Clarence Thomas's journey from Pinpoint, Georgia's poverty to the Supreme Court reveals a complex narrative where his grandfather Myers Anderson funded elite education and civil rights activism, yet Thomas claims self-made success despite these advantages. The hosts expose inconsistencies in his recollections regarding segregation and colorism, which fueled his resentment against light-skinned elites and led to his seminary departure after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. His subsequent immersion in Black nationalism at Holy Cross, including support for Angela Davis and regressive views on women, highlights a radical phase that contrasts with his later judicial persona, suggesting his story is less about pure grit than generational resources and evolving racial ideologies. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Women Take Matters Into Their Own Hands00:02:09
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
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My mind was blown.
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As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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10-10 shots five, city hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
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The Disturbing Pattern of Grego Lesbi00:06:56
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What's stroking out my all of Europe because of because of the heat and the lack of air conditioning and the houses built to retain heat and the climate change?
How you doing, Europe?
Everybody okay?
Are you talking about the runway that literally melted?
Literally.
Sophie, it's 40 C over there, which in real people numbers is like a lot.
Miles, do you know Celsius?
Do you understand Celsius?
Miles graduated.
113.
Co-host of the daily zeitgeist.
Miles.
Why do they use different numbers over there for the temperature?
We all know, man.
They just want to Lord that shit over us because we kicked England's ass.
We fucking owned their asses.
And then we owned the only other country in Europe, Germany.
Yeah.
That's right.
So two tours.
That's right.
That's the thing.
We got all the Thanos stones for kicking ass.
Miles, we both know how terrible the United States is.
Why is there such joy as an American in making fun of Europe?
What is it?
What is that about us?
I think because we know that we have no history.
So that really, it's like, you know, it's like when you have like a dumb sports argument and like there's that one thing someone can say about your team that's so fucking true and you just it just upsets you and you can't do anything about it.
That's like when like Europeans are like, but you have no history here.
Everything is new like McDonald's or blah, blah, blah.
And you're like, fuck you, man.
And you're like, no, that's true.
That's true.
Because it's all stolen and built over shit.
I have drank in a bar in Dublin that is like was has been in operation since before Columbus was a war criminal.
Like it's right.
Like that's so but now you guys are toasty.
So there.
Hold that.
But what's funny is too, like in Spain, they know better in Spain.
They're like, yo, you're out in the middle of the day, stupid.
No, they're like, look, we have yielded to capitalism in many ways, but we're not giving up our naps in the four hours in the middle of the day.
I'm really very jealous.
It's 40.
It's 42, my man.
It's in real people numbers.
That's like, what, 70?
Jesus.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Nobody knows.
Hi to them.
You know what?
Everyone does know, Miles, that Clarence Thomas is a real piece of shit.
Holy shit.
Oh, I can't wait.
Clarence Thomas is a real, he's a real one.
We started this episode with some good old-fashioned American chauvinism because most of this episode is going to be talking about a number of things that are terrible in our nation's history.
Because the history of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the man who probably did more than any other single government official to end Roe v. Wade and is doing his best to end a number of other civil rights is also the story of like everything that's terrible about this country and its history.
Like it's amazing how much shit is packed into this guy's life and how much like fucked up stuff.
I mean, number one, you're going to be pretty sympathetic to this dude for the early part of this.
And I have to say, one of the things, like, I want to start this, I guess, with like an admission for me.
I think he's probably the bastard's pod subject I've been wrongest about.
Because for a long time, I'd never even thought of doing him until pretty recently.
Not that I didn't think he sucked, but like his years of like, he's, you know, number one, for a very long time, he was viewed as like Justice Scalia's sidekick, basically.
And people who knew anything about the Supreme Court were generally aware that that was not fair, but I'm not a Supreme Court knower, Miles.
That's not my, that's not my, my strength.
But even so, he's got years of like, I knew he had all these like cruel things he'd written in dissents and all this like regressive shit that he'd championed.
So like I never doubted that he was a bastard.
But again, there's a reason why we don't cover everyone who just sucks on this show.
And it's because like also they need to be interesting because this is entertainment too, right?
And I kind of thought like, well, he's just like a shitty guy who became a judge.
How much could there possibly be in that fucking life story?
And now we're going to do a four-parter on him.
So holy shit.
I was very wrong about this guy.
So let me start by admitting that.
Okay.
So this is like, we're getting a true, we're getting the origin story of the villain.
And a lot of weird, shitty stuff.
Spoilers, we're going to be talking about pubic hair.
Oh, yeah.
I remember that part.
Uh-huh.
Now, I don't know if you remember this part, Miles.
I forgot where I was, where I learned about all the things I didn't know I didn't want to know.
That was a horrendously evil laugh, and I did not know.
I've been working on it.
I've been working on it.
Thank you.
I'm sorry.
I went to a class hosted by the Riddler this weekend about unleashing your inner Batman villain.
And I don't know.
I don't want to toot my own horn because I'm early in the process, but I did just kidnap a billionaire's son.
So a little bit of applause, a little bit of applause.
I'm working on it.
It's going to be good.
Well, that's great.
So, Miles, if you casually read about Clarence Thomas, the way most people do, because who's got the time to really know that much about the Supreme Court?
Well, we all do now because it's an immediate threat to all of our futures.
But if you read these real casual breakdowns of him, you'll learn a couple of things.
He's very conservative.
He never talks during oral arguments.
He's been known as the silent justice for that reason, although that's changed kind of recently.
And he got his start as Justice Scalia.
Like he was kind of his lickspittle, right?
He would vote the same way Scalia did all the time.
That's at least what people would say about him.
And then, of course, there's the fact that he sexually harassed Anita Hill, who was questioned by Congress and ultimately ignored when Thomas was voted in on the narrowest margin in Supreme Court history.
That's like the baseball card, you know, version of Clarence Thomas' history.
Stats.
The stats, right?
All of that is technically true, with the exception of him being Justice Scalia's Lickspittle.
We'll talk about that later.
But it turns out it's also all so incomplete that I now feel not going into detail about the life and beliefs of Clarence Thomas is kind of a disservice.
So here we go.
Clarence Thomas was born on June 23rd, 1948, in an unpowered wooden shack on the edge of a tidal swamp near the small town of Pinpoint, Georgia.
Centuries of Compounded Negativity and Suffering00:14:15
As you might have guessed from everything in that last sentence, he was born into the kind of poverty that most of us who are capable of listening to podcasts can only dimly comprehend.
Very few, even as bad as poverty is in the very few people exist in that kind of poverty in the United States this day, right?
Like it is, he is, he is living, this is 1948, he's living with access to like 1840s technology for the most part, right?
Like that is this kid's childhood.
That's this kid's like the world he comes into.
His great-great-grandmother had been born into slavery and emancipated at age nine because of there's this war.
