Clarence Thomas Quotes

Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.

Forty million Americans smoked marijuana; the only ones who didn’t like it were Judge Ginsberg, Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton.

Women who accuse men, particularly powerful men, of harassment are often confronted with the reality of the men’s sense that they are more important than women, as a group.

Classroom Activities 1. Using felt and yarn, make a hand puppet of Clarence Thomas. Ta-da! You're Antonin Scalia!

Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I'll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political." It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities." This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance. Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.

Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Maskela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative. I no longer cared to play that game ... The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds - social, economic, even ethnic - yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but that did not mean we had to think alike

...back to the USA where there is honor and integrity and Lord knows what else, I thought. I got confused. President Bush and Clarence Thomas and antiabortion and AIDS and Duke and crack and homelessness. And everywhere, MTV, cartoons ads, magazines--just war and sexism and violence. In Mexico, at least a can of cement falls off a scaffold on your head, no Uzis or anything personal.

Even fervent abolitionists, viewing blacks as equal in rights but inferior socially and culturally, didn’t relish having freedmen come north to live beside them but wanted them to stay down south.

I could tell...that my friends were doing their best to get across the message that I wasn't Frankenstein's monster but a perfectly normal human being. What they didn't understand was that my opponents didn't care who I was. Even if they had wanted to know the truth about me, it would have made no sense to them, since I refused to stay in my place and play by their rules and was too complicated to fit into their simple-minded, stereotypical pigeonholes. In any case, I couldn't be defeated without first being caricatured and dehumanized...[T]hey couldn't allow my life to be seen as the story of an ordinary person who, like most people, had worked out his problems step by unsure step. That would have been too honest-and too human.

Daddy always seemed to be preparing for rainy days. Maybe that’s why they never came.

As much as I hated the injustices perpetrated against blacks in America, I couldn't bring myself to hate my own country, then or later.

So that’s why he came to Memphis—“to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black. I come to state that I’m a man, free to think for myself and do as I please.… I will not be consigned the unquestioned opinions of others.

Poet Walt Whitman, a Civil War hospital volunteer who later interviewed pardon-seeking Confederates, remarked that “in any other country on the globe, the whole batch of Confederate leaders would have had their heads cut off.

All the Democrats who voted for him [Clarence Thomas] were from the South, the opposite of what had happened in 1967, when Southern Democratic senators opposed [Thurgood] Marshall. By 1991, blacks had become a core constituency of Southern senators, and Democrats feared alienating them with a vote against Thomas.

Only the Democratic Party could produce a string of presidential candidates who oppose school choice and vouchers while sending their own children to lily-white private schools. Only the Democratic Party could hysterically denounce a Supreme Court nominee for allegedly making unwanted sexual advances in the workplace and then applaud a president who was receiving oral sex from a White House intern while discussing deploying American troops with a congressman on the phone. Indeed, only the Democrats could oppose Clarence Thomas, actually block Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg (for marijuana use), and then run Bill Clinton for president.

The racial oppression that inspired the first generations of the civil rights movement was played out in lynchings, night raids, antiblack pogroms, and physical intimidation at the ballot box. In a typical battle of today, it may consist of African American drivers being pulled over more often on the highways. (When Clarence Thomas described his successful but contentious 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing as a “high-tech lynching,” it was the epitome of tastelessness but also a sign of how far we have come.) The oppression of women used to include laws that allowed husbands to rape, beat, and confine their wives; today it is applied to elite universities whose engineering departments do not have a fifty-fifty ratio of male and female professors. The battle for gay rights has progressed from repealing laws that execute, mutilate, or imprison homosexual men to repealing laws that define marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. None of this means we should be satisfied with the status quo or disparage the efforts to combat remaining discrimination and mistreatment. It’s just to remind us that the first goal of any rights movement is to protect its beneficiaries from being assaulted or killed. These victories, even if partial, are moments we should acknowledge, savor, and seek to understand.

He denounced self-pity and pitied himself.

It’s hard to count the ways in which the administrative or regulatory state overturns, abolishes, and usurps the Constitution.

There is nothing of democratic self-government in the “command” of this newly hatched, elitist administrative state, of course.

