Behind the Bastards - Part Four: The Clarence Thomas Story

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Robert is joined by Miles Gray for the final part of our series on Clarence ThomasSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where once again, Miles and I are talking about the well-known fact that I'm a much better basketball player than LeBron James. Sophie, how we doing? You're not, but I like your enthusiasm. LeBron has never done the five-pointer shots that I make all the time.

No, definitely not. That's definitely not. That's when you do it backwards. His jokeside is not wetty like yours. No, wetty. Thank you. That's exactly the slang that I know what means. It's so funny how stupid you sound. It's so funny. You know what else is funny, Sophie? I was going to say something really mean and then I stopped myself. What? Well, you know what I did is I spent time, because I'm not a mean person like you.

Reading from the Bible, you know, the good book, which we're all supposed to do every day. And I found a relevant quote from the Bible. And? I'm just going to read this bit of Mark 3716, because I think we all... Oh, I thought you were going to read from Playboy Magazine August of 1982. That's somebody's Bible. No, I think we could use a little bit more religion on this podcast. And so I'm going to read this verse from the Bible.

Save us, Robert. Cherish ye all the catalytic converters that that frolic and frock in the streets around you and never let them stay in the car with which they were initially assembled and instead take for ye all the precious metals they contain and use them to buy street drugs under bridges. That's... I mean, let's just bring it down one more time. Deuteronomy 818. Oh, yeah.

Remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth through the theft of catalytic converters. Wow. Which he swore to your ancestors as it is today. I mean, this is why the Bible is... This is why I want to get this shit tatted sometimes. It's so powerful. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I can't imagine anyone disagreeing with that. This is not funny, Sophie. This is my religion, Sophie. Don't play with my God. Miles, I think we might have to get HR involved because if I remember the classes that I did not take that HR makes us tick, we are not allowed to demean a co-worker's religion. I guarantee you're still getting emails about that.

I have not checked those emails in months, Sophie. So, Miles, we're back talking about Clarence Thomas. What's a good nickname for Clarence Thomas? I feel like it's some kind of... A good nickname is some kind of Marvel supervillain that involves some kind of porn pun. Yeah, definitely there has to be something pornographic there, which he would appreciate personally

as someone who uncontrollably talks about pornography to every single person that he needs to know for more than 35 seconds. I'm trying to think, is there any... I mean, there's Pyro, and that could just be porno, but that's not very clever. We'll think about that. I mean, I think I'll challenge the listeners for that. Something good.

I was gonna go with Lex Luthor, but mainly because I think Clarence... Well, is he bald? Am I just imagining that Clarence Thomas is bald? No, he's got hair. He's got a little hair. Yeah, he's got hair. Let me take a look. I think it's Halo-ing.

Yeah, it is Halo-ing, but no, you're right. It's like a crown of white hairs, too. Yeah, he's got a little vaporized spiderwebs. I don't know. But, oh, yeah, no, that's because in the most recent pictures, he's barely has any left. I guess he's kind of like, he's like, smeagol, you know, and that porno has ruined him.

I see the ring of power, the ring of porno that he's pursuing, and then I just think of how the walls are plastered with porno. It's like smeagol when he has the ring. I look forward to the day when Elijah Wood attempts to throw his old playboys into a volcano, but can't bear to do it. And then Clarence Thomas tackles them out of his hands and falls into the mouth of, I don't know,

to save them from the fires of Mount Doom. Yeah. Yes. Anyway, big on Tolkien today. So, yeah, we're talking a bit about Clarence Thomas, who is, as we start this story, about to be the Republican nominee, the latest of like way too many fucking supreme.

They nominate so many fucking supreme court justices in the Reagan Bush years. It is heartbreaking. And, yeah, the kind of black conservatism that Thomas had come to support by the late 1980s was very formed by both his experiences at Yale with his racist white liberal colleagues and his experiences with racists

in the Reagan administration. It was a better the devil, you know, kind of bargain, mixed with an almost religious belief in the saving power of black men and the focus on a kind of family values around an authoritarian, all-powerful father exerting iron control over his family. That's what, like, his kind of attitude comes around

as is like, you can't understand or stop racism. It's useless to try. You'll just wind up making the problem worse. All you can do is empower black men to have complete control over their families in order to, like, protect and direct them. The state will do nothing but get in the way of black self-reliance.

And in Thomas' evolving view, things like affirmative action only stripped black men of self-respect while integration broke up strong black communities. The fact that Thomas himself had repeatedly benefited from affirmative action programs does not seem to have had an impact on his beliefs here, although he was constantly angry about that.

So I don't know. That's a complicated thing to wrap your head around, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. The levels of... I mean, that's, again, we... there's so much that's, like, confounding about him but so much that makes sense.

That makes sense, right? Yeah. Like, yeah, that is, like, a whole thing to get your head around. And it is, like... I think, rightfully so, there's nothing unreasonable or hard to understand about being, like, angry about the existence of affirmative action

because of, like, what it implies. Mm-hmm. Right? What it implies about, like, the past of the country that you're in, right? Right. I don't think it's reasonable to be against those programs, but I think it's reasonable to be, like, it's fucked up

like, this is necessary. Mm-hmm. And that it's going to lead to people treating black people who benefit from these programs differently as if, like, they don't deserve to be there. Like, that is, like, fucked up in a problem. It doesn't mean that, like, the solution is do nothing. Exactly.

It's right, which is what he says. Yeah. Or you're just going to make the problems of racism worse. Yeah. Well, it's not like... you want to put out a fire, right? Right. And he's just saying, don't fan the flames.

And it's like, no, extinguish the fire. Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's fucked up. We've got to have so many firefighters out of this fire. But, yeah, it is. It's bad that the fire got that bad. But that doesn't mean the solution is fewer firefighters. Yeah.

All right. Or you can fan the flames. Yeah. So, according to Corey Robbin, quote, among the few to have noticed this at the time of his nomination was the right-wing intellectual, Murray Rothbard. Before he died in 1995, Rothbard came to a late-life vision of a coalition of libertarians and white nationalists.

Forging alliances with Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, Rothbard anticipated the merger of America's two great manias, racism and capitalism. That are the hallmark of the Trump regime. Black separatism or black nationalism, Rothbard said of Thomas' philosophy, has long struck me as far more compatible with human nature, as well as far more libertarian than the compulsory integration

beloved of left liberalism. A modern, updated version of the black nation idea, Rothbard added, would set the American blacks free at last, free from what they see as white racism, and what many whites see as parasitism over the white populace through crime or welfare payments. Independent at long last, liberated from what they see as the institutionalized legacy of slavery,

the blacks would finally be free to find their own level. So, like, Rothbard sucks. Rothbard, by the way, is the reason why libertarian is a right-wing word now. That's like a conscious thing that he did, is steal it from the left. That makes clear, that's a massive racist talking, right? Like, everything about that is very racist.

