Ginni Thomas, Ultimate Ride-or-Die Bitch

Clarence Thomas is the most powerful Wife Guy in America.

[if you are reading the email version of this piece, it may be truncated for length and you can link to the full piece on Substack by clicking on the title.]

"Good morning Anita Hill, it's Ginni Thomas. I just want to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”

That's a voicemail from 2010 that today's subject left - unprompted! - at Anita Hill's work number. Virginia L. Thomas woke up one morning, nearly two decades after her husband's fiery Supreme Court confirmation hearing had ended, and decided to give Anita Hill a call and demand an apology for apparently trying to smear him back in 1991. And while this is completely insane, it is actually one of the more levelheaded and restrained things that Ginni Thomas, holding the Bible in the photo below, is known for.

While Clarence Thomas is famously the most taciturn justice on the Supreme Court, his wife has only become more vocal as we enter each new era of increased political polarization, and she’s a big contributor to that polarization herself. With the Soul of a True Poster, this former cult member - this is the third time I’ve said that in this series, and the first time I’ve meant it - has spent decades pushing not only terrible retrograde policies, but completely unhinged conspiracy theories about the Deep State and liberal conspiracy to destroy everything Americans hold dear. She has a direct channel in to President Trump, and advises him on which White House staffers must be purged to save the country. Clarence may be doing a great deal to hurt our country through his judicial decisions and opinions, but Ginni is the one whose mental well-being and significant influence I’m more worried about.

CHAPTER ONE - A ROLLER COASTER NAMED AFTER DIARRHEA

To know Ginni Thomas only as Clarence Thomas’ wife is to do her a disservice, as she was a notable DC operator before meeting her husband. As a Congressional staffer and eventual lobbyist for the US Chamber of Commerce, Thomas was active in advocating for policies that appealed to the absolute worst instincts of business owners; most notably, she banged the drum against the Family and Medical Leave Act, taking a principled stand against everyone who wanted unpaid leave from their jobs - unpaid! - for some stupid reason like "giving birth and taking care of a newborn".

But whatever, all of that shit is boring, let's talk about how she was in a cult, a real cult this time. One of the stranger cultural phenomena from the 1980s was the explosion of weird self-help seminars where yuppies would scour their souls for humiliating things from their past, cry a bunch, and claim to have had a breakthrough and re-order their priorities. If you've seen The Americans, you remember that Phil went to “est” meetings, and est was a real thing and a sister organization to Lifespring in DC, where Ginni Thomas was once a member.

Lifespring, though, was less a self-help seminar than an emotionally abusive multi-level marketing scheme, breaking down the lanyard-wearing dorks in the District, ostensibly in the name of Living Your Best Life, but really. in the name of Giving Us Money And Finding Other People To Give Us Money. The Washington Post attended the entry-level "basic" weekend seminar in 1987, and there are almost too many good lines to quote from their piece on it. The weekend was facilitated by this man with an inspiring story about a roller coaster named after diarrhea:

"One time, [moderator] Jim's young nephews corralled him into taking them on a wild, stomach-turning roller coaster called Montezuma's Revenge. He was frightened, but he went on the ride seven times. "I made a commitment and took action because it was a risk. I expanded my comfort zone and I found the highs that we don't let ourselves experience in life." Lifespring will show us how to do that. Lifespring will teach us to be players in the game of life, spectators no more. "Showing up as your commitment in your life," they call it in Lifespring jargon, a language all their own."

And just like riding a roller coaster, Lifespring encouraged students to put aside their fears dive right in to seminars designed by John Hanley, a former toilet-cleaning service salesman convicted of six counts of felony mail fraud (“Hanley repeatedly asked The Post not to report his conviction because it is irrelevant to his current business and because "it would blow us out of the water," he says. "I learned a lesson. I was just a kid. And that judge was a little crazy”) and copying wholesale from other seminars called shit like "Mind Dynamics" where sales reps would get waterboarded in order to develop their negotiation skills. That's not a joke, by the way:

“Hanley attended Patrick's Leadership Dynamics Institute, a brutal training program in which salesmen were whipped, beaten, tied to crosses and forced to eat garbage and feces. Hanley made a name for himself at the institute when he reacted to being locked in a coffin for 14 hours by falling asleep. The trainers were so impressed by Hanley's will that they invited him to join their staff, according to former Lifespring vice president James Moore…Hanley moved to another Patrick-related company, Mind Dynamics...The course got very tough. In a class for Mind Dynamics trainers...he was held on the floor by four people with his nose and mouth covered by a wet washcloth until he nearly passed out.”