Busing, affirmative action, and abortion are but the three most glaring areas in which the justices have made law from the bench, with no constitutional license to do so.

The end result may be trains that run on time (although I doubt it), but the cost is to our Constitution and the individual liberty it protects.

But that small government of limited and enumerated powers hasn’t operated for nearly a century.

The founders worried constantly about how their envisioned republic might get hijacked, especially by ambitious officials who would transform it into an elective despotism. This is what they meant.

As James Madison put it, because men are not angels—because they can (and do) rob, rape, kill, and conquer—they need a government to restrain and protect them, an “institution to make people do their duty.

Ever since the New Deal, those on the Right have sensed the American polity’s transformation with growing discomfort, but around 2009, when the Tea Party movement mobilized, that discomfort turned to anger.

Biden was for the Iraq War before he was against it. And he was the Senate sponsor of the Clinton White House anticrime law that had led to the mass incarceration of young black men. In addition, he’d ushered Clarence Thomas onto the Supreme Court, spent the early part of his career in the Senate trying to end school busing, and represented perhaps the most business-friendly tax haven in the nation, Delaware, for thirty-six years.

Many of the women I met there (Yale) had come from the most privileged of circumstances, yet they often referred to themselves as "oppressed." I found it hard to take their "oppression" seriously, since I'd spent the first part of my life living among black women who cooked and kept house for the middle and upper class whites of Savannah. They never talked about being oppressed. What right, then, did the elite white women of Yale have to complain about their lot?

Thomas and his siblings constitute a natural experiment in the effects of such a caring, supervised, value-laden upbringing, compared with a more typical poor, fatherless childhood. It is the difference between freedom and victimhood.

The house of the Plantagenets, from Henry II to Richard III himself, was brimming with blood. In their lust for power the members of the family turned upon one another. King John murdered, or caused to be murdered, his nephew Arthur; Richard II despatched his uncle, Thomas of Gloucester; Richard II was in turn killed on the orders of his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke; Henry VI was killed in the Tower on the orders of his cousin, Edward IV; Edward IV murdered his brother, Clarence, just as his own two sons were murdered by their uncle. It is hard to imagine a family more steeped in slaughter and revenge, of which the Wars of the Roses were only one effusion. It might be thought that some curse had been laid upon the house of the Plantagenets, except of course that in the world of kings the palm of victory always goes to the most violent and the most ruthless. It could be said that the royal family was the begetter of organized crime.

This sets the wheels of government moving in reverse gear; the servant becomes the master, and the right to earn a living becomes subject to the servant’s whim and caprice as he professes to apply some vague and variable statutory standard.

The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the electronic records of millions of telephone conversations—both callers and receivers—and the subject lines of e-mails, including names and Internet addresses. Then it would send the refined intelligence to the Bureau for action. Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law. As Cheney knew from his days at the White House in the wake of Watergate, the NSA and the FBI had worked that way up until 1972, when the Supreme Court unanimously outlawed warrantless wiretaps. Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The president was “free from the constraints of the Fourth Amendment,” Yoo wrote. So the FBI would be free as well.

But the ruined South—the war had cost it $13.6 billion—wanted its cotton, its only source of income and still the nation’s major export commodity, amounting to nearly two-thirds of U.S. exports by 1889 and three-quarters of the world’s supply.11

As the American Revolution’s tutelary philosopher, John Locke, had pronounced, the legislative branch has the authority “only to make laws, and not to make legislators”—but that’s just what Congress has done in creating administrative-agency rule makers.

The serfdom was as much a cultural as an economic matter. “Slavery is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law,” Frederick Douglass lamented. “Customs, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South.

when faced with a clash of constitutional principle and a line of unreasoned cases wholly divorced from the text, history, and structure of our founding document, we should not hesitate to resolve the tension in favor of the Constitution’s original meaning.

The practice of creating independent regulatory commissions, who perform administrative work in addition to judicial work,” Roosevelt himself admitted, “threatens to develop a ‘fourth branch’ of Government for which there is no sanction in the Constitution.”33

For the “dirty little secret of freedom” is that, in many respects, “you’re on your own. You’re crossing the prairie of life at your own risk,” just like the American pioneers.6 No wonder Thomas loves to quote the charge of Thomas à Kempis—as much Stoic as Christian—“to ensure that in every place, action, and outward occupation you remain inwardly free and your own master. Control circumstances, and do not allow them to control you. Only so can you be a master and ruler of your actions, not their servant or slave; a free man.

