Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson: quite a contrast

The New Neo Posted on by

As part of the recent SCOTUS affirmative action decision, Clarence Thomas took special care to offer a critique of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in the case. Here’s what he had to say on the matter.

I find it particularly interesting to look at the backgrounds of Thomas and Brown Jackson, the two black justices who are on very opposite sides of this issue. Who had the privilege and who didn’t? Who was more oppressed? Compare and contrast.

Clarence Thomas is 75, and was born under segregation in the deep South. Brown Jackson is 52 and was born in unsegregated DC and grew up in unsegregated Florida. But that’s just the beginning.

From Clarence Thomas’ Wiki profile [emphasis mine].

Thomas was born on June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia. Pin Point was a small, predominantly black community near Savannah founded by freedmen after the Civil War. He was the second of three children born to M. C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola “Pigeon” Williams, a domestic worker. They were descendants of enslaved people and spoke Gullah as a first language. Thomas’s earliest known ancestors were slaves named Sandy and Peggy, who were born in the late 18th century and owned by wealthy planter Josiah Wilson of Liberty County, Georgia.

Thomas’s father left the family when Thomas was two years old. Though Thomas’s mother worked long hours, she was sometimes paid only pennies per day, struggled to earn enough money to feed the family, and was forced to rely on charity. After a house fire left them homeless, Thomas and his younger brother, Myers, were taken to live in Savannah with his maternal grandparents, Myers and Christine Anderson.

Thomas experienced amenities such as indoor plumbing and regular meals for the first time while staying in Savannah. Myers Anderson had little formal education but built a thriving fuel oil business that also sold ice. Thomas has called Anderson “the greatest man I have ever known”. When Thomas was ten years old, Anderson started taking the family to help at a farm every day from sunrise to sunset. He believed in hard work and self-reliance, and counseled Thomas to “never let the sun catch you in bed”. He also impressed upon his grandsons the importance of a good education.

More can be found here on Thomas’ background experiences. His mother was eighteen when he was born, and they lived in “a one-room wooden house near the marshes. It had dirt floors and no plumbing or electricity” [emphasis mine]:

A devout Catholic who created his own fuel oil business in Savannah in the 1950s, [Thomas’ grandfather] provided the example of self-motivation in the face of segregation that would inspire his grandson. Through hard work and a refusal to submit to the poverty and degradation of menial work, he “did for himself,” as one of his favorite expressions went. He fed and cared for Clarence and Peanut and paid for their education at St. Benedict the Moor; at this all-black grammar school, white nuns exercised firm discipline. The racist vigilante group known as the Ku Klux Klan often threatened the nuns, who rode on the backs of buses with their students and demanded hard work and promptly completed assignments.

It’s not hard to imagine why Thomas is offended at the idea that a legacy of slavery hampers every single black student today, when they have so much much less of that to contend with than he did.

Clarence’s grandfather took him to a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), of which Anderson was a member, and read the boy’s grades aloud…

Clarence’s favorite retreat was a blacks-only library in Savannah—the Savannah public library was for whites—funded by the Carnegie family. His browsing there helped to formulate his ambition: He would one day have the sophistication to understand magazines like the New Yorker.

Remember that Thomas’ first language was Gullah.

More:

In his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” Thomas says he felt “tricked” by paternalistic Whites at Yale who recruited Black students.

“After graduating from Yale, I met a black alumnus of the University of Michigan Law School who told me that he’d made a point of not mentioning his race on his application. I wished with all my heart that I’d done the same,” he wrote.

“I learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for White graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it,” Thomas wrote. “As a symbol of my disillusionment, I peeled a fifteen-cent price sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I’d made by going to Yale.”

Thomas’ hardship story is a contrast to Brown Jackson, whose story is rather different, to say the least:

Johnny and Ellery Brown, Jackson’s parents, have been married for 54 years.

Intact family.

Both Miami natives, [Brown Jackson’s parents] were raised in the Jim Crow South, attended segregated primary schools, before graduating from historically Black colleges and universities, according to her White House biography. They settled in DC and both worked as public school teachers.

So it’s actually Brown Jackson’s parents who are of Clarence Thomas’ raised-in-segregation generation (although perhaps not so poverty-striken as Thomas’ rather extreme situation), and they became teachers. Then her father went to law school.

“My parents taught me that, unlike the many barriers that they had had to face growing up, my path was clearer, such that if I worked hard and believed in myself, in America I could do anything or be anything I wanted to be.”

I guess her parents were of similar mindset about that as Clarence Thomas, since this quote resembles his philosophy. This seems to run counter to Brown Jackson’s dissent in the Harvard case.

Also:

Jackson credited her interest in law to her father, recalling in her opening remarks, “My very earliest memories are of watching my father study – he had his stack of law books on the kitchen table while I sat across from him with my stack of coloring books.”

Once again, a very different atmosphere and upbringing to that of Clarence Thomas. Her brother is a lawyer, too.

For decades I’ve seen and read so many criticisms of Clarence Thomas from the left, most of them quite vicious. And yet his story would be legendary – if only he were a Democrat rather than a conservative.

Cocaine at the White House? No biggee

The New Neo Posted on by

The story of cocaine found at the White House has been changing rapidly, and now it’s been declared a non-story of sorts:

Again, there are cameras everywhere in the non-residence areas of the White House. There are security checks and various other means to track who goes in and out. Yet, the Biden administration is pretending this is some unsolvable happening. Why are they not helping the Secret Service? Why is the Secret Service not going over the tapes to see who stashed the coke there? None of this adds up.