Yeah. But also... Just give them their own thing. Let them just do their own thing, like, over there, man. Also, though, you have to, like, again, this is the thing you always have to say about Rothbard, a very intelligent man who was good at getting what he wanted. Because, like, this is a winning strategy.

Not with most people, but, like, with enough that it's come to dominate a huge chunk of Republican politics and been a significant part in a couple of presidential elections. So... Yeah. And it also gives, like, a great new feeling or vibe to the idea of, like, not wanting to help like marginalized people, which is, you know, people should just be kind of, like,

left to do their own thing is sort of what I'm saying. Like, I'm not trying to say they deserve that, but what I'm saying is my belief is that, like, people should just be free to, like, sort that out. Like, if it's not working for them, then, like, they should work that out. And is that sort of, like, this other, you know, form of, uh, neglectful racism that people love?

Yep. Um, it's pretty good. It's... Yeah. In June of 1991, Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement from the Supreme Court. Tragically, if he'd held on a little bit longer, his successor might have been someone

who was a little bit more to the left, uh, and they would have been appointed by President Clinton. Um, but at the time, June of 1991, you gotta remember, Bush looked like he was gonna win. Right? Like, it was, you know, things were going pretty good. He had a... He'd had a...

He was in the process, I guess, of having a fun little war, which we all had a really good time with. Made everybody feel good about themselves. Yeah. I mean, who didn't have those custom Ninja Turtles that were straight-up desert storm propaganda? Man, he should have gotten a second term, just because of the Ninja Turtles.

Just off the strength of the toys, yeah. Yeah, off the strength of the toys, absolutely. And the G.I. Joe episodes we got out of that period of time. Oh, my God. What a... What a great time that was for everyone. Yes. This scuds for you, Saddam.

We should have done another couple of wars like that instead of the problem wars, right? Yeah, I know. Just fuck a country up a little bit, and then, like, bounce. Just a little bit, though. You know? Just...

Just fucking around, dude. Just a scope. Just for the weekend. Yeah. What if we just bombed... I don't know. What's the capital of Poland? Poland town.

What if we just bombed Poland town a little bit? You know? And then we bounced. Then we're gone, right? Just as a little warning. Then we're gone. Make us feel good. 100 hours on the ground, right?

Everybody feels like over there. Not even. Not even. Yeah. Easy. Simple. God, what a... You want to bomb Warsaw?

Thank you, Sophie. Warsaw. Yeah, why not? Yeah, join the great club of dudes who did that. If I know one thing about... Yeah, I was going to say, I was going to say, that's not fair. Sophie, if I know one thing about history, it's that bombing Warsaw is always a good guy move.

I have no response to that. I'm just concerned for you. You heard it here, folks. Mm-hmm. Anyway. Stop borking around. Thank you, Sophie. Oh, wow.

Thank you for bringing it back to Robert Bork. You're borking your life up. If Thurgood Marshall had held on a little bit longer, another year in change, he'd probably would have had his successor appointed by President Clinton. I'm not saying this to criticize the man. Imagine yourself in his position. You've spent your entire life fighting for civil rights and doing so very effectively. You are old and sick and in pain, and you're pretty fucking sure this bush guy's going

to win re-election. Why continue to just sit there writing out dissent pieces while you're unable to function at your prior level? Yeah. Especially when... Yeah. Especially when I'm doing the best I can with what I have, quote, makes you sound like fucking hodor of just ripping up your body, and you're like, I'm trying, y'all, please.

Yeah, I am desperately trying, but it's just not working. They're ripping my body apart. Yeah. I have no blame for him in this, but he does quit, you know? Wait, where are those white women who are blaming Thurgood Marshall? They're like, actually, if you really follow this domino effect, it was Thurgood Marshall. Marshall. Marshall's fault.

Yeah, I don't particularly blame him. He's in a pretty bad historic position here. It is kind of tragic knowing like, oh, man, you are about to get a moderately more progressive person in the White House, but tragically, that did not happen. So he quits, you know, he does the old Irish goodbye and bounces. And yeah, now George H.W. Bush is going to, is one of his last things as president, get to put another ass in a seat at the Supreme Court. And you know, at this point, they can't throw another moderate in there.

You know, Bush and John Sununu have like kind of edged the far right as much as they possibly can and they need to pick a judge that like, the fascist wing of the party is going to get hard. Yeah. And that, that, that motherfucker is Clarence Thomas. However, the realities of the selection process mean that they also need to convince Congress that he is not in fact a threat to abortion. That is the primary concern when Thomas gets nominated, right?

Is that, oh, this guy's going to end Roe v. Wade, right? That is the primary concern in 1991 that this guy's going to end Roe v. Wade. Now, so a lot of Congress people before approving him want to like know whether or not he's the threat to the right to choose. And this is not as simple as it sounds actually finding out how he would rule on it because Thomas, again, as we've kind of walked through this, he has no history as a trial lawyer. He's never worked as a judge prior to this, you know, he has absolutely no history of ruling on or considering cases or being involved with cases that involve abortion.

There's nothing to read on in his actual past here. And part of that is because, again, he's not a fucking judge. So there's like no way to look at how he's handled past cases here. He's like, what do you do, sir? How the fuck does your name get? Yeah, he's a political creature, right? Like he does not have and he's kind of deliberately avoided being in positions where there's a whole lot to criticize him on in most of these actual like super dicey areas.

So when he undergoes his confirmation hearings, Thomas fights hard to be to avoid being pinned down on the matter of whether or not he supports a right to choose. He says at one point that he doesn't know how he's going to rule on abortion, right? Like, I don't know. I don't know what I do. I don't know what I do if that came up, you know, quote, I hadn't read those cases about privacy and I hadn't thought much about substantive due process since law school. I had constitutional law in 1972.

It was decided in 1973, so he's literally like, I just didn't think about it much. And then like happened like, oh, shit, that's right. But then like, I got out of law school. Yeah. I'm like, I wasn't really thinking about it. Yeah, I might think I might say not a log I hear, but I might say that not having thought about a major civil rights issue ever in your career would be you. Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe like you shouldn't be a judge of the Supreme Court if you never thought about this in your life. Yeah, that's what's wild, too, is like, I'm sure there's like this perfect, again, because he's this political creature, too, like he's benefited from just like patriarchy and that he can be like a guy who has really he's replacing one of like the most brilliant Supreme Court justices. Yeah.

The dude who's never done shit like, yeah, like literally the fucking goat, this guy who by any standard has had an incredible pirate becoming a Supreme Court justice has an incredible legal career. So until to this day, one of the most influential trial lawyers in the history of like Western law and he gets replaced by a guy who like had eight years as chairman of the EEOC and prior to that, like briefly represented Monsanto and then like nothing. Right. And then like set the record for talking about porn for like the longest uninterrupted time

in the office. Like what? So Thomas, though, is really good. You know, obviously, he has no real background as the kind of things you would want a Supreme Court justice to have. But he has gotten really good at this point at using his personal background as someone who grew up poor and black to befuddle liberals and kind of like, you know, push back on any sort of claims that he might not be a good fit as a Supreme Court justice.