And if Congress can’t delegate the legislative power that the Constitution gives it, it certainly cannot delegate power that the Constitution doesn’t give it, such as the power to hand out selective exemptions from its laws, as agencies do when they grant waivers.35

In his stint in the criminal appeals division, the young lawyer lost his last radical illusion about race. Jailed blacks were not political prisoners, suffering oppression by “the man,” he found. A black man who made a black woman submit to rape and sodomy by holding a blade to her little boy’s throat was just a thug. “This case, I later learned, was far from unusual: it turned out that blacks were responsible for almost 80 percent of violent crimes committed against blacks, and killed over 90 percent of black murder victims,” he writes.

The Court has “overseen and sanctioned the growth of an administrative system that concentrates the power to make laws and the power to enforce them in the hands of a vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus that finds no comfortable home in our constitutional structure,

Typical was (later governor and U.S. senator) Pitchfork Ben Tillman’s cold-blooded massacre in South Carolina of “a troop of black militiamen for no other reason than that they had dared to conduct a celebratory Fourth of July parade through their mostly black town,” Thomas writes.

As the founders often cautioned, a self-governing republic doesn’t have a governing class. Part of America’s current predicament is that it now has a permanent, unelected one, unanswerable to the people. Absolutism—soft perhaps, but absolutism nonetheless—has replaced a democratic republic.

Our local communities, once vibrantly self-governing, have lost vital autonomy, as the Court has hemmed in their ability to police themselves and regulate their schools, all in the name of atoning for America’s original sin of slavery but in fact harming black Americans more than helping them.

Worst of all, the regulatory agencies may presume anyone they charge to be guilty unless he proves his innocence, and he has but limited standing and scope to appeal the agency’s decision to a real court, effectively “making the commission’s decisions on fact final and conclusive,” the ABA objected.

But since such an institution is made up of imperfect human beings with the same unruly passions as anyone else, “In framing a government of men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”3

Imagine: they celebrated the Declaration of Independence! But for decades, groups like Tillman’s “raped, murdered, lynched, and robbed as a means of intimidating, and instilling pervasive fear in, those whom they despised.… Between 1882 and 1968, there were at least 3,446 reported lynching of blacks in the South.

But after a frustrated Franklin Roosevelt threatened to enlarge the high bench and pack it with his partisans, Justice Owen Roberts, in the infamous switch in time that saved nine, stopped finding New Deal legislation unconstitutional, so that 5–4 decisions against FDR became majority decisions allowing his schemes.

For a half century, the Supreme Court, through increasingly fanciful legal reasoning, has handed the political Left victories in the culture wars—on race, sex, criminal justice, public order, schooling—that it would have found bruising, and sometimes impossible, to win through the constitutional legislative process.

The dilemma facing Bush and the Republicans was clear. If Marshall left, they could not leave the Supreme Court an all-white institution; at the same time, they had to choose a nominee who would stay true to the conservative cause. The list of plausible candidates who fit both qualifications pretty much began and ended with Clarence Thomas. … There was awkwardness about the selection from the start. "The fact that he is black and a minority has nothing to do with this," Bush said. "He is the best qualified at this time." The statement was self-evidently preposterous; Thomas had served as a judge for only a year and, before that, displayed few of the customary signs of professional distinction that are the rule for future justices. For example, he had never argued a single case in any federal appeals court, much less in the Supreme Court; he had never written a book, an article, or even a legal brief of any consequence. Worse, Bush's endorsement raised themes that would haunt not only Thomas's confirmation hearings but also his tenure as a justice. Like the contemporary Republican Party as a whole, Bush and Thomas opposed preferential treatment on account of race—and Bush had chosen Thomas in large part because of his race. The contradiction rankled.

The constitutional machinery of limited and enumerated powers, separation of powers, and checks and balances all aimed to prevent such an “improper or wicked project,” and America’s vast size, even in 1787, ensured that a multitude of factions—special interests—would bar any single one from tyrannizing over the others.

