U.S. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito (L) and Clarence Thomas on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
On Wednesday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a speech at the University of Texas, Austin, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In it, he took the opportunity to offer a lengthy attack on progressive politics that was widely criticized, with New York Times political analyst Jamelle Bouie calling the Justice’s assertions “nonsense.”
According to Thomas, “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”
“It’s nonsense,” said Bouie in response, characterizing Thomas as a “strange, bizarre, misanthropic man with a wide array of frankly lunatic beliefs,” while noting that he is “one of the most powerful people in the country as the longest serving Justice on the Supreme Court.”
As Bouie clarified, Thomas was suggesting that progressives believe human rights come from the government, which amounts to a rejection of the Declaration of Independence and has caused much of the social fracturing we see today. As a consequence, asserts Thomas, those on the political Left are to blame for the world as it is.
We should not, said Bouie, take Thomas’s arguments seriously.
“This idea that progressives or liberals or left of center Americans are the ones who are directly assaulting the Declaration of Independence, who have rejected the idea that all men are created equal, who insist that you only have rights if the government gives them to you,” explained Bouie, “Not only is that not an accurate description of what leftists in the United States believe — it is an accurate descript of Thomas’s own ideological allies.”
As Bouie pointed out, Thomas “loves” Trump, Vance, and MAGA, “and core to the MAGA project is a rejection of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a rejection of the idea that all Americans exist on a plane of equality, or ought to. Key MAGA politicians and thinkers routinely make arguments for the natural existence of hierarchies or natural aristocracy and the idea that some people belong and that others can be excluded or dominated because they don’t. Clarence Thomas is literally describing the views of the people he has empowered as a justice.”
This forced Bouie to two possible conclusions.
“So either he is kind of delusional about the people he has surrounded himself with,” said Bouie, “or he is ultimately a Republican hack.”