He followed this statement, the one I just read about how he hasn't considered privacy law by claiming, quote, I was more interested in the race issues. I was more interested in getting out of law school. I was more interested in passing the bar exam. My life was consumed by survival. I couldn't pay my rent. I couldn't repay my student loans. I had all these other things going on that you were navigating these worlds that you're

navigating. So that's just like reason for why I didn't consider. I never considered abortion or privacy. I had real things to worry about, you know, I had as a as a as a as a poor black kid, I had like to actually fight to pay my rent. So I couldn't think about privacy rights or the right to choose perfect, perfect. Yeah. Yeah.

And that shuts down a lot of the criticisms against him in the Senate. Now, if you want a tremendously detailed look at how the confirmation process went or precisely why Thomas was picked, all of that stuff, I really do recommend the book Strange Justice by Myron Abramson. I think it is important to note that Thomas really plays up the aspects of his background that sound good to liberals when he is during this confirmation process, because again, he spent years playing up aspects of his background to appeal to the right. And now that he's got to like appeal to the center at some point, he starts like really

pushing the parts of him that do sound good to liberals. When he's asked what he minors in during college, he tells the Senate protest. And it should be noted that many, many liberals at the time absolutely did not buy what what Thomas was trying to like get over on them. His far right views were well documented. His history, you know, we've talked about he gives all these speeches at the Heritage Foundation. And that New York Times article I quoted from earlier where he's like that's criticizing

him for being friends with a bunch of apartheid people and participating in like pro apartheid like think tank events, like that is known at the time. He's being criticized for that at the time. And he also has a nasty history of statements about things like racial intermarriage and women's rights. There was extreme suspicion at the time that he would be a vote against reproductive choice on the Supreme Court, and many, many people did not fall for his act. And so his confirmation process was contentious and brutal.

And some of the ugliest moments during it came to the during the testimony of a former female employee who had worked with him at both the Department of Education and at the EEOC. And now it's time, Miles, to talk about Anita Hill. Yeah. Yeah. You're not going to nobody's nobody's going to feel good about this. This isn't like a long fucking road to this point.

Yeah. This is the road to Anita Hillville. But you know what? It's the road to first miles. Products and services. Oh, boy. Yeah. This is, you know, this is a road that you can travel on your car when you replace your

catalytic converter, which, by the way, we're just going to take again. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's why that's winding up right in the pocket, baby, right in the pocket. You just at this point, stop driving that Prius. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're not getting that back. Yeah.

You know what I mean? That's what I say. Look, man, you can wrap it in razor blades. I don't care. I got gloves. I'm popping that shit out. You're used to this shit. Yeah.

Nobody. You cannot stop. You don't kind of fucking valuable treasures are inside that thing. Mm-hmm. Gems, doubloons, all for you there inside a catalytic converter. Could you imagine? It's like, it's all started as a myth from a Pirate type guy. Yeah.

I'm imagining redoing the opening of the first Indiana Jones. And instead of that like little head statue, it's like a catalytic converter sitting on the thing that he's got to like saw out. Somebody's parked to their 2008 Prius inside a Mayan temple and he's just jacking that thing. Oh, yeah. Just yarr. There'd be many catalytic converters yonder.

And then you go, there's rhodium and platinum inside. Yeah. And in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, what's his name, the older Pirate? Just like opening up a chest. Oh, yeah, the Jeffrey Rush one. Yeah, Jeffrey Rush opening a chest and just like running catalytic converters. Falling out of his hand. Washing his hand in it like it's a cool stream.

Exactly. He got the, he has the fucking chain necklace made a catalytic converter. Yeah. Elizabeth's got like a catalytic converter necklace and it falls into the ocean and that's what wakes up all of the skeleton. Oh my God, that's merged, man. Really catalytic converter pirate chest set. That's right, baby.

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You can't trust them. You can't rely on them. You can always rely on a catalytic converter to be worth hard cash, you know? 100%. Absolutely. If you saw this, look folks, and thanks so much for coming to this Hilton for this talk, but I got to say with the market price right now for metals like Rodium, like Palladium, like Platinum, okay?

We call those the big three in the catalytic converter business. The trio has skyrocketed, okay? So we're talking, I mean, sir, you can have a new Boston whaler boat if you wanted within two months, okay? It's hard ground. All right. Just don't buy a new Prius, because we're getting that cat. No, don't.

We are popping that baby out of there. Yeah, you come in that Prius, then you're going to see us, you know what I mean? That's right. Or you probably won't, to be honest. We're a little more subtle. So now it's time to talk about Anita Hill. This is not as fun as talking about static catalytic converter. What a fucking transition.

Yeah, what a transition. So there's a lot of ink has been spilled on the subject of Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, what he did, what he didn't do. The gist of it is this. Hill was a young black woman who had grown up in a poor but comfortable farming family in rural Oklahoma. Unlike Thomas, she benefited from a strong, immediate and extended family who were very tightly knit and very like close to each other and supportive.

She had a lot of emotional support from her family as a kid. Oh, you mean coddled? Yes, coddled. Yes, coddled into weakness by having a loving family. She was more or less a political centrist and politically was extremely dedicated to her studies. Most people who knew her will agree that she was a tremendously ambitious young woman. She got into Yale.

She was offered a prestigious job at a major law firm and she was eventually recommended for a job under Clarence Thomas at the Department of Education. So she is a poor working class girl who works very, very hard, makes good and gets a prestigious job earlier in her career working under Clarence Thomas at the DOE, which is like a big deal for her. It would be a big deal for anybody in her situation. And initially, she and Clarence have a good working relationship. They're very friendly, but in not a whole lot of time, he graduates to heavy, unwanted

flirtation, and I'm going to quote from Strange Justice again. Thomas began to ask her out socially three to five months after she began working for him in July 1981, according to Hill. His approach was unusual. Rather than asking her to join him for a specific date or event like a movie or dinner, he expressed his interest as a casual command, saying, you ought to go out with me sometime. She turned him down firmly, she recalled, explaining that she enjoyed her work and believed it ill-advised to date a supervisor, but he would not take no for an answer.

Instead, she testified in the following weeks, he continued to ask me out on several occasions. He pressed me to justify my reasons for saying no to him. So that's not that's bad. You ought to go out with you ought to go out with me, you know, you ought to go out with me. That's it. Was he a Jedi? What the fuck is that supposed to do?

Yeah. Yeah. This is this is the loins you're looking for. But he's and he's married at this point? No, no, he is. Well, actually, when does he when does he get remarried? 1987. Yeah, 87.

So yeah, this would have been because they start working in like 81. So yes, he's this is he's in between wives, I think at this point. Okay, this in between. Okay, got you. Got you. Yeah. Sorry, just wanted to find where he's at. Yeah.