We all learn about how the Constitution’s framers accomplished that delicate balance through the three branches of government and the separation of their powers: democratically elected representatives frame laws to do the voters’ will, which the elected president executes, unless the Supreme Court deems them unconstitutional.

The little town of Dayton - not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened - was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don't realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn't overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn't so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not.” By essentially abolishing the public use clause, the Court has subordinated individual rights to the arbitrary will of the government, Thomas remonstrated. “I do not believe that this Court can eliminate liberties expressly enumerated in the Constitution.

James Madison, always at the vortex of the fierce disputes over what measures these enumerated powers implied as necessary and proper, concluded—after serving for a quarter century as a congressman, secretary of state, and president—that the bedrock constitutional principle was simply to ensure that America does not “convert a limited into an unlimited Govt.

As Wilson outlined the concept, the Court would sit as a permanent constitutional convention, continually making and remaking the law, to adapt, in a kind of Darwinian evolution, to changing circumstances. It would make up law, in Chief Justice Earl Warren’s words, according to “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”4

WILSON CONCOCTED and legitimized the magic elixir of judicial constitution-making and rule by administrative agencies, but Franklin D. Roosevelt employed it like an alchemist to transmute the American political system into a full-blown administrative state that resembled George III’s system of rulers and subjects as much as it did George Washington’s government.

This was the ideology of the European enlightened despots of the eighteenth century, especially Prussia’s Frederick the Great, who ruled through a meritocratic class of efficient, educated, benevolent bureaucrats, who, more than ordinary citizens, could divine the spirit of the times and knew which way the arc of history bent, so they could speed it along in the right direction.

I began to suspect that Daddy had been right all along: The only hope I had of changing the world was to change myself first. I thought of the many times that he and I had delivered fresh-picked farm produce to one of our elderly relatives. On such occasions he never failed to remind me that if we hadn’t worked so hard to grow it, we wouldn’t be able to give it to those who needed help.

What would George Washington—whom the Senate declared didn’t need its approval to dismiss Senate-confirmed executive-branch officers, since he alone was responsible to the voters for their actions—have to say about the civil service rules and union protections that make the whippersnappers so difficult, and often impossible, to fire? Even Franklin Roosevelt thought bureaucrat unions an absurdity.41

The Constitution lodges all legislative power in Congress, which therefore cannot delegate its lawmaking function elsewhere. So it’s forbidden for Congress to pass a law creating an independent or executive-branch agency that writes rules legally binding on citizens—for example, to set up an agency charged with making a clean environment and then to let it make rules with the force of law to accomplish that end as it sees fit.

Little wonder that one congressman warned that “government by committees, boards, bureaus, and commissions will, if unchecked and uncontrolled, destroy the republican conception of government”—or that a senator deemed one of the agencies a “star chamber,” the arbitrary, juryless court of Stuart despotism, where due process (as first laid out in Magna Carta over 800 years ago and reiterated in the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment) had no place.

So too the race-conscious remedies that the Court has sanctioned or imposed have increased social tensions and distorted key civic institutions. Those liberties that the framers thought so absolute that they enshrined them in the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, especially political speech, and the protection of private property—became negotiable, with the connivance of a Court established above all to protect those constitutional liberties that it would be tyranny to abridge.

McConnell was the case that declared constitutional the next clamp-down on campaign finance, the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, which barred political parties from taking soft money and blocked union and corporate political ad spending shortly before an election. At the time, it was hard not to think that the law grew, at least in part, out of an embarrassed Senator John McCain’s wish to transfer the blame to “the system” for his having unwittingly helped a constituent and contributor who turned out to be a $3 billion savings-and-loan fraudster.

