Politicians lie so frequently that the practice is seldom newsworthy. Even staggering, in-your-face lies of epic consequence, such as "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor," rarely result in dire consequences for the individual making the bogus claims. Hypocrisy is a bit different and - in sufficient doses – can prove fatal to candidates, campaigns, and ideas. The recent revelations regarding US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's book sales are a heaping helping and could end the progressives' war on Clarence Thomas.
"I literally prepped the boxes and had my aides count the books before signing. I even have a spreadsheet noting how many books were signed each day." That is Court employee and Sotomayor's taxpayer-funded assistant Anh Le, speaking of her and her colleagues' work schedule. There was no reporting on whether workers comp claims shot up after their pressed service as an ad-hoc book warehouse team. Imagine the headlines if Justice Thomas had a court employee mow his lawn or wash his car. Most independent bookstores carry an average of 7,000 books in inventory. Supreme Court employees moved over 11,000 books for Sotomayor and her publisher.
The ever-expanding campaign against Clarence Thomas being played out in the pages of the Fourth Estate could be rendered counter-productive unless the media is willing to sacrifice Sotomayor on a similar ethical altar.
Good for the Goose?
David Rand is a psychology professor at Yale who researched hypocrisy. "[W]e found that people viewed hypocrites as dishonest — more dishonest, in fact, than people who uttered outright falsehoods." And "Remarkably, hypocrites were rated as less trustworthy, less likable and less morally upright than those who openly lied." That's a powerful force. The greater the gulf between professed virtue and revealed sin determines the degree of hypocrisy.
We learn from the AP report that Sotomayor benefits directly from book sales, and handsomely so. She came to the Court an unpublished author but received, within a year, a $3.1 million advance for her first effort. That was a memoir. Now she writes children's books and has earned royalties for sales of at least $400,000 since 2019.
Should Sotomayor face the same level of scrutiny as Thomas? And would such scrutiny highlight the partisan hypocrisy of a media so determined to go to bat for the political left? As Noam Chomsky once noted, "For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit."
A Surprising Take
Thomas has served on the Court for almost 32 years, over twice as long as his sister Justice. He has spoken glowingly about the collegiality of the Court since joining. In 2022 Justice Sotomayor referenced her relationship with Thomas directly. She believed the two were probably the Justices who disagreed the most in court opinions but that they "share a common understanding about people and kindness towards them." She said:
Justice Thomas is the one Justice in the building that literally knows every employee's name, and not only does he know their names, he remembers their family's names and histories.
He is the first one who will go up to someone when you're walking with him and say, 'Is your son okay? How's your daughter doing in college?' He's the first one that, when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida. He is a man who cares deeply about the Court as an institution and about people.
Justice Sotomayor offered the anecdote with kind regard, which is no small matter. De-humanizing Thomas is right out of the progressive handbook. Literally. Saul Alinsky, a birthing person for the progressive movement and Hillary Clinton's hero, wrote the widely cited Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." For Sotomayor to put Thomas' humanity on record is no small matter.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The Risk of Hypocrisy
Is all that enough to stop the war on Thomas? When Republicans started attacking President Biden as a hypocrite, the New York Times recognized the danger and published a hit piece against the notion. An editorial board member wrote, "[H]ypocrisy provides a neat, clean, easy to grasp, nonpartisan rubric by which to pass judgment on public officials." And, "[w]ith hypocrisy, you don't need to get into the policy weeds or take a stand that could be considered ideologically slanted."
Expect progressive shot-callers who spend millions on attacks to look for a better return on investment. The big box media may well be shamed into moderating its takes on future anti-Thomas revelations or risk derailing one of the most left-leaning darlings of the Supreme Court and its own already-sullied reputation in the process. Fewer news outlets will be interested in running a story on rumors Virginia and Clarence Thomas did not license their Labrador retrievers in the mid-'90s. And all the people said, "Amen!"
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