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You are here: Home / Politics / Activist Judges! / Weekend Reading Strange Tales: ‘Ginni and Clarence: A Love Story’

Weekend Reading Strange Tales: ‘Ginni and Clarence: A Love Story’

by Anne Laurie|  July 15, 20234:57 pm| 90 Comments

This post is in: Activist Judges!, Excellent Links

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Save the date: Senate Democrats will vote on July 20 on legislation to set up a code of conduct for the Supreme Court, tighten financial disclosure rules, and beef up recusal requirements for justices.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 11, 2023

How a fiercely loyal couple saved one another, raged against their enemies, and brought the American experiment to the brink. https://t.co/u5DzuDUZSU

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) June 21, 2023

There was lot of social-media negativity about this story when it first appeared last month, but it’s hardly the author’s fault that the Thomases are the most toxic high-ranking political folie à deux since Ronnie and Nancy (or perhaps Charles Manson and Squeaky Fromme).

A new spate of well-sourced stories about the open corruption around Justice Thomas and his top aides (Payments via Venmo!) give me the impression that he, and his beloved wife, are being set up by his ‘friends’ as a scapecoat to protect the younger, less obviously tainted SC(R)OTUS members…

TL, DR (but you should read, cuz it’s amazing!): Clarence and Ginni are lab-created products of the 1970s backlash against civil rights and feminism — You can force us to let Those People into our spaces, said the William F. Buckley-ites, but you can’t make us *accept* them. Putting the ‘action’ in ‘reactionary’:

… There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. “They go on morning runs,” reports a 1991 piece in the Washington Post. “They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.” Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the president’s chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as “my best friend.” (“That’s what I call him, and he is my best friend,” she later told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things is romantic…

… Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it…

“There is nothing you can do to get past Black skin,” Thomas once told Juan Williams. “I don’t care how educated you are, how good you are at what you do — you’ll never have the same contacts or opportunities, you’ll never be seen as equal to whites.” His is a fundamentally fatalistic vision of white liberals, whose every attempt to “help” is pure vanity, a more dangerous, because more dishonest, extension of the white supremacy they profess to deplore. His views on school busing are instructive: “I wouldn’t have gone into South Boston. It would have been taking my life in my hands for me to do so. Why, then, were innocent children being made to do what a grown man feared?” This is not a question earnestly posed, because Thomas has in countless speeches articulated the motives of white liberals disrupting Black life: They act to assuage white guilt, to improve the aesthetics of the ruling class, to stoke the delicate self-conception of those who would never willingly cede power, all of it in service to a supremacist status quo. He prefers, he has said, the directness of southern racism to the subtlety of northern condescension…

At age 12 Ginni boarded a chartered plane for Washington, D.C., having been selected as a page for the GOP Women’s Conference, where she would sport a sash and a top hat; partisan costuming would continue to be a theme throughout her life. Her childhood was social where Clarence’s had been isolated, a succession of parades and rallies and fundraisers, the sense that the world could, though determined voluntarism, be changed. Ginni’s mother supported Phyllis Schlafly’s crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment, and hosted at her home, there on the sandproof carpet, like-minded nationally known speakers, such as Frederick Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. Marge Lamp, or as she put it in her campaign literature, “Mrs. Donald G. Lamp,” ran for state legislature under the theme of “common sense” and told the paper she’d commute to Lincoln and be back home at night, such that her husband would not miss many meals. She was, according to friend and former congressman Hal Daub, a positive, active, affable, civic-minded presence in Omaha, one-half of a marriage of equals. Her best campaigners, she said, were her children. She lost, but she had passed on something in the attempt…

“That was my first real campaign,” Ginni told a reporter in 1974. She was a high-school student canvassing for Republicans in the age of Watergate, which, she assured the reporter, “was just Nixon and his people, not the Republican Party.” Why campaign when you’re too young to vote? “Because the party needs us,” she said, sloshing through the rain to deliver more talking points. Ginni was a compulsive joiner. As a “warrior woman,” she donned a shield and cheered on the football team. Daub, a centrist Republican, would later employ her in D.C. She stood out in his office as social, eager, and unusually knowledgeable — “a wonk.”

In the spring of 1986, Clarence was a 37-year-old divorced single father and one of D.C.’s most eligible bachelors according to Jet magazine, which we can be fairly certain Ginni did not read. He was the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a rise from poverty that a traditional conservative would describe as a rags-to-riches individualist American triumph, but this is neither Clarence Thomas’s experience nor the story he chooses to tell.

There had been, after the brief and defining comfort of his Black Catholic elementary school, a tour of white institutions where Clarence was made to endure a succession of racist humiliations. He was one of only two Black children in his high-school seminary, which is to say constantly surrounded by white adolescent boys. “Smile so we can see you, Clarence,” he recalls one saying in the dark. He dropped out of his college seminary after he heard a classmate celebrating the death of Martin Luther King Jr. As an undergraduate at Holy Cross, he listened to records of Malcolm X speeches, helped found a Black Student Union, and nearly dropped out in protest of racially motivated mistreatment. He was never so invested in student life at Yale Law, where the distance between himself and his classmates appeared the difference between Pin Point and Greenwich. “I felt the difference in my bones,” he writes. “I was among the elite, and I knew that no amount of striving would make me one of them.” What other Yale Law student, gearing up for a summer home, was “sick with worry” about the “frightening prospect” of driving through the South in an unreliable old car past a Klan-sponsored billboard? Who else had to endure the strange looks of white mechanics inspecting the failing car, a “bad night’s sleep” in a strange motel when no one could fix it, and rescue, finally, from his brother?

As the head of the EEOC, burdened with debt, Thomas was a man conspicuously lacking generational wealth. He was still broke. American Express cut him off for failure to pay his bills. He could not access a credit card, and so when he did official business, incredibly, his secretary had to book him only in hotels that took cash. His apartment was full of cockroaches. He was overcome with loneliness, “lower than a snake’s belly,” and, according to his friend Armstrong Williams, liable to “bore women to death” on dates.

