invite only chat groups. Moderators can wipe servers, and the Community Safety Team relies on somebody inside the chat, reporting violations of Discord rules. So it requires Community reporting community.

  48. 48.

    Roger Moore

    @Baud: @AlaskaReader:

    The thing about Discord is that it’s made of a zillion little chat rooms that you have to specifically join, rather than one big feed that everyone gets an algorithmic sampling from.  Anyone who wants one can set up their own Discord server* specific to their interest and then control the rules for joining.  So one server might be set up by a Nazi and used for Nazi stuff, while another server might be set up by Antifa and used for Antifa stuff.  You have to look at the details of which servers the military was contacting.  My guess is they were mostly contacting big, general interest servers rather than the smaller ones where nasty ideologies can fester.

    *It’s slightly more complex than that. Discord is all run by a single company, but each instance behaves more or less like an independent thing rather than one part of a larger whole.

  49. 49.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Baud:

    I resent not being Baud.

    I am forced to wear pants every time I leave the house. Pisses me off to no end.

    @jackmac:

    Deep, deep down the resentful Thomas also must know that while he succeeded the great Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, he will never match Marshall’s eminence.

    Or come close to getting anything near the respect Marshall had. Marshall is considered one of the modern titans on the court, and Thomas knows he is a useful tool. He knows the people on his side have used him, as a token first and then as a compliant judge. He knows that outside of that bubble he’s considered a silly man, not to be taken seriously.

  53. 53.

    Josie

    @SiubhanDuinne: ​
     This is exactly the story I had in mind. I am convinced there is stuff behind this and the payment of Kavanaugh’s debt that we would find very interesting.

  55. 55.

    The Lodger

    @jackmac: At some time in the future, a historian will refer to Ketanji Brown Jackson as the second African-American justice and no one will catch the error.

  58. 58.

    SFAW

    @Baud:

    All the recent revelations are making me question whether Roberts is really just calling balls and strikes up there.

    As Josie wrote, you are so cynical.

    I, on the other hand eagerly await CHIEF Justice Roberts assessment re: the no-strings-attached-oh-no-how-could-you-even-think-that? tokens of Mr. Crow’s sincere affection and friendship for InJustice Thomas — I seem to remember hearing that Mr. Crow had no idea Thomas was actually on SCOTUS — when the CHIEF Justice will say “stare largitio decisis.”

  61. 61.

    Another Scott

    @SiubhanDuinne: Some of the story is out there.

    E.g. Abigail Tracy at VF (from 2018):

    Inside the White House, however, news of Kennedy’s retirement didn’t come as a shock. In fact, as The New York Times reports, the 81-year-old’s announcement was the culmination of a carefully orchestrated 17-month campaign by the Trump administration to remake the Supreme Court before the 2018 midterms, when there is an outside chance that Republicans could lose their majority. For conservatives, Kennedy’s seat was seen as one of the keys to rolling back abortion rights—on the campaign trail, Trump pledged to appoint a justice who would overturn Roe v. Wade. But first, Trump had to demonstrate to Kennedy that he could be trusted to nominate quality jurists to the Supreme Court. The campaign was multifaceted: over the course of several months, Trump systematically nominated three of Kennedy’s former clerks for plum judicial posts. While he criticized other, more conservative members of the court, he lavished praise on Kennedy—despite the fact that the justice has been pilloried by the right for his votes on social issues. And he cultivated a relationship with Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin, who worked closely with the Trump Organization in his role at Deutsche Bank as the global head of real-estate capital markets, according to the Times.

    The overtures continued outside the White House. Ivanka Trump reportedly took Kennedy to lunch shortly after the inauguration and brought her daughter Arabella Kushner to the Supreme Court to hear oral arguments as special guest of Kennedy shortly after. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who serves as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, went on conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt’s radio show last month to implore the court’s aging judges, “If you’re thinking about quitting this year, do it yesterday.”

    […]

    Both Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were Kennedy clerks.

    I don’t know what TFG said to Kennedy – presumably Kennedy will have to spill the beans there. He retired to go on Senior Status but I don’t quickly see that he’s heard any cases anywhere.

    HTH a little.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  63. 63.

    Steeplejack

    It just dawned on me that I haven’t seen Amir Khalid’s nym in quite a while. Is he taking a vacation, or have I just missed seeing him?