As someone who has worked in corporate sales for over a decade myself, I pride myself in having been able to achieve a basic level of competence on the job without being either crucified or buried alive. Lifespring seminars weren’t as obviously brutal, but they still involved having participants live out their most humiliating fears in front of hundreds of others, in the name of overcoming internal barriers to success. After completing the “basic” course, participants were urged to drop hundreds of dollars on the spot and sign up for higher-level courses, although of course they got a discount if they recruited friends and family to sign up for basic instead. Lifespring made a big effort to recruit from both K Street and Capitol Hill, hoping to make connections in all of DC’s halls of power, and once hilariously tried to get an in with the military:

“In 1980, Lifespring trained hundreds of servicemen at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. In a letter to the Pentagon and in press reports, a captain there said that Lifespring was security risk because trainees would find their loyalties torn between military values and those taught by Lifespring. A Harvard psychiatrist said servicemen would be "loyal to Lifespring." The Air Force stopped the training.”

I hope you all enjoyed, as much as I did, the mental image of a two-star general running to the phone yelling “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” and trying to cancel the self-help seminar he booked for his airmen. The Post article also included plenty of testimonials from psychologists on how abusive Lifespring’s tactics were, details on all of the out-of-court settlements that Lifespring had to pay for inflicting so much emotional distress, and testimonials from disenchanted former participants, including one that will probably catch your eye:

“Virginia Thomas, a lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, took Lifespring a couple of years ago, when she was a congressional aide. She was confused and troubled by exercises such as one in which trainees listened to "The Stripper" while disrobing to skimpy bikinis and bathing suits. The group then stood in a U-shaped line, made fun of fat people's bodies and riddled one another with sexual questions. After talks with Garvey, Thomas decided she had been taken in. It took her months to break fully from Lifespring's "high-pressure tactics.”...Thomas felt guilty about breaking her Lifespring "commitments." She hid out in another part of the country to avoid constant phone calls from fellow trainees who were taught that it was their responsibility to make Thomas keep her commitment to Lifespring.”

Yeah, that’s right, Thomas was interviewed for the piece, and her experience in Lifespring shaped her career to follow. Lifespring ostensibly taught its participants not to be passive victims, but to take charge of their lives and careers and more aggressively pursue what they wanted; as we’ll see, Thomas certainly has had no trouble doing this throughout her career. But her experience at Lifespring also led her to join an organization called the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), whose stated mission was to inform people on potentially dangerous cults, and in some cases rescue and deprogram cult members. While that may not cause you to bat an eye, that was apparently a controversial thing to be involved in back in 1991, when a different Washington Post profile of Thomas highlighted the apparent shadiness of CAN:

“Religious liberty advocates accuse it of supporting deprogrammers who kidnap members of religious groups and coerce them to undergo treatment. CAN's adversaries have included fundamentalist Christian splinter groups, the Church of Scientology and the Unification Church. CAN officials maintain that cults tried to stifle Thomas's activities while she worked at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a labor relations attorney during the mid-'80s. Fred Krebs, Thomas's supervisor, confirmed receiving letters objecting to her involvement in anti-cult work...“If Ginni is the wife of a Supreme Court justice, it's probably a little scary for the cults," [CAN President] Ryan said.”

I mean, sure, yes, but I was always under the impression that cults were bad. For instance, between 1991 and tody, the image of the Church of Scientology has potentially taken a hit (‘potentially’ included for legal reasons). This particular profile of Thomas, as we’ll see, is from a completely different era in politics, and a completely different era of how the Post’s readers would view “fundamentalist Christian splinter groups”. But, though the piece presents CAN as shadier than it likely was, the actual shady thing that it points out was that in 1987, during her involvement with CAN, Ginni Thomas happened to get married to the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission - and, incredibly, one of the “Most Eligible DC Bachelors” according to Jet magazine, a perfect match for Ginni who was one of “28 Women of Promise” according to Good Housekeeping magazine. Very shortly after his wedding, that EEOC head began taking an interest in rooting out workplace “new age training programs which conflict with employees' religious beliefs”. It was almost as if a powerful government official had internalized his new wife’s pet project, and used his own power to make things happen for her, a pattern that would maybe start to repeat itself over the next few decades. And the reason that the Post was writing that profile of Ginni Thomas in 1991 was that this powerful government official had just been nominated to sit on the Supreme Court.

