After the many years it has been occurring, some conservatives may be becoming immune to news about the annual ritual defamation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Like
clockwork, Justice Thomas is attacked, smeared, and denigrated in the months leading up to the end of a Supreme Court term in which there are consequential public policy and constitutional issues on the docket.
However, this year it was different because this year's ritual defamation campaign brought in a new level of viciousness aimed at Justice Thomas’s wife Ginni.
It is no secret to anyone in Washington that Ginni Thomas is a conservative. She was a respected congressional staffer for a very conservative Member of Congress before she ever met Clarence Thomas and they supposedly met through her work in the Bush administration.
And after working for conservatives on the Hill, Ginni worked for the conservative Heritage Foundation, the used-to-be conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the conservative media outlet the Daily Caller, so why the sudden attacks on Ginni Thomas and her work in conservative politics?
Close examination shows that the left’s narrative about the Thomases would have to be substantially stronger even to qualify as flimsy. Mark Paoletta, Daniel Greenfield, and Christian Adams, among others, have published detailed and devastating rebuttals to the left’s claims that Ginni Thomas’s political work in any way creates an ethical conflict for Justice Thomas, and they have exposed the raw political agenda beneath those claims.
The disingenuousness of the attacks and the whole timing thing puzzled me greatly until I read a piece in Townhall by our friend Timothy Daughtry, Lifting the Veil on the Left’s Attacks on Clarence and Ginni Thomas, the entire piece is must-read, but I’ll pull out some key paragraphs.
Let’s start with the premise that issues raised by the left are never the real issues for the left.
For the left, observed Dr. Daughtry, there is always a deeper strategic agenda that is hidden beneath the surface positions and rhetoric, an agenda that is grounded in a radically different view of a how society should be governed than the one reflected in the American Constitution.
Obviously, silencing Justice Thomas, who is one of the strongest defenders of Constitutional rule of law on the court, is clearly the left’s short-term goal here. But that goal is only part of a much larger strategy proposed Tim Daughtry.
In such cases, [as the attacks on the Thomases] conservatives are often quick to accuse the left of applying a double standard or even being hypocritical in their selective outrage, and in one sense that accusation certainly fits here. Leftists who reflexively project sexism and racism onto every issue seem content to attack Ginni Thomas for speaking her own mind and Justice Thomas for daring to hold judicial views that the left deems impermissible for a black man to hold. Once we see the attacks on the Thomases in light of other tactics used by the left, however, it becomes clear that there are no double standards on the left. There is one, and only one, standard that guides the positions and rhetoric of the left, and that standard is that the left’s agenda must be advanced by any means necessary.
The ultimate goal of all left-wing tactics is to remove political power from the hands of voters and elected officials who respect the Constitution and its separation of governmental powers and to put all political power in the hands of “woke” activists who are insulated from electoral accountability. From the left-wing rioters who burn buildings and drag motorists from their cars to their better-dressed allies who prefer the sanitized label of “progressive,” the American left may march under different names, but they are all marching in the same direction, and they all see the American Constitution as an outmoded relic of an oppressive worldview and system that must be dismantled.
Taking Tim Daughtry’s analysis to its logical conclusion, it is not the man Clarence Thomas the Left is after, the larger agenda is to discredit his intellectual and legal legacy as the mere parroting of his wife, and to cancel his magisterial record as one of the Court’s most consistent advocates for constitutional limits to protect the God-given rights of individuals from abuse at the hands of self-serving politicians and the administrative state.
So, when you see attacks on Clarence and Ginni Thomas know that the Left doesn’t give a damn about judicial recusal standards, judges sympathetic to the Left violate the ones they would hold Justice Thomas to all the time. What critics of the Thomases are really after are your God-given constitutionally protected rights, and Ginni and Clarence Thomas are just in the way.
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