Here's a shocker, or maybe not really. Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo’s BFF Clarence Thomas just hired a new clerk, Crystal Clanton, who had previously gotten busted sending texts and SnapChats that were so ass-scorchingly racist that they got her fired from her second-in-command position of national field director for Turning Point USA. Quite an achievement!
“I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.”
Along with other TPUSA employees, Clanton also reportedly kept up a conversation of anti-Muslim messages on SnapChat, such as “a bacon a day keeps the Islams away” and “Ramadan bombathon,” as well as taking pictures of their heads wrapped in towels to mock head coverings commonly worn by Arabs. Clanton’s contribution was a photo of a man who appears to be Arab and a caption, “Just thinking about ways to do another 9/11.”
What a peach! When the messages were unearthed by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer in 2017, TPUSA let her go. (Remember 2017? Racists were apparently capable of embarrassment back then. Those were the days.) At the time, Clanton lamely offered, “I have no recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or who I am and the same was true when I was a teenager.” (Actually Clanton was 20.)
Don’t worry, TPUSA went on to “accidentally” hire many more racists, they are not running out.
Anyway, it was not “end of story!” Clanton’s tearjerker lament of self-victimization was apparently Ginni “Gitmo Barge” Thomas’s favorite song. Ginni not only hired Clanton to help her with her right-wing media ventures for her consulting company, Liberty Ventures, she even invited her to move into her and Clarence’s home in VA, where Clanton lived with them for almost a year before getting accepted into the Antonin Scalia school of law at George Mason University (aka ASSLAW).
Pretty cozy! Which is to say kind of freaky! But if there’s one thing we can say for sure about the Thomas marriage, Clarence loves Ginni. And Ginni loves Clarence, pube Cokes and all. She let him adopt his grand-nephew, and when she asked to keep a pet racist who followed her home, of course he couldn’t say no.
Anyway, after matriculating from ASSLAW, and doing whatever it was she was doing for the Thomases, Clanton clerked for US District Judge Corey Maze in Alabama, and then Clarence recommended her to Chief Judge William H. Pryor Jr. of the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. The Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability of the Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the federal judiciary, stepped in, and was all like wait, hold up, did she actually say this? Did you guys even Google her before you hired her? Did she lie to you? WTF?
But the Thomases were not about to let anyone besmirch their roomie. Clarence tuned up his lamentation violin and wrote a letter supporting the appointment that was so schmaltzy it makes “Wind Beneath My Wings” sound like a farting pug:
“Crystal came to live with us and work with my wife about three years ago after her controversial and public departure from Turning Point USA … My wife informed me of the horrible way in which she had been treated at Turning Point and asked that she be allowed to live with us. I agreed, and she lived with us for almost a year.”
Thomas relates how he encouraged Clanton, “understandably distraught and depressed,” to go to law school; recommended her when she applied to law school; and then suggested her to Pryor as a clerk, informing him of “the grossly out of character and unfounded allegations against her.”
Wow! And more:
“I know Crystal Clanton and I know bigotry,” Thomas wrote. “Bigotry is antithetical to her nature and character.” Thomas, who said he recommended to Pryor that he hire Clanton as a law clerk, added, “We have reached a sorry state of affairs when a young adult can be indelibly marked with today’s ‘scarlet letter’ of defamation. This is especially true in the judiciary.”
Won’t someone please think of the racist children! Former head of TPUSA and glob of mayonnaise that’s been left too long in the sun, Charlie Kirk, even chimed in to defend the lady he fired, adding a new, nonsensical excuse that an unnamed former employee “created fake text messages to be used against other employees,” and that Clanton hadn’t said anything about that at the time, because of a non-disclosure agreement. Mmmkay, sure, so, why did you fire her, then? And why did she herself admit to saying it when she was a 20-year-old “teenager”? And aren’t women supposed to not be having jobs, and making babies instead, anyway, in Charlie Kirk’s mind? Never mind. The not-even-slightly-credible-sounding excuse worked, the Second Circuit stuck its head in the sand, and Pryor was allowed to keep his clerk.
And now she is Thomas’s clerk. Mazel tov, I guess?
People have accused Clarence Thomas of not having principles, but he does! He believes in whatever is good for Clarence and Ginni Thomas. If that means hiring a lady who honed her racism at Charlie Kirk’s knee, that’s what he’ll do. If that means dining next to Leonard Leo’s Nazi memorabilia collection, that is fine. The ends justify the means. Especially when those means are Clarence Thomas’s mom’s house getting paid off, luxury vacations, private school for Thomas’s great-nephew, and pin money for Ginni’s lobbying firm. Win win for them! Big lose for everyone else who doesn’t like their tax dollars going to pay the salary of someone like Clanton, but those are the breaks.
And if you don’t like it, you can just pull yourselves up by the bootstraps and find your own billionaires to buy you!
OK, reality check. No one short of top of their class ivy league law school grads, typically with a big firm background to boot, can even sniff a clerkship at the supreme court and somehow a recent grad from #32 ranked ASS law school with a shocking background gets the gig? And this is the court that killed affirmative action with zero sense of irony.
once again for all of those in the back of the theatre:
ANITA HILL WAS RIGHT! 100%