CHAPTER TWO - AUNT OPAL WITH THE SAVE

As we now know from his confirmation hearing, rooting out cult activity was allegedly not the only thing Clarence Thomas was up to at the EEOC. Obviously, the confirmation hearing was an unimaginable time for Ginni; hell, her family’s support could even be characterized as ‘inconsistent’, since members of her family still weren’t one hundred percent on board with interracial marriages back in, uh, 1991:

““I can guarantee you I was surprised when I found out she was going with a black man," Ginni Thomas's uncle Ralph Knop said from his farm in Iowa. "It was unusual for us.” "But he was so nice, we forgot he was black," her aunt Opal added, "and he treated her so well, all of his other qualities made up for his being black."”

Thank you, Aunt Opal, for diving in with the save. The net result of the confirmation battle, of course, was that Clarence got put on the court, and Clarence and Ginni’s marriage came out stronger from this shared trauma. After the confirmation hearing concluded, Clarence and Ginni - I honestly cannot believe this was real - were on the cover of People magazine, with Ginni doing an in-depth interview on the Anita Hill accusations titled “Breaking Silence”, but the silence being broken was not that of “the woman sexually harassed by an incredibly powerful man at her office” but “the wife of the man accused of sexual harassment who had just been installed on the Supreme Court for life.”

The interview is just jaw-dropping start to finish, and is an incredible artifact of a completely different era. Ginni’s theory on what happened with Anita Hill was that she was infatuated with Clarence, upset by getting the brush-off, and made up the accusations wholesale as revenge. As Ginni put it:

“My case was also different from Hill’s because what she did was so obviously political, as opposed to trying to resolve the problem. And what’s scary about her allegations is that they remind me of the movie Fatal Attraction or, in her case, what I call the fatal assistant. In my heart, I always believed she was probably someone in love with my husband and never got what she wanted.”

Jesus Christ. It gets worse:

“As for Anita Hill’s charges, I have my theories, but I don’t have evidence. I believe the charges were politically motivated. You can tell because of the timing. We were hit with all these charges, but they didn’t get him...What hurts most in all this is that there are people out there who still might believe Anita Hill. My only prayer is that the truth comes out as fast as possible. I think Anita Hill was used in the sense that she never wanted her story to be public. She wanted to be one of the shadow people.”

Ginni also explained how she was once sexually harassed at work but reported it right away like a Good Believable Woman would do, and how she appreciated the support her husband got from the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee [note to self - look up who the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee was in 1991, he really ended up on the wrong side of this one and I’m sure he’s out of politics forever now, might be fun to include in essay?]. There was also a lot of insight into her faith life in this piece: she and her husband prayed regularly together and with their friends to get through this ordeal, and devout Catholic Clarence viewed the confirmation hearings as “spiritual warfare. Good versus evil. We were fighting something we didn’t understand, and we needed prayerful people in our lives. We needed God”. Ginni was not Catholic at this point - that wouldn’t happen until 2002, with some encouragement from the Scalia family as well as her husband - but I can certainly understand how a woman who believes her husband is being smeared on a national stage would grow closer to him, and grow in her faith with him, and eventually convert to his faith. At the end of the interview, Ginni expressed her hope that “we have set a new low, that Americans in their outrage can say, “No, there is a level at which it is disgusting, horrible and wrong.” Based on the last Supreme Court confirmation hearing I saw, we hadn’t set a new low in 1991 after all, but it was sure nice to think that we had.

I’m going to write one of the sentences from the People interview again and put it in bold type because of how completely insane it is: “What hurts most in all this is that there are people out there who still might believe Anita Hill.” Reading it in 2020 is mind-blowing, but I suppose 1991, a year which I can literally remember from my childhood, was a different era in how we treated women. As it turns out, 2010 was also a different era, because in their coverage of Ginni’s infamous voicemail followup to Anita Hill, the Post included this lede: “It is one of Washington's enduring mysteries. Nearly two decades after Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his fractious Supreme Court confirmation hearing, it remains unclear who was lying.” And as bonkers as that would be to write in 2010, and then it somehow got topped in 2016 by the National Catholic Register, writing a profile of Thomas in which the author took issue with the fact that everyone seemed to end up on Anita Hill’s side, even the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture, which, in the Register’s opinion, didn’t do enough to highlight Thomas’ trailblazing history as an African-American justice working hard to undo civil rights protections, and did too much to highlight that whiny law professor:

“Thomas would describe the attack on his reputation as a “high-tech lynching.” And while Hill failed to convince the Senate of the veracity of her claims, the allegations have continued to cast a shadow over Thomas’ legacy. Exhibit A is the Smithsonian museum’s depiction of Anita Hill as a trailblazer for women who encountered sexual harassment in the workplace. And earlier this year, HBO released Confirmation, a film that also took Hill’s side.”