It was not on a date that he met 29-year-old Virginia Lamp but at an intimate roundtable on affirmative action, or, as Ginni recently put it, on the subject of “how long America needs race-preference policies to get over slavery.” Midge Decter (or “Mrs. Norman Podhoretz”) introduced Thomas to Ginni, who was then a labor lobbyist for the Chamber of Commerce. The two of them shared a cab back to the airport…

Ginni did not doubt her husband when a young woman accused him of describing rape scenes at work. In fact, reports Clarence, she “loved me more than ever.” Weren’t these accusations just more evidence that she had landed the ideal man, an object of crazy-making desire? “In my heart,” she said later, “I always believed she was probably someone in love with my husband and never got what she wanted.”

By all accounts, at this point, Clarence Thomas simply fell apart. “I lay across the bed and curled up in a fetal position,” he writes. “He was,” Ginni said later, “debilitated beyond anything I’d ever seen in my life.” “I have never had an experience like that,” former senator John Danforth later said. “Ever. Still haven’t. Because he was a broken man. He was just broken.” It was “spiritual warfare,” Virginia said, “good versus evil.”

It is hard to see how Clarence Thomas would have extricated himself from the fetal position without Ginni, who closed the blinds and put on Christian music and invited couples over to pray and called a neighbor to come over and give Clarence a haircut, which she did. He got up at one in the morning the night before the hearing and looked over his papers, suggestions on how to respond, and was, according to Ginni, “really confused.” She cleared the table for him. She turned on his computer. He wrote his speech on a notepad. She typed it up…

She watched the proceedings in rage, “the wrath of anger coming out of my eyes.” Why wasn’t the conversation about his heroism? Where was the celebration for obstacles he had overcome? “My name has been harmed,” he said. “My integrity has been harmed. My character has been harmed. My family has been harmed. My friends have been harmed. There is nothing this committee, this body, or this country can do to give me my good name back. Nothing.”…

… Thomas’s loyalty, repeatedly expressed, is not to the grandfather who denied him affection, or the country that abandoned him to poverty, but to the woman he “needed … more than anyone,” the woman who did not doubt him when doubt was merited, the woman who handed him a towel as he emerged exhausted from the bath, or perhaps the shower, a Supreme Court justice. She was “as dear and close a human being as I could have ever imagined having in my life.” They had been through a “fiery trial” and emerged “one being — an amalgam.”

It wasn’t normal for the wife of a Supreme Court justice to give a full, intensely personal, and aggrieved account of the confirmation process and her husband’s attendant breakdown to People magazine, complete with posed pictures of them in their apartment — here casually reading a Bible together on the couch, here drinking coffee in the kitchen, here holding hands amid a bunch of binders on the floor — but from the very beginning Ginni and Clarence Thomas would appear to have no particular interest in decorum. In 1994, Clarence Thomas, successor of Thurgood Marshall on a Court steeped in “formality, courtesy, and dignity,” according to its Historical Society, presided over and hosted Rush Limbaugh’s third wedding, to a former aerobics instructor he met on CompuServe, at the Thomases’ home in Fairfax Station. Thomas had told the nation he couldn’t get his reputation back; he evidently did not care to try…

Thomas quotes W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, he echoes arguments one might encounter in Black Power, he draws frequently on his own painful childhood, and yet he comes, almost all of the time, to conclusions amenable to Harlan Crow. In an opinion on affirmative action and elsewhere, Thomas quotes Douglass: “The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us … I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.” It would be madness to suggest that Clarence was wrong to see hypocrisy, condescension, and white supremacy running through the progressive project, and while these may not have been the concerns of his friends in Washington, he found in Republicans people with the same basic program: to take, when confronted with a neighbor’s deprivation, no political action at all…

There was something in Ginni and Clarence that reinforced and refined a shared extremism, something beyond their shared intolerance for ambiguity. There was an interlocking set of beliefs, a fatalism born of the lived experience of racism and the entire heavily manned edifice of white ignorance. If white liberals only made anything worse, if they would sacrifice the safety of children sent into South Boston in service of their own pathetic vanity, they might as well live inside their own self-affirming stories. They were most dangerous, after all, when they tried to help. They were most supportive, those angels lining the hallway, when you left their myths intact.
…

There is considerable ambiguity about what various participants in the invasion of the Capitol on January 6 were doing. There is no ambiguity about what Ginni Thomas was doing. She was trying to overthrow the government. Biden had been elected on November 3. On November 5, Ginni seemed to think everything had been taken care of. The “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators,” she wrote in a text to the president’s chief of staff, “are being arrested & detained … & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.” On November 9, she sent dozens of Arizona lawmakers emails asking them to choose their own electors (that choice being “yours and yours alone”) rather than let Biden take the state he had won. “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!,” she wrote to Meadows the next day. “You are the leader, with him.” November 19: “The intense pressures you and our President are now experiencing are more intense than Anything Experienced (but I only felt a fraction of it in 1991).”…

On January 6, she posted a George Orwell quote to social media. The quote was fake. She was a Facebook-addled 63-year-old woman posting at 3:33 a.m., 3:46 (“I get up early with my dogs,” she told the committee), whose sources of information included Glenn Beck and other more obscure because more insane right-wing conspiracy theorists. She was a woman who identified happiness itself as an act of antagonism against “haters,” a self-proclaimed bridge burner disgusted with both Mike Pence and “elites,” a category that evidently did not include the wife of the longest-serving Supreme Court justice or the president’s chief of staff to whom she happened to be talking. She was a hype-woman being hyped up by her friends (“There are no rules in war,” Connie Hair, then Louie Gohmert’s chief of staff, reportedly texted her) and in turn hyping others. She was picking up “vibes,” she told the January 6 committee, vibes being sufficient basis on which to overturn an election…

There is no obvious strategic benefit toward making a spectacle of one’s lack of respect for judicial procedure. This is not useful to the Federalist Society, or to Harlan Crow, or to the many institutions Harlan Crow supports. It is an expression of love to Ginni, or an expression of disdain for the rest of us, or both.