Yeah, she had a son and her son had several young kids and then abandoned those kids, leaving her to take care of them.
So that's his grandmother.
Now, one of his grandmother's son's kids who gets abandoned by her son is a guy named Myers Anderson, who is Clarence's grandfather on his mother's side.
Myers refused to ever speak about his own father, but he also would follow in his footsteps.
So Myers has a daughter, Leola Williams, who is Clarence's mom.
And Leola is born out of wedlock.
Her mother, Myers' partner, dies in a subsequent childbirth when she's three.
Now, Myers is not the kind of guy who wants to have daughters.
He thinks that's kind of a waste of time.
So he decides he's not going to raise his daughter and he sends her to Pinpoint, Georgia, where she's raised by his sister, her aunt.
Her aunt is not a nurturing kind of person.
It's a very strict upbringing.
And there's never any belief that like Leola's going to have a future, right?
Like she does not have prospects.
Aunt Ani was illiterate.
So Leola doesn't really learn how to read as a little girl.
And Aunt Ani keeps her kind of ward, whatever you want to call her, from playing with other children.
She doesn't want to let her socialize.
She wants to keep strict control over her so she doesn't get pregnant young like it tends to happen.
Leola was so desperate for some kind of childhood that she made dolls for herself out of clumps of weed, washing the roots to simulate hair.
So, like, again, when we're talking about how poor these people are, Clarence's mom is making dolls out of clumps of weed, right?
Like weeds.
Like, that is, yeah, that's like a level.
Yeah, right.
And like, when you always talk about parenting, it's like, we're all just trying to break cycles, you know, like what our grandparents did and what they did.
So that's where we're starting here.
Yes.
Like you're saying, like, centuries past.
You've got centuries of slavery and families being forcibly broken up.
And then a pretty bad pattern gets started by Myers's father who leaves the family.
And Myers doesn't abandon his kids because he has a relationship with them, but he also doesn't want to take care of daughters.
So he just kind of shuffles them off to whatever the oldest member of his family is, right?
And that person's like, well, if you have any kind of freedom, you're clearly going to have even more kids before you're ready for them.
So I'm going to basically make you live in a prison.
So that's how Leola grows up.
When she's 16, she gets pregnant anyway with Clarence's older sister, Emma May, and she drops out of school.
Leola was still a teenager when she had Clarence, a little bit after she has Emma Mae.
The shack that they lived in was insulated with newspaper and caulked with library paste.
That was, again, like, that's what they have access to, right?
Like, where are things free?
What is it that you can get your hands on in order to fill holes in your house?
Just about as desperate as it gets.
Yeah.
Clarence's younger brother was born a little more than a year after him.
Now, you will notice that I have not talked a lot about their father.
Clarence Thomas's dad is known as MC Thomas.
And the reason he doesn't show up in this story much is that because as soon as he has three kids with Leola, he abandons her and his family because he's gotten someone else pregnant.
And her dad threatened to shoot him if he didn't marry her.
So this is a rough start, right?
Like, I think it's like the okay.
So it's the worst parts of everything.
Go on.
This, it is like one of those, if you were, if you were like writing this background for like a fictional character, people would be like, all right, well, maybe pick like one of these things.
Yeah, right.
An editor would be like, it feels like you're putting a hat on top of a hat.
Yeah.
With how vivid this history of suffering is.
Yeah, it is, it is deeply difficult.
And it's worth noting the community in Pinpoint, this kind of upbringing is not common for other people who live in Penpoint, which is a black community.
It is a very traditional community.
It is very uncommon there for a father to leave his family or for children to be born outside of wedlock.
Everyone is extremely religious here.
So from the start, Clarence doesn't just grow up with all of this going on in his family, which is tremendously difficult.
He's also ostracized.
It is made clear to him by other people in the area that his upbringing is fundamentally different and like fucked up, right?
Holy shit.
Yeah.
Right.
So yeah.
This is fucking spooking me out, man.
Because it's so we constantly look at figures like this, like especially in this, especially in the Supreme Court, where you're looking at this idea that, you know, on a whim, they can curtail all these human rights.
And we're just like, how the fuck could what's going on with you that you think it's all good?
And to hear this story even start for this early on, I'm like, oh, fuck.
This sounds again, this sounds like centuries of like compounded negativity, suffering, coming together to form like this human being.
And you're like, oh my God, of course.
Like it's, you can't fathom it.
Yeah.
I mean, this is probably why it's a bad idea to just like pick nine random people and be like, you are our God kings now.
Yeah.
That's like.
Because all sorts of shit might have gone on in their backgrounds that make them do real wild shit.
And maybe that's not good.
I don't know.
Like, you don't have to have had this background to wind up trapped in the nearly everybody winds up kind of trapped in the past to some extent.
You know, maybe you just love the music of the 1990s, but everybody, everybody like winds up growing up with something that you never quite move past, right?
Which is why one of the many reasons why people shouldn't be able to hold too much power over each other because we develop all these weird fucking hang-ups and it's best to just kind of minimize the damage that can do is my attitude.
Right.
So yeah, we've covered some desperate origin stories on this show, but I have to say, like Clarence Thomas's early childhood is like, it's up there, you know?
That is rough.
His dad, you know, again, leaves as soon as he gets another woman pregnant.
It's possible that Clarence's dad was bigamously married.
The legalities here are very unclear, but none of his kids were planned.
And in general, that was not super common with his family.
His mother later told interviewers, quote, we didn't know anything about birth control or where babies came from.
When you got pregnant, you just had it.
So, yeah.
As I said earlier, Clarence grows up aware that he's not living with the kind of family that most kids have.
Everyone is extremely pinpoint.
Like, money isn't a thing anybody has, but most kids have fairly stable family networks and are born kind of with at least that in their lives.
Clarence is aware that he's missing something.
A black journalist who knew Thomas when he was growing up told Jane Mayer and Jill Abrams, and the journalist I believe is anonymous for understandable reasons.
Jane Mayer and Jill Abrams, authors of the book Strange Justice, quote, he starts out as a little black boy, not accepted in the black world.
He has no money, no family.
This puts him at the bottom of the pecking order among southern blacks, a community that is far more closed-minded and rigid than many whites imagine.
As soon as he was born, he was just out there, a floater.
So that's one attitude, at least, on his background, right?
That's a single person's opinion.
Now, once his dad leaves, his mom was forced to move in with the aunt who had raised her miserably.
And she leaves her kids with the aunt who had raised her, this very strict woman who like has had a life I can't even imagine in terms of difficulty.
And Clarence's mom moves to Savannah, 15 miles away, which is a lot further back then, to work as a live-in servant for a rich white family so that she could send money back home.
She made $14 a day.
When she visited her kids, they would regularly ask about their father.
And, you know, she didn't really have a good answer for where he was.
