Leftist ideologues in the corporate press can’t stop themselves. Ever since their 1991 character assassination of Clarence Thomas failed to stick, they’ve twisted themselves in knots to paint the conservative Supreme Court justice as a moral stain. Their latest attack came in the form of a hit piece in ProPublica on Thursday about his family’s close personal friend Harlan Crow paying tuition for the Thomases’ grandnephew, Mark Martin.
It’s a total nothingburger. The piece itself acknowledges the disclosure laws are narrow and thus don’t even appear to apply to this situation since Martin is not the justice’s offspring. Case closed — or, at least, it should be.
Mark Paoletta, Ginni Thomas’ lawyer and a longtime friend of the Thomases, further elaborated on the payments in a statement. He said Crow had personally recommended Randolph Macon Academy, which Crow himself had attended and financially supported, for Martin before sending the first year’s tuition payment directly to the school. Then after later recommending a Georgia boarding school, Crow sent a year’s worth of tuition payments directly there before Martin returned again to Randolph Macon.
Though ProPublica tries to juxtapose these payments with a $5,000 “Education gift to Mark Martin” from different friends, Earl and Louise Dixon, that the Supreme Court justice did disclose — See!! Thomas knew he had to disclose tuition money! — that payment seems obviously different: Crow sent tuition for Thomas’ non-offspring directly to the school; the Dixons sent money to help offset Martin’s education costs to Thomas. ProPublica even admits Thomas was concerned about the Dixons’ gift and thus only accepted it under the terms it went directly into a trust for Martin. Thomas subsequently disclosed it, taking extra precautions for what he considered a gift.
Long story short, the Thomases didn’t actually violate any ethical standards. As Crow told ProPublica in a statement, “It’s disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.”
But ProPublica is mad, so it consulted unnamed “experts” who are also mad to drum up a fake controversy and drag a great American hero into another news cycle. How predictable.
Also predictable is the propaganda press glossing over details contradicting their favorite narratives and thus missing the real story.
Downplayed by ProPublica’s sorry excuse for journalism are the unsensational facts that Clarence Thomas and his wife took in their 6-year-old grandnephew to nurture and raise him for over a decade until he reached adulthood. These circumstances were familiar to Thomas. As he detailed at length in his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, the justice’s own maternal grandfather raised him and his brother when his single mother was unable to do so, an upbringing he credits with positively changing the course of his life.
Buried in the third-to-last paragraph of the article is an anecdote from Martin himself that, at one point, Thomas made tangible personal sacrifices to pay for his grandnephew’s private school himself, selling, as Martin described it, “his most prized car.”
On top of that, the Thomases’ close personal friends also cared enough about Martin to contribute in meaningful ways to the boy’s future.
At its heart, this is really a story about love, sacrifice, and provision — and it obliterates the left’s favorite abortion talking point: that as soon as a baby is born, conservatives no longer care about his or her life.
This ad hominem attack seems to crop up everywhere. Leftists shout it in response to conservative positions on abortion, adoption, and foster care; debates over dumping more money into failing public schools; disagreements over police use of force and self-defense; disputes over gun-control proposals; talks about securing the border; discussions about disastrous government health care policies; and more. Debates must be easy when you control corporate media, entertainment, and Big Tech and can declare uncontested that pro-lifers are morally bankrupt.
In the midst of the left’s dark discourse, however, Thomas is a shining light. While ProPublica and the rest of the corporate media can daily ignore the life-giving work of pregnancy centers, faithful Christians, adoptive parents, pro bono litigators, homeless ministries, thriving classical schools, and other institutions simply by not covering them, they accidentally expose the pro-life posture of true conservatives in seeking to make a monster out of Clarence Thomas.
Their smear fails in more ways than one. It turns out this pro-life architect of the Roe v. Wade takedown does care about life outside the womb.