Look, the Register is owned by EWTN, which is the right-wing Catholic media conglomerate where the higher-ups show up to cheerlead at Trump rallies (they’re currently pushing hydroxycholoroquine!). I would absolutely expect them to be fans of a conservative, Catholic, anti-abortion justice like Thomas, I would expect them not to believe Anita Hill, I just hope their profile of Clarence Thomas didn’t go way overboard in terms of fulsome praise oh come the fuck on:

As you’d expect, the Register profile focuses on Clarence Thomas’ faith life, including his upbringing with his Catholic grandfather, his brief time in seminary, and the clear influence of Catholicism on his jurisprudence. But it also touches upon the growth in his and Ginni’s faith life during the confirmation hearings, and how Ginni was always ride-or-die from day one, as ““We knew before we went in that the left would galvanize and throw everything at him,” Ginni Thomas, the justice’s wife, told the Register, as she recalled the devastating impact of the accusations and the time she and her husband spent seeking solace in prayer and scriptural reading.”

Being ride-or-die from day one is something I can understand, but why the fuck was she ride-or-die on day six thousand, nine hundred thirty-five? Why did she call Anita Hill, umprompted, nineteen fucking years after the hearings ended to complain to her? Well, there was a lot of speculation about this when it actually happened, because it really did come out of nowhere. The Daily Beast called out that “The Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American journalist Karen Hunter, appearing on MSNBC, theorized that Ginni was in an Ambien stupor. Gawker [RIP] wondered if she was drunk. Even members of Ginni’s family appear to be somewhat perturbed that she chose to raise her husband’s turbulent 1991 confirmation hearing again.”

Obviously, I had to look up the Gawker piece, and here are some highlights:

“Virginia Thomas, who, besides being the wife of the biggest jerkoff on the Supreme Court, is a Tea Party activist, must have been having a weird Saturday morning on October 9!...Hill (who, full disclosure, was totally fucking right) was pilloried by the right-wing and treated terribly by, among others, Senator Arlen Specter, at that point a Republican; Thomas was confirmed 52-48, and now it is One Of Those Things We Don't Talk About At The Dinner Table, like Religion and Money and Aunt Nicole's Accident...Hill, who is a law professor at Brandeis, mulled over the weird message for a week and turned the phone over to the campus police.”

Good for Hill. Thomas, for her part, maintained that she was phoning with nothing but good intentions, saying in a statement that “I did place a call to Ms. Hill at her office extending an olive branch to her after all these years, in hopes that we could ultimately get past what happened so long ago. That offer still stands. I would be very happy to meet and talk with her if she would be willing to do the same. Certainly no offense was ever intended.” The content of the voicemail, in which she accuses Hill of smearing her husband and directly asks for an apology, kind of undercuts this statement and makes it sound like Thomas was just being an asshole for no reason. Unless, as the Daily Beast suggested, she might have actually had a reason:

“The timing of the phone call did seem strange to some. The morning Ginni “reached across the airwaves,” the Times ran an article about her growing public role at Liberty Central, where she works to oppose the leftist “tyranny” of Obama and leftist Democrats in congress. It raised issues about where “large, unidentified contributions” were coming from and pointed out that it could lead to recusal issues for her husband on the Supreme Court. Was Ginni orchestrating a publicity campaign and using Hill as a ruse to galvanize her own base, some wondered.”

Some wondered. We should probably talk about Liberty Central.

CHAPTER THREE - MRS. THOMAS DOES NOT NECESSARILY SUPPORT OR ENDORSE THE PRODUCTS, SERVICES OR POSITIONS PROMOTED IN ANY ADVERTISEMENT CONTAINED HEREIN

Like most awful people, Ginni Thomas got heavily involved in the Tea Party movement and the 2010 midterm elections. Shortly after the midterms, she helped found Liberty Central, a conservative dark-money lobbying group, and would later form an accompanying conservative activist group called Groundswell. While there were plenty of these groups going around in the 2010s, only one had access to the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice. Now, it seems unlikely Ginni would sell the group that way - although she did market it by saying that her “experience and connections” made Liberty Central unique among lobbying groups - but it is worth mentioning that Liberty Central had access to the spouse of one of the five sitting Supreme Court justices who actually made it possible for these dark money groups to exist.

