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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees SO4-O months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What's stroking out? My all of Europe, because of, because of the heat and the lack of air conditioning and the houses built to retain heat and the the climate change. How you do in Europe. Everybody OK, are you talking about, are you talking about the runway that literally melted? Literally, Sophie, it's 40C over there, which in real people numbers is like a lot. Miles, do you know Celsius? Do you understand? Celsius? Miles greater than 1300 and 13113 Co, host of the daily Zeitgeist. Miles. Yeah. Why? Why do why do they use different numbers over there for the temperature? We all know, man. They just wanna Lord that **** over us because we kicked England's ***. We ******* owned their *****. Yeah. And then we owned the only other country in Europe. Germany. Yeah, that's right. So two European. Mm-hmm. That's right. That's the thing. We got to bring the Fano stones. For kicking *** miles, we both know how terrible the United States is. What is? Why do we have, why is there such joy as an American and making fun of Europe? What is it? What is that about us? I think because we know that we have no history, so that really, it's like, you know, it's like when you have like a dumb sports argument and like, there's that one thing someone can say about your team that's so ******* true. And you, you just it just upsets you. But then you can't do anything about it. That's like when, like, Europeans are like, but you have no history here. And everything is new or like McDonald's or blah, blah. And you're like, **** you, man. And you're like, no, it's true. That's true because it's all stolen and built over. Sure, I have drunk in a bar in Dublin that is like was has been in operation since before Columbus was a war criminal. Like, it's right like that. So, but now you guys are toasty. So there, yeah, hold that. But what's funny is too, like, in Spain. They know better. In Spain they're like, yo, you're out in the middle of the day, stupid. No, no, they're they're like. Look, we we we have yielded to capitalism in many ways, but we're not giving up our NAPS in the four hours in the middle of the day. Very jealous. Yeah, it's 40. It's 42, my man. It's in real people numbers. That's like, what, 70? Jesus, I don't know. I don't know. Nobody knows how to them. You know what everyone does know, miles. That Clarence Thomas is a real ***** ** ****. Ohh ****. Ohhh, I can't wait. Yeah, Clarence Thomas is a real he's. He's a real one. And we started this episode with some good old fashioned American chauvinism because most of this episode is going to be talking about a number of things that are terrible in our nation's history. Because the history of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the man who probably did more than any other single government official to end Roe V Wade and is doing his best to end a number of other civil rights. Is also the story of, like, everything that's terrible about this country and its history. Like, it's amazing how much **** is packed into this guy's life and how much, like, ****** ** stuff. I mean, the number one, you're going to be pretty sympathetic to this dude for the early part of this. And I I have to say one of the things, like, I want to start this, I guess, with like an admission for me. I think he's probably the ******** pod subject I've been wrongest about because for a long time I we I I'd never even thought of doing him until pretty recently. Not that I didn't. Think he's sucked, but like his years of, like he had, you know, number one for all very long time, he was viewed as like Justice Scalia's sidekick, basically. And people who knew anything about the Supreme Court were generally aware that that was not fair. But I'm not a Supreme Court nowhere, miles. That's not my, that's not my my strength. But Even so, he's got years of, like, I knew he had all these, like, cruel things he'd written and dissents and all this, like regressive **** that he'd championed. So, like, I I never doubted that he was a *******. But again, there's a reason why we don't cover everyone who just sucks on this show. And it's because, like, also they need to be interesting because this is entertainment too, right? And I I kind of thought like, well, he's just like a ****** guy who became a judge. How much could there possibly be? And that ******* life story? And now we're going to do a four parter on him. So. Holy ****. I was very wrong about this guy, so let me start by admitting that, OK, yeah, this is like we're getting a true we're getting the origin story. Yeah, of of the villain and a lot of weird, ****** stuff. Spoilers. We're going to be talking about pubic hair. Oh yeah. You know, I remember that part. Uh, now. Ohh, but I don't know if you remember this part. Milahs. I forgot where I was, where I learned about all the things I didn't know. I didn't want to know. That was that was a horrendously evil laugh and I did not have. Enjoy it. I've been working on it. Thank you. I'm trying to. I'm sorry. I went to. I went to a class hosted by the Riddler this weekend about unleashing your inner Batman villain and. I don't know. I don't wanna like, I don't wanna like, I don't wanna like toot my own horn because I'm early in the process. But I did just kidnap a billionaire son, so. Ohh, a little bit of applause. A little bit of applause. I'm working on it. It's gotta be good. Well, that's great. So, miles, if you casually read about Clarence Thomas the way most people do, because who's got the time to really know that much about the Supreme Court? Well, we all do now because it's an immediate threat to all of our futures. But if you, if you read these like real casual breakdowns of him, you'll learn a couple of things. He's very conservative. He never talks during oral arguments. He's been known as the silent justice for that reason. Although that's changed kind of recently and he got his start. Was just a Scalise like, he was kind of his lickspittle, right? He would vote the same way the Scalia did all the time. That's at least when people would say about him. And then, of course, there is the fact that he sexually harassed Anita Hill, who was questioned by Congress and ultimately ignored when Thomas was voted in on the narrowest margin in Supreme Court history. That's like the the baseball card, you know, version of Clarence Thomas's history stats. The stats, right? All of that is technically true, with the exception of him being Justice Scalia's lickspittle we'll talk about that later. But it turns out it's also also. Incomplete. That I now feel not going into detail about the life and beliefs of Clarence Thomas is kind of a disservice, so here we go. Clarence Thomas was born on June 23rd, 1948, in an unpowered wooden shack on the edge of a tidal swamp near the small town of Pinpoint, Georgia. As you might have guessed from everything in that last sentence, he was born into the kind of poverty that most of us who are capable of listening to podcasts can only dimly comprehend. Very few. Even as bad as poverty is in the cut, very few people exist in that kind of poverty in the United States this day, right? Like it is. He is, he is living, this is 1948. He's living with access to, like, 1840s technology for the most part, right? Like that is this kid's childhood. That's this kid, right? Like the world he comes into. His great, great grandmother had been born into slavery and emancipated at age 9 because of there's this war. Yeah, she had a son and her son. Had several young kids and then abandoned those kids, leaving her to take care of them. So that's his grandmother now. One of his grandmother's sons, kids who gets abandoned by her son, is a guy named Myers Anderson, who is Clarence's grandfather. On his mother's side, Myers refused to ever speak about his own father, but he also would follow in his footsteps. So Myers has a daughter, Leola Williams, who is Clarence's mom, and Leola is born out of wedlock. Her mother Myers's partner dies in a subsequent childbirth when she's three. Now, Meyers is not the kind of guy who wants to have daughters. He thinks that's kind of a waste of time, so he decides he's not going to raise his