And this was made more miserable by the fact that their father's father, their grandfather on their dad's side, was the town bus driver.
So they had to see their grandpa every day without like having a relationship with them because like their dad was just gone.
Yeah, rough.
So life in Pinpoint was extremely difficult.
Again, the poverty here is very intense.
Leola, like most local women, took the job that you could get as a woman in Pinpoint, which was working at a crab and shrimp factory.
This is the kind of thing that most women who grew up there spent their entire lives picking crab and shrimp out of shells from dawn until dusk.
Leola started when she was nine, which was very common.
This is how people spend their whole lives in fucking Pinpoint.
It was illegal for her to start work at nine, but the plant owner didn't care, and neither did the government of Georgia.
And this is not a place where government inspectors come, right?
Nobody's showing up in Pinpoint to check on these people because they are poor and black.
So the government doesn't give a shit what happens.
As his life begins, Clarence seemed destined to a similar life path.
This is what happened to most people in Pin Point.
Education did exist technically, but it had to be done in between brutal work shifts because you have to help your family survive.
So, like, learning and stuff comes secondary.
And, of course, you can't continue school once you have kids of your own, which often happens at like 15 or 16.
A lot of folks around him are illiterate.
Again, it's not, it's looking like this is more or less the path he's going to wind up on, just because there's not a lot of options.
Because of segregation, people in Pin Point were not allowed to use the local beaches, the libraries, or the parks.
All of those were outside of Pin Point.
And even if they'd been able to afford traveling to such luxuries, again, there was segregation.
The Constitution technically guaranteed them the right to vote, but there were poll taxes and literacy tests in Georgia that made it basically impossible.
In the rare occasions where a Pin Point resident would wind up in the same court as a white person, they were made to swear on separate Bibles.
This is like as Jim Crow as it gets.
Now, this is not the kind of upbringing that you would expect somebody to be able to like get a law degree and become a Supreme Court justice from.
And it did not happen to many kids in Pin Point.
But in 1955, when Thomas was six, his life changed.
To his intense and lasting fortune, he and his brother accidentally lit their curtains on fire with a wood stove and burnt their family house to the ground.
This put their great aunt, she was no longer able to take care of them, right?
Because like they burned her house down.
So her mom, their mom takes them in at first, but she is living in servants' quarters, which is like this filthy tenement in Savannah that's like built by rich people to be as small as possible so their servants just have a place to live.
It is a single bedroom with an outdoor toilet, and it's not a kind of thing that you can really raise two boys in.
Leola begged their father for help.
He wasn't willing to do anything.
So she started to beg her father, Myers Anderson, who had abandoned her for help.
And Myers eventually agrees to help because, again, they're boys, right?
He didn't really care about raising girls, but these are boys.
Now, I'm going to quote again from Strange Justice to talk about how Clarence would later relate what he said had happened.
Quote, Thomas's recollection of how Myers Anderson came to intercede is somewhat different.
He has told a number of people over the years that at about that time, his mother became romantically involved with a man who had no interest in taking on her children.
As his friend Michael Middleton remembers it, Thomas told me his mother dumped him and his brother on the grandfather because she'd met some man.
So by the age of seven, Clarence Thomas had been abandoned by both parents.
Now, that could be true.
She could have like decided to abandon them, but it seems more likely that she was just in a desperate situation and needed help from her grandfather.
Clarence hates his mom.
He is like, will be mean to her his entire life.
You can have whatever opinion on that you want.
I think he might have made that up.
He makes a lot of stuff about his backstory up.
So interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, because that absolutely, when you describe, you know, her living situation, how could anyone think like that?
That was going to be the place where she could have her kids grow up.
Well, yeah.
And Myers is kind of like, if you're, if you're Leola, Myers is a great person to give your kids to because unlike everyone else you know in your life, he has money.
He gets out of Pin Point.
We're talking about this in a bit, but he is doing well financially.
So it's not just like, well, you're a man in my family and I need help with these kids.
It's, well, you have fucking resources.
And I've literally never met another single person who has resources.
Right.
So, yeah, Myers is not thrilled to take on new kids.
He yells at Leola and he refuses at first, but then his wife threatens to leave him.
And so he agrees to take in both boys.
Now, Clarence has an older sister too, Emma May.
Myers Anderson still refuses to help with her.
He's only going to race the boys.
Oh my God.
It's yeah.
The worst fucking messages are constantly being reinforced to this person as like a child.
And you're, my God, like you're seeing it all start forming like so early where it's like, nope, I have value because I'm boy.
A Tinge of Cruelty in Anderson's Actions00:07:46
Yeah.
I have value because I am boy and like I am being now separated from my community and given an opportunity no one else is.
And yeah, a whole bunch of shit is going to result from this.
So Emma May, his sister, remains living in poverty with her aunt, living with like family because their house got burnt down.
Now, while up to this point, again, Clarence and his brother had been as poor as it gets, once they move in with Myers, they're suddenly middle class instantly.
His life, obviously, this is a fucking man who grows up in the late 1800s in Georgia, a black man.
His life was grueling and tremendously difficult.
He had never gotten beyond a third grade education, but he had turned a pushcart business into a coal, ice, and oil delivery business.
Like he's delivering fuel to local businesses and stuff.
And his business has done well enough that he's bought rental properties and a small farm.
Like he is extremely successful and a very intelligent man.
He had attempted to expand into contracting, like helping with like construction of houses in Savannah, but he had been denied a permit to make cement because of racism.
So he is, he has hit, basically, Myers has hit the height of success that you're allowed to achieve as a black man in Georgia in this period of time.
And it's also been made very clear of him that you're not allowed to get do better than this.
Exactly, that there are limits to it.
Yeah.
So yeah, that said, obviously, his situation is still light years beyond what Thomas had enjoyed before.
And once they're living with their grandpa, Clarence and his brother have electricity.
They have indoor plumbing.
And most importantly, they have access to good private schools.
Right.
Now, in return, they have to deal with Myers Anderson.
And this section from a write-up in The Atlantic gives an idea of what he was like to live under.
Quote: Anderson wouldn't let Thomas or his brother wear work gloves on the family farm as they cut sugar cane or helped butcher livestock.
He never praised the boys or showed them affection.
He feared the evil consequences of idleness, Thomas wrote in My Grandfather's Son, and so made sure that we were too busy to suffer them.
In his presence, there was no play, no fun, and little laughter.
So that's good.
That's all my, all my favorite homies grew up like that.
Good and normal guy to raise some kids.
Holy shit.
Hates women, never smiles, makes you hurt yourself to work.
Fucking fun.
And your book is still my grand, what grandpa is my grandfather's son or whatever?
Well, when Clarence gets older, we'll talk about this, but he decides the fact that his grandpa, because his grandpa is like the right-wing platonic ideal of like a grandfather, right?