See, Liberty Central came into being right around the same time that the court ruled 5-4 in the Citizens United case that groups like this could accept unlimited donations as a form of political "speech". Clarence Thomas' decision as a Supreme Court justice certainly made his wife's job a hell of a lot easier, as Politico reported:

"But the Thomases came under particular scrutiny after POLITICO revealed that, while the Supreme Court was deliberating over the Citizens United case, Liberty Central had received a $550,000 anonymous contribution. Reached by phone on Wednesday, Thomas said she was having trouble with the signal, telling a POLITICO reporter: “I would be happy to talk with you, but I really can’t understand clearly what you’re asking, so maybe this is not a good time to talk.” She did not respond to subsequent voice mail or e-mail messages.”

It's possible that Clarence Thomas had no idea what his wife was up to and that there was no conflict of interest, but it sure as hell looked like there was a conflict of interest, which is still something that ethical judges generally try to avoid. But since there's no way to force a Supreme Court justice to recuse himself, Clarence got to hear and rule on this case while Ginni got to crinkle a candy wrapper into her phone receiver and say "uh, I think you're breaking up, are you in a tunnel right now?" Honestly I'm probably being too harsh, I'm sure Politico found a disinterested third party that commented on this particular incident and said it was totally normal and fine:

"Leonard Leo, an executive at the conservative Federalist Society who is a longtime friend of the Thomases and sits on Liberty Central’s board, told POLITICO in November that the call had no impact on Liberty Central’s fundraising or on Thomas. “The people that were supportive of Liberty Central were supportive of her,” he said, adding, “I don’t think that they were going to pull back from her at a time when she needed support more than anything else.” He called the controversy over the Hill call “a nothing burger” for Thomas.”

Fantastic, glad that's cleared up, from the Liberty Central board member who is personal friends with the Thomases and has dedicated his life to getting more justices like Thomas on the Court. The reality is that this sort of thing happened all of the time with Ginni Thomas - she'd be calling up Congressmen to gut the Affordable Care Act, while her husband was also evaluating its constitutionality. She was literally emailing other conservative activists asking for the best strategy to drum up support for Trump’s Muslim ban that had stalled in the courts, and her husband would eventually vote to un-stall it. Back during his confirmation hearing, Clarence’s former colleague at the EEOC said that “"The one person [he] really listens to is Virginia...He depends on her for advice." Maybe things had changed since 1991, although everything I just read indicates that Ginni and Clarence only grew closer together after that ordeal.

Liberty Central was not Thomas’ only hard-right hobby; she also was a contributor to The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson’s weirdly horny conservative news site. Most of Thomas’ early work for the Caller appears to be video interviews with “rising stars” in the Republican party, which mainly meant former executive branch flacks trying to stay relevant:

Thomas’ most recent work for the Caller was in 2018, and was more in the vein of all of the dumb bullshit that your aunt would share on Facebook, talking about the bias of the liberal media and the leftist propaganda mandated as part of college curricula everywhere:

Like most of the output of conservative blogs, Ginni Thomas’ articles got increasingly sad as the Trump era continued on, and the woman who used to record interviews with former UN Ambassadors was now profiling people like ultimate dumb son Donald Trump Jr., or James O’Keefe, the fame-hungry hack best known for going “undercover” and dressing up in a Halloween pimp costume to ask for funding from ACORN. As Thomas wrote, “He talked about going undercover in the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. Those videos of Robert Creamer, the husband of progressive Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky, became an “internet phenomenon and were credited with having a significant impact.” O’Keefe claims that he got no Pulitzer Prize, however, “just a blizzard of legal attacks.”"

I am able, right now, to independently verify O’Keefe’s claim that he has never been awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Thomas may have tremendous access to power, but until very recently she was writing articles that ended with “For more information on Donald Trump, Jr. join the 2.52 million following him on Twitter or like his Facebook page. Mrs. Thomas does not necessarily support or endorse the products, services or positions promoted in any advertisement contained herein, and does not have control over or receive compensation from any advertiser.”

So, obviously that's all very funny, but Thomas eventually stopped writing for the Caller in 2018, because her career took her where we all knew it was going to.

