- Reactions to Clarence Thomas’s speech blaming everything he doesn’t like on progressivism — and Hitler and Stalin too! A standard conservative screed.
- The Project Hail Mary soundtrack.
What kind of contorted logic is going on here?
Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, 17 Apr 2026: Clarence Thomas Gave a Speech Blaming Progressivism for Hitler. It Was Mostly Just Sad.
Justice Clarence Thomas gave a rare public address on Wednesday that started as a benign celebration of the Declaration of Independence before devolving into a bitter attack on progressivism, steeped with grievance, bad history, and self-regard. In the speech, delivered at the University of Texas at Austin, Thomas blamed progressives for the worst crimes of the 20th century, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were all “intertwined with the rise of progressivism,” as was “racial segregation,” “eugenics,” and other evils. The justice also bemoaned the “unfair criticism and attacks” that he and other tellers of truths must withstand as the price for courageously “not budging” on their principles.
This is a conservation between Lithwick and Stern, a preview of a podcast, which I haven’t listened to. Stern:
The speech is ostensibly bemoaning the progressive movement of the early 20th century, but the New Republic’s Matt Ford has a fantastic piece about how his history is completely wrong. Thomas claims that the American progressive movement was founded by Wilson and imported from Germany, neither of which is true. It was a reaction to corporate abuses and corrupt governance and horrific things like child labor and environmental destruction. It was an organic, grassroots movement, but Thomas says it was a top-down push to suppress individual liberties and put the government in charge of everything. That is a false, libertarian counterhistory that has no basis in reality. The justice also asserts that progressivism led to the worst atrocities of the 20th century, including Nazi Germany, Stalinism, and Mao, and draws a straight line from that to progressivism today.
So, will we find anything new here? Or just the same old arguments that life was perfect in some imaginary past and anything that’s changed since then is bad and must be blamed on “progress” and “progressives.”
Lithwick:
I think Thomas’ Achilles’ heel—which you can really see in this talk—is that he just can’t get past Clarence Thomas. Everything, in the end, is about Clarence Thomas. This speech comes out as a love song to the one person in Washington who has the courage not to succumb to flattery and demands and politically correct cronyism. Everyone else loses their moral courage and takes the bait, the grift, the deal.
And this: the self-regard of people (like many conservatives) who just know they’re right.
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Robert Reich, yesterday: The Worst Justice Ever, subtitled “His attack on progressivism last week was the last straw”
Not Alito, as Reich has long thought.
Clarence Thomas is 77 years old. He has now served on the Supreme Court for over 34 years, making him the longest-serving member of the Court. He is a bitter, angry, severe hard-right, intellectually dishonest, ideologue. After reading his latest thoughts on America, I’ve concluded Thomas is even worse than Alito.
Last Wednesday, Thomas gave a rare public address at the University of Texas in Austin that began as a banal tribute to the Declaration of Independence before degenerating into a misleading screed against progressivism.
“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream,” Thomas intoned. “The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.”
Thomas went on to blame progressives for the worst crimes of the 20th century, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were all “intertwined with the rise of progressivism,” as was “racial segregation,” “eugenics,” and other evils.
This is pure rubbish.
Similar points as above:
In reality, America’s Progressive era emerged at the start of the 20th century from the corruption and excesses of America’s first Gilded Age (we’re now in the second, if you hadn’t noticed) — its record inequalities of income and wealth, its “robber barons” who monopolized industries and handed out sacks of money to pliant legislators, it’s dangerous factories and unsafe working conditions, its violent attacks on workers who tried to form unions, its corporate control over all facets of government, its widespread poverty and disease, and its corrupt party machines.
In many ways, the Progressive Era — whose most prominent leader was Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, not Woodrow Wilson, by the way — saved capitalism from its own excesses by instituting a progressive income tax, an estate tax, pure food and drug laws, and America’s first laws against corporate influence in politics.
…
Clarence Thomas got it exactly backwards. Had we not had the Progressive Era and its reforms extending through the 1930s, America might well have succumbed to fascism — as did Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini, or to communist fascism, as did Russia under Stalin. Progressive and New Deal reforms acted as bulwarks against the rise of fascism in America.
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Salon, Heather Digby Parton, today: Clarence Thomas’ attack on progressivism should alarm you, subtitled “In a speech celebrating America’s 250th, the Supreme Court justice gave a dishonest and dangerous read of history”
Like a modern-day Paul Revere, Clarence Thomas is sounding the alarm: Progressives are an existential threat, determined to destroy all you hold dear, unless you are willing to sacrifice and fight them with everything you have. Perhaps you think that’s a bit aggressive coming from a Supreme Court justice charged with making dispassionate decisions about the Constitution and the rule of law. But he made his position clear in an April 15 speech before invited faculty and students at the University of Texas at Austin. You have been warned.
The speech was supposed to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which the nation will be celebrating this summer. (For his part, Donald Trump is planning an IndyCar street race around Washington, D.C., and a UFC fight on the White House lawn.) Thomas used the opportunity to charge that “progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” adding that the ideology “holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”
It does?
Here’s another familiar theme: he’s God-besotted. He thinks rights come from God, not the Constitution. This is nonsensical. Which god? And which religion? I bet the Iranians think exactly the same about their cultural rules.
Later:
But Clarence Thomas, like many conservatives in this misbegotten era, suffers from Fox News brainrot, a condition that encourages them to wallow in the bitterness of their own experience while believing the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of people who refuse to accept the way things are supposed to work. The perspective of Thomas and others like him has become so warped that they can work themselves into a paranoid frenzy about “progressivism” wielding government power at the expense of the individual, even as they defend a president who is systematically tearing up the Constitution and setting it on fire. In his speech, Thomas said that many Americans no longer accept that “all men are created equal” and deserving of “unalienable rights” protected by limited government.
He’s right about that. But it’s his own compatriots who feel that way, not progressives.
So is there a take-away lesson here? That people who tell history are always biased and that their stories can’t be trusted? No, more than that.
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Project Hail Mary soundtrack. We saw the movie today, but I haven’t listened to this yet. Alas, it’s broken into 50 separate videos.