daughter, and he sends her to pinpoint Georgia where she's raised by his sister, her aunt. Her her aunt is not a nurturing kind of person. It's a very strict upbringing, and there's never any belief that, like Leola is going to have a future, right? Like she does not have prospects. Aunt Annie was illiterate, so Leola doesn't really learn how to read as a little girl, and Aunt Annie keeps her kind of ward whatever you want to call her from playing with other children. She doesn't want to let her socialize, she wants to keep strict control over her so she doesn't get pregnant young like it tends to happen. Leola was so desperate for some kind of childhood that she made dolls for herself out of clumps of weed, washing the roots to simulate hair. So, like, again, when we're talking about how poor these people are. Clarence's mom is making dolls out of clumps of weed, right. Like weeds. Like, that is. Yeah. Yeah. OK that's like a level. Yeah. Right. And like every, when you always talk about parenting, it's like we're all just trying to break cycles, you know, like what our grandparents did and what they did. So that's where we're starting here. Yes. Like you're saying send like, centuries past. You've got centuries of slavery and families being forcibly broken up. And then a pretty bad pattern gets started by by Myers's. Father who leaves the family. And Myers doesn't abandon his kids because he has a relationship with them, but he also doesn't want to take care of daughters. So he just kind of shuffles them off to whatever the oldest member of his family is, right? And that person's like, well, if you have any kind of freedom, you're clearly going to have even more kids before you're ready for them. So I'm going to basically make you live in a prison. So that's how Leola grows up when she's 16. She gets pregnant anyway with clearances, older sister Emma Mae, and she drops out of school. Leola. Was still a teenager when she had clearance a little bit after she has Emma. The shack that they lived in was insulated with newspaper and caulked with library paste. That was again like, that's what they have access to, right? Like, where are things free? What is it that you can get your hands on in order to, like, fill holes in your house just right, just about as desperate as it gets. Clarence's younger brother was born a little more than a year after him. Now you will notice that I have not talked a lot about their father. Clarence Thomas's dad is known as. MC Thomas and the reason he doesn't show up in this story much is that because as soon as he has three kids with Leola, he abandons her and his family because he's gotten someone else pregnant and her dad threatened to shoot him if he didn't marry her. So this is a rough start, right? Like, I think it's just like, OK, so it's the worst parts of everything go on this. It is like one of those if you were, if you were like writing this background for like a fictional character. People would be like, alright, well maybe pick like one of these things. Yeah right. An editor would be like, it feels like you're putting a hat on top of a hat. Yeah, with and it's how vivid this was. The history of suffering is yeah, it is. It is deeply difficult and it it's worth noting the community in pinpoint. This kind of upbringing is not common for other people who live in pinpoint, which is a black community. It is a very traditional community. It is very uncommon there for a father to leave his family. Or for children to be born outside of wedlock. Everyone is extremely religious here. So from the start, Clarence doesn't just grow up with all of this going on in his family, which is tremendously difficult, he's also ostracized. It is made clear to him by other people in the area that his upbringing is fundamentally different and, like, ****** ** right? Like ****. Yeah. Right. So yeah, it's this is ******* spooking me out, man, because it's so. You we, we constantly look at figures like this. Like, especially in this especially in the Supreme Court where you're looking at this idea that you know, on a whim they can curtail all these human rights and we're just like, how the **** could what's going on with you that you think it's all good? And to hear this story even start for this early on I'm like, oh, **** this sound again. This sounds like centuries of. Compounded negativity, suffering, coming together to form like this human being. And you're like, Oh my God, of course. Like, it's you can't fathom it. Yeah. And it's, I mean, this is probably why it's a bad idea to just, like, pick nine random people and be like you. You are our God kings now. Yeah, that's like, because all sorts of **** might have gone on in their backgrounds that make them do real wild ****. And maybe, yeah, that's not good. Umm, I don't know. Like it. You don't have to have had this background to wind up trapped in that nearly everybody winds up kind of trapped in the past to some extent. You know, maybe you just love the music of the 1990s, but everybody, everybody like, winds up growing up with something that you never quite move past, right? Which is why one of the many reasons why people shouldn't be able to hold too much power over each other because we develop all these weird ******* hang ups and it's best to just kind of minimize the damage that can do, is is my attitude right? So, yeah, we've covered some desperate origin show stories on this show, but I have to say, like, Clarence Thomas's early childhood is like, it's up there, you know, that is, that is rough. His dad, you know, again leaves as soon as he gets another woman pregnant. It's possible that Clarence's dad was Bigamously married. The legalities here are very unclear, but none of his kids were planned in general. That was not super common with his family, his mother later told interviewers. Quote, we didn't know. Anything about birth control or where babies came from when you got pregnant, you just had it. Umm. So yeah, as I said earlier, Clarence grows up aware that he's not living with the kind of family that most kids have. You know, everyone is extremely pinpoint, like money isn't a thing anybody has, but most kids have fairly stable family networks and, you know, are born kind of with at least that in their lives. Clarence is aware that he's missing something, a black journalist who knew Thomas when he was growing up told Jane Mayer. Jill Abrams and the journalist I believe is anonymous for understandable reasons. Jane Mayer and Jill Abrams, authors of the book Strange Justice quote. He starts out as a little black boy not accepted in the black world. He has no money, no family. This puts him at the bottom of the pecking order among Southern blacks, a community that is far more closed minded and rigid than many whites imagined. As soon as he was born, he was just out there, a floater. So that's one attitude at least on his background, right? That's a single person's opinion. Now, once his dad leaves, his mom was forced to move in. With the onto it raised her miserably and she leaves her kids with the aunt who had raised her. This very strict woman who like has had a life I can't even imagine in terms of difficulty. And Clarence's mom moves to Savannah, 15 miles away, which is a lot further back then, to work as a live in servant for a rich white family so that she could send money back home. She made $14.00 a day when she visited her kids. They would regularly ask about their father and you know. She would didn't really have a good answer for where he was. And this was made more miserable than by the fact that their fathers father, their grandfather on their dad's side was the town bus driver so that they had to see their grandpa every day without like having a relationship with them because like their dad was just gone. Yeah, rough. So life in PINPOINT was extremely difficult for again, the poverty here is very intense. Leola, like most local women, took the job that you could get as a woman and pinpoint which was working at a crab and shrimp. Factory uh, this is the kind of thing that most women who grew up there spent their entire lives picking crab and shrimp out of shells from dawn until dusk. Leola started when she was nine, which was very common. This is how people spend their whole lives and ******* pinpoint. It was illegal for her to start