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.