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Clarence Thomas Sounds The Alarm -- Digby
https://digbysblog.net/2026/04/19/clarence-thomas-sounds-the-alarm/Progressives are destroying everything you hold dear.
In many cases it's sad to see a person lose their intellect and get lost in the tangles of their degrading brain. In Thomas's case he never had the intellect. But his owners don't want someone too smart.
Like a modern-day Paul Revere, Clarence Thomas is sounding the alarm: Progressives are an existential threat, determined to destroy all you hold dear, unless you are willing to sacrifice and fight them with everything you have. Perhaps you think that's a bit aggressive coming from a Supreme Court justice charged with making dispassionate decisions about the Constitution and the rule of law. But he made his position clear in an April 15 speech before invited faculty and students at the University of Texas at Austin. You have been warned.
The speech was supposed to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which the nation will be celebrating this summer. (For his part, Donald Trump is planning an IndyCar street race around Washington, D.C., and a UFC fight on the White House lawn.) Thomas used the opportunity to charge that "progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government," adding that the ideology "holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights."
It does?
This is well-trod philosophical ground -- referencing "negative" and "positive" rights, natural law and all the usual back and forth about originalism and whether the Constitution is living or static. We know where Thomas says he stands on those arguments, although these days he seems perfectly willing to throw precedent in the trash and back authoritarian policies if it suits his ideological whim.
Nonetheless, it was an interesting speech, and a highly political one -- mainly because the justice chose to hark back to the original Progressive Movement that began in the 1890s and lasted until the 1920s as a way to attack those who call themselves progressives today. Thomas spent an inordinate amount of time attacking Woodrow Wilson as progressivism's intellectual and spiritual leader, when I would guess that most people who identify that way today couldn't tell you when he was president much less what he believed in. And if they do know who he was, they would almost certainly reject vast swathes of his philosophy. He was, after all, an unreconstructed racist and eugenicist -- something Thomas seems to suggest is a feature of progressivism, which could not be more wrong.
. . .
The speech was supposed to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which the nation will be celebrating this summer. (For his part, Donald Trump is planning an IndyCar street race around Washington, D.C., and a UFC fight on the White House lawn.) Thomas used the opportunity to charge that "progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government," adding that the ideology "holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights."
It does?
This is well-trod philosophical ground -- referencing "negative" and "positive" rights, natural law and all the usual back and forth about originalism and whether the Constitution is living or static. We know where Thomas says he stands on those arguments, although these days he seems perfectly willing to throw precedent in the trash and back authoritarian policies if it suits his ideological whim.
Nonetheless, it was an interesting speech, and a highly political one -- mainly because the justice chose to hark back to the original Progressive Movement that began in the 1890s and lasted until the 1920s as a way to attack those who call themselves progressives today. Thomas spent an inordinate amount of time attacking Woodrow Wilson as progressivism's intellectual and spiritual leader, when I would guess that most people who identify that way today couldn't tell you when he was president much less what he believed in. And if they do know who he was, they would almost certainly reject vast swathes of his philosophy. He was, after all, an unreconstructed racist and eugenicist -- something Thomas seems to suggest is a feature of progressivism, which could not be more wrong.
. . .
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