  65. 65.

    SFAW

    @Josie:

    Okay, you can sit on the bench (no pun intended) with me and Baud.​

    OK, but if it means I have to be pantsless — Baud’s bench, Baud’s rules, after all — it’s you two who will suffer.

  66. 66.

    AlaskaReader

    @Jay:

    In a report by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Discord officials were said to have acknowledged that “the risks of relying too much on user moderation when the userbase may not have an interest in reporting problematic content.”

  67. 67.

    Fake Irishman

    @Redshift:

    Yep. The postdoc fellows at my research unit (in a government agency) created a discord channel during the pandemic to stay in touch and network when we all worked from home. They are a great many things, but white supremacist gunhumping misogynistic Nazis they most certainly are not.

  68. 68.

    Jay C

    @SFAW:

    Yeah: cynical or not, relying on CJ Roberts to do diddly-squat about ethical violations at SCOTUS is a fool’s game: Roberts has been completely chumped by Sam Alito and his FedSoc pals: see the “investigation” into the leak of the Dobbs decision last year: it came up with:

    1.Diddly, and

    2. Squat.

    And pretty much confirmed the cynical (if likely accurate) theory that Alito either leaked it himself, or had one of creatures do it, probably mainly to embarrass Roberts into stifling his dissent – and to remind the CJ exactly whose “Court” it really is.

  69. 69.

    SFAW

    @Jay C:

    Roberts is just as much of a hack as Alito, but his hackery is more focused on keepin’ them darkies from a-votin’, rather than on keepin’ the wimmins in their place. Which is not to say that he doesn’t support Alito’s misogyny (or whatever it is), just that vote/voter suppression is his big thing.

    When I’m declared God-Emperor, the two of them — hell, the six of them — will have some ‘splainin’ to do.

    From their cells.

  70. 70.

    Mallard Filmore

    @Baud: Some of the Ukraine YouTube channels that I follow also have a Discord room where they can share the more … controversial … videos that YouTube will take down.  None are related to video games.

  72. 72.

    AlaskaReader

    @Baud:

    The question was asked that maybe our nation’s military recruiting efforts aimed at supremacists, racists, bigots, incels, and wanna-be warrior gamers isn’t a great military strategy?

    For some, the answer appears to be it’s fine.  Nothing to see here, move along.

  74. 74.

    Nora

    @Kay: ​
     
    I remember Mrs. Alito weeping in public over how nasty people were being to her “good man” husband. Cynic that I am, I figured it was a show on her part. He was up for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court; did anyone actually believe that he wouldn’t be asked some hard questions? Not to mention that a man who held that the police could strip search a mother and her 10 year old daughter who were not suspected of any crime nor named in any warrant shouldn’t expect to be treated with any more gentleness than he allowed the police to use against innocent people.

  77. 77.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Another Scott:

    I didn’t know the two Ivanka anecdotes, so thanks for those. And I knew, but had forgotten, that Gorsuch had also been one of Kennedy’s clerks. I wish Nina Totenberg had chosen to track down all of these stories for a book instead of her social life with RBG.

  79. 79.

    Citizen Alan

    @Nora: The thing I despise most about Clarence Thomas is that he is the biggest recipient of affirmation action in US history.  At the time of his nomination, there were scores of African-American judges who were more qualified for SCOTUS and there were also scores of conservative judges more qualified. But an African-American judge who is so conservative that he is a staunch supporter of white supremacy? In that, Clarence Thomas was one-of-a-kind.

  80. 80.

    JPL

    @SFAW: yup   I have a friend who keeps saying that he’ll moderate because he’s concerned about his legacy.  I said his legacy flew the coop years ago.

  82. 82.

    lollipopguild

    @Roger Moore: Thomas is a lot of things but his position(for life) has been and will continue to be very useful for a lot of right wing a**holes.

  84. 84.

    JPL

    Ginny is going to read that article and call Anita again and ask her to recant her testimony.   As much as I like Joe, let’s remember that he gave us Thomas.  He had more witnesses lined up but ended the hearings without calling them.

    I hope Joe stands firm with Kevin and the debt ceiling talks, but history doesn’t bode will for him.

  85. 85.