“What’s the best part of being a justice?” she asked him in their interview.

“First of all,” he said, “it would be impossible without you … Um, it’s sort of like” — and here he is searching for the words, his eyes darting back and forth — “it’s sort of like, How do you run with one leg?”…

He thought going to Yale was going to make him equivalent to white ppl.
What he doesn’t realize is that white ppl will ALWAYS question your existence in any professional setting. We’re where we are bc he hates he’s not white.

— Ryan (@Ryanspeaks140) July 2, 2023

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Reader Interactions

90Comments

  1. 1.

    schrodingers_cat

    July 15, 2023 at 5:05 pm

    Sadly Thomas has a lot of company. Avivek Cringeswamy and Nikki Haley are wannabe white people of Indian origin in this election cycle.

  2. 2.

    Anonymous At Work

    July 15, 2023 at 5:11 pm

    A non-Manchin’d, Sinema’d, and Feinstein’d Democratic Senate majority would definitely want to know more than a few things that wouldn’t bode well.  Roberts’ wife’s side-hustle.  Kavanaugh’s disappearing credit card debt.  ALL the real estate sales from Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Barrett.  Subpoenas galore to both the briber and bribees.  Would be fun.

  3. 3.

    Nettoyeur

    July 15, 2023 at 5:15 pm

    W’s rich family father-son status insecurity drama gave us two failed Mideast wars, thousands of damaged soldiers,  trillions in debt, and an economic crash. Trump’s rich family father-son cruelty drama gave sheer chaos in government, an attempted coup,  trillions more in debt, and a tepid COVID response that gave the US a far higher death rate than many developed nations . Biden comes from a middle class family which suffered a series of economic reversals, but somehow he had a loving relationship with his father. He is presiding over a US comeback with record low unemployment, decreasing inflation and deficits, while beating back resurgent Russian aggression on the cheap. Family values, maybe?

  4. 4.

    japa21

    July 15, 2023 at 5:15 pm

    @Anonymous At Work: But you don’t understand.  Per Roberts, requiring judges to testify to Congress would go against the separation of powers and would destroy the country, so it is appropriate that justices ignore subpoenas.  And go ahead, sue right up to the SCOTUS.  I think I know how 6 of them would rule.

  5. 5.

    Baud

    July 15, 2023 at 5:17 pm

    I wish we lived in a world where we didn’t have to care about their marriage.

  6. 6.

    Hoodie

    July 15, 2023 at 5:17 pm

    @schrodingers_cat: I guess these folks  miss the point that being white doesn’t make you special, it just allows you to be mediocre. Kind of sad when you think about how they could be different.

  7. 7.

    Nettoyeur

    July 15, 2023 at 5:18 pm

    @schrodingers_cat: Vivek wants to remove the voting rights of 18-24 year olds, fire federal employees, and reinstitute the spoils system for running the federal govt. Pretty much the Elon Musk approach to Twitter. Nikki is trying very hard to pretend she is really white supremacist. What could go wrong?

  8. 8.

    Suzanne

    July 15, 2023 at 5:18 pm

    I know that I would probably read that piece and come away better informed. But the two of them make me so mad…. I’m sorry. I would rather rub shit in my hair than read another word about Clarence Thomas.

  9. 9.

    swiftfox

    July 15, 2023 at 5:19 pm

    May have disagreed with R&N politically but Thomas-level corrupt? I don’t think so. Also interesting is Reagan’s sound bites from the SAG strike in 1960.

  10. 10.

    Baud

    July 15, 2023 at 5:22 pm

    @Suzanne:

    Yeah, all praise to AL, but I’ve grown a little weary of media attempts to make bad people interesting.

    ETA: I admit my attitude towards these things may not be the best one.

  11. 11.

    schrodingers_cat

    July 15, 2023 at 5:25 pm

    @Baud: I just found out that I am one degree of separation from a most vile right wing columnist from India. Eww.

  12. 12.

    Baud

    July 15, 2023 at 5:26 pm

    @schrodingers_cat:

    How could you have just found out about one degree of separation? That’s a parent, sibling, or child.

  13. 13.

    schrodingers_cat

    July 15, 2023 at 5:28 pm

    @Baud: I thought that was the zeroth degree of separation. Its the divorced spouse of someone married into the family.

  14. 14.

    Miss Bianca

    July 15, 2023 at 5:29 pm

    @Baud: I think I’m with you on this one.

  15. 15.

    FastEdD

    July 15, 2023 at 5:30 pm

    It makes me think that stealing the election in 2000 emboldened these assholes into thinking they could steal the election in 2020.

  16. 16.

    Dan B

    July 15, 2023 at 5:33 pm

    @schrodingers_cat:  Crazedswamy.  He’s been spouting insane theories.

  17. 17.

    Baud

    July 15, 2023 at 5:33 pm

    @schrodingers_cat:

    I thought zero was the आत्मन, the self.

    ETA: I would say that’s at least two degrees.

  18. 18.

    schrodingers_cat

    July 15, 2023 at 5:38 pm

    @Baud: Yeah I think you are right. Its not someone I know directly. But just found out that the ex-spouse of the person who is now married into the family was a vicious bigot.

  19. 19.

    Brachiator

    July 15, 2023 at 5:47 pm

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Sadly Thomas has a lot of company. Avivek Cringeswamy and Nikki Haley are wannabe white people of Indian origin in this election cycle.

    America is a crazy place. Until relatively recently, Asian Indians have had to fight to be recognized as white, which was the insane proxy to be considered a “regular American,” I guess.

    Some of the court cases are absurd.