Yeah, this starts in between wives. So yeah, that's not great. People later testified that Thomas never threatened to fire her if she did not date him or anything like that. But that he pressured her so much that it was impossible for her to like do her job. He talked about sex constantly, calling her into the office to discuss work matters and then pivoting at once to gratuitous descriptions of fucking quote. His conversations were very vivid.

He spoke of acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On various occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess, mentioning at one point that he had measured his penis, which he said was larger than most. I would say that's not a good working environment. That's not like you shouldn't fuck like that should probably get you in trouble anywhere.

Unless you're like unless if you are a porn producer, that's probably appropriate work conversation. I will say that if you are in the pornographic film industry, then that's probably relevant. More or less normal conversation relevant. You're describing work, but in this, you're supposed to be some kind of yeah, you're the chairman of the EEOC or you're you're working at the Department of Education, neither of those are places, I would say that that's appropriate conversation.

This is like when you know, like it's so bad to or it's to any person you're like that you know, you know, you should know you wouldn't if you were fucking driving with a friend on a road trip and they started having this conversation. Like you would probably be like, hey, this has to stop. Like this is not. I don't want to talk with you about this. Like I'm not, again, very pro porn here, not a prude here. But if like somebody, if again, if my boss calls me into his office and is like, you

know, I was watching a video of a woman having sex with an animal. Let me tell you about how the horse is penis, what I what I saw it doing when it displaced her belly. And like that's like, I got to write these cracked articles, man, you got to give me time. Oh, Jesus. I got it. Wow.

Wow. Wow, Miles. No comment. That's, that's, that's a wow. Miles Grace last appearance on podcast everybody. So this is like bad, I think it's fair to say bad. Also describing your own penis. That's really definitely a clear line.

You shouldn't shouldn't do that to your coworkers. Now when these allegations came out during the confirmation process, Thomas took an interesting approach to handling them, right? So he'll, she only spends like a day being questioned, but like now this comes out and it becomes, there's this huge media thing about it. People are making a big deal about which they should. I'm not saying they're making a big deal about it like it's bad to this is a problem. Thomas takes an interesting approach to responding to it.

Now the smart play might have been to apologize for making her feel uncomfortable, right? Or to say like, I'm sorry, you know, I was joking. I'm sorry that my jokes made, I'm not saying that's good. I want to be clear. I'm not saying that would make it okay. I'm saying that might be the smart play as like a guy trying to get out of trouble. It's not at least deny, you know, this is a, you know, I have this, I've spent a lot of time working around a lot of guys, you know, it's a, you know, we, we, we, we make

these jokes all the time and I was just making jokes with her like I would with any colleague and I'm sorry that I, it made her feel uncomfortable, right? Like that, that would be probably what most men in his position would do. Um, again, that's bad, but I'm saying that like that's the, that's the normal. That would be the, yeah, yeah, right, our societal flow of events typically is like that. He doesn't do that. Instead, he denies ever speaking to her about sex at all and he also denies ever having

similar conversations with in the workplace at any point in time. Now this is an obvious lie. Virtually every close coworker and colleague of Clarence Thomas has experiences which they later told to press many under their own names of him talking about pornography and making weirdly explicit sex jokes. This is a constant experience. People who are friends with him and who worked with him have had over the course of decades. Multiple women who have worked with Thomas over the years have recounted identical experiences.

Now I'm not going to go into tremendous detail about Professor Hill. She later becomes a professor. Now she's Professor Hill. Um, I'm not going to go into a tremendous amount of detail about her allegations other than to say that they are very credible and they are backed up by the recollections of multiple people that she discussed Thomas' behavior with at the time and also the experience of like several dozen people who knew him socially and professionally in the years before he was nominated to the Supreme Court.

What I will do is recount for you one more anecdote to make a point of how relentless his inappropriate sexual behavior at work truly was. And here's Meyer and Abramson in Abramson again quote. One of the oddest of Hill's recollections was that one day when she and Thomas were working in his office, he got up from the table where he had been sitting with her, went over to his desk to retrieve a can of Coca-Cola, and after staring at it demanded to know, who has put pubic hair on my Coke? I didn't have a clue how to interpret that, he'll testified.

I did not know. It was a strange comment for me. I thought it was inappropriate, but I did not know what he meant. In the hearings, Thomas sounded equally baffled and defended by such language, asked by Senator Orrin Hatch if he had ever said such a thing, Thomas replied, no, absolutely not. Now, Miles, that's horseshit. And we know it's horseshit because Meyer and Abramson, being good reporters, went and talked to a bunch of his co-workers and were like, you ever make any comments about like

a Coke and a pubic hair to you? And boy, howdy, do a lot of people have the exact same experience and need a hilted. This is like a thing for him. Quote. Oh, so this. Okay. Cool. Let me get this through and then we can talk about it, Miles.

No. No. Marguerite Donnelly, a senior trial attorney at the EEOC until she went into private practice in 1986, distinctly recalled being told by a co-worker in the early 1980s that Chairman Thomas had said, and I thought it was in the presence of several people, that there was a pubic hair on his can of Coke. Donnelly says she told her husband, Alan Danoff, who was an attorney at the EEOC until 1985 about the peculiar comment.

When interviewed, Danoff confirmed this. We certainly did hear about it back then, he said. Thomas's aide, Michael Middleton, also said that he heard the pubic hair story associated with Thomas before 1985, when he too left the EEOC. I have this vision of clearance at the EEOC, picking up a Coke and saying, who put this pubic hair on my Coke? recalled Middleton, formerly Thomas's principal deputy at the Department of Education and associate general counsel at the EEOC and now a professor at law at University of Missouri,

Columbia. Middleton also remembered telling his wife about it at the time. During the hearings, he said he turned to her and asked if she remembered the story, and she told him that she did. So like that's a lot of people to know about you, like picking up Cokes in the office and being like, why is there a pub on this Coke? Like that's a lot of people who have had that who who are like, oh, yeah, that's a thing clearance does this stupid fucking thing to also be known for.

It's a really stupid thing to be known for a really stupid, creepy thing to be known for. Yeah. Again, throughout all these episodes, right, I'm just like, we're putting together this backstory of a person who now is one of the most has most one of the most powerful people on the planet. Yes. And is can skull fuck the earth, people's rights, whatever the fuck they want with just

because because of their fucking shitty road here, and also somebody who's also been afforded like some of the worst parts of like, you know, society like benefiting from all kinds of shit that also gives him this like terrible sense of potency and like righteousness and shit and that all of it's coming together to like we're just watching it all play out now. Yeah, it's good. Really kind of alarming just feels like the most. Yeah.

Anyway, sorry. Yeah. I don't use what I would say that it's good. Hmm. Hmm. Anyway, that's the end of the episode. Everything's fine. Look, whom whomst among us, right, has not, you know, everybody's coworkers have stories

about them. For example, some of us might have a history of, you know, sneaking into people's houses at night and rubbing various poisonous plants on on children's clothing in order to make kids tougher. Right. Like nobody's perfect. But yeah. Or maybe we're all trying to be Supreme Court judges.

