Good morning, peeps, and welcome to Oka f Daily with Meet your Girl Danielle Moody recording from the Home Bunker. Folks, It's like the news coming out about Clarence Thomas, his
criminal grifting ass just won't stop. And what's so infuriating about the latest round of just how corrupt this Supreme Court justice is, which is the fact that he has been refusing to disclose over the last what seventeen years or so, that he's been getting a salary from a firm that no longer exists, a real estate firm that was started in the nineteen eighties that closed in two thousand and six, but somehow between two thousand and six
and roughly now, Clarence Thomas has somehow been getting a income from there. Also latest discoveries that Harlan Crowe, Everyone's favorite villain, billionaire villain, bought Clarence Thomas's childhood home, that Clarence Thomas's mother still lives in, that she doesn't pay any rent or mortgage too. Like if there was a hearing an investigation that needed to be opened, I feel like, hello, Floodgates,
we are there. But because we know that Democrats don't want to be called bad names by Republicans, and they think that if they don't investigate things, then Republicans will play nice in the sandbox. The Republican Party has lit the sandbox on fire and filled it with gasoline. So I'm confused about why you feel that if you do move or you don't move, that somehow your friends from across the aisle are going to magically turn back into your friends again.
They are not.
They want you dead. They literally have said so in so many different ways. So let's just do what the people elected you to do, which is to make sure that our government and our judiciary isn't filled with corrupt,
fucking grifters. There's an idea just throwing it out there, you know, when you see this level of corruption and you think about the millions of dollars that Republicans have spent, whether it was on Benghazi, whether it was on their trial to try and get rid of Bill Clinton, whether it was on like bullshit investigations into the Obama administration that all came.
Up with zilch, right, zilch.
And you look at the investigative report right now that's being done by the New York Times, and every single week is coming up with the new news about Clarence Thomas and his wife Jinny and how they have been grifting, And this wouldn't matter so much. It'd almost be comical if he were some po dunk judge right that only had state jurisdiction. No, he has jurisdiction over all of our fucking lives. So doesn't it matter whether or not
he is corrupt, whether or not he's taking payoffs. My fucking god, I'm just wondering when, if ever we are actually going to clear the swamp out. You know, Donald Trump, remember back in twenty sixteen, is like, Oh, We're gonna drain the swamp. Yeah, you drained it, and you put it into all the fucking streets, every single main street.
Right.
I feel like we've been swimming and shit for the last seven years, and I'm like, can somebody take a hose to this shit?
Ugh?
Anyway, I'm just really outdone, you know, on top of the fact that the Senate Judiciary should fucking call an emergency hearing and haul his ass and haul Chief Justice John Roberts's ass in front of the committee, besides the fact that Merrick Garland should open up a fucking investigation into Clarence Thomas and his wife and should have been doing that, even if it was only around the fucking insurrection and not all of their grifting, fucking schemes that
they've been up against. But my god, it would be lovely to believe that we live in a country of laws. I would love that. Coming up next, dear friends, on today's show, I'm always excited when I get to have one of my favorite people on joining to really delve into the legal woes that this country, our democracy are facing.
So coming up next to my conversation with Dahlia Lithwick, who is a New York Times best selling author of the book Lady Justice, Women, The Law and the Battle to Save America, and she is also a senior editor at SLAT and an MSNBC contributor and the host of Amicus. That conversation is coming up next, folks. I am always very excited when I get to bring back to the show some of my friends, and Dahlia Lithwick is just that the author of Lady Justice, Women, The Law and
the Battle to Save America. My fellow nerd Avenger, we do Mary Trump's show together, and my fellow comrade in crazy is what I will call it, Dahlia. I will start this off that we have had more mass shootings than we have had days in the year. We're now in April. We are facing a decision to pull FDA an FDA approved medication if a pristone that aids an abortion that was approved back twenty plus years ago by the FDA is safer than a lot of over the
counter medications. As I've been hearing, we have learned, Dahlia, that Justice Clarence Thomas is a grifter and has been spending a lot of his time with a known billionaire and receiving lavish gifts somewhere of you know, five hundred thousand dollars vacations. I'm also dying to know what a five hundred thousand dollars vacation looks like, because I said, where did he go?
Mars?
And you know, just the weaponizing of the Republican Party. I don't even know where to start. So what I will start with is how are you faring in this New America?
So, first of all, Danielle, it's always for me, just like balm to the soul, no matter how bad it is to be in conversation with you. I just feel like I hear you in my ears so often, you know through the day that to get to actually like be with you is immensely better than being alone imagining what you could say.
So thank you, you know.