He's this hard working man who like doesn't cry, doesn't smile, you know, strict discipline.
And even though he doesn't really get along with his grandpa in real life, once he's in politics, he recognizes that his grandpa is like, that's a money-making endeavor, right?
You can sell that to these white Republicans, like that you had this strict background.
And because he was so strict, we got so far, you know?
Yeah, I wasn't able to be too black because I was my, my grandfather made sure there was no riff raffian stuff happening.
Like it's, it's a really, God, it's so fucking grueling.
And with every fucking layer you add to this shit, you start understanding his resentment of all kinds of people, of women, whatever.
And you're like, it's in, it's wrapped in such trauma that it like you can see how that manifests into somebody with a fucking like demonic agenda like this.
Yeah, it's not going to be surprising that the ends he reaches, like, are some of them will be surprising, I guess, but like a lot of this does make sense.
So Thomas would later write that his grandfather made sure that both boys knew that they had to, quote, work twice as hard to get half as far.
Um, and that, like, yeah, that was just the way shit worked in the United States, which to be fair, it did.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's, I think a lot, not just him, a lot of people.
Yeah, I was told that too, but it was, it was twice as hard for half the pay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is like, yes.
I, and I, I have, again, we've talked about like, he's not an entirely credible narrator about his past.
I have absolutely no, whether or not his grandfather said those exact words, I have no doubt that he wanted to get that across to those kids.
Right, right.
That's fucking true.
Um, so while Myers clearly wanted both boys to be successful, that was kind of where his concern with them ended.
He wanted them to be able to make like money and be successful in society.
Um, he seemed to have not even money as much as he wanted them to have like a position, right?
Like he wanted them to have like do make status.
Yeah, exactly.
Status.
He did not really seem to care about them as human beings.
Um, Thomas later told colleagues in government that Myers rarely spoke to him except to order him to do chores.
A Yale law school colleague claims that Clarence told him of physical, uh, frequent physical punishments for misbehavior.
If he or his brother overslept, quote, they'd have the shit beaten out of them.
Um, and the book Strange Justice goes into even more detail.
Quote, so Thomas and his brother were made to rise before dawn and help their grandfather deliver coal and oil and spent their holidays and weekends doing heavy farm work for him.
There seemed to be a tinge of cruelty in some of Anderson's weekend, in some of Anderson's actions.
Thomas, for instance, recalled that his grandfather had removed the heater from the fuel delivery truck because he felt that even on freezing winter mornings, heat was not conducive to good work habits.
In the old-fashioned way of make of many such families, challenges to authority were met with frequent and humiliating corporal punishment.
A particular torture was the front hall coat closet, where, according to Leola Williams, Anderson used to lock the boys when they misbehaved.
My daddy was hard.
The kids couldn't get away with nothing, she recalled.
Sometimes when her father was too tired or busy to beat the boys himself, Leola said, he would call her to whip them for him.
But the little boys soon got too fast for her to catch.
So instead, she said, I would have to throw my shoes at their heads to catch them at all.
So harsh was the physical punishment, according to Armstrong Williams, later Thomas's aide at the EEOC, that Thomas still bears a thin scar from a whipping his grandfather administered with an electrical cord.
So like, that's not, maybe don't do that to kids.
I don't know.
Every way, I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, I mean, that kind of shit is so common, man.
Yeah.
And the whole like...
Older generations, too.
It's like, there's the common stuff, and then there's the, I've removed the heater from the truck because being warm will make you work badly.
Like, huh?
Yeah.
He's, he's got, again, every layer because it's like not a single thing was like good except for the, like, his access to like higher society.
Yeah.
Essentially.
He has access to money, but like none to affection.
And again, I think the actual, the physical punishments described there, that is just the norm across certainly the South.
Right.
And not just the South in the United States.
That's everywhere.
Right.
Like that is, that is incredibly common, those attitudes that like, yeah, you're going to whip them with a fucking cord if they don't do something right.
You pop a kid in the fucking face, you know?
Like that is like my in Oklahoma, my public fucking school spanked us and shit.
And that was in the 90s.
Like the attitudes, particularly in rural areas of like physical punishment towards kids are not at all uncommon in this period.
It's the weird, you have to be miserable.
You can't let yourself relax.
You can't let yourself like feel good for a moment when you're working because that will make you lazy and that's dangerous.
That I think is the thing that is actually really different about his upbringing.
Right, right.
From Addiction to Acceleration00:03:50
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just it again freaks me out even more.
Yeah.
Every single thing, like it adds to someone being even more rigid and unable to see the good in anything and acts out like their powerlessness in youth in a way to feel like omnipotent, even if it's through destruction.
Yeah.
But you know who is omnipotent through their destruction, Miles?
Which aeronautics company?
The products and services that support.
Miles, our primary sponsor in this podcast is the corporation, who you probably know from one of their many delicious beverages, but who is also building a laser to end all life on earth.
See, has realized that capitalism can't continue to expand indefinitely, but what can expand indefinitely is the circle of debris when we blow up the earth.
So buy a fund the space laser that will end all life.
That's our motto.
Promo code, kill us all.
Gulp, gulp.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
Music, Conversation, and Special Guests00:06:15
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
So Meyer sends the boys to a Catholic school, which is, he is also, he's a Catholic convert too, which matters to Catholics.
But whatever.
And he's primarily, it seems like he kind of converts to Catholicism because that offers more opportunities.
If you are a Catholic, you can go.
You can send your kids to Catholic school.
Like it's a good community.
It provides more support, right?
So the school he sends the kids to costs about 20 bucks a year, which even then is not expensive for a private school, right?
Like that's not a fortune back in those days.
But it's still, I mean, it's certainly outside the reach of most families in Pen Point who probably never saw $20 in one place at the same time in their lives.
And more to the point, it's out of reach of like a lot of black people and particularly rural Georgia in that period because it is, while it is a segregated school, it's a pretty good school because it's a Catholic school, right?
So it has access to resources that public schools often don't.
It's got a more progressive background than most.
It had been founded in 1878 during Reconstruction by a group of white Franciscan nuns who believed that black people could be good Catholics, which was real controversial at one point.
Like, oh my, wow.
Yeah.
Well, locals in Savannah called them the Inward Nuns.
Like, that was, yeah, that's who founds this school that he goes to.
And it is a good education.
The nuns clearly cared about teaching their students and doing so well.
That said, they are also Catholic nuns in the 1950s.
So they're beating the hell out of these kids.
You talk to anybody who goes to a Catholic school in the 50s, they're getting the shit slapped out of them with rulers.
Like that is, that's just how that stuff goes.
Right.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
So again, hey, so how was school?
Like pretty good?
Were the teachers like kind of forward thinking and challenged their beliefs and things?
No, they beat the fuck up.