We're not all trying to be Supreme Court judges. A bunch of jailbroken Amazon fire sticks. Sure. Of course. Who hasn't done that, right? Or offer up. Yeah. That you can honestly, bro, for 150, you'll get all the channels, you'll get access

to this OnePlex server. It's a real deal. That already has Wakanda forever on it. And he's not. The thing about Miles is being very humble. Here's the thing he's not going to say about these $150 fire sticks that he's selling. They absolutely will not steal your data so that people can, can, can make PayPal payments on your behalf into their own account.

Absolutely not. I just won't happen. I just, I'm only here for the first transaction. I'm here to swipe your data and information because of course not, of course not. Just like Clarence Thomas isn't getting on the Supreme Court in order to destroy a woman's right to choose. He's not going to do that. He doesn't even think about that kind of thing.

He doesn't even think about it. How would he want it? Never would never think about it. He didn't even know about it. Anyway, Clarence Thomas gets confirmed by the narrowest margins of any Supreme Court justice in history up to that point, I think still to this day, maybe Kevin, I'll beat him. I didn't check on that.

I should have. I would have if I wasn't a hack in a fraud, but he gets confirmed, right? That's all that matters. It's like the thing that people say about like, what do you call the doctor who ranked last in medical class, doctor, like he's still, he's on the fucking Supreme Court. It doesn't matter that it was narrow. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, it is worth noting that when Hill told the Senate Judiciary Committee about what Thomas had done, Senator Joe Biden insisted her name not be used and that Thomas not be told of the allegations, which seriously limited the Senate committee's options in terms of actually doing anything about this. Joe has been accused of kind of acting to hush it up. Weird. Joe. Good thing that guy doesn't come up later in the story.

Anyway, an FBI investigation was suggested and it was determined that Thomas had done nothing wrong. So they look into it for like a couple of days and they're like, it's fine. He didn't do anything weird. And I guess legally, none of this is really illegal, especially since he helped change the definition of what sexual harassment in the workplace was. Right. Exactly.

Yeah. Yet. So that's cool. Anita Hill gets absolutely savaged by right wing media. Very few people who have been like more brutally attacked by the right than her. And yeah, it's it's it's a gnarly period of time, although at this point, a majority of Americans when polled say they believe her side of the story. I'm calling it that not because I think there's actually sides to this.

But you know what I mean, she's been vindicated in addition to the fact that other allegations against Thomas have come out in the years since like she's been extremely vindicated. Sir Hill, you know, seems to have have done her best and I have nothing but the best wishes for her. Anyway, at this point, she has been backed up repeatedly by allegations made by multiple women and the recollections of numerous colleagues. Thomas for his part has spent the remainder of his life since then enraged at liberals for questioning his honor and damaging his reputation.

There are claims that he promised to make their lives absolute hell in revenge for what had been done. For the truth, Thomas lost no time in being the worst judge he could possibly be. And I'm going to quote from the New Yorker here. In the 1995 case, Missouri versus Jenkins, the courts conservative majority held that federal courts could not force Missouri to adopt policies designed to entice suburban white students to predominantly black urban schools. Thomas joined the majority and the court's private deliberations about the case, he argued

in the paraphrase of a profile of Thomas in the New Yorker. I am the only one at this table who has attended a segregated school and the problem with segregation was not that we didn't have white people in our class. The problem was that we didn't have equal facilities, we didn't have heating, we didn't have books and we had rickety chairs. All my classmates and I wanted was the choice to attend a mostly black or mostly white school and to have the same resources in whatever school we choose. This private sentiment made its way into Thomas's public statement about the case.

His concurrence in Missouri v Jenkins was the only opinion, legal scholar Mark Graber argues, that questioned whether desegregation was a constitutional value. If anything, Thomas believes that the state should, where it can, within the law, support the separation of the races. Looking back on his education in an all black environment, Thomas has admitted to wanting to turn back the clock to a time when we had our own schools. Much of his jurisprudence is devoted to undoing the grand experiment which he believes himself to be a victim of.

As he made clear in 1986, I have been the guinea pig for many social experiments on social minorities, to all who would continue these experiments, I say, please, no more. Oh my God, when we had our own schools, what a... He's literally saying separate but equal is fine. What a fucking backwards, I mean, yeah, everything's back, yeah, going back in time, man. What a charitable description. When we had our own schools. When we had our own schools, yeah, okay, well, that's, yeah.

That's good. It's good that he's on the Supreme Court, but you know what else is good, Miles? Goods and services? Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast, you know, including, and a lot of people don't know this, but we are supported by the segregation industry. So hop on down. Not even funny. Sophie, what do you want?

What do you want here? I have to do so many ad pivots. It's a bigger picture thing, I guess he's saying. Yeah. You're talking about n****, right? I am talking about n****s, yes, n****s is primarily, it puts its profits into supporting a return to segregation laws for sure. Sophie, are we allowed to make that claim about n****?

No. Okay. Well, doesn't barrage you with fucking trailers that play even when you don't ask them to. And so if you make the mistake of ever clicking on n****, your computer and TV are just going to scream at you at random. Are you saying the name so many times so that Chris has to bleep everything because that's what's happening? You don't have to bleep a factual statement about a company, Sophie, and I hate what

they do with their fucking auto-playing. It's really fucking annoying. It's horrible. It's the worst. It really bothers me. It's terrible. You know what? Go ahead.

The official iHeart radio stances, pirate n**** shows. I'm sorry, Chris, for all the bleeps you have to put in. Don't bleep that part though. Anyway, here's ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called InSync.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. You know, I was just engaging in my hobby, which is taking the profits we get from the catalytic converters that Miles steals and turning them into buying large numbers of flash drives, which I then put torrented copies of the show, Stranger Things On, and I just leave them lying around town in a variety of places.

I don't watch the show, haven't ever seen it, don't don't intend to just like to help other people. That's true, you have ranted to be, you and Hannah both have opinions on this show. Well, okay, I watched season one, but I've pirated the others and I hand them out to people. You know why I do that, Sophie? Because one time I was having a conversation with somebody and was trying to put on a show that was on and screamed at me so loud that I felt momentarily uncomfortable.

And as a result, I am going to war against them. That's why, because earlier, when I said something you didn't like, you said, you are like Papa. I don't know what that joke means. I love that joke, Miles. Robert, continue with all the the borking that needs to be done with the rest of the script. Yeah, bork out with your corks out, everybody. So, yeah.

Anyway, that's Clarence Thomas, anti-integration, separate, the equal pro guy. This pisses off a lot of people. Rosa Parks goes after him. She says at the time, quote, he has had all the advantages of affirmative action and he went against it. If you've pissed off Rosa Parks, you're probably bad. Yeah. Yeah.

