A good and decent man whose understanding of the Constitution as written by our Founding Fathers is matched only by his abiding reverence for it, we are fortunate indeed to have him on the Court.

Clarence Thomas and Me
To speak as a black man at odds with the consensus of other blacks can be burdensome—and liberating.

Clarence Thomas is a black American icon. There is no more American story, and no blacker story, than his. We should celebrate him as a living embodiment of this nation’s greatness, given his rise from the challenging circumstances of his upbringing—poverty, segregation, colorism, linguistic alienation—to holding a seat on the Supreme Court. Excluding Thomas from any history of African-descended people in this country would render it incomplete,  just as ignoring his influence would leave any history of the current Court incomplete. 

Justice Clarence Thomas is unquestionably a towering figure in American jurisprudence. As Scott Douglas Gerber, a leading authority on his legal theories, has noted, Thomas’s impact on constitutional law over the last quarter-century has been stunning. His long-standing views have carried the day in major cases. He has stuck to his principles in his three decades on the Court, and it has paid off. Thus, his insistence that the Commerce Clause does not empower the federal government to regulate everything under the sun is now the law. His position that federal agencies should have relatively restricted power is now the law. His view that the Second Amendment means what it says, and that individuals have a fundamental right to carry firearms, is now the law. His conviction that no constitutional right to an abortion exists is now the law. And, perhaps most poignantly, his passionately articulated view that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause forbids racial preferences in higher-education admissions decisions is now the law. Indeed, his principled stance that the Court’s job is to discern the original understanding of the constitutional provision at issue in a case has become the Court’s dominant approach. One could even plausibly hold that this is now Justice Thomas’s Supreme Court, not Chief Justice John Roberts’s. Thomas is its longest-serving sitting member, and his legacy will continue well after his time on the bench is over, as many of his former clerks are now federal judges themselves. 

And yet, despite his now-undeniable skill as a jurist and judge, Thomas finds himself the target of criticism that differs in kind from that reserved for the Court’s other conservative justices. One expects public disagreement with his most controversial opinions; we should welcome intellectually rigorous dissent, for no one can test the validity of ideas without it. But too often, critics attack not Thomas’s ideas but the man himself—and this is especially true of black critics, who regard him not merely as mistaken but as a traitor who has forfeited his status as “authentically black.” For them, he is an Iago-like figure, driven by a perverse impulse to degrade African Americans. The quasi-religious conviction that Thomas’s reasoned defense of capitalism, color blindness, and individual liberty amounts to a disgust for his fellow blacks is, in my view, the outcome of a projected disgust for Thomas himself.

Most close observers of Thomas’s place in American life are accustomed to this reaction. Nobody blinks, for example, when Ibram X. Kendi issues yet another broadside against yet another of Thomas’s perceived sins. As far back as 2013, before Kendi was crowned the arbiter of racial goodthink, he questioned how a man like Thomas could hold the opinions he does. Writing of Thomas’s concurring opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Kendi finds that the justice is “either being blatantly dishonest” in his comparison of affirmative action and de jure racial segregation or that he has a “blatant inability to decipher, to assess and to judge.” It could not be that Thomas is intellectually capable of coming to this conclusion and that he believes it. What black person who grew up in segregated Georgia could? (Never mind that Kendi misreads Thomas’s opinion, accusing him of questioning the sincerity of the University of Texas’s position on diversity, while believing the sincerity of segregationists’ “separate but equal” doctrine. Thomas clearly disbelieves both.) 

This tendency to respond to Thomas by questioning either his honesty or his competence has been a through-line for his critics for decades. Thomas himself noted the phenomenon in his speech before the National Bar Association in 1998. At the time, he regularly heard the charge that he was merely following Antonin Scalia’s lead rather than working out his own conclusions about cases before the Court. Thomas remarked:

With respect to my following, or, more accurately, being led by other members of the Court, that is silly, but expected, since I couldn’t possibly think for myself. And what else could possibly be the explanation when I fail to follow the jurisprudential, ideological and intellectual, if not anti-intellectual, prescription assigned to blacks. Since thinking beyond this prescription is presumptively beyond my abilities, obviously someone must be putting these strange ideas into my mind and my opinions. Though being underestimated has its advantages, the stench of racial inferiority still confounds my olfactory nerves. 