    Citizen Alan

    @Kay: True. I never really thought of myself as poor back when I was a teacher because financially, I was better off than they were at the same age and was no worse off than any other beginning teacher. It was only only when I was clerking and worked for a judge who thought nothing of taking a two-week vacation in Europe basically on a whim that I began to feel a level of financial insecurity. One of the best things about specializing in bankruptcy law is that I am constantly aware of the median income in the state where I live (because it is a factor in the disposition of every individual bankruptcy case). The knowledge that even in Mississippi I was making 4 times the median income for an individual constantly slapped me in the face at the thought that I might be “poor.”

  89. 89.

    Roger Moore

    @AlaskaReader: ​
     

    The question was asked that maybe our nation’s military recruiting efforts aimed at supremacists, racists, bigots, incels, and wanna-be warrior gamers isn’t a great military strategy?

    No. Some of us suggested that the existence of a Discord server that served Nazis doesn’t mean that all, most, or any but a tiny fraction of Discord servers serve Nazis. You’re the one who’s making the wild assumption.

  91. 91.

    gene108

    @AlaskaReader:

    I’m on a couple dozen Discord servers. None of them are racist, misogynistic, or anti-Semitic.

    When the pandemic hit, in person TTRPG’s stopped. Everything went online and different groups used their own servers for voice chat.

    There are a bunch of perfectly reasonable Discord servers out there.

  92. 92.

    Citizen Alan

    @Baud: Discord is just a platform and like any Social media platform is only as good as each channel’s moderators. I use it all the time for tabletop gaming and fanfiction interests. And in the Discord I have for my own writing, the mods are so good, they just preemptively banned someone after learning that they had just been banned for harassment on a completely different channel.

  93. 93.

    Citizen Alan

    @Roger Moore: The Chief Bankruptcy Judge for North Mississippi has taken the position that a law firm sending so much as a box of chocolates at Christmas for the benefit of the clerk’s office and the judicial law clerks violates the Code of Judicial Conduct.

  94. 94.

    AlaskaReader

    @Roger Moore: I understand your wish to limit the scope to just ‘Nazis’, that’s handy for you in a rhetorical way,

    …but that doesn’t speak to the very real reasons for the growing extremist radicalization in the ranks.

  95. 95.

    Roger Moore

    @lollipopguild:

    Not all useful people are useful idiots.  To summarize the terminology:

    • Card-carrying member.  Someone who is an open and official member of the organization and cause.  This would be, for example, a White Supremacist who was a member in good standing of the League of the South, Worldwide Church of the Creator, KKK, or similar open White Supremacist organization.
    • Fellow traveler.  Someone who is not an open member of the organization or cause, but who is ideologically aligned and can be counted on support it.  There are too many White Supremacists in this category to name or describe.
    • Useful idiot.  Someone who works toward the organization or cause’s purpose without fully realizing it.  This might be someone who accepts White Supremacist framing for everything even though they claim to believe all races are equal.

    I honestly don’t think Thomas is just a useful idiot.  He probably isn’t a card-carrying White Supremacist, but he’s at least a fellow traveler.  There’s no way he could work as consistently in favor of White Supremacy as he has without being an active supporter.

  97. 97.

    JoyceH

    @Citizen Alan:

    The thing I despise most about Clarence Thomas is that he is the biggest recipient of affirmation action in US history. At the time of his nomination, there were scores of African-American judges who were more qualified for SCOTUS and there were also scores of conservative judges more qualified. But an African-American judge who is so conservative that he is a staunch supporter of white supremacy? In that, Clarence Thomas was one-of-a-kind.

    Particularly despicable has been his willingness to throw his own people, even family, under the bus to please the white overlords.

    I remember years ago reading a story about Thomas from pre-SCOTUS days. He was speaking at some conservative confab, and bemoaned how government assistance makes people dependent. He referenced his sister, who was on welfare and complained when the check was late. Now for the rest of the story – Thomas’ sister had worked her entire life in domestic positions, AKA maid service. Bu,t the time came when an elderly relative, aunt or great-aunt became disabled and needed a full time caretaker. So sister quit her job and went on welfare so she could look after the old lady, probably saving the government thousands of dollars in indigent disabled care as well as providing a nicer home for the old lady. Of course, she’s going to complain when the check is late – that’s what she’s living on! And BTW, Thomas was a high ranking functionary in the Reagan administration, but did he tap his own funds to help the aunt? Nope, he just left it all up to the sister, and then trashed her in front of a well-heeled and well-fed white audience. Grrrrrr!