CHAPTER FOUR - A BIZARRE CHEX MIX

If you can push your way through several previous harrowing memories, you'll remember that the first iteration of the Trump White House had a bizarre Chex Mix of staffers. There were a lot of lifelong Republican operators who thought this was going to be normal (Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Mike Pence, Kellyanne Conway), white supremacists who were getting their feet in the door (Steve Miller, Steve Bannon, Kris Kobach), generals about to humiliate themselves (John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Jim Mattis), incompetent grifters looking for a payday (Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos, Tom Price, Ryan Zinke, Ben Carson, Jared Kushner), Trump loyalists and early adopters (Jeff Sessions, Mike Flynn), and executive producers of the Lego Batman movie (Steve Mnuchin). Part of the reason for this unusual setup was that so many of the usual suspects that you'd expect to return from the Bush White House or the legislative branch didn't want to be publicly associated with Trump, and that's only the political appointees, not the career executive branch bureaucrats who took the opportunity to retire or go into the private sector when the Trump presidency arrived.

The brain drain has, of course, gotten worse, as many (not all) of the names I listed are now punchlines in hilarious two-for-one "remember when" jokes, as in "remember when Rex Tillerson was one of the most powerful CEOs on the world and he got upset because of the Boy Scout Jamboree and then later had to tell everyone he thought Donald Trump was smart, and then later John Kelly said he fired Tillerson while he was taking a shit?". Trump continued to fire people for looking at him funny, and the executive branch has slowly been reduced to nothing but sycophants and idiots.

Ginni Thomas, as it turns out, has been coordinating the flow of sycophants and idiots into the executive branch. The New York Times reported in 2019 that she and her girlfriends met with Trump to discuss purging disloyal staffers from the White House and replacing them with only the best people. Because it's Thomas, and because it's Trump, and because this is G.O.T.H.S., the meeting quickly turned hilarious:

"President Trump met last week with a delegation of hard-right activists led by Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, listening quietly as members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military, according to three people with direct knowledge of the events. For 60 minutes Mr. Trump sat, saying little but appearing taken aback, the three people said, as the group also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration...one woman argued that women should not serve in the military because they had less muscle mass and lung capacity than men did, according to those familiar with the events. At another point, someone said that gay marriage, which the Supreme Court determined in 2015 was the law of the land, was harming the fabric of the United States. And another attendee was dismissive that sexual assault is pervasive in the military."

It's hilarious to imagine Trump, who cares about literally nothing except his own wealth and fame, forced to sit and listen to women who care deeply about absurd political issues yell things like “WOMEN CAN’T SWIM, THEY’RE LIKE THE BLACKS”. Fortunately, the Times assures us that the meeting began with a prayer, and that members of the meeting would spontaneously lapse back into prayer throughout. Trump also at one point called Ivanka in to say hi, as if to demonstrate that he could name a woman who wasn’t currently in the room with him at the time.

What came out of the meeting? As Axios reported in February of this year, Thomas provided Trump with a very prescriptive list of people in his administration that he should fire for being insufficiently loyal to the cause, and suggestions on whom he should bring in instead. After his impeachment trial concluded, Trump was looking to clean house, and Thomas was looking to get more people she trusted in more positions of power. I’m sure that if we take a look at the list as reported by Axios, given Thomas’s decades of work with some of the most powerful people in the country, we will find a universally respected group of some of the brightest minds in the conservative movement:

“Potential hires she offered to Trump, per sources with direct knowledge: Sheriff David Clarke for a senior Homeland Security role, Fox News regular and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino for a Homeland Security or counterterrorism adviser role, Devin Nunes aide Derek Harvey for the National Security Council, Radio talk show host Chris Plante for press secretary, Federalist contributor Ben Weingarten for the National Security Council.”

Or, maybe it’s a bunch of right-wing media dipshits, plus David Clarke, who had already been rejected for a DHS role, and who couldn’t find a solid-colored shirt for a Fox News appearance:

One thing I can feel good about, though, is that Trump would never talk about the Supreme Court with Ginni Thomas. Sure, Ginni’s husband is the longest-serving member of the Court, and Ginni’s pet projects have repeatedly overlapped with her husband’s work, and Ginni has never shown any interest in avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest before, and her husband has never shown any interest in recusing himself when there is an appearance of a conflict of interest with Ginni’s work, but thankfully the other person in this equation is Donald Trump. And if I know Donald Trump, I know that he, first of all, has a very clear and accurate understanding of how government and separation of powers work, cares deeply about making sure everything appears above board, and would never do anything that even appeared corrupt just out of dumb self-interest.