work at 9:00, but the plant owner didn't care and neither did the government of Georgia. And this is not a place where government inspectors come right. Nobody's showing up in pinpoint to check on these people, right? Because they are poor and black. So the government doesn't give a **** what happens as his life begins. Clarence seemed destined to a similar life path. This is what happened to most people in pinpoint education did exist technically, but it had to be done in between brutal work shifts because you have to help your family survive. So like learning and stuff come secondary. And of course you can't continue school once you have kids of your own, which often happens at like 15 or 16. A lot of folks around him are illiterate. Again, it's not. It's looking like this. Is more or less the path he's going to wind up on, just because there's not a lot of options. Uh, because set of segregation. People in pinpoint were not allowed to use the local beaches, the libraries, or the parks. All of those were outside of pinpoint. And even if they've been able to afford traveling to such luxuries, again, there was segregation. The Constitution technically guaranteed them the right to vote, but there were poll taxes and literacy tests in Georgia that made it basically impossible, and the rare occasions where a pinpoint resident would wind up in the same court as a white person. They were made to swear on separate Bibles. This is like as Jim Crow as it gets. This is not the kind of upbringing that you would expect somebody to be able to like, get a law degree and become a Supreme Court Justice from. And it did not happen too many kids in pinpoint. But in 1955, when Thomas was six, his life changed to his intense and lasting fortune. He and his brother accidentally lit their curtains on fire with a wood stove and burnt their family house to the ground. This put their great aunt mate. She was no longer able to take care of them, right, because like they were in their house down, so her mom. Their mom takes them in at first, but she is living in servants quarters, which is like this filthy tenement and Savannah that's like built by rich people to be as small as possible. So their servants just have a place to live. It is a single bedroom with an outdoor toilet, and it's not a kind of thing that you can really raise. Two boys in Leola begged their father for help. He wasn't willing to do anything, so she started to beg her father, Myers Anderson, who had abandoned her for help. And Myers eventually agrees to help because, again, they're boys, right? He didn't really care about raising girls, but these are boys now. I'm going to quote again from strange justice to talk about how Clarence would later relate what he said had happened. Quote Thomas's recollection of how Myers Anderson came to intercede is somewhat different. He has told a number of people over the years that at about this that time his mother became romantically involved with a man who had no interest in taking on her children. As his friend Michael Middleton remembers it, Thomas told me his mother dumped him and his brother on the grandfather because she'd met some man. So by the age of 7, Clarence Thomas had been abandoned by both parents. Now that could be true, she could have, like, decided to abandon them, but it seems more likely that she was just in a desperate situation. And needed help from her grandfather. Clarence hates his mom. He is like will be mean to her his entire life. You can have whatever opinion on that you want. I think he might have made that up. He makes a lot of stuff about his back story up. Yeah, yeah. I mean because that absolutely. When you describe, you know, this is her living situation. How could how could anyone think like that that was going to be the the place where she could have her kids grow up? Well, yeah. And Meyers is kind of like, if you're, if you're Leola, Myers is a great person to give your kids to because unlike everyone else, you know, in your life, he has money. He gets out of pinpoint. We'll talk about this in a bit, but he is doing well financially. So it's not just like. Well, you're a man in my family and I need help with these kids. It's well, you have ******* resources, and I've literally never met another single person who has resources, right? So yeah, Myers is not thrilled to take on new kids. He yells at Leola and he refuses at first, but then his wife threatens to leave him, and so he agrees to take in both boys. Now, Clarence has an older sister too, MMA Myers. Anderson still refuses to help with her. He's only going to raise the voice. Oh my God. It's it's yeah the the worst ******* messages are constantly being reinforced. Yeah person. I was like a child and you're my God. Like you're seeing it all start forming. Yeah like so early where it's like, no but I have value because I'm boy yeah I have value because I am boy. And like I am being now separated from my community and given an opportunity, no one elses. And yeah a whole bunch of **** is going to to result from this so. , his sister remains living in poverty with her aunt, living with like family because their house got burnt down. Now, while up to this point again, Clarence and his brother had been as poor as it gets, once they move in with Myers, they're suddenly middle class instantly his life, obviously, this is a ******* man who grows up in the late 1800s in Georgia, a black man. His life was grueling and tremendously difficult. He had never gotten beyond a third grade education, but he had turned a pushcart business into a coal. Rice and oil delivery business, like he's delivering fuel to local businesses and stuff and his business has done well enough that he's bought rental properties and a small farm like he is extremely successful in a very intelligent man. He had attempted to expand into contracting, like helping with like construction of houses in Savannah, but he had been denied a permit to make cement because of racism. So he is he is hit. Basically, Myers has hit the height of success that you're allowed to achieve. As a black man in Georgia in this period of time, and it's also been made very clear of him that you're not allowed to get do better than this, you know, exactly that there are limits to it. Yeah. So, yeah. That said, obviously his situation is still light years beyond what Thomas had enjoyed before. And once they're living with their grandpa, Clarence and his brother have electricity, they have indoor plumbing, and most importantly, they have access to good private schools right now. In return, they have to deal with Myers, Anderson and this section. From a write up in the Atlantic gives an idea of what he was like to live under. Quote. Anderson wouldn't let Thomas or his brother wear work gloves on the family farm as they cut sugar cane or helped butcher livestock. He never praised the boys or showed them affection. He feared the evil consequences of idleness, Thomas wrote in my grandfather's son, and so made sure that we were too busy to suffer them in his presence. There was no play, no fun, and little laughter. So that's good. That's all my all my favorite homies grew up like that. Good and normal guy to raise some kids. Holy hates women. Never smiles. Makes you hurt yourself to working fun and your book is still my grand what? Grandpa is my grandfather's son or whatever. Well, when Clarence gets older we'll talk about this, but he decides the fact that his grandpa because his grandpa is like the right wing platonic ideal of like a grandfather, right? He's this hard of working man who like doesn't cry, doesn't smile, you know? Strict discipline and and even though he doesn't really get along with his grandpa in real life, once he's in politics he recognizes that his grandpa is like, that's a money making endeavor, right? You can sell that to these white Republicans like that that you had this this strict background because he was so strict. We got so far. You know I wasn't able to be too black because I was my my grandfather made sure there was no riff Raff in stuff happening like it's it's a really, it's God. So ******* great again. With every ******* layer you add to this **** you start understanding his resentment of all kinds of people, of women, whatever, and you're like it's and it's wrapped in such trauma that it like, you can see how that manifests into somebody with a ******* like a demonic agenda like this. Yeah, it's not going to be surprising that the ends he reaches, like some of them will be surprising. Yes. But like, a lot of this does make sense. So Thomas would later write that his grandfather made sure that both boys knew that they had to, quote, work twice as hard to get half as far and that, like, yeah, that was just the way **** worked in the United States. Which to be fair, it did. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's I think a lot. Not just him, a lot of people. Yeah, I was told that too, but it was it was twice as hard for half the pay. Yeah. Yeah. That is like, yes, I and I have. Again, we've talked about like, he's not an entirely credible. Narrator about as best I have absolutely no whether or not his grandfather said those exact words, I have no doubt that he wanted to get that across to those kids, right? Right. That's ******* true. So while Myers clearly wanted both boys to be successful, that was kind of where his concern with them ended. He wanted them to be able to make like money and be successful in society. He seemed to have not even money as much as he wanted them to have like a position, right, like he wanted them to have. Like, do may status. Yeah, exactly. Status. He did not really seem to care about them as human beings. Thomas later told colleagues in government that Meyers rarely spoke to him except to order him to do chores. A Yale Law School colleague claims that Clarence told him of physical, frequent physical punishments for misbehavior. If he or his brother overslept, quote, they'd have the **** beaten out of them. And the book Strange justice goes into even more detail. Quote so Thomas and his brother were made to rise before dawn. And help their grandfather deliver: oil and spent their holidays and weekends doing heavy farm work for him. There seemed to be a tinge of cruelty in some of Anderson's weakness in some of Anderson's actions. Thomas, for instance, recalled that his grandfather had removed the heater from the fuel delivery truck because he felt that even on freezing winter mornings, heat was not conducive to good work habits and the old fashioned way of make of many such families. Challenges to authority were met with frequent and humiliating corporal punishment. A particular torture was the front hall closet, coat closet where, according to Leola. Williams Anderson used to lock the boys when they misbehaved. My daddy was hard. The kids couldn't get away with nothing, she recalled. Sometimes, when her father was too tired or busy to beat the boys himself, Leola said he would call her to whip them for him. But the little boys soon got too fast for her to catch. So instead, she said I would have to throw my shoes at their heads to catch them at all. So harsh, wished the so harsh, was the physical punishment, according to Armstrong Williams, later Thomas's aide at the EEOC. But Thomas still bears a thin scar from a whipping his grandfather administered. An electrical cord. So, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not maybe don't do that to kids every play. I mean. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, that, I mean, that kind of **** is so common, man. Yeah. And the the whole, like, older generations, too. It's like, there's the common stuff and then there's the. I've removed the heater from the truck because. Yeah, because being warm will make you work badly, like, huh? Yeah. He's he's got again every, every layer because it's like, not a single thing. Was like good except for the like his access to like higher society. Yeah actually he has access to money, but like none too affection. And again I think the actual, the physical punishments described there, that is just the norm across certainly the S right and and not just the South in the United, that's everywhere, right. Like that is that is incredibly common. Those attitudes that like, yeah, you're going to whip them with a ******* cord if they don't do something right. You pop a kid in the ******* face, you know like that is like my in Oklahoma, my public *******. School spanked us and **** and that was in the 90s. Like the the attitudes, particularly in rural areas, of like, physical punishment towards kids or not at all uncommon in this. It's the weird. You have to be miserable. You can't let yourself relax. You can't let yourself, like, feel good for a moment when you're working because that will make you lazy and that's dangerous. That, I think, is the thing that is actually really different about his upbringing. Right? Right. Yeah, it's. Yeah, just if it's again, it just freaks me out even more. Yeah, every single thing like it adds to someone being even more rigid and unable to see the good in anything, and acts out like their powerlessness in youth in a way to feel like omnipotent. Even. It's through. If it's through destruction, yeah, but you know who is omnipotent? Through their destruction? Miles. Which? Which aeronautics company? The products and services that support you know miles, our primary sponsor in this podcast is the corporation you probably know from one of their many delicious beverages, but who is also building a laser to end all life on Earth. See has realized that capitalism can't continue to expand indefinitely, but what can expand indefinitely is the circle of debris when we blow up the earth so by. Fund the space laser that will end all life. That's our that's our motto promo code. Kill us all. Go, go. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying. Or for a family. And it meant family start at 2 lines. 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A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals, no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy. Try better help is a great option. It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time when you want to be a better problem solver therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind. Better help calm behind this fall on revisionist history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people. Isn't that funny? That's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Ohh, we're back. So Meyer sends the boys to a Catholic school, which is he is also, he's a Catholic convert too, which matters to Catholics, but whatever. And he he's primarily, it seems like he kind of converts to Catholicism because that offers more opportunities. If you are a Catholic you can go, you can send your kids to Catholic school like it's a good community it it provides more support, right so. The school he sends the kids to cost about 20 bucks a year, which even then is not expensive for a private school, right? Like that's not a fortune back in those days, but it's still, I mean, it's certainly outside the reach of most families in pinpoint who probably never saw $20 in one place at the same time in their lives. And more to the point, it's out of reach of like a lot of black people and particularly rural Georgia in that. Because it is, well, it is a segregated school. It's a pretty good school. Because it's a Catholic school, right? So it has access to resources that public schools often don't. It's got a more progressive background than most. It had been founded in 1878 during reconstruction by a group of White Franciscan nuns who believed that black people could be good Catholics, which was real controversial at one point, like. Like, wow, yeah. Well, locals in in Savannah called them the inward nuns. Like that was the. Yeah, that's who founds this school that he goes to. And it is a good education. The nuns clearly cared about teaching their students and doing so well. That said, they are also Catholic nuns in the 1950s, so they're beating the hell out of these kids. You talk to anybody who goes to a Catholic school in the 50s, they're getting the **** slapped out of them with rulers like that is that's just how that. Those, right? Yeah. Wow. OK. So again, hey, so how was school like? Pretty good. Were the teachers, like kind of forward thinking and challenged their beliefs and things? No, they beat the **** out. Well, it's even worse. It's like they were forward thinking for the time and also being the like. Actually, it's a little bit from column A yeah, a little