One of the excuses I’m seeing from defenders of Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow is the claim that Crow was being generous and kind and you don’t want to discourage people from being kind, do you? Dahlia Lithwick is having nothing to do with that.

There’s also something specifically infuriating about the way defenders of the deep spiritual kinship between Harlan Crow and Clarence and Ginni Thomas root their argument in the fact that paying for an at-risk youth’s private school tuition is a noble act—“charity” even. The problem with that is, this is a conservative legal movement that is racing to subvert voting, public education, the administrative state, and (at present) the possibility of student loan forgiveness. So Harlan Crow’s replacement of an entire New Deal safety net with an ad hoc charitable benefits system administered by himself and directed only at the offspring of personal friends is specifically infuriating. Because the kids who receive the generosity of the Crow’s private charity are not yours, and the kids who receive the protections of EPA regulation are not yours, and the kids who receive the benefits of going to schools where nobody will shoot them are not yours. The beauty of Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow is that they always get to determine who benefits—and guess what? Unless and until you are related to a sitting Supreme Court justice: It will be not you.

The lesson we are learning from the new scandals at the high court go way beyond “ethics” reform. This is no longer an ethics problem. This is a democracy reform problem, and it signals first and foremost an effort to deform democracy to serve the Harlan Crows and the Leonard Leos of the world. It also signals a view of democracy in which they will determine whose private life is private and who are the “gossips.” (You may still know them as “journalists.”)

Right, let’s replace the social safety net with crony capitalism. That’s not generosity, that’s selfishness.

Trump was found guilty of sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll, but keep in mind that this was a civil trial, not a criminal case, so he can’t be punished with jail time, only a fine. A $5 million fine. It will do nothing.

• Trump won’t pay it. If we know anything of the man, it’s that he doesn’t pay his debts.

• His audience of gullible authoritarian morons won’t care.

• He’s going to continue his run for the presidency.

• The media will continue to treat him as a serious politician, and court his approval.

It’s a moral victory, but Republicans don’t care about morality.

That’s a question nobody bothered to ask, until now. Oz lost hard to Fetterman in his senate campaign, and turned himself into a standing joke with his bizarrely out-of-touch efforts to find common ground with Pennsylvanians, despite being from New Jersey. So what is he up to now? He seems to have abandoned Pennsylvania and any political aspirations, and is trying to resume his medical grift.

In running a polarizing political campaign, Oz risked all of that. Now, it appears he’s trying to get it back.

Indeed, after the election, reports emerged that Oz attempted to restart his daytime show, which ended in January 2022, before he kicked off his Senate bid. But his jaunt into politics soiled his marketability with a mainstream audience.

Perhaps more importantly, his Senate run entailed months of scrutiny from the press, and Oz’s opponents, dissecting his more dubious medical claims and business practices, tarnishing his reputation further.

All 13 seasons of his show were also produced by Winfrey’s Harpo Productions. Winfrey endorsed Fetterman in November.

He’s still a big joke, and his social media presence is permanently stained.

But even as Oz attempts to pivot back into the medical personality that built his fortune, onlookers aren’t always so receptive. While he still boasts fans in the comment sections who’ve lauded his semi-return to public life, many are still trolling the once-candidate with the same jokes that hung over his Senate run.

None of that will hurt his money-making con, though. He’s spending a lot of time in Florida nowadays, where he can fleece the MAGA sheep. One of the goals of the pseudoscience scam is to identify a ripe crop of gullible rubes, and his campaign did successfully accomplish that.

It’s pretty simple, actually. Right-wingers have been bribing Clarence Thomas for years.

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Harlan Crow has been celebrating this with his bought-and-paid for super-realistic art. It’s all the same small circle of cronies and their apologists.

It’s like a crime family. Charming.

No one is done with Clarence Thomas. He has another channel for his bribery stream.

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

I was dismayed by the first sentence of the second paragraph. People are paying $6000/month for a boarding school? That’s nuts. I could never afford that kind of payout, nor could most people. This must be how “trickle down economics” works — the people with many millions of dollars subsidize the lifestyle of people who run over-priced private boarding schools.