    In its decision in the case of U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), the Supreme Court deemed Asian Indians ineligible for citizenship because U.S. law allowed only free whites to become naturalized citizens. The court conceded that Indians were “Caucasians” and that anthropologists considered them to be of the same race as white Americans, but argued that “the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences.”

    The Thind decision also led to successful efforts to denaturalize some who had previously become citizens. This represented a particular threat in California, where a 1913 law prohibited aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning or leasing land. Only in 1946 did Congress, which was beginning to recognize that India would soon be independent and a major world power, pass a new law that allowed Indians to become citizens and also established a small immigration quota. But major immigration to the United States from South Asia did not begin until after immigration laws were sharply revised in 1965.

    Conservatives now have this loose standard of assimilation for some not entirely white people. American-ize your name, become Christian and accept right wing conservative values and all is well. Oh, and you must demonize non-white people, which is a weird ass contradiction.

  20. 20.

    OzarkHillbilly

    July 15, 2023 at 5:52 pm

    @Suzanne: Having my finger nails pulled would be preferable.

  21. 21.

    schrodingers_cat

    July 15, 2023 at 5:53 pm

    @Brachiator: Thind’s case is sad. He fought in the Great War for the US. Arguing that he is white was the only way to fight deportation.

  22. 22.

    Brachiator

    July 15, 2023 at 5:57 pm

    @Nettoyeur:

    Biden comes from a middle class family which suffered a series of economic reversals, but somehow he had a loving relationship with his father.

    I thought that Biden came from a wealthy family that hit a decline and later became securely middle class. I also thought that Dubya had a good relationship with his father.

    Trump world does seem to have a twisted history.

    In short, no easy answers.

  23. 23.

    Tehanu

    July 15, 2023 at 6:00 pm

    @Anonymous At Work: ​
     

    Roberts’ wife’s side-hustle. Kavanaugh’s disappearing credit card debt. ALL the real estate sales from Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Barrett. Subpoenas galore to both the briber and bribees. Would be fun.

    In our dreams, I’m afraid.

  24. 24.

    zhena gogolia

    July 15, 2023 at 6:00 pm

    @Suzanne: Yeah, I was kind of reading it, and then I said to myself, WHY? WHY?

  25. 25.

    Wapiti

    July 15, 2023 at 6:00 pm

    @japa21: What’s crazy is that the Constitution spells out legal immunities for Congress (They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.) It does not spell out any legal immunity for the Supreme Court Justices.

  26. 26.

    zhena gogolia

    July 15, 2023 at 6:01 pm

    @FastEdD: I think that all the time.

  27. 27.

    Captain C

    July 15, 2023 at 6:03 pm

    @Brachiator:

    Oh, and you must demonize non-white people, which is a weird ass contradiction.

    Not necessarily.  It’s kind of like how a gang might send you after your own brother or cousin, to prove your loyalty to the gang.  Or how someone on the wrong side of the One Drop Rule in Jim Crow but successfully passing for white might join the Klan to make sure their bona fides aren’t questioned.

  28. 28.

    laura

    July 15, 2023 at 6:07 pm

    @Hoodie: being white doesn’t make you special, it just allows you to be mediocre – boy howdy, ain’t that the absolute truth.

  29. 29.

    Daoud bin Daoud

    July 15, 2023 at 6:11 pm

    “Like-minded nationally known speakers, such as Frederick Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.” Schwarz of CACA to the rescue!

  30. 30.

    schrodingers_cat

    July 15, 2023 at 6:13 pm

    @Captain C: Also white supremacy with a brown face gives white supremacists a degree of plausible deniability

    Also add me to the chorus of people who do not want to read about this couple that bonds over hate.

  31. 31.

    randy khan

    July 15, 2023 at 6:17 pm

    @Suzanne:

    I read it, and it illuminate some things we already know very well, but probably doesn’t add anything to people who’ve been paying attention since the day he was nominated for the Supreme Court.

    The only new thought I had after reading it was that I’m now kind of convinced that Thomas won’t resign strategically while there’s a Republican President – he sees being on the Court as his revenge on all the people who treated him badly and he doesn’t want to give up a minute of that.

  32. 32.

    schrodingers_cat

    July 15, 2023 at 6:17 pm

    @Dan B: He makes me cringe everytime he opens his mouth and cringeswamy sounds a bit like Krishnaswamy.

  33. 33.

    Martin

    July 15, 2023 at 6:18 pm

    @Baud: Yeah, I mean I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take away from this. It’s not like psychoanalyzing the Thomases helps us through this moment, or how to avoid this moment in the future. They are more or less a living fossil of a moment in time which doesn’t really exist (though I take schrodingers point that moment does echo) actually sort of just validates my whole ‘wouldn’t it be better if Boomers just retired from the whole running the world thing’. It’s clear that Thomas is determined to draft the entire country into his narcissistic self-loathing crusade, like it or not, but like, no shit. This is not new information. And it’s not like Trump, DeSantis, Graham are doing anything different with the same goal and the same general lack of agency to stop them. Sure we can vote against them, but we can’t force them into therapy and unbreak them.

  34. 34.

    Brachiator

    July 15, 2023 at 6:21 pm

    @Captain C:

    RE: Oh, and you must demonize non-white people, which is a weird ass contradiction.

    Not necessarily.  It’s kind of like how a gang might send you after your own brother or cousin, to prove your loyalty to the gang.

    No. It’s more like eagerly volunteering to hurt your own brother. In the UK, Tory minister Priti Patel endorsed immigration laws which might have excluded her own parents from being able to live in the UK, had the policies been in force earlier.

    Or how someone on the wrong side of the One Drop Rule in Jim Crow but successfully passing for white might join the Klan to make sure their bona fides aren’t questioned.

    Probably never or rarely happened, but I take your point.

  35. 35.

    Steeplejack

    July 15, 2023 at 6:23 pm

    In the bipartisan spirit, I will point out that Sonia Sotomayor is starting to get some scrutiny because her staff is pushing sales of her books.