bit from common. They believed we were people, so it was important to hit us in order to make us learn Jesus Christ. Yeah, the 50s, man. Quite, quite a time. So, yeah, segregation officially ends in 1954. That doesn't mean that kids in all white and all black schools suddenly stop going to those though, right? It's a process. And so it's not until 1964 when Thomas starts attending an elite Catholic High School that he actually is an integrated classrooms. So fairly early on in his childhood, segregation legally ends. But it's not until he's in high school that he actually is in an integrated classroom, right. So he winds up, you know, finally. Going to a school that is not like segregated based on race and he would later call state enforced segregation quote as close to totalitarianism as I would like to get, which is interesting because he's only it actually it ends when he's 6, right. So like right at the start of his education is when segregation ends. You might want to look at that as like an example of him like kind of playing up the story. I don't think necessarily that it is. I think it more speaks to the fact that the legacy of segregation exists in his life throughout his childhood even though again it ends. Very early on in his life, but it doesn't end because it's not a clean break like we often like petition momentum behind this. Yeah, so Clarence's father remains close to a complete non entity for the rest of his childhood. Years later during a speech at Pepperdine University, Clarence would give a bit of detail into one of the only interactions he ever has with his dad. Quote I saw him only twice when I was young. The first time was when my mother called her parents with whom my brother Myers and I then lived and told them that. Someone at her place wanted to see us. They called a cab and then sent us to our housing Project department, where my father was waiting. I am your daddy, he told us in a firm, shameless voice that carried no hint of remorse for his inexplicable absence from our lives. He said nothing about loving or missing us, and we didn't say much in return. It was as though we were meeting a total stranger, but he treated us politely enough and even promised to send us a pair of Elgin watches with flexible bands, which were popular at the time. Though we watched them all the mail every day, the watches never came and went. A year or so had gone by my grandparents. Bought us for them. Bought them for us instead. My father had broken the only promise he ever made to us. After that, we heard nothing more from him, not even a Christmas or birthday card. For years my brother and I would ask ourselves how a man could show no interest in his own children. I still wonder. I do feel like that's overwhelmingly the reaction to these adepts. Like, *** **** they're so ****** **. You're like, you couldn't you couldn't construct someone more who's been through all this kind of, like, **** that would make you ******* this guy. Yeah, anyway. One or two things to one of with that anecdote with his grandparents and the watches says that they've got them. The watches is one of two things is true either. Well, I guess one of three things is true. Either maybe he played up how hard his grandfather was and there was actually more softness in that relationship than he wanted to admit and this is an example of it. Or his dad was just so ****** that even his ******* grandfather was like, all right, like, I got to get these kids the ******* watches, like this is just too bad, or it's grandma, right? Or grandma was was the one. Did that happen? I mean, either way, I think even if you even if you're lying, but that's what you want. That's who you want people to think you are. Yeah, that's also pretty instructive. Like at every level, the many things can be true. He is. There's a lot to think about here. So when he starts high school, he is a member of the first generation of his family to enjoy any kind of quality. Again, his grandfather has a third grade education, not uncommon at the time. And yeah, so he is, he is the first male member of his family, he and his brother, because they're at the same age to go to a good high school. As the book Strange Justice makes clear, a good deal of his opportunity here came as a result of the successes of the civil rights movement, right. It's not just his grandfather's success. It is the fact that a lot has people have been fighting for him to have this opportunity. Quote. And Thomas's first year of life, President Harry Truman, in a controversial state of the Union address, called for more extensive civil rights laws. Including the establishment of some sort of Fair employment practices program, the **** of the idea that eventually grew into the EEOC. The speech touched off such furious opposition in Georgia that Senator Richard B Russell proposed export exporting the state's black population to the north. Leading the fight against such racial progress was the staunch segregationist Jay Strom Thurmond, the same man who had championed Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court. Some 4 decades later, on May 17th, 1954, when Thomas was five, the Supreme Court handed down. It's unanimous decision ordering the end of public school segregation. The lead attorney was Thurgood Marshall, then the head of the N Double ACP's Legal Defense Fund. Marshall is who Clarence Thomas is going to replace on the Supreme Court. So Grandpa Meyers would have agreed with the fact that, like his son's up or his grandson's opportunities were a result of both his hard work and all of the civil rights fighting. Because Myers Anderson was a dedicated member of the N AA CP he earned, he earned the nickname in town sharpshooter, for the skill with which he targeted boycotts. Against racist white businesses. Is again. He's like a hard dude. But you also get the feeling that if you're fighting off, like, you want this ************ on your side in a fight. Yeah, like he's he's good. OK, well, what's he like? Oh, I mean, he's the worst ******* grandparent. He's a ****** grandpa. But you know what? He allied, though. Yeah. Yeah, he don't. Guided the N double ACP chapter with free heating fuel in the winter at the expense of his business. One friend of the so clearly he didn't think that it was bad for them to have heating. I don't know. I don't know how to parse that all out. It's all very yeah. Everything's very conditional. Yeah, yeah. One friend of the family at the time noted that Clarence attended a few N double ACP meetings as a boy. But he was at boarding school for a lot of the time, right. And a number of like folks who grew, like, grew up with him and report on this time. Say that like while they were doing in double ACP stuff, he was at boarding school quote surrounded by whites. Clarence recalls his school differently. He describes it as an entirely black environment and both of his schools were majority black. It's again, we're not ever getting objective when we're talking about the people who knew him or him. This is everything's filtered through decades of memory because this is all a long time later and everyone's feelings on the matter too. So I don't want to like, put one side or the other as like 100%. Write about what was going on here. Yeah. You wanna do both sides? Well, at least, like, I don't know. I was. I'm just. I'm. I'm not. I'm not growing up in ******* Savannah, GA, in 1950s. But it is, it is worth noting that, like, he benefits from the civil rights struggle, but his grandpa has also put him in a situation where he's not taking part in it, you know. Right. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's abstract to him. Yeah, exactly. He's already has gigantic chips on both shoulders. Yeah. And at least it's at this point, it seems to be kind of, it won't be later, but that is he does have that ability as a child that it is kind of abstract. So this is one of those areas where we get into the inconsistencies between how other people. Describe Thomas's youth and how he has described it since. Once he became a conservative political figure, and this happens before he's a Supreme Court Justice, he's lobbying for years. Thomas made a point of claiming in speeches that he would give for things like the Federalist society and all these colleges. He would always make the claim that he had succeeded in spite of a low quality education, right? In one 1988 speech he told an audience quote. I don't understand how it is that people today are getting worse educations than I received in the segregated schools of Savannah now. We already know that, like, that's not 100% accurate, right. Like just based on his actual background because he right to a very high quality series of private schools right, right now, obviously, like there's a lot to say about that, but he it it's just not true. Like the things that he would claim about his education and he's obviously as a right winger. He's claiming that in order to be like, look, the schools don't need more money. You know, the poor schools that I went to did a better job than modern schools. There's some cultural thing that's making the schools bad where it's like, no man, your grandpa paid for you to go to a great. Private school dudes. Like, yeah, he's he's playing. Yeah, he's Mr Ultimate bootstraps. Yeah. And it's fine. Like, it's good that your grandpa did that for you. But, like, don't pretend that you, like, had a hard Scrabble, Scrabble public school education because you didn't. I think that's, like, the thing, right? Because if if there's a fork in the road, if you're like, choose your own myth making adventure, you want to choose the against all odds right version Nook. Because that's part of especially in with America like, most people want to obscure the fact that. Like, you know, they're like generational. Uh, they were generationally admitted to like, an Ivy League school and like, Nah, man, like, it was all hard graft. I came from the nowhere. Well, yeah, I think for him too, that really helps for like multiple levels to be like, yeah, I went to a ****** school. That's why they don't need anything. And also look what I did, folks. Yeah, lifted myself out. It's ****** ** because, like, obviously there's a ******** of kids and family members of his who grew up in pinpoint who could have gone as far as he did, or at least, like, got a hell of a lot further than they did. In the the capitalist sense of the word, but didn't because they had to grow up in pinpoint picking fish out of like shells and stuff because that was the only opportunity they got. He gets thankfully like luckily I should say he gets an opportunity because of his who you know who his grandfather is, but he doesn't like to acknowledge that in the future except for like when he he does he has to. He does acknowledge his grandfather, but always in the the way his hardness shaped him as opposed to the way his. Their sources provided opportunities, and I think that's really interesting. Yeah. So this just like, wow. Yeah, that it's. I was just carved out of my grandpas sternness. Yeah. That's. I mean, it makes sense that this is like the way he's going to claim it. So this next bit gets into some territory that is definitely uncomfortable and difficult for me to parse out well. But we're going to talk about the specific kind of racism that Clarence. Within his youth. And a lot of it did not come from where I think at least where I would have expected being a ******* white dude who did not grow up in Savannah, GA, and I'm going to quote from a write up in The New Yorker here. His nickname in the schoolyard in the streets was ABC, America's blackest child. If he were any blacker his classmates cheered, he'd be blue. Color was code for class. The darkness of Thomas's skin, along with the Gullah Geechee dialect he retained from PINPOINT, was a sign of his lowly status and origin. For Thomas, these cruelties are a lifelong hurt. People love to talk about conflicts interracially, he told the reporter Ken Foskett, who published a biography of Thomas Judging Thomas in 2004. They never talk about the conflicts and tensions interracially from a young age. The primary divide Thomas had to confront came from the privileges associated with black wealth and light skin. You had the black elite, the school teachers, the light skinned people, the dentists, the doctors, Thomas has said. My grandfather was down at the bottom. They would look down on him. Everybody tries to gloss over that now, but it was the reality. And, you know, that is Thomases and again, other folks, you know, have different recollections, but this is what he recalls of like what he deals with as a kid. I mean, yeah, at every, at every turn and get like, right that there's he grew up having already feeling inferior as like a black kid because the community he grew up in. And then on top of that, the colorism **** comes into it as well and makes him even more. His resentment, yeah. It becomes like, Oh my God, one of the things every again, at every ******* level. Yeah, there's no he has no, he doesn't belong anywhere. Yeah. Or and feels like he has a bone to pick with everything. And you see how that leads to the man he becomes in this like this ideology of self-reliance, which is a fantasy, but like you get how someone who comes who grows up feeling like they don't have a place anywhere. That grows up with this attitude towards self-reliance. Now of course the reality is we've talked about is that like he benefited tremendously from a community that fought for his his rights, even though it does seem like maybe that it didn't feel that way to him, but like that was what was going on. His grandfather was a part of that. It's very bleak that this is kind of a lot of what he seems to take out of the period. And again, for all of his like right wing white supporters, he's the version of blackness. That they wished every other black person. Yeah. Like was like, it wasn't really an issue, actually. If you want, there's racism. It's between black people. Exactly. Exactly. And that his narrative doesn't offend anyone or take notice of the struggle that pretty much every other black person in the country had to. Yeah, yeah. It's it's again a lot going on here. Yeah. Yeah. Everything's not 5D6D9D chess now. After high school, Clarence enters the seminary. His grandpa wanted him to be a Catholic priest. He's really, really approving of this mood move. It's probably one of the few things that like Clarence gets like some kind of like expression of pride from his grandfather for doing because that's like man, if you're a ******* Catholic priest, you're that's like at least for Catholics about the height of like respectability, you know? All right, man. So he gets admitted to a pre study program because being a priest is kind of like. Being a doctor. In 1964, this is the year that Congress you rather have operate on you, Robert. A priest. Of course. Because the doctors are just gonna put that ******* Bill Gates chip in me miles takes. That's right. That Bill Gates chip. You're the one I'm talking about. Bait. Yeah, I'm glad. And for that pro science ********. Well, I I don't know. You see, miles, you've. I don't believe in the Bill Gates chip in the vaccine. I believe that Bill Gates is putting chips inside of all of us that allows him to control when we orgasm. That's why you can't go to the doctor. Stay away from the doctor, OK. I didn't think I didn't hear about this. Yep, the Bill Gates probably ship. Look it up. Go to Bill Gates. Come ship. Chip or ship. That's a different thing. Oh no, there's a. He does have a. Come ship. Yeah. Miles. Go to reddit.com and type in Bill Gates *** chip or Bill Gates come ship. Yeah, and you'll get hit. Ship is very interesting. Yeah, there's a lot going on with the come ship. OK, so anyway, we digress. We digress. To our. Heads because miles, this podcast is sponsored by Bill Gates. Come ship and come chips. Let Bill Gates be your one stop shop for seaman for the makers of. 