(Author’s note: If you read this story straight out, you may be tempted to dismiss it. But what attracted me to attempting this speculative narrative is that almost every past-tense statement in here is true. For instance, Thomas’s wife, Ginni, really was a member of a cult and had to be deprogrammed (it’s how they meet). T.S. is an actual conservative, african-american who is a favorite of Thomas’s. T.S. was pivotal in the direction Thomas’s life took, largely because their childhoods were so similar, which is probably part of the reason his writings were foundational in shaping Thomas’s thinking about economic and social justice issues concerning minorities. Thomas himself, started out as a liberal, right up until he was snubbed by multiple major law firms, despite being near the top of his graduating class. In many ways, his story is not so remarkably different from Stokely Carmichael and his turn to the black power and black nationalist movements. So, don’t dismiss this story outright. If nothing else, take a moment to research “Ginni Thomas and Lifespring.” The fact that many of us are unfamiliar with these facts is, in some measure, an indictment of us in how little we still understand about the opposing camp.)
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During much of Justice Thomas’s stormy tenure on the Supreme Court, it would have been hard to imagine linking him in common cause with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. No reasonable observer of the court imagined his stature ever rising to the level of liberal reverence afforded the man who seemed his ideological polar opposite. That changed in dramatic fashion over the days and weeks after his death, as the contents of a small leather journal found by his side gradually became public.
In circumstances eerily reminiscent of those surrounding the 2006 passing of former colleague Antonin Scalia, Thomas’s lifeless body was discovered by a maid during morning rounds at the Topridge Resort hideaway of longtime benefactor, Harlan Crow. Thomas died within weeks of Republican-turned-Democrat Nikki Haley winning the 2028 presidential election in landslide fashion. Historians now believe that had Thomas chosen another course, Haley likely would have remained a Republican, and U.S. history as we know it today would be substantially different.
“He fooled everyone. The Bushes, the Birchers, his billionaire bedfellows, even his wife, Ginni. No one saw this coming,” observed retired Federal Judge and conservative stalwart Michael Luggig. A former Trump loyalist who asked to remain anonymous put it more bluntly, “When it first dropped, I believed it about as much as I believed honesty was about to become the new billable hour. Yet here we are, the f-ing black swan event of our time.” What neither Judge Luggig, Trump’s Justice Department supporters, nor anyone else saw coming was that beneath Thomas’s famously taciturn silence rested a fierce level of personal and social introspection.
“T.S.,” he stated in one the journal’s earliest entries, “was the first portrait of a man in which I recognized how the grinding hardships of poverty, emotional abandonment, and an abusive insistence on self-reliance can move from being instructive to destructive, from generating self-love to replacing it with a pathological self-hatred. Until, at last, the abused becomes willing to become the abuser, even to the point of adopting the same narratives once used to enforce their own abuse.”
An observation by his future wife Ginni, seems to have provided the pivot that altered the arc of his life for good. “. . . all those things that got me [in] to Lifespring [a cult from which she once had to be deprogrammed] are still there,” she said in an interview a few days before he added, in a 1989 entry, “perhaps those things remain in us all. How deep must my emotional blinders be if I, even as a black man, have only now come to see that the moment I fail to tow the conservative cult line, a day later I would be out on my ear, just another n-gr to them.”
It is hard to be certain if Thomas’s insight arose at a tipping point in history of if his insights became the tipping point. But once he understood the exact nature of the blindness on all sides, he decided that he could harness that lack of self-awareness to his own ends and, he hoped, “to the betterment of all.”
As historian, Ken Burns noted in his excellent video 2041 videography, “Deep Waters”, “Sometime around 1994, Justice Thomas realized that if he was willing to ‘play the minstrel clown,’ so to speak, by advancing judicial arguments so ludicrously contrary to the spirit of the republic in their undertones, yet rhetorically plausible on the surface, then maybe others would be willing to jump onto the clown car with him. He hoped that what ended up on display for all the world to see would show their true colors and render American Conservatism obsolete.”