  98. 98.

    BlueGuitarist

    The Dobbs 5 went out of their way to emphasize their dishonesty by claiming Roe had been egregiously wrong from the start, even though they failed to say so under oath when it mattered, because they are dishonest cowards who hate America. Roberts prefers a low key (not obviously lying) approach to the same outcome.

  99. 99.

    Roger Moore

    @Citizen Alan:

    I’m not surprised.  People around here have been describing the very strong ethics rules they’ve encountered.  The ones I’m most familiar with are the ones affecting physicians, which have been getting tougher and tougher over time.  When I go to conferences, the organizers and companies selling stuff make a big point that they aren’t allowed to give so much as a disposable pen to a physician.

  100. 100.

    Ohio Mom

    @SiubhanDuinne: I appreciate that you keep reminding me of that moment “Justice Kennedy stopped dead in his tracks”. So much goes in this world that this has fell to a corner of my brain but yes, What was that about?

    We can make assumptions — Trump blackmailed him into quitting — but I long to know the details.

  101. 101.

    AlaskaReader

    @japa21: The link describes the growing extremist within new recruits.

    To say the military is not specifically ‘targeting’ extremists is a handy excuse, …only that excuse ignores the fact that extremists are growing in the ranks,

    ….and shining a light on just where recruitment efforts are currently focused as opposed to where the focus was in the past is going to shed some light on what kind of people are being recruited.

  102. 102.

    AlaskaReader

    @gene108: There were some perfectly benign cancer cells found, …so it’s fine to ignore those that aren’t benign.

    Got it.

  103. 103.

    Steeplejack

    @JPL:

    At this point Roberts can’t “moderate,” or it would be pointless. A 5-4 court is only slightly less bad than a 6-3 court. Has he been rendered irrelevant?

  106. 106.

    AlaskaReader

    @Omnes Omnibus: Quite evidently not.

    But I am pointing out that Discord chat rooms have been shown to be incubators for extremists of all sorts.

    Of particular concern to me is what has been learned of the ‘gaming culture’ and the co-mingling of extremists with the naive and easily persuaded.

    To be told there are some ‘not Nazis’ on Discord doesn’t speak to the problem.

    The Pentagon already admits there are dangers to recruiting from among that subset of the population.

    I’m saying they’re not wrong to be concerned and I for one do not think first person shooter gamers, or worse, should be a focal point for recruiting.

  111. 111.

    Tehanu

    @JoyceH: did he tap his own funds to help the aunt? Nope, he just left it all up to the sister, and then trashed her in front of a well-heeled and well-fed white audience. Grrrrrr!

    Totally with you on this. What a jerk.

    @Ohio Mom:  My thought too, and likewise on Miss Lindsey Graham. Nobody does a public about-face like that unless they’re trying to hide dirt.

  112. 112.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @AlaskaReader:

    That is a bad faith ignoring my point.  There is a direct equivalence between text messages and Discord servers, which are mostly private and invitation only chat systems.  Both get used by Nazis.  Would you say text messages are incubators for Nazi extremism and the military should not use them?

  113. 113.

    AlaskaReader

    @Frankensteinbeck:Bad faith, you say.

    I didn’t ‘ignore’ your point, I dismissed it because it’s an over-simplification, a generalization that I did not put forth.

    The generic ‘text message’ is not the equivalent of a platform known among a subset of users as a ‘safe place’ for their tribalism.

  114. 114.

    Sister Golden Bear

    When I had bottom surgery, there was an invite-only Discord server someone had set up where fellow patients could talk about their recoveries, ask questions, seek emotional support, organize get together at the hotel we were staying at during the initial recovery, etc. No Nazis.

  116. 116.

    AlaskaReader

    @Sister Golden Bear: …and I’lll assume you didn’t get recruitment messages from the US military on that particular server.

    But which servers do you think the recruiters look to?

    Do you think they do not go where they are the most welcome?

  117. 117.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @AlaskaReader:

    a generalization that I did not put forth.