This failure of nerve already was manifest in the selection and confirmation process of Clarence Thomas. Bush's choice of Thomas caught most black leaders off guard. Few had the courage to say publicly that this was an act of cynical tokenism concealed by outright lies about Thomas being the most qualified candidate regardless of race. Thomas had an undistinguished record as a student (mere graduation from Yale Law School does not qualify one for the Supreme Court); he left thirteen thousand age discrimination cases dying on the vine for lack of investigation in his turbulent eight years at the EEOC; and his performance during his short fifteen months as an appellate court judge was mediocre. The very fact that no black leader could utter publicly that a black appointee for the Supreme Court was unqualified shows how captive they are to white racist stereotypes about black intellectual talent. The point here is not simply that if Thomas were white they would have no trouble shouting this fact from the rooftops. The point is also that their silence reveals that black leaders may entertain the possibility that the racist stereotype may be true.

Daddy had never been able to understand how I, a college student, could consider myself "oppressed." He didn't think of himself that way and didn't see why I should. My job, he insisted time and again, was to "play the hand you're dealt," the way he'd done his whole life. Besides, I had a better hand than he'd ever held - and we both knew it. My life was full of opportunities of which he had never dared to dream. All I had to do was reach out and take them. What right, then, did I have to whine about "the man" ?... I'd been drunk on revolutionary rhetoric, but now I knew it was nothing more than talk.

THE NEW DEAL didn’t transform the Constitution only by institutionalizing nine unelected judges with lifetime tenure as a permanent constitutional convention, turning Woodrow Wilson’s theory into hard reality. It also allowed Congress to create, at the president’s request and with the blessing of the Court, an unprecedented regulatory state, made up of a constellation of administrative agencies—from the Federal Housing Administration and the Federal Communications Commission to the National Labor Relations Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission—that make rules, enforce them, and adjudicate transgressions of them.

A political science professor and Princeton University president before his election as U.S. president, Wilson had fallen under the spell of a quite different political tradition from American republicanism. He had learned German to read philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and his followers, and he embraced their concept of the Rechtsstaat, whose ideology replaces “the contract theory of the origin of the state” with the idea that the function of the state is not to protect individual rights but rather to take “general care for the interests of the community,” as the University of Chicago’s hugely influential political science chairman Charles Merriam had put it in 1903.

Here it’s worth stepping back from Thomas and the Court to survey all this from the perspective of the framers, particularly that of Constitution architect James Madison and his argument in favor of adopting the new governmental framework in Federalist 10. We have designed a government that will protect our natural rights to life, liberty, and property, Madison says. But since men, though equal in rights, have different talents and ambitions, the Constitution’s protection of their freedom to employ those talents as they see fit will result in quite different—that is, unequal—outcomes. Some will be rich; some poor. That is not a flaw but a sign that the liberty we value is alive and well.

The combination in the same hands of the power to make the laws and the power to carry them out is the essence of arbitrary rule by decree, the founders believed, guided by such writers as the Baron de Montesquieu, John Locke, and William Blackstone. For them, the separation of powers was key to the protection of liberty from such tyranny, Thomas writes. The Constitution vested all legislative power in Congress, all executive power in the president, and all judicial power in the Supreme Court and inferior courts, because the framers did not want to have those powers delegated to other hands, lest it bring about the “gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department,” as Madison put it in Federalist 51.

While we waited on a bench outside the motel office, I bought a copy of the Nashville Tennessean out of a metal box, just to see what was happening in the world. The principal story indicated that the state legislature, in one of those moments of enlightenment with which the southern states often strive to distinguish themselves, was in the process of passing a law forbidding schools from teaching evolution. Instead they were to be required to instruct that the earth was created by God, in seven days, sometime, oh, before the turn of the century. The article reminded us that this was not a new issue in Tennessee. The little town of Dayton—not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened—was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don’t realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn’t overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

Clarence Thomas got his ass on the court. If Brett Kavanaugh gets ousted, THAT'S RACIST.

Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The

Marshaling an impressive array of historical evidence,” writes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “a growing body of scholarly commentary indicates that the ‘right to keep and bear arms’ is, as the Amendment’s text suggests, a personal right.”1 He cited two books, Joyce Lee Malcolm’s To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right—the preeminent study of the English beginnings of the right—and this author’s That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right—which traces the right from its Greco-Roman origins through modern American jurisprudence.

replacement of Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas,

My grandparents, when they took us in in 1955, what they did was supply hope… And people think it’s just education, it’s just food. It was more than that, and they understood that. They understood that you needed the things of life-- work ethic, self-discipline, a set of morals, to get through life. And they supplied them… These were poor black people in the Deep South, but they had figured out the essentials of life. It was their victory. They had won. They had been proven right.