His first and perhaps most brilliant move was to become a more ardent “originalist” than even Antonio Scalia. “I have been at it, now, for almost twelve years,” he reflected on September 22, 2004. Still, no one suspects that the version of originalism I am breathing into the Republican ecosystem is purposely pulled from little more than fourteen percent of the Confederate Constitution as it differs from the U.S Constitution. Low to no cooperate taxes, lax regulation of businesses, destruction of funding for public programs. United under God for sure, but not one wedded to the common good.”
Other journal entries make clear that many of his questionable decisions regarding monies, gifts, and friendships were as much political cover for this ruse as anything else. “Who would believe that I, such a clear beneficiary of affirmative action, would then pull up the ladder behind me if I wasn’t profiting. They would smell a rat, and I’d be out on my ear.”
Despite an increasing clarity of purpose, there were times he was accosted by tremendous self-doubt. Post 9/11. Then in 2010, after Obama had picked up the pieces of the Bush economic disaster, yet the tea party missed the obvious chance to exit from the crazy room he and others had been constructing. And, of course, when Trump appeared. The golden one was “the most frightening manifestation” of a ploy he never imagined would go so far.
“I looked in horrified bemusement at the phrase, ‘Own the libs,’” a journal page from those years began. “I failed to understand how no one, not even the liberals, seemed to notice the almost Freudian implications of large group of conservatives wanting to “own” a coalition of almost every kind of brown person you could imagine, along with their white friends.”
On another page, he questions, “…why so many conservative whites failed to see that they were in the process of destroying the constitutional guardrails that protected all minorities, if not from every abuse, at least from most of the worst excesses of the majority population. This, at a time in the not-too-distant future, when they were destined to be in the minority?”
Near the most fevered pitch of those years, when his plan appeared on the verge of destroying rather than saving the republic he seemed to take solace in something Gini once said, “I remember asking her how she finally figured out she was in a cult. She answered, when I realized, I used to say I love you almost every day to my family, to my best friend, to so many people I cared about. But at some point, all I ever did was argue with them. I started to hate them. That’s when she said she knew for sure.”
Ginni Thomas had plenty of wrong ideas in those years. But on this one thing, she was right. As the 2024 election neared, the hate and violence of the Republican right was on such full display that it was impossible to ignore. People had to make a choice. Enough people choose love, or at least enlightened self-interests, that it was able to save the day.
“We are all afraid. All of us. But we are afraid of the wrong things.” Nikki Haley said during a telecast to the entire nation a week before the 2028 polls opened. “I’m afraid of you, and you’re afraid of me. But what we should really be afraid of is the corporations. They’re selling us all down the road. And for what? Jeff Bezos made roughly $23 billion last year, enough to give every one of his employes a raise of $40 thousand and still take home 9 billion. And how do they keep us from noticing? Easy, just talk about immigrants being threats. Convenience us that our minority neighbors are animals. That I need to be afraid of you and you need to be afraid of me. Enough! Enough! Enough already! It’s time to take our country, and the American dream, back! Back from the corporations, the crooked courts, and the scaremongers! It’s time!”
Of her decision to change parties and give that speech, former President Haley has pointed directly at the Kline vs. Gadston opinion penned by Thomas, where he wrote, “The life blood of a country is its corporations. They are ill-served by large numbers of indolent, slothful workers. Given that AI is more industrious, more thoughtful, and more efficient, the founding fathers would have applauded the swift demise of such an inferior workforce.”
Now that we know his true intent, Thomas essentially martyred himself by writing that decision. How was he not going to go down in infamy? And, so it would have been, except for one small journal that he likely intended us never to see.
This is why, today, we celebrate the sacrifice of these two great souls who long seemed on opposite sides the American struggle for freedom. The changes that have taken place since Thomas’s death – the dissolution of poverty, hunger, homelessness, almost unimaginable class disparities – would not have been possible without either man. Having finally learned the rest of the story, we celebrate them both on this hallowed January day.