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.”