I’ve lived through segregation. Now, it’s diversity. I think people should be asked to show what it has produced. We have done some damage in our society, particularly to the people who could least afford the damage… They shut down schools in the name of integration… They irreparably changed the black teaching profession, and these policies irreparably changed our communities.

For years my brother and I would ask ourselves how a man could show no interest in his own children. I still wonder.

In 2011, Leo teamed up with Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni to co-found another nonprofit that successfully opposed an Islamic center being built near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York, denigrated as the “Ground Zero Mosque.

Those five members of the Supreme Court found a nonsensical distinction; that doesn't mean that Florida state legislators or state supreme court judges are required to play the semantic games that Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia did to reach the result they desired.

scenes from the Legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table many lovely pictures have been painted, showing much diversity of figures and surroundings, some being definitely sixth-century British or Saxon, as in Blair Leighton’s fine painting of the dead Elaine; others—for example, Watts’ Sir Galahad—show knight and charger in fifteenth-century armour; while the warriors of Burne Jones wear strangely impracticable armour of some mystic period. Each of these painters was free to follow his own conception, putting the figures into whatever period most appealed to his imagination; for he was not illustrating the actual tales written by Sir Thomas Malory, otherwise he would have found himself face to face with a difficulty. King Arthur and his knights fought, endured, and toiled in the sixth century, when the Saxons were overrunning Britain; but their achievements were not chronicled by Sir Thomas Malory until late in the fifteenth century. Sir Thomas, as Froissart has done before him, described the habits of life, the dresses, weapons, and armour that his own eyes looked upon in the every-day scenes about him, regardless of the fact that almost every detail mentioned was something like a thousand years too late. Had Malory undertaken an account of the landing of Julius Caesar he would, as a matter of course, have protected the Roman legions with bascinet or salade, breastplate, pauldron and palette, coudiére, taces and the rest, and have armed them with lance and shield, jewel-hilted sword and slim misericorde; while the Emperor himself might have been given the very suit of armour stripped from the Duke of Clarence before his fateful encounter with the butt of malmsey. Did not even Shakespeare calmly give cannon to the Romans and suppose every continental city to lie majestically beside the sea? By the old writers, accuracy in these matters was disregarded, and anachronisms were not so much tolerated as unperceived. In illustrating this edition of “The Legends of King Arthur and his Knights,” it has seemed best, and indeed unavoidable if the text and the pictures are to tally, to draw what Malory describes, to place the fashion

For example, political scientist Manning Marable said of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “Ethnically, Thomas has ceased to be an African American.” Columnist Carl Rowan of the Washington Post wrote of black economist Thomas Sowell, “Vidkun Quisling in his collaboration with the Nazis surely did not do as much damage as Sowell is doing.” And Spike Lee said that Michael Williams, a black appointee in the Bush administration, was such a traitor to his race that he deserved to be “dragged into an alley and beaten with a Louisville slugger.”39

Pissed off by the lies, misrepresentations, and outright horseshit, I decided it was time to strike back. It was time to reclaim the Constitution. Besides, if the Righties were wrong about everything else—like health care, climate change, and the corporate tax rate—they had to be wrong about the Constitution. First, I did my homework. I read the Constitution and the amendments; perused The FederalistV and Madison’s notes taken during the Constitutional Convention; surveyed the lives of the Founders and FramersVI; looked over the Supreme Court opinions of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas; and even tried to digest Glenn Beck’s The Original Argument, Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments, and Dr. Ben Carson’s A More Perfect Union—three of the best over-the-counter sleep aids on the market. To find out how the mind of a strict constructionist works, I also dipped into Ted Cruz’s autobiography, A Time for Truth, a faith-based romance novel in which the hero falls in love with himself at an early age.

If Douglass were alive today and made this statement on nearly any media platform or virtually any Democrat Party event, he would be booed off the platform. In other words, he would be abused and smeared as Clarence Thomas is today.

supported the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, believed Roosevelt’s New Deal enslaved Black people,5 blasted the 1995 Million Man March while comparing the Nation of Islam to the Ku Klux Klan,6 and supported lifting sanctions against South Africa before apartheid had ended.