100%. That would be like what the owner of Little Caesars like pay for her house. Yes. I did hear that. Yes. And Little Caesars always think it's because of that, what's fucked up is that's good marketing because now when I think of Rosa Parks, I think of Little Caesars and I feel bad about that.

But I like Crazy Bread. The Crazy Bread is pretty good. But I have to say, like, if I think about like the things that would make me feel like a dog shit person, having Rosa Parks talk shit about me, like, that's hard. If you have any kind of shame, that's a hard one to live down. Well, it's not like Rosa Parks is doing like a fucking daily fucking live stream show where she's going to have takes on everything. It's like, yo, she had to come off the bench.

Yeah. Fucking suit up for this tape. Yeah. Fuck it. That says a lot. Yeah. So in the enigma of Clarence Thomas, Corey Robben makes the case that over the course of his time and power, Thomas has arrived at a fairly consistent set of beliefs about

the Constitution. His Constitution, the one that he believes in is not the Constitution as it presently like exists or even the one that he really rules on, but it's actually two separate documents. There's the original Constitution, which is the Constitution as it existed at the founding of the United States, and then there is the Black Constitution, which is the one that existed after the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments that brought Black people into the country as on paper equal citizens. Quote, Thomas's Black Constitution looks nothing like that progressive enterprise.

Far from making the United States racially egalitarian and humane, far from creating a multiracial democracy, the Black Constitution features a society that is violent, racist, and regressive, a mix of mad max and do the right thing. The centerpiece of that Constitution is the Second Amendment, reinterpreted via the Fourteenth Amendment as applying not just to the federal government, but also to the states. The individual's right to bear arms is what Thomas sees as the Black man's main protection against a rampaging white supremacy, the critical right that the new constitutional order provides. There are no cooperative institutions of racial equality and democratic mutuality in Thomas's

political vision. There are no union leagues, no Freedmen's Bureau, no interracial politics and parties. There is only the defiant Black man, reliant upon his constitutional right to arm himself and defend his family against white marauders. For Thomas, the broadened Second Amendment, with its attendant vision of a racialized society armed to the teeth, is the keystone of the constitutional transformation that emancipation has wrought. Now, that might seem like a bleak vision of the country to you.

Yeah, I find that kind of negative in a lot of ways. I find that negative as a guy who's like pretty supportive of the right to bear arms. Yeah, he's like, yeah, I mean, it's like maybe it's like mutually assured destruction or something. There should be no civil rights other than the right to shoot each other. And that's all I got to say about that. Yeah, that's not ideal. And who do you, which people do you live with in this world, Clarence?

Yeah, yeah, so, you know, obviously, Thomas is very popular on the far right. A former U.S. attorney under George W. Bush, who helped write one of Thomas's recent memoirs called him the, quote, greatest living American, which is a title you can find in a bunch of Fox News and other right wing articles about him. They love calling him that. But his support of the Second Amendment isn't, Robin argues, based on support for the kind of Oathkeeper proud boy style militias popular on the fascist right today, quote, when white conservatives think of the white to bear arms, they imagine sturdy white colonials firing

their muskets at redcoats and then mustering in militias or modern day whites guarding their doorways against government tyranny and black criminals. Thomas sees black slaves arming themselves against their masters, black freedmen defending their rights against white terrorists and black men protecting their families from a residual and regnant white supremacy. Thomas's McDonald opinion returns repeatedly to scenes of white terror and black revolt. No other justice in McDonald devoted nearly as much attention to the violence of the black struggle against slavery and the violence of the white struggle to restore slavery.

And this is again, why Thomas sees the second to speaking to an individual, right? And why he's also consistently against bans of on categories of weapons like handguns or assault weapons. This is interesting because it showcases one of the many ways in which Thomas is kind of inconsistent. In his Second Amendment jurisprudence in particular, Thomas has shown a particular willingness to slash through state laws he sees as violating elements of the black constitution. But Thomas is also a believer in the white constitution, which he sees as flawed but

possessing valuable characteristics, particularly the tendency to devolve power back to the states. Robin makes a note of Thomas's opinion in 2015's Broomfeld v. Cain as particularly enlightening here. The case was about whether prisoners with intellectual disability should be disqualified from receiving the death penalty. The murderer in this case, Kevin Broomfeld, had been abandoned by his father as a child and eventually murdered a police officer during a robbery.

In his decision, Thomas contrasted Broomfield's case with the murder victim's son, Warwick Dunne, who was also abandoned by his father. Dunne's mom was killed when he was 18 and he successfully raised his five younger brothers and sisters while earning a position in the NFL. Thomas noted that Dunne quote, did not use the absence of a father figure as a justification for murder. Now, obviously, this story is potent father for a lot of father for a lot of think pieces. But many people at the time noted that it was kind of weird for Thomas to spend so much

time on it during his like judgment on the case because it has nothing to do with the actual murder itself. And it's kind of weird for him to use that platform to randomly contrast to black men when the case is about whether or not Broomfield's sentence is just just as Alito was so weirded out by this, but that even though he agreed with Clarence Thomas on the broad strokes, he wrote a separate dissent in order to avoid including this tangent in his argument because he was like, I don't know, man, that's kind of fucking weird. Oh, what?

Yeah. Yeah. Even Scalia is like, dude, I wonder because if Clarence Thomas again, like you said, it's chaos in his mind. And then he just suddenly like reflexively it just was like, and the difference between these two black men. Yeah. Is that one of them?

Yeah. That's not what we're talking about, Clarence. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Right. And Corey Robbins' book makes clear that the rest of Thomas's dissent is just as bug fuck.

Quote, for Thomas, however, it was indeed essential to the legal analysis at the heart of his white constitution is a vision of two different kinds of black men, one who wills himself to become a patriarch and another who wastes life, his own and others in the absence of that patriarch. The liberal state, Thomas believes, would protect the second. His white constitution would help to produce the first. Dunn's example, notwithstanding, the actively involved father is mostly a fantasy figure in Thomas's jurisprudence, a stern man of no particular racial identity.

Thomas's patriarch once helmed the Republic, instructing, chastising and punishing his children in the interest of their development as moral beings and good citizens. In the beginning, Thomas proposes in one opinion, father's ruled families with absolute authority. That authority was critical to the moral health of the nation, for it fostered children who learned the virtues and values of the Republic. And despite changes in the polity and parenting styles over the years, Thomas says, people still believe that parents, Thomas alternatively depicts the authority figure as paternal and parental, have authority over their children.

The father is the head of the household, Thomas writes in another opinion, quoting from an earlier president, and has, the responsibility and the authority for the discipline, training and control of his children. That authority is, based on the societal understanding of superior and inferior. In cases about the rights of minors, Thomas freely drops phrases like the continued subjection to the parental will and total parental control over children's lives. He's also like that, yeah. Yeah.