    Sotomayor’s staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children’s books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009. Details of those events, largely out of public view, were obtained by the Associated Press through more than 100 open records requests to public institutions. [. . .]

    In her case, the documents reveal repeated examples of taxpayer-funded court staff performing tasks for the justice’s book ventures, which workers in other branches of government are barred from doing.

    In 2019, as Sotomayor traveled the country to promote her new children’s book, Just Ask!, library and community college officials in Portland, Oregon, jumped at the chance to host an event.

    They put in long hours and accommodated the shifting requests of Sotomayor’s court staff. Then, as the public cost of hosting the event soared almost tenfold, a Sotomayor aide emailed with a different, urgent concern: She said the organizers did not buy enough copies of the justice’s book, which attendees had to purchase or have on hand in order to meet Sotomayor after her talk.

    “For an event with 1,000 people and they have to have a copy of Just Ask to get into the line, 250 books is definitely not enough,” the aide, Anh Le, wrote staffers at the Multnomah County Library. “Families purchase multiples, and people will be upset if they are unable to get in line because the book required is sold out.”

  36. 36.

    SpaceUnit

    July 15, 2023 at 6:25 pm

    I got about three paragraphs in before I started feeling nauseous and bored.  Their story ain’t worth my time.

  37. 37.

    Daoud bin Daoud

    July 15, 2023 at 6:30 pm

    @Baud: if only Clarence’s & Ginni’s marriage were more like that of Adolf and Eva!

  38. 38.

    Chief Oshkosh

    July 15, 2023 at 6:31 pm

    @japa21: If those 6 individuals want to set themselves apart from society,…well, it’s awfully cold out there…

  39. 39.

    Daoud bin Daoud

    July 15, 2023 at 6:33 pm

    @FastEdD: if the Sinister Six have any say in it (and they will), the Orange Obscenity will be installed by fiat against the will of the American public.

  40. 40.

    trnc

    July 15, 2023 at 6:34 pm

    They would have you believe that because we didn’t go to full colorblind, no progressive policies made any difference to opportunity for POC.

  41. 41.

    Quiltingfool

    July 15, 2023 at 6:35 pm

    Soprano 2, if you’re around, to answer your rain question, yes, it did rain last night!  I don’t know what Osage Beach (Lake of the Ozarks) got, but here in Macks Creek we got a pretty good downpour for about 45 minutes or so.  Our poor little pond filled up a bit.  Helps that it gets lots of runoff!  We need more, but I’ll take what we got, better than nothing.

    We’re in a severe drought right now.  Our neighbor cuts hay from our bitty acreage (cuts down on brush hogging yay!); last year he got 9 large bales, this year only 3.  Doubt they’ll be another cutting, unless we get more consistent rain.

  42. 42.

    Brachiator

    July 15, 2023 at 6:36 pm

    @randy khan:

    Thomas won’t resign strategically while there’s a Republican President – he sees being on the Court as his revenge on all the people who treated him badly and he doesn’t want to give up a minute of that.

    The weird thing is that Thomas is not getting any revenge, only aiding and abetting his supposed enemies.

  43. 43.

    Dan B

    July 15, 2023 at 6:37 pm

    @schrodingers_cat:  I haven’t heard Vivek speak so there’s less cringe for me.  Reading quotes is plenty cringe worthy.

    I avoid audios and video of these creeps to reduce the potential PTSD.

  44. 44.

    Martin

    July 15, 2023 at 6:38 pm

    @Brachiator:

    Oh, and you must demonize non-white people, which is a weird ass contradiction.

    Oh, not at all. White people demonize ‘white trash’ all the time for being white wrong. It’s not about demonizing non-white people, it’s about reinforcing the social hierarchy. ‘White trash’ aren’t doing their job of showing white people as more deserving of being at the top, and Clarence Thomas isn’t demonized by conservatives because he’s reinforcing the social hierarchy as aggressively as Tommy Tuberville.

    You only demonize those that are demanding or presenting as being in the wrong social slot – people of color for being too high, and poor whites for being too low. So yeah, Thomas is expected to demonize blacks that aspire above their station – and he does – reliably.

  45. 45.

    Dan B

    July 15, 2023 at 6:43 pm

    @Quiltingfool:  It seems there are two types of weather in the world, drought plus heat or flooding.  Much of western Washington is in moderate drought but we’re in severe drought in Seattle.  Zero rain in July and less than an inch in June.  Scattered showers Monday.  88° today.

  46. 46.

    KenK

    July 15, 2023 at 6:45 pm

    Poor Clancy. The struggles of an Oreo. Fck him and his miscreant spouse.

  47. 47.

    Martin

    July 15, 2023 at 6:47 pm

    @Brachiator: The weird thing is that Thomas is not getting any revenge, only aiding and abetting his supposed enemies.

    He’s been fully accepted into white culture. The free money he sought after graduation he’s getting. He’s made himself more valuable to white people despite his skin color than literally any white person – even Alito isn’t laying down markers as aggressively as Thomas is.

    He’s the black person who won.

  48. 48.

    Josie

    July 15, 2023 at 6:47 pm

    @Brachiator: ​
     Yes, but he doesn’t see the wealthy conservatives as his enemies. He actually believes they are his friends, the poor man.

  49. 49.

    frosty

    July 15, 2023 at 6:48 pm

    @schrodingers_cat: I thought one degree was just you know someone who knows the target. Two degrees is you know someone who knows someone who knows the target. Etc. I didn’t think it had anything to do with family members.

  50. 50.

    Brachiator

    July 15, 2023 at 6:53 pm

    @Martin:

    RE: Oh, and you must demonize non-white people, which is a weird ass contradiction.

    Oh, not at all. White people demonize ‘white trash’ all the time for being white wrong. It’s not about demonizing non-white people, it’s about reinforcing the social hierarchy.

    White people who most demonize “white trash” are often just a generation away from being white trash themselves. Again, the contradiction is playing itself out.

