HIGH ON THEIR OWN SUPPLY

This story about Clarence Thomas's wife got some attention yesterday:

With Ginni Thomas under scrutiny due to her connections to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, which has led to concerns about her husband's votes on any cases before the court involving Donald Trump, Politico is now reporting on the burgeoning relationship between the two and the man who appears to be Trump's heir apparent.

"Emails handed over to American Oversight, a group that bills itself as a government watchdog, suggest that DeSantis is in regular contact with Justice Clarence Thomas," Politico's Gary Fineout reports....

The report goes on to note that Ginni Thomas has bragged about her relationship with the potential GOP presidential nominee in 2024 and wrote, "...my husband has been in contact with him too on various things of late.”

The Politico report is here. American Oversight posted the text of the email on Twitter. Here it is:

It's not news that Clarence Thomas, like the Court's five other conservatives, is a Republican politician in robes, but his chumminess with a man who could someday be president while he's still on the Court is scandalous, or at least it would be in a healthier country.

But I also want to direct your attention to the wording of this email. Ginni Thomas says of her coalition,

We focus on action items for the greatest threats and opportunities to constitutional governance, and admittedly, we are weary about the GOP divisions, lack of courage and lack of leadership. We start and end each meeting with prayer, but the Left has all the cultural institutions now and seem to be weaponizing them against conservatives and basic freedoms.

What surprises me is that this is how they communicate with one another privately, when they assume not only that liberals aren't listening, but their own hoi polloi aren't in on the conversation either. I think we sometimes assume that they know they're not telling the tuth -- they don't really believe that Trump won the 2020 election or that they're plucky underdogs fighting a culture that's run exclusively by jackbooted liberal fascists. But when Ginni Thomas writes that "the Left has all the cultural institutions now and seem to be weaponizing them against conservatives and basic freedoms," it suggests that she really believes this, or at least assumes that DeSantis does.

I don't know what the larger meaning of this is, but I worry that sincere zealots with power might be more dangerous than cynics with the same power. They're not just trying to get the rubes to hate us so they can win the next few elections. They really hate us themselves. They really believe we have power obtained illegitimately, power that should be taken from us by force to restore legitimate government.

And they believe they're the underdogs. The wife of one of the nine most powerful judges in America -- one of the six most powerful, really -- tells an aide to the governor of the third-largest state in the Union that they live in a shared state of powerlessness. It would be funny if it weren't a dangerous kind of madness.

I suppose I could also laugh at the fact that Ginni Thomas says (twice!) that the coalition's meetings take place in a "cone of silence." She's a couple of years older than I am, so I know that's a reference to a TV show from our childhood, Get Smart, a spy spoof in which agents sometimes communicated under an awkward device designed to prevent others from hearing their words.



Maybe that's reason enough not to fear them. Maybe they're just absurd paranoiacs. But they're paranoiacs in power who think we should be crushed. And they're not just saying that for effect.