One of the favorite pastimes of the nation’s legacy media outlets is maligning and spinning conspiracy theories about Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. The smear du jour, this time via Politico, is that Donald Trump’s lawyers saw a direct appeal to Thomas as their best chance to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The attempt to tarnish Thomas hangs primarily on his wife, Ginni, who was involved in some conversations about 2020-election litigation. But news flash: Justice Thomas and his wife are different people. As Andy McCarthy explained during one of the last rounds of Thomas-dragging:
The Thomases maintain a wall of separation regarding their respective professional lives to avoid conflicts: Justice Thomas does not discuss the Court’s pending cases with Ginni, and Ginni does not involve the justice in her political activities — not that either of them would try to become involved in the other’s work.
Moreover, you don’t have to be a constitutional-law scholar or a psephologist to know this effort had no chance of going anywhere. Many paragraphs down, the Politico piece admits this:
The Trump’s team’s effort found virtually no traction at the high court. The only outward signs of dissension among the justices were mild, like a Dec. 11 order where the court rejected a bid by Texas to challenge the vote counts in four other states. Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito issued a brief statement saying they’d have accepted jurisdiction over the case, but joined the other justices in denying Texas any relief.
Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Whether it was the uncorroborated Anita Hill allegations or claims that he was a beneficiary of affirmative action, the mainstream media cannot help but denigrate Thomas. All this calumny in the press about the senior justice is enough to make one wonder: Why do the media loathe his presence on the bench so much?
Some Thomas detractors, by purporting to “explain” Thomas, have actually revealed themselves. Consider The Enigma of Clarence Thomas by Corey Robin, a political-science professor and contributing editor at the socialist rag, Jacobin. Robin claims that Thomas’s originalism is motivated by his deep-seated black nationalism and pessimism about the potential for racial harmony in America. This is a load of malarkey. Thomas has explicitly repudiated his radical past. If anything, he is living proof that anyone in America can transcend prejudice and adversity regardless of where one is born.
All Robin’s screed does is provide yet more evidence that those in the media and other progressive elites hate Thomas because he doesn’t conform to their assumptions about who is supposed to believe what. Intolerance for ideological diversity, especially when it is evidenced by minorities, is a hallmark of the progressive Left.