The house of the Plantagenets, from Henry II to Richard III himself, was brimming with blood. In their lust for power the members of the family turned upon one another. King John murdered, or caused to be murdered, his nephew Arthur; Richard II despatched his uncle, Thomas of Gloucester; Richard II was in turn killed on the orders of his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke; Henry VI was killed in the Tower on the orders of his cousin, Edward IV; Edward IV murdered his brother, Clarence, just as his own two sons were murdered by their uncle. It is hard to imagine a family more steeped in slaughter and revenge, of which the Wars of the Roses were only one effusion. It might be thought that some curse had been laid upon the house of the Plantagenets, except of course that in the world of kings the palm of victory always goes to the most violent and the most ruthless. It could be said that the royal family was the begetter of organized crime.

Gun rights are claimed as an American birthright and clothed in the dignity of the Constitution, but this is a false and fabricated history. To believe in the gun, you have to subscribe to a series of fantasies about the American past. You have to believe Theodore Roosevelt when he says that guns civilized the West and that the men who died “generally” deserved their fate. You have to believe Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas when he writes that firearms brought “possibilities of salvation” to African Americans after the Civil War. You would have to believe that, for two hundred years, every court in the land got the Second Amendment wrong, until Antonin Scalia rode in with his dictionaries in 2008.

The reason liberals despise Clarence Thomas or caricature a Ben Carson, more so than they do white conservative justices or public figures, is the threat that they pose to the entire engine of liberal condescension — and Democratic politics. When successful blacks prove that they easily compete in the marketplace of talent and ideas without liberal racial policies and their political henchmen, then the entire architecture of liberal racial politics collapses. The disdain shown a Thomas or Carson suggests that liberal racial politics serve as private medieval penance in the abstract, and at little personal cost for assuaging guilt over liberal apartheid.

The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns. Its weapons were smooth-tongued lies spoken into microphones and printed on the front pages of America’s newspapers.

As a child in the deep South, I’d grown-up fearing the lynch mobs...as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I’ve been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington DC where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.

At bottom, identity politics rests on problematic ideas of political authenticity and representation. These derive from the faulty premise that membership in a group gives access to shared perspective and an intuitive understanding of the group's collective interests. This leads to two related beliefs that are wrong-headed and politically counterproductive: that only a group member can know or articulate the interests of the group, and that any group member can do so automatically by virtue of his or her identity. Clarence Thomas should have been evidence enough to invalidate the premise linking group membership and perspective. Embarrassingly, people like Maya Angelou and Catherine MacKinnon initially cut Thomas slack based on the silly belief that because he's black and once was poor, putting him on the supreme court would turn out OK. The simplistic belief that any credible member of a group can automatically represent that group's interest feeds a tendency to reduce political objectives to a plea for group representation on decision-making bodies or in other councils of power. That's the Clinton trick: to accept pleas for group representation or "access" while repudiating demands for an issue-based program. The dominant elites can happily satisfy such pleas; token egalitarianism is no threat at all.

The women in the movie Hidden Figures were more like the people around me. You always had those people, exceptional people, around, people who were just brilliant, and they were black. Suddenly they turned us all into helpless victims. I don’t think creating that attitude is good, that sense of a permanent victim status, like we’re serfs or something. I don’t think it’s good now, and I think it’s counterfactual and ahistorical.

If we keep it up, we’re going to look around and someone will say, ‘I want my constitutional rights,’ and they’ll be told, ‘We have no Constitution.’ I think we have to be really, really careful… We’re running the risk of one day not having a Constitution, and hence not having a country. We’re going to pay a price. People forget what happened to the great empires of the world: the Ottoman Empire, gone, fragmented; the Habsburg Empire; the Roman Empire. And the one thing that we have is this long-lasting written constitution, that should be, for us, like the Holy Grail: to be protected. Our desires don’t amend the Constitution, that’s the touchstone for everything. It allows us to live in a free society, but it doesn’t guarantee us the best position in that free society.