Well, it's even worse.
It's like they were forward thinking for the time and also beat the fuck out of us.
Actually, it's a little bit from Colleen.
Yeah, a little bit from Columbia.
They believed we were people, so it was important to hit us in order to make us learn.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
The 50s, man.
Quite a time.
So, yeah, segregation officially ends in 1954.
That doesn't mean that kids in all white and all-black schools suddenly stop going to those, though, right?
It's a process.
And so it's not until 1964 when Thomas starts attending an elite Catholic high school that he actually is in integrated classrooms.
So fairly early on in his childhood, segregation legally ends, but it's not until he's in high school that he actually is in an integrated classroom.
Right.
So he winds up, you know, finally going to a school that is not like segregated based on race.
And he would later call state-enforced segregation, quote, as close to totalitarianism as I would like to get, which is interesting because he's only, it actually, it ends when he's six, right?
So like right at the start of his education is when segregation ends.
You might want to look at that as like an example of him like kind of playing up the story.
I don't think necessarily that it is.
I think it more speaks to the fact that the legacy of segregation exists in his life throughout his childhood, even though, again, it ends very early on in his life.
But it doesn't end because it's not a clean break.
Like we often like pretending.
There's still momentum behind this.
Yeah.
So Clarence's father remains close to a complete non-entity for the rest of his childhood.
Years later, during a speech at Pepperdine University, Clarence would give a bit of detail into one of the only interactions he ever has with his dad.
Quote, I saw him only twice when I was young.
The first time was when my mother called her parents with whom my brother Myers and I then lived and told them that someone at her place wanted to see us.
They called a cab and then sent us to our housing project apartment where my father was waiting.
I am your daddy, he told us in a firm, shameless voice that carried no hint of remorse for his inexplicable absence from our lives.
He said nothing about loving or missing us, and we didn't say much in return.
It was as though we were meeting a total stranger, but he treated us politely enough and even promised to send us a pair of Elgin watches with flexible bands, which were popular at the time.
Though we watched them all, the mail every day, the watches never came.
And when a year or so had gone by, my grandparents bought us for them, bought them for us instead.
My father had broken the only promise he ever made to us.
After that, we heard nothing more from him, not even a Christmas or birthday card.
For years, my brother and I would ask ourselves how a man could show no interest in his own children.
The Fantasy of Self-Reliance00:10:54
I still wonder.
Oh, fuck.
I do feel like that's overwhelmingly the reaction to these anecdotes.
Like, God damn.
They're so fucked up.
You're like, you couldn't, you couldn't construct someone who's been through all this kind of like shit that would make you fucking this guy.
Yeah.
One of two things, too.
What that anecdote with his grandparents in the watches says, that they've got them the watches, is one of two things is true.
Either, well, I guess one of three things is true.
Either maybe he played up how hard his grandfather was and there was actually more softness in that relationship than he wanted to admit.
And this is an example of it.
Or his dad was just so shitty that even his fucking grandfather was like, all right, like, I got to get these kids the fucking watches.
Like, this is just too bad.
Or it's grandma, right?
Or grandma was the one who made that happen.
I mean, either way, I think even if you, even if you're lying, but that's what you want, that's who you want people to think you are.
Yeah.
That's also pretty instructive.
Like at every level, many things can be true.
There's a lot to think about here.
So when he starts high school, he is a member of the first generation of his family to enjoy any kind of quality education.
His grandfather has a third grade education, not uncommon at the time.
And yeah, so he is the first male member of his family, he and his brother, because they're about the same age, to go to a good high school.
As the book Strange Justice makes clear, a good deal of his opportunity here came as a result of the successes of the civil rights movement, right?
It's not just his grandfather's success.
It is the fact that a lot has people have been fighting for him to have this opportunity.
Quote, in Thomas's first year of life, President Harry Truman, in a controversial State of the Union address, called for more extensive civil rights laws, including the establishment of some sort of fair employment practices program, the bud of the idea that eventually grew into the EEOC.
The speech touched off such furious opposition in Georgia that Senator Richard B. Russell proposed exporting the state's black population to the North.
Leading the fight against such racial progress was the staunch segregationist J. Strom Thurmond, the same man who would champion Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court some four decades later.
On May 17th, 1954, when Thomas was five, the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision ordering the end of public school segregation.
The lead attorney was Thurgood Marshall, then the head of the NAACP's legal defense fund.
Marshall is who Clarence Thomas is going to replace on the Supreme Court.
So Grandpa Myers would have agreed with the fact that like his son's or his grandson's opportunities were a result of both his hard work and all of the civil rights fighting, because Myers Anderson was a dedicated member of the NAACP.
He earned the nickname in town Sharpshooter for the skill with which he targeted boycotts against racist white businesses.
He is, again, he's like a hard dude, but you also get the feeling that if you're fighting on, like, you want this motherfucker on your side in a fight, like he's good.
Okay, well, what's he like?
Oh, I mean, he's the worst fucking grandparent.
He is a shitty grandpa, but you know what?
He ally, though.
Yeah, yeah, he down.
He provided the NAACP chapter with free heating fuel in the winter at the expense of his business.
One friend of the, so clearly he didn't think that it was bad for them to have heating.
I don't know.
I don't know how to parse that all out.
It's all very, yeah, everything's very conditional.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One friend of the family at the time noted that Clarence attended a few NAACP meetings as a boy, but he was at boarding school for a lot of the time, right?
And a number of like folks who grew like grew up with him and report on this time will say that like while they were doing NAACP stuff, he was at boarding school, quote, surrounded by whites.
Clarence recalls his school differently.
He describes it as an entirely black environment, and both of his schools were majority black.
It's again, we're not ever getting objective when we're talking about people who knew him or him.
Everything's filtered through decades of memory because this is all a long time later and everyone's feelings on the matter too.
So I don't want to like put one side or the other as like 100% right about what was going on here.
Yeah, you want to do both sides.
Well, at least like, I don't know.
I wasn't, I'm not, I'm not growing up in fucking Savannah, Georgia in 1950s.
But it is, it is worth noting that like he benefits from the civil rights struggle, but his grandpa has also put him in a situation where he's not taking part in it, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, it's abstract to him.
Yeah, exactly.
He's already has gigantic chips on both shoulders.
Yeah.
And at least at this point, it seems to be kind of.
It won't be later, but that is, he does have that ability as a child that it is kind of abstract.
So this is one of those areas where we get into the inconsistencies between how other people describe Thomas's youth and how he has described it since.
Once he became a conservative political figure, and this happens before he's a Supreme Court justice, he's lobbying for years.
Thomas made a point of claiming in speeches that he would give for things like the Federalist Society and all these colleges.
He would always make the claim that he had succeeded in spite of a low-quality education, right?