Thomas was right to point to the racist undercurrent that flowed through questions about his competence and independence. Only a failure of intellect, of courage, of race pride, or some deeper, unnamed corruption could account for his departure from the “common sense” of his tribe. Such an attitude ironically demonstrated the soundness of Thomas’s long-standing critique of affirmative action—that it made its beneficiaries, whatever their objective merits, appear less competent than their white peers. Here was Thomas, a beneficiary of affirmative action at Holy Cross and Yale Law School, encountering the exact questions about his abilities that he worried could haunt any black person as long as affirmative action persisted.

Who asked those questions? Some whites, yes. If we are being generous, perhaps they could be forgiven for asking—if only in their minds—the questions that affirmative action suggested. But shouldn’t blacks know better? We know that the best of us are just as good, just as smart, just as competent as the best of everyone else. So why were so many blacks eager to unleash against Thomas the very tropes about inferiority that had dogged us for centuries?

Because the “Uncle Tom” mythos is so indelibly ingrained in the “liberal” psyche it’s damned near reflexive by now, a near-instinctual reaction to every black man like Justice Thomas who dares to abandon the D卐M☭CRAT intellectual plantation and think for himself—a mythos reaching far enough to ensnare blacks who have been brainwashed by dogmatic Left-liberalism, as so many others have, in its fetid toils to this very day.

I repeat: Real Americans are most fortunate to have him on the USSC, but we’re hardly the only ones to benefit: the US Constitution itself is fortunate to have as staunch, able, and wise a defender and protector as Justice Clarence Thomas on its side. A little of the backstory for those younger folks who weren’t around for it, or for any of us greybeards who might have forgotten.

Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia. After his father abandoned the family, he was raised by his grandfather in a poor Gullah community near Savannah. Growing up as a devout Catholic, Thomas originally intended to be a priest in the Catholic Church but was frustrated over the church’s insufficient attempts to combat racism. He abandoned his aspiration of becoming a clergyman to attend the College of the Holy Cross and, later Yale Law School, where he was influenced by a number of conservative authors, notably Thomas Sowell. Upon graduating, he was appointed as an assistant attorney general in Missouri and later entered private practice there. He became a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator John Danforth in 1979, and was made Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education in 1981. President Ronald Reagan appointed Thomas as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) the next year.

President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1990. He served in that role for 19 months before filling Marshall’s seat on the Supreme Court. Thomas’s confirmation hearings were bitter and intensely fought, centering on an accusation that he had sexually harassed Anita Hill, a subordinate at the Department of Education and the EEOC. Hill alleged that Thomas made multiple sexual and romantic overtures to her despite her repeatedly telling him to stop; Thomas and his supporters alleged that Hill and her political supporters had fabricated the accusation to prevent the appointment of a black conservative. The Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52–48, the narrowest margin in a century.

Since the death of Antonin Scalia, Thomas has been the Court’s foremost originalist, stressing the original meaning in interpreting the Constitution. In contrast to Scalia—who had been the only other consistent originalist—he pursues a more classically liberal variety of originalism. Thomas was known for his silence during most oral arguments, though has since begun asking more questions to counsel. He is notable for his majority opinions in Good News Club v. Milford Central School (determining the freedom of religious speech in relation to the First Amendment) and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (affirming the individual right to bear arms outside the home), as well as his dissent in Gonzales v. Raich (arguing that Congress may not criminalize the private cultivation of medical marijuana). He is widely considered to be the Court’s most conservative member. Thomas has accepted luxury trips and gifts from Harlan Crow, a wealthy Republican donor, for two decades since at least 2004 and failed to report them.

The above having been culled from shitlib Wikipedia *GAG SPIT*, it’s no surprise that they’d just HAVE to get that last little dig in as if it amounted to a goddamned thing, anymore than the patently spurious Hill smear-job attempt did. Nice try, ya fucktards.

Having risen above the initial controversy of his appointment and confirmation to assume the mantle of a true titan of American jurisprudence, Clarence Thomas is hands-down the greatest USSC Justice we’ve had in my lifetime, probably of ALL time. Long may he live and continue to serve; we shan’t see his like again.

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