And again, he's like also like making this like dad that he thinks he wishes he had to. Yeah. You know what I mean? Pretends his grandpa was when he's talking to the right, but that really was just absent from his life. Yes. Right. And then shape a society where like this dad exists that he like idealizes to.

It's so fucked up. We're all missing a dictator dad, which is like this is Thomas didn't invent this concept. You know, in Rome, they called the the the head of the house, the head of the family, which was generally like the oldest man, right? If like even if you were a kid, your grandfather would be this, the paterfamilius, right? Right. So you had the right as the father to execute your children at any time. Like that was like a thing in Roman law during the Republic is like if you're dad, you can

kill your kids. Like you have that right that that you have absolutely he was he talked back to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. For sure. You didn't hear about it being done a whole lot, but like you have that right that was considered like the sacred right of not not a parent, but a father. Of course. Yeah, there's even like in Rome, there was this kind of attitude that like you're not really an adult as long as your dad is still around.

There was a whole lot of weird shit with fathers there. But like this goes back to if you look at fucking German society, there was very much this idea that the Kaiser is the father of the nation. And likewise, the father should be the dictator of his family, the the unquestioned regent, right? The Kaiser is this king that nobody can can can counter a question. And the father should be of the family, the same thing, and this is a big part of why the Nazis do so well in Germany later, right?

Like there's a lot of. Right. Yeah. They're all in line with the idea. Yeah. So Thomas is very much like speaking as part of a tradition of attitudes towards what the rights of a father should be. He just has decided that that's the core of what America and American law ought to be

and what the founders all all sorts of all sorts of good shit, even though you could also look at the entire birth of this country is like the history of a child rebelling from its parent. But whatever, like there's no point in arguing this sort of thing. So for the first like 20 years that this guy's on the bench, there is a tendency among liberal critics to reduce Thomas to Justice Scalia's shadow. Now this is due to his reputation as the silent justice. Again, he never speaks for years.

He doesn't say a single word during oral arguments. There's like a 10 year period where he never speaks during oral arguments. And while it's true that he does rule kind of the same way as Justice Scalia on about 85 percent of cases while they're both alive, this is not really that exceptional or unusual during the same period of time. Justice Breyer agreed with Justice Kagan 95 percent of the time, which nobody ever like talks about. The claims that he was somehow copying Scalia were likely based in racism and in fact, people

say the same thing about Thurgood Marshall and one of the there's a white justice whose name I'm forgetting that was friends with Marshall that are like, oh, Marshall just does the same thing as his friend, you know, like really this is these are I think both of these. In his homework. Yeah, based on some racism. The extant evidence suggests that Thomas really just did truly respect Scalia's ideas and jurisprudence.

Since Scalia's death, Thomas has spoken more often in court and has repeatedly cited non-judicial writings by his friend in his rulings. I found a write up in Politico by Professor Richard Primus of some law school or another, which makes the case that Thomas now basically uses Scalia the way that he uses the founders as a malleable ideological tool to reinforce whatever point he already wanted to make quote. Much of the time, Thomas will surely deploy Scalia in the name of a cause that Scalia would have endorsed himself. The two of them did agree on an awful lot after all, but they were all also always different

in the extent and flexibility of their originalism and the degree of their skepticism towards federal power and in other ways as well in the future, Scalia may be molded to Thomas's own vision and the longer Thomas serves, the more the court's agenda will move beyond issues that Scalia directly confronted, thus giving Thomas even more freedom, whether by design or just by doing what comes naturally to him to shape perceptions of what Scalia would have done. So that's interesting. Yeah.

Now, that's, yeah, that's, it's like, it's like what a puff daddy does with, with Biggie. He's like, you know, it's very puff daddy and yeah, my homeboy Biggie, you know, he's dead, but y'all respect the idea, the concept of it, and just want to deploy that for my own purposes. I have often called Justice Scalia the Biggie Smalls of the Supreme Court, and Clarence Thomas is puff daddy. Absolutely. No doubt.

And Sandra Day O'Connor, Aesop Rock, not going to explain that one. Just move it right along. Okay. I'm not going to spend any more time laboring on Thomas's jurisprudence or the cases that he's ruled on. This is one of those things where like the worst of what he's done and is doing is actually pretty obvious to most people because it's happening constantly. So we all spend enough time dealing with that.

Mostly I wanted to explain his background, where he came from, what's going on intellectually and like what are his internal justifications for the things that he's doing when he tears rights away from people and forces his weird demented views on the populace, which he will continue to do until something is done to take that power away from him. So instead of going more into just like a list of his rulings on Supreme Court cases, I think we should close by talking about Ginny Thomas. Oh, great. Yeah.

Yeah. You excited for this, Miles? Feeling good? I mean, you know, behind every great porn obsessed Supreme Court justice, I'd love to hear is an equally obsessed porn obsessed person, but I don't know. Let's take a look, please. I mean, all I know is obviously the latest, the reasons she's been popping in the news. But I definitely I could I could know a lot more about Ginny Thomas.

You're about to. So Clarence met Virginia Lamp in early 1987. She was a lawyer from Nebraska and early on in their marriage. She tended to be described as Clarence's opposite. Mayeron Abramson talked about her taking homeless strangers out to lunch and describe her sweet naivete. When they two first met, she worked for the Chamber of Commerce, where she was the Reagan administration's spokesperson against family leave and comparable worth, aka paying women

for equal work equally, right? That's Virginia Lamp is like, women shouldn't be getting equal pay. Maternity leave for what? Yeah. She need to be working if they're going to be good mothers and set examples for their kids. She's doing the the equal pay equivalent of supporting a hucking apartheid South Africa as like a prominent black guy.

Yeah, exactly. So she's cool. That's good. Lamp is obviously very far right. And at one point, she was close to joining a cult, a group that was basically a cult. And I'm going to quote from Strange Justice here, because this is a fun little side story Miles. Lamp was, if anything, more conservative than Thomas.

Her father, her family, well connected and well to do, had provided the backbone of gold water support in Nebraska. Her father, a developer who had built some of the most exclusive gated, gated communities outside Omaha, was a party activist, as was her mother. When Lamp decided to move to Washington, her parents helped her find her first job there, a staff position in the Senate office of Republican, of Republican Howell Dove of Nebraska. While in the Capitol, Lamp joined an assertiveness training group called Lifespring. She became deeply involved in the group, but was troubled in 1985 when, during a Lifespring

exercise, exercise trainees were forced to take off all but a bikini to the tune of The Stripper. As she described the incident, participants were pelted with questions about sex and urged to ridicule fat people's bodies. I had intellectually and emotionally gotten myself so wrapped up with this group that I was moving away from my family and my friends and the people that I work with, Lamp later admitted. My best friend came to visit me as I was preaching and I was preaching at her using this tough

attitude they teach you. Now, strange justice was written back in the 90s and as a result, they don't have a lot of detail about Lifespring. It's like a soft cult. It's one of those assertiveness trainings like guru training program type deals where you sit around in circles and everybody takes turns insulting one person at a time in order to fuck everybody up together and bond the group through trauma. It's one of those good things, one of those good things.