More broadly, I suppose we should consider that Clarence and Ginni have possibly never talked about politics with each other in their spare time, despite working in that field for their entire careers. There's no way I can know for sure. But Ginni Thomas has strong opinions about hot-button political issues, she lives with one of the most powerful men in the country, she works with another one of the most powerful men in the country, and often the issues Ginni works on overlap with the issues that Clarence rules on. With all of that in mind, do you think Ginni spends all of her spare time carefully coordinating fundraising and public opinion campaigns, making a full-court press to bring a callous reactionary political agenda to life? Or does she carve out an unusually high percentage of that time to post stupid shit on Facebook? Guess what!

CHAPTER FIVE - THE SOUL OF A TRUE POSTER

The number of Washington Post profiles of Ginni Thomas far outstrips any other spouse of a Supreme Court justice, probably in American history. Obviously, no other spouse of a Supreme Court justice has been as politically active as Thomas has, including during their spouse’s tenure on the Court. But we also have to consider the possibility that the other spouses see Ginni’s Facebook page and quietly say to themselves “okay, I have to remember to never do this myself and end up in the paper." What goes on with Ginni’s Facebook page that led the Post to write this, with the exhausted-sounding headline “What is Ginni Thomas Saying Now?”, in 2018?

“She looks and sounds like the Washington wife of yore, with the pearl earrings, the Reagan-red cocktail attire, the sunglasses tiara’d atop her blond bob. At the holidays, she lays wreaths at Arlington and sings carols around the piano with her be-sweatered husband, Clarence, who happens to be the longest-serving justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Memorial Day means a backyard barbecue with star-spangled tablecloths and a sheet cake that reads “God Bless America!” But meanwhile, on Facebook, she’s behaving like your slightly paranoid neighbor who stockpiles bullets and astronaut food.”

Thomas’ Facebook page, which is very public and very painful to look at, is a wastewater treatment plant of One America News videos, fawning adulation for her colleague Donald Trump, and the usual right-wing conspiracy theories that we’ve come to know and love. As the Times put it in 2019:

“She has also drawn criticism for sharing social media posts promoting conspiracy theories, including one suggesting that the billionaire philanthropist George Soros was working against Mr. Trump and that Democrats had committed voter fraud during last year’s midterm elections. Shortly before the elections, Ms. Thomas also shared a misleading post about the caravan of migrants traveling toward the United States.”

If that’s not enough, the Post has more:

“This month [December 2018], Ginni Thomas shared a Facebook post that bizarrely described California as a war zone, with illegal immigrants scaling walls and carjacking U.S. citizens. Last month, she shared a post alleging that Democrats committed voter fraud in four midterm races. (Which ones? How? She didn’t say.) Then there was the post in August (since deleted) proclaiming that teenage survivors of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting are “dangerous to the survival of our nation” because of their gun-control activism. And the post in February that harangued Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for supposedly wiretapping Donald Trump — a baseless accusation indulged in only by conspiracy theorists.”

What makes someone a True Poster? Thomas obviously spends a lot of time vomiting stuff out onto her feed, but a lot of people post dumb stuff all the time. The most succinct way I can define a True Poster is someone who could, and probably should, hire a PR team to manage their social media feeds, but instants upon doing it themselves, thus sabotaging their own goals. I can post dumb shit all day, but I don't actually have political power I should be using instead. Donald Trump, arguably the Truest Poster in history, can literally end the world today by launching a nuclear strike from his desk (best not to think about this too much), but instead he posts about hamburgers and misspells the name of the Nobel Prize.

Ginni Thomas is very much in the same vein; she's a high-tier DC operator herself, but she's literally married to one of the most powerful men in the country, who is part of the five-vote majority that's reshaping every aspect of law in America, and she can't stop posting. Consider everything she could accomplish if she deleted her account: she would, at the very least, still accomplish everything that she has already, without the Washington Post investigating her (or me doing whatever this is). Maybe she'd even have the time to take on two or three more jaw-droppingly terrible causes!

As of this writing, Thomas' posting efforts are focused on the quarantine, and the urgent need to re-open the economy,  which will only cost us the lives of a few tens of thousands of working-class, elderly, and sick Americans. Governors have already been sued over their shelter-in-place orders, some of those cases have already landed in the federal appellate circuits (my state's order is currently being reviewed in the Seventh Circuit by...ah crap, Amy Coney Barrett). Do you think one of those cases could end up before the Supreme Court?  Do you think, if it does, that Clarence Thomas will be part of a five-vote majority striking these orders down and undermining our already-threadbare state-by-state public health efforts developed in the absence of any meaningful federal response? And do you think there's anything we can do to stop it?