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You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time when you want to be a better problem solver therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind. Betterhelp com behind this fall on revisionist history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Ohh we're back so. 1964, the year he gets admitted to his pre study program for for seminary. Again semen come perfect. That's the year also that that Congress debates Civil Rights Act. The rector of the seminary he goes to, William Coleman is a progressive and he chose to offer clearance and one other black student scholarships in order to make sure that there wouldn't just be white priests, right. Like that's it's kind of an affirmative action program, you know, and he and his brother are the OR he and the. This other student are the first black people admitted to this particular seminary. Prior to starting preschool, Clarence had been awkward and uncomfortable around women. Friends noted that he seemed to nurse a deep well of resentment towards his mother and becoming a or learning. Doing the pre study for becoming a Catholic priest did not help with this part of his life. From strains justice quote. If Thomas was unsophisticated about girl, certainly the nuns had done little to change that. The only sex education the youngsters at Saint Benedicts and St Pius X received. Called Johnson was from their own parents, which Thomas lacked after 6th grade. Boys and girls were separated in class and the Johnson is one of the other students there recalls. We were lectured about sin all the time. The nuns view of women at that time, according to Carol Delaney, who was taught by them in Savannah, was that we should become wives and mothers and submit completely to male authority. The husband was the head of the wife as Christ was the head of the church. Women were associated with sin through EVE. So again, this is the good, I mean. Well, this is now seminary. Yeah, so? This is what he's learning. You're the main character in a religious video game, yeah, where you have to fight the evil women and but you're a incel pretending you're Val cell. Yeah. And it's there's a lot to be said by someone who is better at an analyzing these things than me of like the similarities between his grandpas attitude towards like, well I'm not going to raise a girl that's not worth it to what these priests and nuns are teaching him about women, right. I would like do the nuns ever go? And I'm bad too. I suck so hard I'm actually get the I'm a serpent. The mother of saying. Why am I here? I gotta go. I'm bad. So According to him, he's a pretty good student at seminary. But he is also kind of becomes, in this point, constantly infuriated by the racism he encounters from the other students. Because, again, it's just him and one other black student. Everybody else is white as hell, he later recalled one night when the lights were turned off and a classmate said, quote, smile clearance. So we can see you. Yeah, he was particularly bothered, he says later. Not by the fact that. People laughed, but by the fact that nobody came to his defense, right? He has like these friends and they won't stick up for him. Which, Yep, I don't have any trouble believing that he reached a snapping point in 1968 during his first year at actual seminary, right, because he has to do preschool for priests precum yeah, he's got a pre *** before he can get to be real simple seminary. So when he when he joins that big ******* he learns, oh boy, no, I should. That's not a good way to lead into that line. So during his first year at the actual seminary, you know, it's 68, which is the year that Martin Luther King Junior is assassinated. And when that happens, he recalls a classmate, says to him, good. I hope the SLB dies, I think because there was lag time in between him being shot. Yeah, yeah, finding out. Clarence says that racism is why he ultimately quits the seminary. His grandfather is ******* furious at this, right? Like, obviously, if you know anything about Myers Anderson, the fact that you encountered racism and seminary is not an excuse to not become a priest to that guy, right? Like, right. Exactly. Over a little bit of racism. Yeah. Let me tell you about racism. Yeah. So it this doesn't go over well, his grandfather throws him out of the house. And his memoir Thomas would later write he'd never accepted. Any of my excuses for failure and he wasn't going to start. Now you've let me down, he said. For years the two remained estranged and Myers Anderson refused to attend his grandsons, graduations, or wedding. Ohh my, I know rice is so ******* bleak. Is that according to Thomas or that's according to someone that is according to Thomas? I have not heard any counter to that story though. OK, but yeah, Jesus. Now there's a couple of things that are left out. One of them is that a big part of why Myers becomes angry is that when his son. Because he's gonna go on to become a lawyer and he's going to justify it because when he drops out of preschool, he's like, well, I've decided I want to become a lawyer so that I can help the community, right, so that I can fight for civil rights. And he never does this. So one thing that is left out of this people will claim who knew the family at the time is that Myers was also angry that he doesn't do that part of it. So I don't know. Again, we Alltel stories about our pasts, right? So one of the nuns who ever tell you about that helicopter I was in that got shot down? No. Maybe. Maybe you can have it. OK, so you're not gonna you're not gonna give us the helicopter story right now? You just bringing that up? Just teasing that. I'm just saying I was with a lot of brave men and women that day. Well, I was in a helicopter once with with William Gates. We were heading towards an island. A friend of ours, buddy named Jeff, owned Little Iowa. Just out in the anyway. So you don't think that's a good? You don't think that's a good bit? I think that's good. Terrible bit. You don't think the hung out on Epstein's island bit has legs? I don't know why we've gotten into this territory. No. Why are you doing this? It doesn't make you look very good or cool. It's because the word seamen is kind of in seminary and in seminary that's also kind of fun. And then there's all these guys. Priests are always. This is. That's what I mean. Like, this is not a good. This is not a good bit. No, this is. And I'm not a good guest to have for serious things, you know? Yeah. I probably, I don't know why you're like, going back to your middle school humor for this episode, Robert. It's it's kind of. You know, it's not your thing. It is my thing, Sophie. It's always been my thing is my thing. It is too my thing. Well, it's it's like three more times like three years ago. So it's the middle schooler? Umm, yeah. So I'm gonna teach everybody how many times I can say come in a four part series about Clarence Thomas. It's actually very appropriate given some weird things that he does to all of his coworkers. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. Great. So one of the nuns who likes him, right, because he decides to quit. And apparently one of his guns is like, hey, if you're not going to be a priest, why don't you go to Holy Cross, which is a Catholic College in Wooster? I think it's pronounced Worcester, MA. It is spelled Worchester. I'm so angry. Wooster, ******* nonsense. So this is a white liberal college, which you might expect to have been better than the seminary in Savannah, GA. It is not. After 1968, it had decided to actually try and recruit black students, and in order to do that they set up. A. A scholarship fund, uh, named after Martin Luther King and Thomas receives one of these scholarships to go to the school that he would not have been able to afford otherwise, which is again the second time that he's he's benefited from an affirmative action program. To summarize his time in college, I want to quote from the book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. Quote moving to a white institution in the north repeated the trauma of moving to a white seminary in the South, which Thomas described in an interview with the crisis, the magazine of the N Double ACP. Thus quote, so you leave that all black. Environment and you go into an environment where you are the only black and you are sitting where you live day in, day out and attend the classes, and the only blacks you see are the two women who work in the kitchen and the rest are white people. You go through some changes. Going through those changes in the charged context of an integrating Northern College campus surrounded by the tenants and techs of blacks. Nationalism transformed him. It was a special time in my life, he says. In later years, Thomas would downplay the presence of black nationalism in his mature thinking, hotly declaring. I'm not a nationalist yet. Never disavowed