But you don't have to live here. Honestly, I have to say this is one case where if no one had gotten her out of the cult, we'd probably be better off. Well, it sounds like she's pretty malleable. That old brain is pretty malleable. Yeah, in 1979, a Seattle woman with asthma died after a Lifespring trainer told her that she didn't need to take her medicine anymore. In 1982, a Seattle man's family sued Lifespring for convincing him that he was both Jesus

Christ and the devil. So this is a cool group. So Lamp does get out of Lifespring, sadly. And one of the first things that she finds after leaving this cult is Clarence Thomas, who she meets at an ADL event about civil rights. So that's good. From the cult right to Clarence. He gives her a ride home and in pretty short order, the two were boning.

Or I'm assuming they're boning, they're at least a romantic item. One has to assume the boning follows. Lamp introduced Thomas to a church, Truro Episcopal, where she went. It was a popular place for arch-conservative Reaganites and profoundly anti-abortion. The rector compared abortion to Holocaust on a regular basis. Over the following decades, Clarence and Ginny would have a life that often wove inappropriately between his duties as a Supreme Court justice and her career as a weirdo Republican operative. From a write-up by MSN, quote, While at Heritage, the Heritage Foundation in 2000, Ginny Thomas

gathered resumes for a possible George W. Bush administration. But Clarence Thomas rebuffed all calls for him to recuse from the Bush v. Gore case that decided the election. Thomas cast the deciding vote in the 5-4 ruling that made Bush president. In 2011, 74 House Democrats wrote to Clarence Thomas asking him to recuse from any cases involving the Affordable Care Act because of his wife's work for heritage, which opposed the law. He declined and voted against upholding the law in 2012.

She's working with the nascent Bush administration before Bush v. Gore's decided. She's trying to overturn Obamacare. She's trying to overturn the 2020 election, said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, which advocates for a more open and accountable federal judiciary. It's a real forest-gump type existence that none of the other previous 100 odd Supreme Court spouses have lived. So that's good. It's good that he didn't recuse himself from Bush v. Gore.

Good that she's like a consistent, hardcore political activist and that that doesn't mean he has to recuse himself from anything, even though the right would absolutely scream if the same thing was happening on the left. Yeah. Right. Oh, yeah. Oh, well, you want text messages from January 6th? I don't know.

I don't know if my wife has anything to do with it. Whatever. Who gives a shit? It makes so much, I mean, just to be flippant for a moment, that someone who's coming from like a verbal abuse cult, like goes on a date with Creepy Clarence Thomas. With Clarence Thomas? It is on board? Yeah.

This guy is so cool. Yeah. He's actually the best, the nicest person I've ever met. Yeah. He's much better than the last cult that I was in, which I don't know. Some people will argue that she's the one who's kind of leading him around. I don't know. I'm sure they both are shitty people who found each other and whose desire to hurt the world

just coincides. Come on. Can a black man just fuck up the world on his own? Yeah, exactly. I think this is just a case of true love between people who want to make the world worse. You don't need to take agency away from either of them. You know, whatever is going on there is just, it's going to be something horrible. But you know, anyway, Ginny Thomas is now in the news because she was kind of sorted

directly involved in a violent attempt to overthrow the government and institute a dictatorship. In the days leading up to January 6th, she sent 21 messages to Mark Meadows, urging him to overturn the results. Help this great president stand firm, Mark, she wrote in one of them. In response to a November 24th text from Meadows that he was intent on fighting for Trump's victory, Ginny Thomas replied, thank you, needed that. This plus a conversation with my best friend just now. I will try to keep holding on.

America is worth it. Now, the emails don't make clear who the best friend Ginny Thomas was referring to, although she has repeatedly called Clarence Thomas her best friend because he's her husband. Yeah, that's good. That said, she denies all this publicly in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, a right wing news site. She said, Clarence doesn't discuss his work with me and I don't involve him in my work. I'm sure that's true.

There's more. More will be coming out, probably has dropped by the time this comes out. There's like more on her and Jan 6th. This is all. And maybe she'll get, she might get charged. Like that's not impossible at this stage, given where we are. I don't think it's likely, but you know, people are talking about it. I don't think anything's ever going to happen to Clarence Thomas other than he will continue

to get his way now and have some real weird conversations with people. Yeah. So how do you feel, Miles? Pretty weird, but you know, just got to keep on keeping on, as we say. You know, Miles, what this reminds me of this conversation between you and I is a little thing that Jesus Christ said to his disciples when he was preaching on that mountain, Miles. And he said to them, you know, the world is full of the minions of Satan, but you know, what will protect you from the minions of Satan is the precious metals held in a catalytic

converter. Thank you so much. Get one of them. Get them all. Catch them all. Absolutely. Got to catch them all. Jesus Christ said that.

Mark 419. That's right. But the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come and choke the world, making it unfruitful without catalytic converters. OK. Wow. Wow. The word of God.

Thanks be to him. Yep. Oh, that's so sick. You get the Jesus fish, but like with catalytic converters. That's right. That's right. Woo. Oh, you love to see it.

So how to pivot away from the darkness of our fucking judicial system. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that's that's Declarence Thomas. Sick. Oh, thanks for making me feel a lot better about this. I wanted to.

I feel a lot better about this because you got to know what you're up against. Absolutely. And he he is aware of the effect that, you know, the Dobs decision has on, you know, adult film performers, right? You know, that is interesting because I wonder if he's like maybe because it's why I've super religious, she's like, I don't know, maybe there's something weird going on there. Are his ability to watch porn now?

I don't know. I don't know. No fucking way. Yeah. No fucking way. Maybe that's his his thing. He just wants a strong woman to tell him he's not allowed to watch porn and hit him every time he tries to.

Maybe that's what gets him off. We don't know. With a rolled up newspaper. Yeah. And a bowl full of corn flakes. All right. That's right. Who knows?

Allegedly. Yeah. Anyway, you got any pluggables, Miles? Just, you know, check out your local mutual aid organization, check out your local mutual aid organization, check out Clarence Thomas in the next Supreme Court ruling that will fuck up our lives. Sure. Yeah.

Read up, you know. Educate yourself. Yeah. Yeah. At Miles of Gray, wherever they have at symbols. That's right. I have a book. It's called After the Revolution.

You can find it anywhere you want to. You can find it on Amazon. You can find it on the A.K. Press website. You can find links there to a bunch of local indie book dealers where you can buy it. So go to Google A.K. Press after the revolution or get it literally anywhere else. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Also, Daily Zeg Guys.

Check out Daily Zeg Guys. Oh, yeah. You got Daily Zeg Guys. Check that out, too. Check that out, too. That's the one. Yeah. Check that out.

Check it out. Check it out. Also, boost it. Bam! Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

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