Also, “raising him as a son” apparently means “shipping the kid off to a school where we won’t have to see him for nine months of the year.”

Worse, in this case, is that Thomas has a billionaire sugar daddy paying the bills, and Thomas knew this was an ethical problem, because he kept it secret.

Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.

Not clear? Crystal clear. He knew this was shady and was feebly trying to hide it.

Oh, hey, remember Herschel Walker, one of the dumbest Republican candidates ever (he lost)? He’s also in the news.

When Herschel Walker emailed a representative for billionaire industrialist and longtime family friend Dennis Washington in March 2022, he seemed to be engaging in normal behavior for a political candidate: He was asking for money.

But unbeknownst to Washington and the billionaire’s staff, Walker’s request was far more out of the ordinary. It was something campaign finance experts are calling “unprecedented,” “stunning,” and “jaw-dropping.” Walker wasn’t just asking for donations to his campaign; he was soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal company—a company that he never disclosed on his financial statements.

Wow. I wish I had a friend I could call up on the phone and ask for half a million dollars that I’d never have to pay back. Well, I do have such friends, I’m sure — maybe I’ll call you up and ask you for a hundred thousand dollars sometime — it’s just that none of my friends have that kind of money, and definitely none of the kind who would give me that much. (I do have a Patreon account, but I only ask for $1-$5, and am deeply grateful for those donations. If any of you want to send me $500K, though, we’d finally be able to do that complete update of the Freethoughtblogs code, and several other things…).

Unfortunately, I’m not a Republican, and also haven’t had my conscience drilled out of my skull, so that’s not going to happen.

He’s such an unfunny, horrible, selfish little man, but I am thankful that he has taught me about another plank of the conservative agenda: they want to abolish no-fault divorce. I had no idea! I assumed this was a safe and entirely reasonable right!

Steven Crowder, the right-wing podcaster, is getting a divorce. “No, this was not my choice,” Crowder told his online audience last week. “My then-wife decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore — and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.”

Crowder’s emphasis on “the state of Texas” makes it sound like the Lone Star State is an outlier, but all 50 states and the District of Columbia have no-fault divorce laws on the books — laws that allow either party to walk away from an unhappy marriage without having to prove abuse, infidelity, or other misconduct in court.

It was a hard-fought journey to get there. It took more than four decades to end fault-based divorce in America: California was the first state to eliminate it, in 1969; New York didn’t come around until 2010. (And there are caveats: Mississippi and South Dakota still only allow no-fault divorce if both parties agree to dissolve the marriage, for example.)

Researchers who tracked the emergence of no-fault divorce laws state by state over that period found that reform led to dramatic drops in the rates of female suicide and domestic violence, as well as decreases in spousal homicide of women. The decreases, one researcher explained, were “not just because abused women (and men) could more easily divorce their abusers, but also because potential abusers knew that they were more likely to be left.”

Today, more than two-thirds of all heterosexual divorces in the U.S. are initiated by women.

I had no idea. I was married in 1980, and I just assumed that this was an entirely voluntary association, taking for granted that she had the same rights I do. Was that a radical idea? I guess it was, once upon a time. What I take for granted is under threat from Republicans now.

Republicans across the country are now reconsidering no-fault divorce. There isn’t a huge mystery behind the campaign: Like the crusades against abortion and contraception, making it more difficult to leave an unhappy marriage is about control. Crowder’s home state could be the first to eliminate it, if the Texas GOP gets its way. Last year, the Republican Party of Texas added language to its platform calling for an end to no-fault divorce: “We urge the Legislature to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws, to support covenant marriage, and to pass legislation extending the period of time in which a divorce may occur to six months after the date of filing for divorce.”

If my wife were unhappy in our marriage and wanted to leave me, it would break my heart, but I recognize that I don’t own her and she has rights of her own and she is an autonomous agent. That Republicans want to deny women that right is eye-opening. I thought it was weird how Crowder kept harping on the idea that his wife was permitted to not want to be married to him, as if her agency was an affront to his right to compel her to live in an unhappy home, but that’s how the conservative mind works, I guess. Selfishly.