One reporter pointed that out by noting that according to Jean-Pierre, anyone can apparently just walk into the White House with anything.

The current story is that there’s just no way to find the perp (unlike, let’s say, every single person anywhere near the Capitol on January 6th):

But one official familiar with the investigation cautioned that the source of the drug was unlikely to be determined given that it was discovered in a highly trafficked area of the West Wing…

Asked what the chances were of finding the culprit, the official said that “it’s gonna be very difficult for us to do that because of where it was.”

“Even if there were surveillance cameras, unless you were waving it around, it may not have been caught” by the cameras, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity given that it’s an ongoing investigation. “It’s a bit of a thoroughfare. People walk by there all the time.”

And yet earlier there were successive reports about where the drug was found and what form it was in, and they don’t conform to this latest one. There’s no particular reason to trust any of the reports, either. But my guess is that, although authorities actually could find the culprit if they wished to do so – or may already know who it is – the public will never learn the answer. The obvious suspect is protected darling Hunter Biden, but he is by no means the only possibility.

Federal judge enjoins government and big tech partnership to censor the right

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s William Jacobson on the decision:

We previously have covered the lawsuit brought by Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration regarding collusion with big tech platforms to silence mostly conservative voices.

After extensive pre-trial proceedings, the federal District Court has issued a Preliminary Injunction prohibiting further collusion. The Memorandum Decision is 155 pages. Most of it consists of extensive findings of fact and evidence of the collusion.

I believe that the most important aspect of the case is the participation of the government in the suppression. From the Memorandum:

The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature.

Not only that, but it seems that most of the suppression of factual information was suppression of truth. In fact, here’s another quote from the decision: “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,'” and that this represents an “almost Dystopian situation.” Actually, I’d eliminate the word “almost” there.

It should be interesting to see how this plays out in a trial. I would imagine if the decision goes against the Biden administration there will be an appeal, and possibly more fodder for leftist hate towards SCOTUS if the Court renders the decision I think it will.

The left has become accustomed not only to controlling government, education, entertainment, the press, and social media, but it’s become used to controlling most federal court decisions and even SCOTUS till now (with recent supposed “swing” justices often swinging to the left). Not only has the left become used to these things, but it thinks that this dominance is the way things should inevitably be, and any deviation from it is an abominable and illegitimate outrage.

This is today’s BBC: on youthful terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Steven Hayward at Powerline.]

Get a load of this BBC “reporter,” whose name is Anjana Gadgil:

First she fences with words, calling armed terrorists between 16 and 18 “children” and implying that gives them some sort of dispensation to kill. Then she cites “the UN definition,” as though that matters. Then she tries to not answer Bennett’s question involving a personal hypothetical. And then she falls back on a meaningless moral equivalence in a cycle-of-violence argument that ignores reality. All with a serious demeanor, as though she’s not spouting nonsensical propaganda – because she knows plenty of people will swallow her argument.

[NOTE: Speaking of Jenin, please see this.]

A good summary of the trans medicalization phenomenon

The New Neo Posted on by

The whole discussion on this video was of interest to me because it’s about how “affirmation therapy” is not actual therapy, and how therapists have been pressured into not offering real therapy for people identifying as trans or presenting with gender dysphoria. But I’ve cued up a two and a half minute segment that I think encapsulates something very basic about trans medicalization:

For the Fourth: on liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post from many many years ago. It was written in the springtime during a visit to New York City. Reading it now, it seems almost archaic in certain ways.]

I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.

When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is the city.

And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.

I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.

All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a preponderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.

The garden is more advanced in time than gardens where I live, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyacinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees whose names I don’t know.

In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.

As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in the Sixties, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early Seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on subsequent visits. So what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.

I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.

The sight is intensely familiar to me – I used to see it frequently when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.

NOTE: I was going to add a photo of the Statue of Liberty here. But instead I was very taken with a video about how the statue was constructed. I’d never previously thought about the challenges involved and how they were surmounted, but I learned about them here. And the video also caused me to reflect, and not for the first time, on how the forces arrayed against the US right now are good at destroying but not at building. Destroying is so much easier:

Netanyahu’s prosecutor-persecutors – sound familiar?

The New Neo Posted on by

Please read this article by Caroline Glick about recent developments in the Netanyahu trial. Whether or not you’re especially interested in Israel or in Netanyahu himself, you will probably be impressed by the similarities to the actions of Donald Trump’s prosecutors in this country. In some ways, what they tried to do to Netanyahu may even be worse – although we have yet to see the full flowering of what is to come for Trump.

All of it is disturbing and chilling, although in Netanyahu’s case there seems to be a major pause in the proceedings for now, because the case is so very weak. But his enemies are very very determined, so don’t count them out, not by a longshot.

Here’s an excerpt from the beginning, but I suggest you read the whole thing:

On Thursday night, with sunken faces, Channel 13’s legal correspondents delivered the news: The judges presiding over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial for bribery and breach of trust had told the prosecutors and defense attorney last week that the prosecutors have not proven their charge of bribery, and are unlikely to succeed in doing so, since all their major witnesses have already testified.

The implications are earthshattering. For the past seven years, two forces—the state prosecution and the media—have pushed Israel to the brink of civil war in their effort to criminalize Netanyahu and demonize his supporters.

Their goal was never hidden. They seek to oust Netanyahu from public life and disenfranchise his voters by disqualifying and demonizing their elected leader.

Beginning in 2016, through criminal leaks to reporters from every major newspaper, radio station and television channel, state prosecutors, police investigators, journalists and editors invented and shaped a narrative of criminality surrounding Netanyahu and sold it to the public on a daily basis.