its role in his development, going so far as to invoke Malcolm X as an analog for precedent or precedent in his biography. I have been angry enough in my life, and there are some points where I'm sure my attitudes approached black nationalism. I'm certain you could say the same thing about Malcolm X in college. Thomas's black friends love to tease him about the furfur of his commitment and the seriousness of his study. What woman would want this man anyway? He's into books and black power, but even as a Supreme Court Justice, looking back on his youthful development, Thomas refused to mock the moment. I was an angry black man, he wrote in his memoir. The more I read about the black power movement, the more I wanted to be a part of it. I used to be an angry black man. Yeah, like you were. I mean, that's one way to describe you really getting in touch with the impression that you have felt. And he does have this brief period of being not just in touch with oppression but like actually committed to doing something about it, right. He is like he is a combat boots and Black Panther beret type activist. Are there. Pictures of him? Like, then? I don't know. I haven't found any that's like the Oh my God, that's the most ****** ** picture. Like, look, I probably yeah, like, I'm sorry, boy. And his his first trip to Washington DC, the very first time he ever goes, is a March on the Pentagon against the Vietnam War. The last protest he ever goes to turns into a massive street bar brawl where 2000 cops assault 3000 protesters demanding the release of Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale and a prominent leading Panther, Erica Huggins. Years later, Thomas would insist, quote I was never a liberal. I was a radical. And and this seems to be true. He organizes a free breakfast program for kids in Wooster, patterned off from what the Black Panthers had done. He supports Communist Party member Angela Davis and her flight from the US government. He helps organize a black student union at his college, and he also publishes a manifesto in that magazine that is extremely black nationalist, with lines like quote the Black Man does not want. Or need the white woman. The black man's history shows that the white woman is the cause of his failure to be the true black man. I know, right? Clarence Thomas. I don't think that's a not gonna be a a A twist. A lot of people see common. So then, like if it's like a cheesy narrative like he has to, I wonder what the moment is that he goes to the dark side, like if he was a Jedi. Yeah, I think part of it is like inverts. He is always, even when he is on this radical side, he's fundamentally rooted in some pretty regressive things as we're going to cover a big part of what? He believes in as a radical in this. Is also the subjugation of women by men, which a lot of left wing 60s radicals #1. There's been a great deal written and a lot by female Panthers about sexism they encountered from these guys who are otherwise heroes of the Black Panther movement. Because again, there was a lot of misogyny in the Panthers. And then there's guys like Stokely Carmichael, right, of students for a democratic society who had a quote that was something like what is the purpose of like a woman in the SDS? And he's like. Well, it's for us to **** right? Like that was again. It is still the 60s, right, right, right. Like there are still limits to what we are capable of thinking about. Yeah, that's wild that even for him he's like, yeah man, like, I'm still, he's like white women are the devil. Yeah, he's still on theme for me. And it's also like you can talk about misogyny within a lot of these left wing circles and black nationalist circles and the same way that like, yeah man, if you went to ******* Woodstock about it, around a bunch of open minded hippies and like, we're a man. Kissed another man. You would probably get beaten within an inch of your life because, like, they're still pretty homophobic, you know? Right, right. Like it was 1969. Yeah, it's not 2040. Yeah. Optimistic miles. So I wanna quote next from a write up by The New Yorker quote. After the BSU learned that a member was dating a white woman, the student convened the group, convened a mock trial, found him guilty, and broke his Afro comas punishment. Thomas took the role more seriously, particularly after meeting Kathy Ambush a black woman who he whom he would marry in 1971 and divorce in 1984 in a poem he called is you is or is you ain't a brother. He set out the obligations of black men to black women even in that milieu. Even Marita and Michael Fletcher reported in the 2007 biography Supreme Discomfort, Thomas's edgy race consciousness stood out when he saw an interracial couple strolling on campus. He'd loudly demand do I see a black woman with a white man? How could that be? Until 1986, when Thomas met Virginia Lamp, who was white and who would become his second wife, he opposed interracial marriage and sex. What? He's a real like, there's a lot going on in the sky. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Wow. I it makes me. It makes, first of all, makes my brain hurt. And then I think about how if he really was, like, trying to reverse, like, the loving decision. Yeah, that's like him being like, no, I really feel this way and I'm going to live that and I'm. I'm regressing to this very bizarre intersection of my beliefs and like, what the ****? Where and who are you? You also see it's interesting because you can see #1. There's a lot of consistency in his belief towards women and what rights women should have. And also and a certain flexibility when he wants something. Right. Because he meets a white woman that he likes and he's like, OK, well, now I'm not against interracial marriage. Right. Oh, you know, not all white women. Yeah, exactly. Come on. I was kind of tripping when I wrote that rap song. Yeah. I mean, and this is, I guess this is all, this is #1A very human thing. But also, it's, like a very conservative thing. Like, you can think about John McCain being, like, the only Republican being, like, we shouldn't torture people. Why? Well, because I got tortured. What? So I know it's bad. Alright? Why don't you brag about it? Yeah. I don't know. People are complicated and generally hypocrites, but you know who's not a hypocrite? Miles. Hmm? You, when you plug your products or pot, whatever. Miles is the end of the episode. Say some things that people can find you at. Oh, you can find me just at miles of Grey on Twitter and Instagram. And if you like, you know, I I do a Daily Show about news and politics and stuff called daily zeitgeist. Even listen to that every day. Or, if you like, trash reality TV. Because that's what I do to avoid thinking about our crumbling Earth. Yeah, check me out on 420 day fiance where I get high and talk about 90 day fiance. Check out the Alexander Miles on the daily zeitgeist on 420 day. Fiance play both at the same time from different devices. They sync up in a way that will reveal secrets to you about how to gain special powers. Exactly. And you can even listen. I'm a third show because I can't stop talking called miles. Jack got mad Busties where I'm just talking about basketball. So a lot of you can get your serious or your frivolous on. Have you seen that Adam Sandler basketball movie yet, miles hustle? Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was pretty good. I thought it was pretty good. I was telling somebody there's like a million scenes in that where, like, I know a famous basketball player just walked on scene and I'm supposed to be like, Oh my God, it's that guy. But I can't tell if they're actors or not because to me, it's just like, well, everyone's very tall in this movie except for Adam Sandler. Sophie James Goldstein is even has a cameo. I don't know who that is. That's how like there's these like deep cut basketball people in it. I didn't realize the Spanish guy who's the second main character is an actual basketballer. Yeah, a basketball izman. Exactly. Thank you. Speaking of balls, the episodes over, we did it, guys. Boom. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SPREAKE. Or.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Survive on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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