In one 1988 speech, he told an audience, quote, I don't understand how it is that people today are getting worse educations than I received in the segregated schools of Savannah.
Now, we already know that, like, that's not 100% accurate, right?
Like, just based on his actual background, because he went to a very high-quality series of private schools, right?
Right.
Now, obviously, like, there's a lot to say about that, but it's just not true, like the things that he would claim about his education.
And he's obviously as a right-winger, he's claiming that in order to be like, look, the schools don't need more money.
The poor schools that I went to did a better job than modern schools.
There's some cultural thing that's making the schools bad, where it's like, no, man, your grandpa paid for you to go to a great private school, dude.
Like, yeah, he's he's playing.
Yeah, he's Mr. Ultimate Bootstraps.
Yeah.
And it's fine.
Like, it's good that your grandpa did that for you, but like, don't pretend that you like had a hard scrabble public school education because you didn't.
Well, I think that's like the thing, right?
Because if there's a fork in the road of your like, choose your own myth-making adventure, you want to choose the against all odds version.
No, because that's part of, especially with America, like most people want to obscure the fact that like, you know, they're like generational, they were generationally admitted to like an Ivy League school and like, no, man, like it was all hard graft.
I came from the nowhere.
And I think for him, too, that really helps for like multiple levels to be like, yeah, I went to a shitty school.
That's why they don't need anything.
And also, look what I did, folks.
Yeah.
Lifted myself out.
It's fucked up because like, obviously, there's a fuckload of kids and family members of his who grew up in Pen Point who could have gone as far as he did, or at least like gone a hell of a lot further than they did in the capitalist sense of the word, but didn't because they had to grow up in Pen Point picking fish out of like shells and stuff because that was the only opportunity they got.
He gets, thankfully, like luckily, I should say, he gets an opportunity because of his, who, you know, who his grandfather is.
But he doesn't like to acknowledge that in the future, except for like when he, he does, he has to, he does acknowledge his grandfather, but always in the way his hardness shaped him as opposed to the way his resources provided opportunities.
And I think that's really interesting.
Yeah.
So this.
Just like the wow.
Yeah.
That it's always, I was just carved out of my grandpa's sternness.
Yeah.
I mean, it makes sense that this is like the way he's going to claim it.
So this next bit gets into some territory that is definitely uncomfortable and difficult for me to parse out well.
But we're going to talk about the specific kind of racism that Clarence dealt with in his youth.
And a lot of it did not come from where I think, at least where I would have expected being a fucking white dude who did not grow up in Savannah, Georgia.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up in the New Yorker here.
His nickname in the schoolyard and the streets was ABC, America's Blackest Child.
If he were any blacker, his classmates jeered, he'd be blue.
Color was code for class.
The darkness of Thomas's skin, along with the Gullah Geechee dialect he retained from Pin Point, was a sign of his lowly status and origin.
For Thomas, these cruelties are a lifelong hurt.
People love to talk about conflicts interracially.
He told the reporter Ken Foskett, who published a biography of Thomas, Judging Thomas, in 2004.
They never talk about the conflict's intentions intra-racially.
From a young age, the primary divide Thomas had to confront came from the privileges associated with black wealth and light skin.
You had the black elite, the school teachers, the light-skinned people, the dentists, the doctors, Thomas has said.
My grandfather was down at the bottom.
They would look down on him.
Everybody tries to gloss over that now, but it was the reality.
And, you know, that is Thomas's.
And again, other folks, you know, have different recollections, but this is what he recalls of like what he deals with as a kid.
I mean, yeah, at every turn, like, right, that there's he grew up having already feeling inferior as like a black kid because of the community he grew up in.
And then on top of that, the colorism shit comes into it as well and makes him even more his resentment.
Yeah.
It becomes like, oh my God.
One of the things.
Again, at every fucking level, there's no, he has no, he doesn't belong anywhere and feels like he has a bone to pick with everything.
And you see how that leads to the man he becomes in this like this ideology of self-reliance, which is a fantasy, but like you get how someone who comes who grows up feeling like they don't have a place anywhere grows up with this attitude towards self-reliance.
Now, of course, the reality is we've talked about it is that like he benefited tremendously from a community that fought for his rights, even though it does seem like maybe that it didn't feel that way to him, but like that was what was going on.
His grandfather was a part of that.
It's very bleak that this is kind of a lot of what he seems to take out of the period.
And again, for all of his like right-wing white supporters, he's the version of blackness that they wished every other black person viewed.
It wasn't really an issue, actually.
There's racism, it's between black people.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And that his narrative doesn't offend anyone or take notice of the struggle that pretty much every other black person in the country had to face.
Yeah, it's again, a lot going on here.
Yeah.
Luck Involved in Clarence's Journey00:06:05
Yeah.
Everything's 5D, 6D, 9D chess now.
After high school, Clarence enters the seminary.
His grandpa wanted him to be a Catholic priest.
He's really, really approving of this mood move.
It's probably one of the few things that Clarence gets some kind of expression of pride from his grandfather for doing.
Because that's like, man, if you're a fucking Catholic priest, that's like, at least for Catholics, about the height of like respectability, you know, cool.
So he gets admitted to a priest study program because being a priest is kind of like being a doctor in 1964.
This is the year that comes.
Who would you rather have operate on you, Robert?
A priest, of course.
Because the doctors are just going to put that fucking Bill Gates chip in me, Miles.
That's right.
That Bill Gates chip.
You know the one I'm talking about.
Yeah, I'm glad you didn't follow that pro-science bullshit.
Well, I don't know.
You see, Miles, I don't believe in the Bill Gates chip in the vaccine.
I believe that Bill Gates is putting chips inside of all of us that allows him to control when we orgasm.
That's why you can't go to the doctor.
Stay away from the doctor.
Okay, I didn't hear about this.
Yep, the Bill Gates come ship.
Look it up.
Bill Gates come ship.
Chip or ship.
That's a different thing.
Oh, no, this is.
He does have a come ship.
Miles, go to Reddit.com and type in Bill Gates come chip or Bill Gates come ship.
Yeah.
And you'll get.
Come ship is very interesting.
Yeah, there's a lot going on with the come ship.
Okay.
So anyway, we digress.
We digress to our ads because Miles, this podcast is sponsored by Bill Gates come ship and come chips.
Let Bill Gates be your one-stop shop for semen.
For the makers of s ⁇ There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of the girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Commitment to Fighting Oppression00:14:51
Oh, we're back.
So 1964, the year he gets admitted to his pre-study program for seminary.
Again, Seaman.
Come.
Perfect.
That's the year also that Congress debates the Civil Rights Act.
The rector of the seminary he goes to, William Coleman, is a progressive, and he chose to offer Clarence and one other black student scholarships in order to make sure that there wouldn't just be white priests, right?
Like that's it's kind of an affirmative action program, you know.
