Ginni Thomas: Goofy Shit Believer, Political Warfare Queen

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Greg Olear 🇺🇦
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Ginni Thomas is smart enough to understand how to wield her enormous power, shrewd enough to leverage her hub’s status for maximum political impact & yet somehow foolhardy enough to—in Mencken’s elegant phrase—“believe passionately in the palpably untrue.”

gregolear.substack.com
Ginni T: Goofy Shit Believer, Political Warfare Queen
We all believe goofy shit. Most of it is harmless. But if she gets her way, the goofy shit Mrs. Clarence Thomas believes will topple our democracy.
4:47 AM · Oct 18, 2022

https://gregolear.substack.com/p/ginni-t-goofy-shit-believer-political

*snip*

Ginni Thomas is an exemplar of, and a partial inspiration for a whole book about, the peculiarly American propensity for believing in goofy shit.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with believing in goofy shit. I believe in goofy shit. So do you. We all have our quirks and eccentricities. Believing in goofy shit only becomes a problem when, as Andersen puts it, we “[go] overboard, letting the subjective override the objective”—when we think and, more importantly, act “as if opinions and feelings were just as true as facts.” And even then, it matters little if the goofy shit we believe involves angels, communicating with the dead, or David Stern rigging the 1985 NBA Draft so Patrick Ewing would wind up on the Knicks.

But if the goofy shit is that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald John Trump, or that the covid-19 vaccine was a diabolical plot involving Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates and secret Ukrainian biolabs, or that the Vice President has the power to subvert the will of the American people in a presidential election by violating boilerplate procedure, or that news articles about the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia are “the enforcement mechanism of diversity narratives that seek to implement cultural Marxism,” or that democracy should be shit-canned to install a Christian nationalist dictatorship to protect the lives of the unborn and persecute gays, or, even worse, all of the above, the goofy shit becomes harder to laugh off. And if the individual who believes in that brand of goofy shit is not only a major Beltway power player but the wife of a sitting Supreme Court Justice, over whom she has such outsized influence that she serves as unofficial den mother to his law clerks and brings him to work to talk to her own interns in a concerted effort to build “connective tissue” among rightwing religious radicals and therefore subvert the courts—that’s dangerous. Like, really dangerous.

Ginni Thomas is smart enough to understand how to wield her enormous power, shrewd enough to leverage her husband’s status for maximum political impact, savvy enough to stay off the mainstream media’s radar, disingenuous enough to play coy when she’s in the general public’s eye, cocksure enough to proceed full speed ahead with her Christofascistic schemes, and yet somehow foolhardy enough to—in H.L. Mencken’s elegant phrase—“believe passionately in the palpably untrue.” If believing in dangerous goofy shit were a virus, hellbent on killing our democracy, it could hardly have found a more fruitful host than Mrs. Clarence Thomas.

*snip*