    Bigotry in America is more about caste than social hierarchy.

    RE: Thomas.

    He’s the black person who won.

    Not at all.

  51. 51.

    Jerzy Russian

    July 15, 2023 at 6:53 pm

    @frosty:   Also too, I thought Kevin Bacon was somehow involved in this.

  52. 52.

    Dan B

    July 15, 2023 at 6:55 pm

    @frosty:  Being related to a nasty piece of work is pretty awful.  My partner’s brother and SIL are like that.  I hope to never see them again.  Sadistic wingers.

  53. 53.

    Miss Bianca

    July 15, 2023 at 6:56 pm

    @zhena gogolia:

    @Suzanne: That’s where I ended up! Started the article and said, “Yup, well-written and all, but I just can’t with these vile people in love. It’s too nauseous.”

  54. 54.

    Miss Bianca

    July 15, 2023 at 6:57 pm

    @Captain C:

    Or how someone on the wrong side of the One Drop Rule in Jim Crow but successfully passing for white might join the Klan to make sure their bona fides aren’t questioned.

    OMG. That’s a harrowing example. I’m sure it’s happened, too.

  55. 55.

    zhena gogolia

    July 15, 2023 at 6:59 pm

    @Jerzy Russian: I know someone who knows Kevin Bacon. What does that make me?

  56. 56.

    Dan B

    July 15, 2023 at 6:59 pm

    OT but Florida:  The GOP in seven counties want to make the Covid vaccines illegal.  Doctors and other medical providers leaving?

  57. 57.

    Jeffro

    July 15, 2023 at 7:01 pm

    @randy khan: I’m now kind of convinced that Thomas won’t resign strategically while there’s a Republican President – he sees being on the Court as his revenge on all the people who treated him badly and he doesn’t want to give up a minute of that.

    Oh I think a large enough check – or threat – will take care of that.

  58. 58.

    Another Scott

    July 15, 2023 at 7:01 pm

    Lest we forget… AmericanRhetoric.com:

    Senator Biden: The committee will please come to order. Judge, tough day and tough night for you, I know. Let me ask, do you have anything you’d like to say before we begin? And I understand that your preference is — which is totally and completely understandable — that we go one hour tonight, 30 minutes on each side. Is — Am I correct in that?

    Judge Thomas: That’s right.

    Senator Biden: Do you have anything you’d like to say?

    Judge Thomas: Senator, I would like to start by saying unequivocally, uncategorically, that I deny each and every single allegation against me today that suggested in any way that I had conversations of a sexual nature or about pornographic material with Anita Hill, that I ever attempted to date her, that I ever had any personal sexual interest in her, or that I in any way ever harassed her.

    A second, and I think more important point. I think that this today is a travesty. I think that it is disgusting. I think that this hearing should never occur in America. This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation. How would any member on this committee, any person in this room, or any person in this country, would like sleaze said about him or her in this fashion? Or this dirt dredged up and this gossip and these lies displayed in this manner? How would any person like it?

    The Supreme Court is not worth it. No job is worth it. I am not here for that. I am here for my name, my family, my life, and my integrity. I think something is dreadfully wrong with this country when any person, any person in this free country would be subjected to this.

    This is not a closed room. There was an FBI investigation. This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace.

    And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. — U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.

    “Uncategorically”??

    The “how dare you question me” tone is [chef’s kiss]. He showed Kavanaugh how it was done. Everyone who dares question him is a liar, about everything, but not him. He’s being unfairly attacked.

    Yeah, I don’t think that he was curled up in a ball with Gini. But I don’t really care if he was or wasn’t.

    The man has been a monster on the SCOTUS, his wife helped people and groups who were trying to overthrow the 2020 election, and they are both determined to grift off their position as much as they’re able. His actions in federal offices are what matter, and he has weakened the commonweal in those actions (no matter what trials and hardships and annoyances he suffered in his earlier private life).

    Grr..,
    Scott.

  59. 59.

    Martin

    July 15, 2023 at 7:14 pm

    @Brachiator: Not at all.

    He would disagree completely. I’m not saying a single other black person would agree with him, but he won. Look at that fucking painting that Crow commissioned – Thomas is the focus. Everyone there is hanging on his every word. This is the fucking Last Supper of Clarance Thomas’ theory of blackness – billionaire white apostles supplicating themselves to the wisdom of the man who would validate why black people or non-christians are culturally lazy and violent and undeserving.

    Of course they’re using him to hurt other black people. What the fuck does he care? He has no empathy for the people he represents – he loathes them. He’s loathed them for quite a long time, and because it’s socially improper for white people to openly loathe black people, installing Thomas on the court allows for that kind of black loathing to be institutionalized at the highest level, where it will remain until such time as he goes in a box. Liberals can make as much cultural progress as they want, the institution will stand strong with that vote.

  60. 60.

    Brachiator

    July 15, 2023 at 7:35 pm

    @Martin:

    Of course they’re using him to hurt other black people. What the fuck does he care? He has no empathy for the people he represents – he loathes them.

    Who is it that Thomas loathes? White people? Thomas has never suggested that he represents black people.

    And of course, the secret fear of some white people is that a black Supreme Court Justice, or a black president, will decide to represent their people and get even. White racists always fear retribution for their crimes against people of color.

    He’s loathed them for quite a long time, and because it’s socially improper for white people to openly loathe black people, installing Thomas on the court allows for that kind of black loathing to be institutionalized at the highest level, where it will remain until such time as he goes in a box. Liberals can make as much cultural progress as they want, the institution will stand strong with that vote.

    This may something about white people, liberals and conservatives, but tells us little about Thomas.

  61. 61.

    E.