    It is exactly the generalization that you put forth, and why people are correcting you.  Maybe it’s not the generalization you meant to put forth and we’re misunderstanding you?  But you keep doubling down on it and it’s hard to imagine anything else you could mean that’s relevant.  You’re upset that the military is recruiting on Discord, because you think Discord is an incubator of Nazis and bad actors, and people are correcting you that it is a mostly private chat system that is no more or less bad than any other chat system.

  118. 118.

    Baud

    @AlaskaReader:

    But which servers do you think the recruiters look to?

    Do you think they do not go where they are the most welcome?

     

    If your “evidence” consists of questions, then your tactics are the same as right wingers like Tucker Carlson.

  119. 119.

    Another Scott

    @AlaskaReader:

    How Many Discord Servers Are There?:

    Discord currently has over 19 million active servers every week.

    I’m not sure you recognize the scale of the task you’re seemingly inviting the DoD to undertake in having them check Discord chat rooms for people needing or having security clearances.

    Plus, there are things like the US Code and so forth that limit snooping on Americans without a warrant.

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  120. 120.

    AlaskaReader

    @RSA: I’m arguing that they should reverse their policy of lowering standards and should instead be raising their standards on all levels.

    From physical standards right on through to online behavior.

    I’m arguing that they should take a very finely focused review of where it is the recruiters are looking for new recruits.

    Ignoring the rise of extremists in the ranks should not be tolerated if we are to maintain the myth we have citizen control over our military.

  121. 121.

    Shalimar

    • @Baud: Discord is popular with gamers. Like Reddit, it’s useful and great but also has a higher percentage of assholes than most social media if you go looking for them.  The big difference between there and an open sewer like Youtube is that your Discord experience depends on the groups of people you hang out with.
  124. 124.

    AlaskaReader

    @Frankensteinbeck: You can believe that like minded persons are not attracted to platforms where they’ve heard they are welcomed.

    They search Discord because they know there are fellow travelers there.

    There’s all kinds of platforms, how to narrow your search for your tribe?   Gee, maybe check where your tribe is known to gather.

  129. 129.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @AlaskaReader:

    They search Discord because they know there are fellow travelers there.

    They search literally every online communication system because they know there are fellow travelers there.  All of your arguments are ones that apply to all the major communications systems.

  130. 130.

    Shalimar

    @AlaskaReader: There are a lot of generally toxic groups on Discord, but the “incubators for extremists” make up well under 1% of the total and finding those is extremely difficult without help from a member. Not easy to search for a background check, and likely they would have missed it unless they hacked his account.

  131. 131.

    AlaskaReader

    @Shalimar: Careful,

    has a higher percentage of assholes than most social media

    I expect some here will presently come to Discord’s defense,  …disabuse you of any such notion….

  132. 132.

    Another Scott

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, clerking isn’t a sign of agreement with the Justice.  But it’s another sign of how insular the institution is, and how Justices are seemingly having a hand in picking their successors…

    Grrr…,
    Scott.

  134. 134.

    Kay

    @Nora:

    IMO half of the keening and wailing over “cancel culture’ is because powerful people got tired of answering questions from people they consider unworthy. Alito and Kavanaugh don’t want “a debate”. They want people to recognize that they are superior beings and listen to them talk.

    Compare Alito or Kavanaugh’s behavior to that of Sotomayor or Ketanji Brown Jackson. The GOP Senators were openly sneering at Sotomayor and they called Brown Jackson a pedophile. Both women stoically endured it with the kind of pleasant professionalism of people with self discipline.

    The conservatives? Alito was fuming in his usual rage and Kavanaugh was bellowing at us and vowing revenge.

  135. 135.

    AlaskaReader

    @Baud: Your ‘zen’ state is compiled from weak non-sequiturs and straw man attempts,

    …but you doh’t make things up.

    You might want to check that hat size…

  137. 137.

    Kay

    ·Dominion lawsuit

    Brian Stelter
    @brianstelter
    ·55m
    Breaking via the
    @wsj: “Fox has made a late push to settle the dispute out of court, people familiar with the situation said Sunday.”

    I bet they did. It goes to trial Monday.

    Don’t settle, Dominion! America is counting on you to expose and humiliate these scumbags!

  138. 138.

    AlaskaReader

    @Shalimar: …1%

    Any concern is limited to just 1%.

    I see, …and you expect I should not ask where you sourced that certainty, eh?