Now I’m wondering if right-wingers even have a theory of mind.

Also, further revelations about Crowder show why no one would want to associate with him for any length of time. He’s also a bullying, demeaning, awful boss, a spoiled tyrannical child.

In March 2018, Crowder and his crew were driving in a van when a former producer he liked to call “Not Gay Jared” fell asleep in the back row. “Steven was in front, and he was joking about what he was going to do,” a witness said. “He climbed over and dropped his junk on top of Jared’s shoulder.” The same ex-staffer recalled that Crowder had exposed himself to Jared in 2017 while they were filming a parody version of Ghost. And on a flight in 2018, a different employee claims they saw Crowder put his testicles on his childhood friend and assistant, John Goodman. Another employee remembered that Crowder had showed his genitals to Dave Landau, a comedian and former co-host who called Crowder a “bully” last week. (Landau claimed that Crowder installed a “‘Dave don’t talk’ button” on the show to get him to be quiet on air.) “At first, I took it as him trying to be friendly or one of the guys,” said an ex-staffer. “Now, I see it was a power play.”

Crowder allegedly sent production assistants to do his laundry and could be an “unreasonable micromanager” who would make wild requests after hours to “set people up for failure.” Ex-staffers claimed that he would “regularly” berate his team and threaten to fire people on the company’s Discord channel. He even went after his own father, Darrin Crowder, per one source, who claimed Crowder would yell at his dad in front of employees when Darrin was working as his son’s booker. (Darrin did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.)

All I can say is…I hope his ex-wife takes him to the cleaners, that his employees abandon him too, and and that not even a right-wing wealthy media site wants to syndicate him anymore. Not even the Daily Wire or Spotify will want to associate with this toxic person. More importantly I hope that every woman in the country becomes aware that a major goal of the Republican Party is to turn their marriages into prisons.

I have never read a book by Nora Roberts, and what I’ve heard about them does not appeal at all. If you enjoy them, great — she’s an immensely popular author, so a lot of people do enjoy her books. Unfortunately, a censorious few do not, and have decided that no one should read them. She’s being banned. For this?

What’s more, the objection to Roberts’s books appears extremely flimsy. Four of those books, which make up “The Bride Quartet,” are about friends seeking love as they build their wedding-planning business.

The books have some sex scenes, but the language is often vague enough that a child would have little idea what was happening. (“He touched, he tasted, he lingered until her quivers became trembles.”) And — spoiler alert — each book ends with a marriage proposal.

Roberts allowed that the books contain “sex” but noted that it is “monogamous” and “consensual.” Speaking of the censors, Roberts told us: “I’m surprised that they wouldn’t want teenagers to read about healthy relationships that are monogamous, consensual, healthy and end up in marriage.”

It’s conventionally heteronormative! But one person, literally one person, squeaked an objection, and chickenshit school administrators in Martin county immediately pulled every Roberts book off the shelves. That’s all it takes, one prude from the fascist group “Moms for Liberty” complains, and administrators instantly surrender.

There’s a reason for that. “Moms for Liberty” is a right-wing terrorist organization.

The group’s methods, however, belie the wholesome vision it tries to project. VICE News has spoken to students, administrators, parents, superintendents, school board members, and teachers who have faced vicious attacks by Moms for Liberty. Their stories paint a picture of a group that conducts orchestrated harassment campaigns against individuals, that’s resulted in many fearing for their safety and, in some cases, their lives.

“The greatest impact that Moms for Liberty is having is imparting fear, within the teachers and the educators and in the parents,” Laura Leigh-Abby, co-founder of Defense of Democracy, a nonprofit group advocating for inclusive education, told VICE News. “The true impact they’re having is really not calculable, because I’m seeing teachers who are afraid to speak out because they don’t want to be targeted.”

It’s their tactics. They harass and threaten to get their way, and all too often people let them have it.