    July 15, 2023 at 7:39 pm

    @Brachiator: Oh you might be surprised. A very white (as am I) girlfriend of mine with a ferociously racist side of the family learned she had an entire set of black relations no one had ever spoken about in three generations. The one side of the family managed to grow lighter and lighter, and evidently also racister and racister, through the generations, looking with increasing scorn on their ancestors. The racism stuck with many of them but the knowledge of their many cousins became totally forgotten. Until, that is, the internet.

  62. 62.

    UncleEbeneezer

    July 15, 2023 at 7:46 pm

    I haven’t listened yet but the Slow Burn podcast series on Thomas is supposed to be great!

  63. 63.

    Subsole

    July 15, 2023 at 7:53 pm

     

    @schrodingers_cat:

    @Nettoyeur: No snark: are we sure she’s pretending?

    I know next to nothing of Indian culture. Is it something like Latino culture, where certain jatis see themselves as ‘white’, similar to Castilianos??

  64. 64.

    Gretchen

    July 15, 2023 at 7:53 pm

    @Nettoyeur: they’re trying to use family values against Biden re: the Arkansas granddaughter he doesn’t acknowledge.  Meanwhile, they criticize him for bringing his recovering addict son to the White House. So if he brought recovering addict former sex worker’s child to the White House with her mom, that would somehow make it all good?

  65. 65.

    Ben Cisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️

    July 15, 2023 at 7:54 pm

    Fuck. Them. Both.

  66. 66.

    Subsole

    July 15, 2023 at 7:55 pm

    @Suzanne: Same, girl, same.

    I have gotten to the point I just cannot read about these folks anymore.

    They’re all Nazi-adjacent assholes we have to defeat for the sake of democracy on earth. I don’t need their life story, anymore than I need Himmler’s, Eichmann’s, Rohm’s, or Goth’s.

  67. 67.

    JCNZ

    July 15, 2023 at 7:55 pm

    @Nettoyeur: A 1000%.

  68. 68.

    patrick II

    July 15, 2023 at 7:58 pm

    @Baud:

    I don’t think you have to be related, just know them personally.

  69. 69.

    patrick II

    July 15, 2023 at 8:06 pm

    Thomas confuses the significant minority of people who don’t think much of him because he is black with the majority who don’t think much of him because he is an asshole — and as a consequence has made an alliance with the minority, proving the majority correct in their assessment.

  70. 70.

    Gretchen

    July 15, 2023 at 8:08 pm

    @Steeplejack: it’s typical to have copies of the book available for purchase at an author talk. It would be weird if you couldn’t buy the book at the talk.

  71. 71.

    Subsole

    July 15, 2023 at 8:09 pm

    @E.:

    That makes a twisted kind of sense. Those relatives were a threat to the ‘passing’ side, just by existing (hello One Drop Rule). And people tend to hate and resent and fear what threatens them. So they probably channeled that into racial contempt. Which also served as useful camouflage.

    Or maybe they just thought ‘if one drop makes you black one drop should also make you white’ and proceeded apace from there.

    It’s racism. Shit don’t gotta make sense. But I feel compelled to see if we can figure it out. Hopefully doing so makes it easier to dismantle.

  72. 72.

    Citizen Alan

    July 15, 2023 at 8:10 pm

    @Brachiator:

    I think it took becoming President himself for Dubya to develop any sort of good relationship with his father. Up until that point, he was the fail-son. IIRC, there was an incident where GHW Bush basically cried while giving a public speech over the fact that Jeb lost his first run for florida governor. Because Jeb was the favored son who was going to run for president in 2000 and carry forth the family legacy. And there was another story from W’s Hard-drinking days where he tried to get into a fist fight with his father.

    Going forward, I think one of the things I will look at closely in any future presidential candidate is what their relationship with their father was like. No more Oedipus complexes in the white house.

  73. 73.

    Gretchen

    July 15, 2023 at 8:11 pm

    How does Thomas figure that his problem wasn’t racism but affirmative action? Does he really think that the patrician white shoe law firms would have been rushing to hire him if affirmative action didn’t exist and he got into Yale Law anyway?

  74. 74.

    Subsole

    July 15, 2023 at 8:13 pm

    @Citizen Alan:

    By every God and devil known to humanity, imagine Jeb being the standard bearer of your legacy.

    I mean…fuck. Kafka wasn’t that grim.

  75. 75.

    Gretchen

    July 15, 2023 at 8:15 pm

    @Steeplejack: it’s typical to have books available for purchase at author talks. I think it’s a stretch to characterize a staff email about the typical number of books per number of attendees as pushing book sales.

  76. 76.

    different-church-lady

    July 15, 2023 at 8:24 pm

    “Busing was the wrong solution. Therefore women should not have body autonomy,” is just a hell of a fucked up view on how to approach a judicial philosophy.

  77. 77.

    Steeplejack

    July 15, 2023 at 8:27 pm

    @Gretchen:

    According to the article, they were wanting the library to purchase the books and then resell them to attendees. Also, regardless, Supreme Court staff members should not have been involved in this non-Court activity. It is prohibited in other branches of government

    ETA: I don’t think this is Clarence Thomas-level stuff, but I have been expecting something to come out about a liberal justice. Even if it was some lame both-sides-y thing.

  78. 78.

    Brachiator

    July 15, 2023 at 8:30 pm

    @Citizen Alan:

    Because Jeb was the favored son who was going to run for president in 2000 and carry forth the family legacy.

    Absolutely great points. But Dubya was also the oldest son, and I think got special attention from his mother. In some traditional families, being the oldest confers privilege even if you are a good off.

    Dubya may have understood that he could seize the family mantle if he ever got his act together.

    But yeah, family dynamics can be crazy. JFK was expected to replace his older brother with respect to the Kennedy legacy.

  79. 79.

    Steeplejack

    July 15, 2023 at 8:32 pm

    @Gretchen:

    To further add: let her publisher push the books, not her Supreme Court employees. That’s what they’re in business for.

  80. 80.

    Nukular Biskits

    July 15, 2023 at 8:42 pm

    I know it’s far too much to expect, but should Democrats win a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate, their first order of business should be to either clean house at SCOTUS or increase the number of justices and then immediate confirm them.