And he and his brother are the, or he and this other student are the first black people admitted to this particular seminary.
Um, prior to starting priest school, Clarence had been awkward and uncomfortable around women.
Uh, friends noted that he seemed to nurse a deep well of resentment towards his mother.
And becoming or learning, uh, doing the pre-study for becoming a Catholic priest did not help with this part of his life.
From Strange Justice, quote, if Thomas was unsophisticated about girls, certainly the nuns had done little to change that.
The only sex education the youngsters at St. Benedict's and St. Pius X received, recalled Johnson, was from their own parents, which Thomas lacked.
After sixth grade, boys and girls were separated in class.
And Johnson is one of the other students there recalls, we were lectured about sin all the time.
The nuns' view of women at that time, according to Carol Delaney, who was taught by them in Savannah, was that we should become wives and mothers and submit completely to male authority.
The husband was the head of the wife, as Christ was the head of the church.
Women were associated with sin through Eve.
So, again, this is the good.
I mean, well, this is now seminary.
Yeah.
So, this is what he's learning.
You're the main character in a religious video game where you have to fight the evil women, but you're in cell pretending you're Volcell.
Yeah.
And there's a lot to be said by someone who is better at analyzing these things than me of like the similarities between his grandpa's attitude towards like, well, I'm not going to raise a girl.
That's not worth it.
To what these priests and nuns are teaching him about women, right?
I wouldn't like, do the nuns ever go, and I'm bad too.
I suck so hard.
I'm a serpent.
I am the mother of Satan.
Why am I here?
I gotta go.
I'm bad.
So, according to him, he's a pretty good student at seminary, but he is also kind of becomes in this point constantly infuriated by the racism he encounters from the other students.
Because, again, it's just him and one other black student.
Everybody else is white as hell.
He later recalled one night when the lights were turned off and a classmate said, quote, smile, Clarence, so we can see you.
Yeah.
He was particularly bothered, he says later, not by the fact that people laughed, but by the fact that nobody came to his defense, right?
He has like these friends and they won't stick up for him.
Which, yep, I don't have any trouble believing that.
He reached a snapping point in 1968 during his first year at the actual seminary, right?
Because he has to do preschool for priests.
Pre-come.
Yeah.
He's got a pre-come before he can get to be real Saman.
So when he joins that big cum shot, he learns, oh boy, no, that's not a good way to lean into that line.
No.
So during his first year at the actual seminary, you know, it's 68, which is the year that Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated.
And when that happens, he recalls a classmate says to him, Good, I hope the SLB dies.
I think because there was lag time in between him being shot and yeah, finding out.
So Clarence says that racism is why he ultimately quits the seminary.
His grandfather is fucking furious at this, right?
Like, obviously, if you know anything about Myers Anderson, the fact that you encountered racism in seminary is not an excuse to not become a priest to that guy, right?
Like a little bit of racism.
Yeah, let me tell you about racism.
Yeah.
So this doesn't go over well.
His grandfather throws him out of the house in his memoir.
Thomas would later write.
He'd never accepted any of my excuses for failure, and he wasn't going to start now.
You've let me down, he said.
For years, the two remained estranged, and Myers Anderson refused to attend his grandson's graduations or wedding.
Oh my God.
I know, right?
This is so fucking bleak.
Is that according to Thomas, or that's according to someone else?
That is according to Thomas.
I have not heard any counter to that story, though.
Okay, but Jesus.
Now, there's a couple of things that are left out.
One of them is that a big part of why Myers becomes angry is that when his son, because he's going to go on to become a lawyer and he's going to justify it, because when he drops out of preschool, he's like, well, I've decided I want to become a lawyer so that I can help the community, right?
So that I can fight for civil rights.
And he never does this.
So a thing that is left out of this, people will claim who knew the family at the time is that Myers was also angry that he doesn't do that part of it.
So I don't know.
Again, we all tell stories about our pasts.
So one of the nuns.
Did I ever tell you about that helicopter I was in that got shot down?
No.
Maybe you can have me in front of it.
Okay, so you're not going to give us the helicopter story right now.
You're just bringing that up, just teasing that.
I'm just saying I was with a lot of brave men and women that day.
Well, I was in a helicopter once with William Gates.
We were heading towards an island a friend of ours, buddy named Jeff, owned.
Little island, just out in the...
Anyway.
No.
So you don't think that's a good bit?
I think that's a terrible bit.
You don't think the hung out on Epstein's Island bit has legs?
I don't know why we've gotten into this territory.
Yeah, why are you doing this?
It doesn't make you look very good or cool.
It's because the word semen is kind of in seminary and in seminary.
That's also kind of funny.
And then there's like pre-seminary.
So then it's a lot of fun.
DM priests are always.
This is not a good bit.
No.
And I'm not a good guest to have for serious things.
Yeah.
I don't know why you're going back to your middle school humor for this episode, Robert.
It's kind of, you know, it's not your thing.
It is my thing, Sophie.
It's always been my thing.
It is my thing.
It is too my thing.
You'll see how many more times.
So it's the middle schooler.
Yeah.
So I'm going to teach everybody how many times I can say come in a four-part series about Clarence Thomas.
It's actually very appropriate given some weird things that he does to all of his coworkers.
Anyway, we'll talk about that later.
So one of the nuns who likes him, right?
Because he decides to quit.
And apparently one of his nuns is like, hey, if you're not going to be a priest, why don't you go to Holy Cross, which is a Catholic college in Wooster.
I think it's pronounced Wooster, Massachusetts.
It is spelled Worcester.
I'm so angry.
Wooster.
Fucking nonsense.
So this is a white liberal college, which you might expect to have been better than the seminary in Savannah, Georgia.
It is not.
After 1968, it had decided to actually try and recruit black students.
And in order to do that, they set up a scholarship fund named after Martin Luther King.
And Thomas receives one of these scholarships to go to the school that he would not have been able to afford otherwise, which is, again, the second time that he's benefited from an affirmative action program.
To summarize his time in college, I want to quote from the book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.
Quote, moving to a white institution in the North repeated the trauma of moving to a white seminary in the South, which Thomas described in an interview with The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, thus, quote, so you leave that all-black environment and you go into an environment where you are the only black and you are sitting where you live day in, day out and attend classes.
And the only blacks you see are the two women who work in the kitchen and the rest are white people.
You go through some changes.
Going through those changes in the charged context of an integrating Northern College campus surrounded by the tenets and texts of black nationalism transformed him.
It was a special time in my life, he says.
In later years, Thomas would downplay the presence of black nationalism in his mature thinking, hotly declaring, I'm not a nationalist.
Yet he never disavowed its role in his development, going so far as to invoke Malcolm X as an analog for precedent or precedent in his biography.
I have been angry enough in my life, and there are some points where I'm sure my attitudes approached black nationalism.