    People speak of the ‘difficulty’ of reaching into Discord servers,

    …and yet it took Belllingcat no time at all to start real time conversations with a certain National Guardsman’s fellows.

  140. 140.

    Nora

    @Kay: ​
      Comparing the behavior of the women Justices nominated by Democrats — who were really subjected to nastiness beyond raking up their prior decisions and writings and questioning them on those — to that of Alito and Kavanaugh (and Thomas) really makes it clear that these guys assume they should be treated with the utmost respect and they are utterly outraged when they are given anything less. Whereas the women in these positions know they’ve earned whatever they’ve gotten, and they know they have to keep a calm and professional demeanor, which the (white) entitled guys do not.

  143. 143.

    dave319

    @Josie: Yeah. Jesus F. Christ, the American political press is a wholly owned genuflecting glee club of the billionaire class. No institutional memory, lazy beyond believing, credulous to a fault, and devoid of curiosity. What haven’t we suspected about Clanky Tom these many decades, that actually turned out NOT to be true? Vindictive? Check. A serial perjurer? Check. An amoral skeeve who recognized GHW Bush cynically put his nomination up because everyone knew, even before Anita Hill, that Thomas was the absolute and complete antithesis of Thurgood Marshal in every way–and yet, Thomas eagerly, greedily, shamefully, and knowingly allowed himself to be used this way. His corruption is who he is, full stop. A genuine shit of a human being, by every metric.

  147. 147.

    AlaskaReader

    @Steeplejack: …there’s always a few who wish to believe they alone have what it takes to become the gatekeepers, …often signaling between themselves in order to seek a shared sense that they really can validate themselves, oft measuring their smugness by comparison to their imagined peers.

  148. 148.

    Shalimar

    @AlaskaReader: Bellingcat traced the documents from places they were more widely disseminated and found several people who were posting them.  Those people told them about the Discord group where the documents were first posted and by whom.  Bellingcat did not join that group or get to see all of the original pages.

  150. 150.

    AlaskaReader

    @Shalimar:

     

    No, they did not have to ‘join’ that particular server to reach those they targeted.

     

    It was easier than that…

  153. 153.

    Chris T.

    @Roger Moore:

    Something as small as a logo T-shirt or a cheap pen and some Post-It notes can be enough to make people remember the giver favorably …

    I have some pens from a previous employer and the pens are crappy, which makes me think of the previous employer less favorably. 😀

    (They’re only marginally, if any, more crappy than any other cheap pen, but I’d think more of them if they were less-crappy, like some of my other cheap pens. I have a lot of cheap pens, I buy them in sets of 3 or 10 or 20 now and then and stick them in pockets and accidentally run them through the washing machine or whatever … to test them, yeah, that’s it, as a test…)

  154. 154.

    Chris T.

    @Lapassionara:

    It’s on tape, and it is clear Kennedy is gobsmacked by what Trump said to him. There’s a story there. Please tell it.

    My own guess (just a guess): both the RNC and DNC email servers were hacked by the Russians. The DNC servers had Podesta’s polenta recipe and the like, so the Russians leaked that stuff. The RNC servers had evidence of felonies and such, so the Russians kept that as kompromat. Manafort or similar passed to the Orange Error something particularly juicy about Justice Kennedy and/or close relatives…

  157. 157.

    Chris T.

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Are you suggesting that everyone on Discord is a dangerous extremist of some kind?

    Everyone, everywhere, is a dangerous extremist of some kind. I am a dangerous Baudist felinist.

  159. 159.

    Xavier

    @Baud: Three justices, including Chief Justice “Balls and Strikes” Roberts asked questions about fairness during oral questioning on the student loan suit. How does fairness come in if you’re calling balls and strikes?

  160. 160.

    Another Scott

    This bit from the April 13 Pentagon briefing struck me:

    Q: Thank you. Sort of as a follow on to Carla and Brandy’s questions, can you say whether DOD has anyone looking at chatrooms on Discord, for example, or other social media chatrooms right now for leaked information? And if not, should DOD have these people?

    GEN. RYDER: So, DOJ is, as I understand it, is working with Discord or Discord has come out publicly to say they are cooperating with the DOJ. So, that’s really a question for DOJ to tell –

    What’s Discord’s policy?:

    Our commitment:

    The vast majority of servers are invite-only and private. An outsider cannot guess the link to a specific server. Discord only lets users search for public servers. All searchable servers are required to maintain healthy and positive communities in order to remain searchable.