EPILOGUE - POWER

Perhaps in a more sane world, Clarence Thomas would be recusing himself from more cases, or Ginni Thomas would be smart enough not to post all of the time.  But we don’t live in a more sane world, and the thing about the Thomases is that there’s no way to stop them. Ginni isn’t going to get fired from her job because she’s basically self-employed, and Clarence isn’t going to recuse himself because there’s no way to force him to. He also can’t get fired, because no Supreme Court justices can get fired; they can theoretically get impeached, but there’s no realistic chance of that happening in the current political era.

So, with whatever justification he wants, Justice Thomas can make things happen, even if his opponents don't want it to happen, even if his opponents think that they way he makes things happen is illegitimate. He can do it and you can't, and he has the force of law on his side. That's power.

The five justices on the majority get this. You think they're waiting for an airtight legal argument to overturn Roe? They didn't use one to gut unions or save the Muslim ban. They know they have power - Leonard Leo picked them because they know how power works, and Amy Coney Barrett wants to join them because she knows it too. Even if you think their reasoning is wrong, they get to decide and you don't. You can't vote them out, and they aren't leaving of their own volition. Even if you think Barack Obama should have filled that empty seat on the Court, their guy got on and yours didn't, and you can't do anything to change it. That's power.

Catholicism, of course, has a message for the powerless. That’s not a surprise, you’ve seen it all over Catholic teaching and all over scripture. Two very obvious examples are in Luke’s Gospel, where Mary sings that "He has looked upon his handmaid's lowliness" and "lifted up the lowly, the hungry he has filled with good things", or the Sermon on the Plain, where Jesus blesses the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the excluded. Christianity and Catholicism are religions for the powerless, founded by a man living under occupation and executed as a criminal. I don't think the Catholics on the Court see their faith that way, and I get little comfort just from knowing that we might be considered "blessed" or "lifted up" as we get stomped on. 

But bound up in Catholicism’s message for the powerless is a message to the powerful. I don't feel like it's preached quite as often, but I picked those two examples from Luke’s Gospel because, well, that message is right there in both of them. Mary doesn't just sing about the lonely being lifted up and the hungry being filled, she sings about the mighty being cast down from their thrones, and the rich being sent away hungry. Jesus doesn't just say "blessed are the poor", He immediately follows it with "woe to you who are rich...woe to you who are filled now...woe to you who laugh now...woe to you when all speak well of you."

I'm not a lawyer or expert in the Supreme Court or federal government, and at best I'm a freelance theologian. So I don't have a good civic or theological solution to a Court that has done so much to hurt those with no power. But any solution that treats this current system, with this current Court majority, as a legitimate use of power, or one that can be addressed within the current system, is insufficient. And any solution that does not directly confront this use of power, and attempt to wrest it away from those using it, is, in my estimation, insufficiently Catholic.

Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments. The current series covers Catholics connected to the United States Supreme Court.

Sources used for this piece include:

Washington Post - “Virginia Thomas Seeks Apology From Anita Hill” (2010)
Washington Post - "I Cried Enough to Fill a Glass" (1987)
Washington Post - “The Nominee’s Soul Mate” (1991)
People - “Breaking Silence” (1991)
Politico - “Justice Thomas’ Wife Now Lobbyist” (2011)
Politico - “Thomas’ Wife Takes on Obama” (2010)
National Catholic Register - “Fearless Justice Clarence Thomas Walks 25 Years in Footsteps of St. Thomas More” (2016)
Daily Beast - “Leaked Emails Show Justice Clarence Thomas’ Wife Pushing Travel Ban” (2017)
Daily Caller - “James O’Keefe Slams Mainstream Media” (2018)
Daily Caller - “Exclusive: Dems Are On ‘The Greatest Witch Hunt Since Salem’” (2018)
The Daily Beast - “Clarence Thomas’ Wife Calls Anita Hill: Why Ginni Did It” (2010)
Gawker - “Clarence Thomas’ Wife Calls Anita Hill to Ask For An Apology” (2010)
Religious News Service - “Justice Clarence Thomas Talks About His Faith in New Documentary” (2020)
New York Times - “Trump Meets With Hard-Right Group Led by Ginni Thomas” (2019)
Axios - “Trump’s “Deep State” Hit List” (2020)
Washington Post - “What Is Ginni Thomas Saying Now?” (2018)