I'm certain you could say the same thing about Malcolm X. In college, Thomas's black friends loved to tease him about the fervor of his commitment and the seriousness of his study.
What woman would want this man anyway?
He's into books and black power.
But even as a Supreme Court justice, looking back on his youthful development, Thomas refused to mock the moment.
I was an angry black man, he wrote in his memoir.
The more I read about the black power movement, the more I wanted to be a part of it.
I used to be an angry black man.
Yeah.
Like, you were, I mean, that's one way to describe you really getting in touch with the oppression that we have felt.
And he does have this brief period of being not just in touch with oppression, but like actually committed to doing something about it.
Right.
He is like, he is a combat boots and black panther beret type activist.
Are there pictures of him like that?
I don't know.
I haven't found any.
That's like the most fucked up picture to like look at probably.
Oh, boy.
And his first trip to Washington, D.C., the very first time he ever goes, is a march on the Pentagon against the Vietnam War.
The last protest he ever goes to turns into a massive street brawl where 2,000 cops assault 3,000 protesters demanding the release of Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale and a prominent leading Panther Erica Huggins.
Years later, Thomas would insist, quote, I was never a liberal.
I was a radical.
And this seems to be true.
He organizes a free breakfast program for kids in Wooster patterned off of what the Black Panthers had done.
He supports Communist Party member Angela Davis and her flight from the U.S. government.
He helps organize a black student union at his college.
And he also publishes a manifesto in that magazine that is extremely black nationalist with lines like, quote, the black man does not want or need the white woman.
The black man's history shows that the white woman is the cause of his failure to be the true black man.
I know, right?
Clarence Thomas.
I don't think that's not going to be a twist a lot of people see coming.
So then, like, if it's like a cheesy narrative, like he has to, I wonder what the moment is that he goes to the dark side.
Like if he was a Jedi or I think inverts.
He is always, even when he is on this radical side, he's fundamentally rooted in some pretty regressive things.
As we're going to cover, a big part of what he believes in as a radical in this period is also the subjugation of women by men, which a lot of left-wing 60s radicals, number one, there's been a great deal written and a lot by female Panthers about sexism they encountered from these guys who were otherwise heroes of the Black Panther movement, because again, there was a lot of misogyny in the Panthers.
And then there's guys like Stokie Carmichael, right, of Students for a Democratic Society who had a quote that was something like, what is the purpose of like a woman in the SDS?
And he's like, well, it's for us to fuck, right?
Like that was, again, it is still the 60s.
Right.
There are still limits to what we are capable of thinking about.
Yeah.
But yeah, it's wild that even for him, he's like, yeah, man, like, I'm still, he's like, white women are the devil.
Yes.
He's still on theme for me.
And it's also like you can talk about misogyny within a lot of these left-wing circles and black nationalist circles in the same way that like, yeah, man, if you went to fucking Woodstock about a bunch of open-minded hippies and like were a man and kissed another man, you would probably get beaten within an inch of your life because like they're still pretty homophobic, you know?
Right, right.
Like it was 1969.
Yeah.
It's not 2040.
Yeah.
Optimistic, Miles.
So I want to quote next from a write-up by The New Yorker.
Quote, after the BSU learned that a member was dating a white woman, the student convened, the group convened a mock trial, found him guilty, and broke his Afrocom as punishment.
Thomas took the role more seriously, particularly after meeting Kathy Ambush, a black woman whom he would marry in 1971 and divorce in 1984.
In a poem he called, Is You Is or Is You Ain't a Brother, he set out the obligations of black men to black women.
Even in that milieu, Kevin Marida and Michael Fletcher reported in their 2007 biography, Supreme Discomfort, Thomas's edgy race consciousness stood out.
When he saw an interracial couple strolling on campus, he'd loudly demand, Do I see a black woman with a white man?
How could that be?
Until 1986, when Thomas met Virginia Lamp, who was white and who would become his second wife, he opposed interracial marriage and sex.
What the fuck?
He's a real, like, there's a lot going on in this guy.
Wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
Wow.
It makes me, it makes, first of all, makes my brain hurt.
And when I think about how if he really was like trying to reverse like the loving decision, that's like him being like, no, I really feel this way and I'm going to live that.
And I'm, I'm regressing to this very bizarre intersection of my beliefs.
And you're like, what the fuck?
Where?
And who are you?
You also see, it's interesting because you can see, number one, there's a lot of consistency in his belief towards women and what rights women should have.
And also a certain flexibility when he wants something, right?
Because he meets a white woman that he likes and then he's like, okay, well, now I'm not against interracial marriage, right?
Oh, you know, not all white women are.
Yeah, exactly.
Come on.
I was kind of tripping when I wrote that rap song.
Yeah.
I mean, and this is, I guess, this is all, this is number one, a very human thing, but also it's like a very conservative thing.
Like you can think about John McCain being like the only Republican being like, we shouldn't torture people.
Why?
Well, because I got tortured once, so I know it's bad.
All right.
Why don't you brag about it?
Yeah.
I don't know.
People are complicated and generally hypocrites.
But you know who's not a hypocrite, Miles?
You.
When you plug your products or pod, whatever.
Miles, it's the end of the episode.
Say some things that people can find you at.
Oh, you can find me just at Miles of Gray on Twitter and Instagram.
And if you like, you know, I do a daily show about news and politics and stuff called Daily Zeitgeist.
You can listen to that every day.
Or if you like trash reality TV, because that's what I do to avoid thinking about our crumbling earth.
Miles on the Daily Zeitgeist00:03:48
Yeah.
Check me out on 420 Day Fiancé, where I get behind and talk about 90 Day Fiancé.
Check out Miles on the Daily Zeitgeist on 420 Day Fiancé.
Play both at the same time from different devices.
They sync up in a way that will reveal secrets to you about how to gain special powers.
Exactly.
And you can even listen to, I have a third show because I can't stop talking called Miles and Jack Got Mad Boosties, where I'm just talking about basketball.
So a lot of you can get your serious or you're frivolous.
Have you seen that Adam Sandler basketball movie at Miles?
Hustle, yeah.
Yeah.
I thought it was pretty good.
I thought it was pretty good.
I was telling COVID-19.
There's like a million scenes in that where like I know a famous basketball player just walked on scene and I'm supposed to be like, oh my God, it's that guy.
But I can't tell if they're actors or not.
Because to me, it's just like, wow, everyone's very tall in this movie except for Adam Sandler.
Sophie?
James Goldstein even has a cameo.
I don't know who that is.
That's how like there's these like deep-cut basketball people in it.
I didn't realize the Spanish guy who's the second main character is an actual basketballer.
Yeah.
A basketballsman.
Exactly, thank you.
Speaking of balls, the episode's over.
We did it, guys.
Boom.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.