I think I want to start with one really heartening piece of news, which is people are pissed off, and to the extent that you and I have spent the last what two years saying where's the energy, where's the anger? Where are the people taking to the streets, Like holy hell, Danielle, Like they took to the streets in Tennessee, they took to the streets in Wisconsin, and God, a Supreme Court justice elected people stood in line for freaking hours to
decide a Supreme court a state supreme court race. Young people who should not bear the burden of fixing our gun problem are taking it upon themselves to do that. And so I just want to lift up before we go down the like despair trail, to the extent that this past couple of weeks has suggested to me that people of color are awake, trans families are awake, young people you know in school who do not want to
live to be massacred tomorrow are awake. I'm pretty heartened by the fact that the slumber that you and I have decried for a long time. Yep.
Yeah, it feels like it's abating.
Now we can talk about and we probably have to talk about.
The through line to every single day point you just.
Gave, whether it's Clarence Thomas, whether it's you know, Gerrymander, supermajority, legislators that don't care, whether it's you know, the madness of the NRA, every one of those things is of a piece with what you do when you need to preserve power and you are in the face of a juggernaut of awake people. That's it's all the same story. Yep. It's the through line is there, and so we can
talk about that. But I just think that the thing that you and I have wanted to see for so long, which is fury and rage and passion and people standing in the well of the Tennessee State House saying, oh, this is not democracy, let's like take a moment and
say that's happening, right. Yeah, you know I will say that I tweeted you know that I'm no longer going to be so cavalier about my thoughts with regard are to Red States, because the actions that have been taken by young people people of color in Tennessee in direct response to the expulsion of Justin Jones and Justin Pearson and not the white representative that make up the Tennessee three really has struck a chord in me because, you know, we talk a lot because we're in this kind of
space where it's trying to use our platform and voices to.
Sound an alarm right that all is not well. And I think that the Republicans, and I want to ask you, did they overplay their hand like we continue to say, oh, this is going to be the tipping point, This is the tipping point, and maybe there isn't ever going to be just one. Maybe it is it is the domino that tips in. It's a series that you know, falls one right after the other. But what the Republican parties move in Tennessee. I think they thought that nobody was
gonna give a damn. I really think that these people are so far gone in the pocket of the NRA and in these supermajorities that they're like, nobody's gonna care if we expel these young black guys like, it's Tennessee. It's the founding ground of the klu klux Klan. So is this for you?
Is it a domino? Is it in an inflection point?
What is it?
It's both?
I think it's both, Danielle, I think it is. And the same can be said of Judge Cosmaric's laughable Mithipristo and order in Amarillo.
Right.
It is massively overplaying a hand. It is saying, yeah, I'm looking around, I can tell that massive majorities of people want and depend on medication abortion, that I do not have the authority to do this and I don't care, which is exactly what we saw in the Tennessee State House. Right. Chriylyn Eiffel came on Amicus my podcast last week and she just made the point, and I think this is important.
What we saw in Tennessee wasn't just a ridiculous power grab, but it was an insult to the idea of due process because none of the folks who were expelled were given notice, They were not given any indication of what their rights were. They were not told how they could correct these decorum violations. They were just booted, right, unheard of, unheard of in a state legislative body. But it was also a suppression of speech in the purest sense. Right.
These are people whose microphones were literally turned off so they could turned off, yep, And so they come in with bullhorns because they have a right to be heard. And then that's seen as a decorum breach. And by the way, it's not a decorum breach to be a child molester in the Tennessee State House. It's not a decorum breach to urinate in someone's see like, all that's fine, but Okay, what Sherlyn's point was, and I think it's important, is that it is clear that we saw what happened
in Tennessee, but what we didn't necessarily clock. And this is where you and I I think.
Have work to do.
Is that we are seeing Wisconsin legislature that plans to, you know, either impeach the newly seated you know, pro abortion justice or strip the state Supreme Court of its powers.
Right.
We are seeing gerrymandered state legislatures around the country saying maybe we can take power away from Fannie Willis in Georgia so she can't prosecute Donald Trump. Right. We are seeing laser focus on making sure that elected officials cannot do the duties of their office and thus disenfranchising you know, one hundreds and thousands of people who voted for them.
So that's the bad news.
Right. We're focused, and I think you're right. Our eyes have been and our hearts have been on the floor of the Tennessee State House. But we ignore what's happening in North Carolina. We ignore what's happening in Georgia at
our peril. So that's the first thing. I think. The other thing is that when I hold up the abortion decision, Clarence Thomas's ridiculous self justification that like somebody somewhere told him that it wasn't in violations of the disclosure rules, so he's fine, this face left nameless person.
Yeah, you know, this is a textualist, right.
His whole life is dedicated to like the original meaning of the text, but he doesn't have to read it because some guys told him when it meant okay. But I think every one of those is a really chilling version of what you and I would call authoritarianism, autocracy, you know, creeping fascism, because it is people who know what they are doing. They've all been caught out and
they don't care. And so what's scary to me is I think that there is a foot race happening, Danielle between it is clear like energized angry, particularly young, you know, women, people of color, voters who know what vote suppression looks like. It turns out they know exactly what it looks like. This isn't complicated, and a machinery, a jerrymandered machinery that goes all the way up to a gerrymandered Supreme Court supermajority that doesn't care. And that's I think, just the
moment we're in. And so the tipping point, I think cuts both ways. We're either going to tilt back into democracy that functions as it should, or we're going to tilt into something that looks like Hungary. I think it's one or the other. And I think that we don't have much further to go on this collision course between these two fourths.