The Constitution guarantees liberty. Now liberty gives you the liberty to succeed, liberty to fail, liberty to be mediocre, liberty to be outstanding. It doesn’t guarantee either, but it does guarantee your right that the government isn’t going to tell you what to do every day.

I think we’ve pushed free will aside, and we’ve pushed aside people’s right to fail… You can’t assure people that they’re going to be successful. You can give people security, but it comes at the expense of liberty.

If you criticize a black person who’s more liberal, you are racist. Whereas you can do whatever to me… and that’s fine because you’re not really black, because you’re not doing what we expect black people to do. That’s just the way it is.

Marshaling an impressive array of historical evidence,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas in 1997, “a growing body of scholarly commentary indicates that the ‘right to keep and bear arms’ is, as the Amendment’s text suggests, a personal right.”3 He cited two books, Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm’s To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right – the preeminent study of the English beginnings of the right—and this author’s That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right—which traces the right from its Greco-Roman origins through modern American jurisprudence.

It’s in that locker!” Campbell shouted. Opening the locker, he saw a mass of flames inside. Quickly, he slammed shut the door, blistering his hands in the process. Both men turned and ran from the room to raise the alarm. As they ran, they passed a fire extinguisher placed on the wall near the writing-room door. It was the first mistake by members of a crew poorly trained in fire drills, rescue operations, or virtually any crisis. If Campbell and Ryan had turned that extinguisher on the fire at once it might have made a critical difference. Three vital minutes passed before Clarence Hackney arrived with his fire extinguisher. He yanked open the locker door and a wall of flame rushed out. Hackney backed off and emptied his extinguisher into it, but it was a waste of time—a dozen extinguishers could not have contained the inferno now raging around the locker.

Solid-steel fire doors had been built into entrances to the public rooms to deal with just such an emergency. It would have taken Hackney only a few moments to isolate the writing room from the rest of B deck by lowering its fire door. Clarence Hackney did not take that preventive measure. Smoke billowed after him as he ran for the telephone near the door connecting the first-class lounge to the smoking room. He dialed the bridge.

I don't know about you all, but I choose truth over lies and freedom over a political party; this is why I watch CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NEWSMAX, and different podcasts. I do this because I was born and raised in a communist country! Through bullets, I escaped from dictators, Iron Fist! I can say Communist, Fascist, and Nazi governments seized people's wealth, and the entire country ended up being equally poor. I remember when socialists seized my people's & Albanians wealth, and Albania ended up being one of the poorest countries in Europe. It took over 30 years and 1000's of lost lives for them to get back on their feet. People had enough of the dictator's, so people overthrew communism and capitalism took over, which turned Albania into the richest people from west vacation there! I can tell If you get EBT & SNAP today, it's because, whether we like it or not, we all pitched in to help. I feel bad for people who cheer up. What Democrats are doing to Trump is what communist did to rich people, and after that, they stole everybody's wealth from business to house, lands, farm animals, So if you think this is OKAY, think again, I was democrat for 25 years, but I'm afraid we will be next! This is why I refuse to choose a political party over my freedom. I hate to see my children and grandchildren who don't know America for their homeland, but if I have to, I'll go back to Albania, Where will you all go? Think about it; wake up before it's too late! Please read before you take your freedom away! I'm sorry, I will vote for Trump just because they offer him money not to run again for president! They also offered money to Thomas Clarence! This should worry all of us. read this before you cast your vote! "Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania tells the extraordinary story of how one man held an entire country hostage for 40 years – and got away with it.

Ruth Frankenberg, a premier white scholar in the field of whiteness studies, describes whiteness as multidimensional. These dimensions include a location of structural advantage, a standpoint from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society, and a set of cultural practices that are not named or acknowledged.21 To say that whiteness is a location of structural advantage is to recognize that to be white is to be in a privileged position within society and its institutions—to be seen as an insider and to be granted the benefits of belonging. This position automatically bestows unearned advantages. Whites control all major institutions of society and set the policies and practices that others must live by. Although rare individual people of color may be inside the circles of power—Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Marco Rubio, Barack Obama—they support the status quo and do not challenge racism in any way significant enough to be threatening. Their positions of power do not mean these public figures don’t experience racism (Obama endured insults and resistance previously unheard-of), but the status quo remains intact.