  81. 81.

    Another Scott

    July 15, 2023 at 8:42 pm

    @Gretchen: Of course, of course.

    YaleAlumniMagazine.com:

    In 1874, James William Morris became the first African American student to graduate from the [Yale] Divinity School. An 1871 graduate of Lincoln University, Morris attended Yale for one year to earn his graduate degree. Solomon Melvin Coles, who had entered Yale in 1872, graduated the year after Morris.

    During the next decade, the Law School graduated its first African American: Edwin Archer Randolph, Class of 1880. That July, he became the first black person admitted to the Connecticut bar. Randolph practiced law in his native state of Virginia, served as councilman and alderman in Richmond, and edited and published the Virginia Planet, an African American newspaper.

    Since Randolph, and, er, maybe a few others, graduated Yale Law before the 20th Century Civil Rights acts, anything that changes the numbers of Black Americans in higher education must necessarily be demeaning to African Americans.

    Or something.

    //

    Seriously, Thomas’s brain is broken. It’s not productive to try to figure out how he thinks about this stuff.

    IMHO.

    Telegram.com:

    […]

    Steven Duke, a white Yale law professor who taught when Thomas attended Yale, said Thomas is right to say that the significance of someone’s degree could be called into question if the person was admitted to an institution on a preferential basis. However, he said that could be overcome by strong performance, noting that two Yale graduates — former Missouri Attorney General John Danforth and former President Bush — put Thomas into top jobs.

    “I find it difficult to believe he actually regrets the choice he made,” Duke said. “It seems to me he did pretty well.”

    Some classmates say Thomas — who was raised poor in Georgia and stood out on campus in his overalls and heavy black boots — faced a tougher transition than black students who came from middle-class or privileged backgrounds.

    Other black classmates say their backgrounds didn’t matter.

    Edgar Taplin Jr., raised by a single parent in New Orleans, said he landed a job after graduation at the oldest law firm in New York, and does not recall black graduates struggling more than whites to get jobs.

    “My degree was worth a lot more than 15 cents,” said Taplin, who retired in 2003 as a global manager with Exxon Mobil.

    Thomas has declined to have his portrait hung at Yale Law School along with other graduates who became U.S. Supreme Court justices. An earlier book, “Supreme Discomfort,” by Washington Post reporters Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, portrays Thomas as still upset some Yale professors opposed his confirmation during hearings marked by Anita Hill’s allegations that Thomas sexually harassed her.

    Because of course he is.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  82. 82.

    geg6

    July 15, 2023 at 8:44 pm

    @Brachiator:

    Biden’s family was always middle class.  Sometimes upper middle (Wiki makes more of their net worth than it was), sometimes lower middle and sometimes middle middle.  Never truly wealthy.

  83. 83.

    gene108

    July 15, 2023 at 8:47 pm

    @Nettoyeur:

    Biden comes from a middle class family which suffered a series of economic reversals, but somehow he had a loving relationship with his father.

    First President in decades who had a really good relationship with his father.

    President Clinton’s father died before he was born. His stepfather was abusive.

    President Obama was not close to his father or stepfather.

    You went over Bush, Jr’s and Trump’s failed father-son dynamics.

  84. 84.

    gene108

    July 15, 2023 at 8:52 pm

    @Baud:

    Yeah, all praise to AL, but I’ve grown a little weary of media attempts to make bad people interesting.

    @Suzanne:

    Its an interesting article worth the few minutes investment to read.

  85. 85.

    gene108

    July 15, 2023 at 9:02 pm

    @Brachiator:

    Conservatives now have this loose standard of assimilation for some not entirely white people. American-ize your name,

    No need to American-ize the name, as long as it’s not hard for American’s to get close enough to not butcher it. See: Ramesh Ponuru and Dinesh D’Souza.

    When Indian names get difficult for Americans are the ones where every syllable is stressed, like Ravi or Kamala.

  86. 86.

    Gvg

    July 15, 2023 at 9:37 pm

    @Wapiti: I am pretty sure that is because of English history. I don’t know the exact historical matches, but I think parliament got arrested, or at least some of them did for political reasons by kings, prime ministers and rivals. So our founders were trying to forestall that. I don’t think other countries had something enough like our Supreme Court, especially what it has become, to have had any useful examples to learn from.

  87. 87.

    schrodingers_cat

    July 15, 2023 at 11:01 pm

    @frosty: That was my understanding as well according to network theory definition.

  88. 88.

    dirge

    July 16, 2023 at 12:25 am

    @Brachiator:  …white, which was the insane proxy to be considered a “regular American,” I guess.

    As a practical matter, in America, “white” means “assimilated into the ruling class.”  Always has.  Note how the Irish and Italians become legally white as soon as they take over big city police departments, build political patronage machines, and use their clout to do what any other white government would, with the zeal of a recent convert.

    Conservatives now have this loose standard of assimilation for some not entirely white people. American-ize your name, become Christian and accept right wing conservative values and all is well.

    Or, as a shortcut, just put on a MAGA hat.  I think we underrate the significance of this innovation.

    Oh, and you must demonize non-white people, which is a weird ass contradiction.

    No contradiction at all.  “White” means the people who do the bullying.  If you don’t want to be on the wrong end of that, you demonstrate your whiteness by joining in to bully others.

    If you’re concerned someone might mistake you for a non-white person, because of your complexion, gender identity, or critical thinking skills, you’d better make damned sure everybody sees you enthusiastically policing the in-group boundary, so they know that you’re “one of the good ones.”  Your life may depend on it.

  89. 89.

    BellyCat

    July 16, 2023 at 10:37 am

    @patrick II: Succinct!

  90. 90.

    Paul in KY

    July 17, 2023 at 12:54 pm

    @Gvg: Bills of Attainder were something very bad in English law (back at that time). Those are specifically banned here.

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