    * Privacy is incredibly important to us. We do not monitor every server or every conversation. However, conversations on Discord are not end-to-end encrypted. When we are alerted to an issue, we investigate the behavior at issue and take action.

    * We have a zero-tolerance policy to content or behavior that violates our Community Guidelines. When we are alerted to a violation of our rules, we investigate and take action. We also work to proactively identify illegal behavior and terminate it.

    * Discord is not an anonymous platform. Users are identified by their username, which is chosen by the user, followed by a “#” and a four-digit number, known as their Discord tag. Discord doesn’t ask for anyone’s real name on signup but we are able to track who is responsible for what by tying usernames to verified email addresses and IP addresses.

    * Users are in control of their experience on Discord. People come to Discord for different purposes, and we want them to be able to tailor their experience on Discord to their own needs. Unlike other platforms where someone might be able to message you as soon as you sign up for an account (before you have added any friends or joined any servers), this isn’t the case on Discord. In order for another user to send a direct message (DM) to you, you must either (1) accept the other user as a friend or (2) decide to join a server that the other user is a member of. We are continuously building products to let our users control their own level of security and privacy. Learn about these tools here.

    I don’t see it mentioned there, and I can’t swear that this is correct, but I thought I heard mention of “backups” from one thread from authorities talking about Discord.

    tl;dr – It looks to me like the kiddies thinking that they can post what they want on these servers without being traced are in a world of hurt if Uncle Sam decides to spend the effort to come after them.

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  161. 161.

    AlaskaReader

    Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center, has been monitoring extremists on Discord for years.

    “I just sort of forget about Discord for a while and then another story like this pops back up and there they are again. It just keeps coming up.

    In 2021, researchers with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue concluded that Discord “primarily acts as a hub for extreme right-wing socialising and community building,” and “provides a safe space for users to share ideological material and explore extremist movements.”

    ……………………………………..

    The white gunman who killed 10 Black shoppers and workers last year at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, shared detailed plans for the attack with a small group of people on Discord…

    ——————————-

    For years, Identity Evropa members have used a server on Discord, a group chat app popular among the alt-right, to send messages to one another.

    …the independent media collective Unicorn Riot published the contents of that Discord server in its entirety.

     

    Some will continue to say, …it’s fine…

  162. 162.

    Momentary

    @AlaskaReader:  I read the report you linked.  The researchers analysed 24 English language Discord servers “associated with extreme right-wing activity.”  The bullet point you quote is ambiguously phrased but taken in context means that the members of the 24 extreme right-wing servers they analysed primarily use them for socialising and community building, rather than for other purposes.  The researchers are not saying that Discord as a whole is primarily used for extreme right-wing purposes, nor did the research they conducted give them any basis for saying such a thing.

  163. 163.

    Gvg

    People keep saying Roberts will have to do something about Thomas or impose an ethics code or this will prove what we know, that he has no ethics. The thing is, I don’t think the Chief Justice has any real power to do anything. I don’t think the position carries much specific power beyond starting the sessions and assigning certain tasks.
    If others know more specifics, could you please educate me?

  164. 164.

    Rugosa

    @lowtechcyclist: ​
     Yes, and that is why the gifts are a corrupting influence even if there is no exlicit quid pro quo. “My friends are such nice people – it’s a shame their taxes are so high.”

  165. 165.

    AlaskaReader

    @Momentary:ISD did not look at or review closed channels,  private chats or groups requiring passwords, …probably aren’t any of those that are used by extremists, right Momentary?

    When they say extremist are using their open servers for ‘community building’,

    …did you imagine that means they are planning to fix the playground equipment at your local park?

    Extremists growing their ‘community’ with more extremists by advertising openly on Discord is evidently something you wish to play down.    Good to know.

    Good talk all you who so earnestly hope to play down the threat of extremists, racists, bigots and supremacists.

     

    There is a listing for 351 open servers under a page saying the right wing loves Discord.  I won’t link to it, any fellow fascist can find it by simply entering your request into any search engine.  Finding your fellow travelers is just that easy.

    …some will continue to say it’s fine.

Comments are closed.