In Pennsylvania, the leader of a local Moms for Liberty chapter allegedly hijacked a dead woman’s Facebook page to harass her enemies, including using the N-word and saying they should hang from a noose. In Arkansas, the head of communications of the Lonoke County chapter said that librarians should be “plowed down with a freaking gun.” In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a member of a local Moms for Liberty chapter harassed an opposing group, threatened to report them for child abuse, and called them “pedophile sympathizers.” In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, police had to be called to a school board meeting after members of Moms for Liberty accused attendees of being “groomers” and wanting to show explicit pictures to children. In Charleston, South Carolina, a Moms for Liberty-affiliated member of the local school board publicly stated he would show up at his son’s teacher’s doorstep with a gun if the teacher came out as transgender.

They’re actually a tiny minority, a widely scattered few, whose only strength lies in their unscrupulous fanaticism. They are our brownshirts. You dare to put a book they don’t like in a library, and they show up at your door with a gun and have a parade of shrieking right-wing assholes marching by your house. The most harmless, mild exhibition of tolerance and open-mindedness will trigger a shit-flinging hateful response.

They don’t even like Judy Blume.

“We thought the '80s, that might be as bad as it would get. We're America, right? We're supposed to have intellectual freedom. And now it's back and it's worse…. We have to fight it. Speak out. Yell.” @judyblume on #bannedbooks. pic.twitter.com/yH4F2Jh4h3

— PEN America (@PENamerica) April 30, 2023

She’s right. Fight back. Except it’s hard — the executors of the repressive policies are usually bland, faceless, cowardly bureaucrats, middle-aged white men sitting on school boards and city councils, masters of being tepid and boring and making excuses to avoid riling up the seething masses of idiots. They will always defend action and inaction by calling upon pitiful pleas to avoid trouble, claiming to be trying to obey the will of the people…where “the people” refers to just those who have bullhorns and guns.

We have to fight back anyway.

Tucker Carlson has been fired, Elon Musk has been exposed as an incompetent twit, so let’s look back at those heady, long-ago (a bit more than a week) times when the two of them would sit down as equals and solemnly discuss the important stuff — like how birth control is destroying civilization.

annnnd it turned into an aside about how birth control and abortion are dooming the human race pic.twitter.com/MgZeE3cWlZ

— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) April 19, 2023

CARLSON: I mean, the urge to have sex and to procreate is – after breathing and eating – the most basic urge. How has it been subverted?

MUSK: Well, it’s just, in the past we could rely upon, you know, simple limbic system rewards in order to procreate. But once you have birth control and abortions and whatnot, now you can still satisfy limbic instinct, but not procreate.

So we haven’t yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent, the last 50 years or so for birth control. I’m sort of worried that hey, civilization, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization’s going to crumble. The old question of like, will civilization end with a bang or a whimper? Well, it’s currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers, which is depressing as hell.

CARLSON: The most depressing.

MUSK: I mean, seriously, yeah.

CARLSON: War is less depressing.

MUSK: Yeah, I’d rather go out with a bang.

CARLSON: With your shoes on, not with your diaper on.

I’m really curious to know how he thinks we would “evolve” to deal with birth control. We seem to be reproducing just fine, population numbers are generally going up, and voluntarily reducing child birth seems to be a good way to deal with the other “problem,” the radical reduction in infant mortality rates, thanks to modern medicine and hygiene. I would think environmental stressors, gross economic inequities, and the assault on successful institutions, like education and democracy, are going to be a far bigger problem for civilization than the fact that the growth curve is flattening. Maybe what he’s worrying about is more that capitalism is crumbling, not civilization. Those aren’t synonyms for each other, you know.

Also really revolting is the idea that war is less depressing than reproductive freedom. Please, Elon, if you find it so horrible, do “go out with a bang.” The sooner the better.

Hey, maybe Carlson getting fired is how “evolution” is dealing with it, and Musk’s rapid erosion of reputation and wealth is simply Darwin’s invisible hand.