Yeah, we're right there.
I'm so glad that you painted the imagery because that's the fear that I have now a couple of years ago, you know, and folks who listen to my show, not that I said this back in twenty sixteen. I said, the election of Donald Trump is white supremacy's last stand, right, But much in the same way that a person, you know, six months into the one hundred Year War was saying, I can't wait until this thing is over. I never said, oh, it was going to be in four years, is going
to be in seven years. I just said what I said, which is that this is going to be white supremacies last stand. We are seeing this as you have laid out all of the other legislatures, all of the other moves that are being made to quell the voices right and the power of the people, which is what democracy is built on. When I think about this collision, course, though, Dahlia, I think about revolution. I think about other breaking points in our country's history where the people have said enough
is enough. The reason why I look at Tennessee and I find that mustard seed of hope grow is because I'm like, oh, to your point, they're awake, right, This is no longer about what's happening to those people over there that I may never know. To those trans folks, I don't know anybody trans. To those black folks, I don't know anybody black, you know, to those queer people,
blah blah blah. I don't know anybody that's had an abortion, So like they're the distance that people were able to have between themselves and the communities that were being targeted has now shrunk because they're coming for you and your voice, all of you.
Does tennesse Se.
Make us think then that hungry isn't a possibility, because what it is showing me is that what they want, what the right wants, Dahlia, I think is violence. I believe what they want is violence. I believe what they want is the ability to say, see, you see what they did. That's why we had to come out guns blazing. That their end goal is this bloodshed in America, that they can develop some type of righteous indignation around.
Am I crazy?
But no, That's what Donald Trump's presence in Waco signal to.
Me, You're not crazy, a proof of concept. Greg Abbott wants to pardon somebody who said he would and did drive his car into a Black Lives Matter protest in Texas and he said, I'm right. He was threatening to kill lawful First Amendment protesters and without that case even coming to him, without knowing one fact about jury deliberations, we have Greg Abbott saying like, send me the pardon. I'm going to pardon him. Right, that's it, that's it.
It's Kyle Rittenhouse, it's Donald Trump, you know, walking through a piece full of Black Lives Matter protests in Lafayette Square with this show of course. So yes, of course it's that. And I think the other example of that is the comparisons we heard from the speaker of the Tennessee State House.
Saying that what.
Justin Pearson and Justin Jones were doing was exactly the same as, if not worse than, what happened on January sixth, when armed insurrectionists loaded to kill killed people, and that it's the same thing to have two black men walk through the chamber in solidarity with gun reformed students who write and their parents.
So you're exactly right.
The seeds that are being sown are if we can portray these two things, as you know, it's like what about ISM's wet dream, right that waiful protests by minority groups who are saying we want to be heard because you have silenced every mechanism for us to be heard. Right, look at the laws they're passing in Florida that make it impossible even to go to the State House to protest, right, so then you try to find a space to be heard, and that is tantamount to armed insurrection. No it's not,
but that's the language that's being used. And so, you know, here's the other thing that I'm going to quote my friend Daniel Moody, who says all the time, you know the other thing that worries me, I feel the way you do. I am so chuffed and heartened by what I saw in Tennessee. I am so I spent last week with a bunch of women in Ohio who are trying to get abortion, you know, up on the ballot by getting signatures. I mean, in my view, like watching people wake up is.
Remarkable.
But my friend Daniel Moody would be reminding me right now. She would be saying, where's the American Bar Association, Where is the academy? Where is is the organized leadership of the party?
Why are they?
And huge props to Kamala Harris for really getting voice to what happened in Tennessee. You know, I think that part of what scares me is you have this ground swell of fury around guns and abortion and the environment and book bands right now in this country, and we look up and where are the leaders and where is the messaging and where is the plan? And where is the like grown up saying, so, get on your school boards, get on your county you know, election boards. Where is
the voice telling people here's where to channel that? And what my frustration is is I feel like this awakeness, which really could be at a tipping point, is not being directed or purposive or even acknowledged or seen beyond like having cable news shows watching. So I guess that's where like my heart hurts a little bit in this conversation is where is our leadership? Where are the institutions?
You know?
What I would say now is that when we look back in history, the revolutions, the movements did not come from on high. They never do because those that are on high believe that there is still something within a broken system to work in repair. And I'm gonna ask you because here you are a part of America's legal system, and I'll say, we're at a point where we have people that have been illegally sat on the Supreme Court.
In my humble opinion, I'm not a lawyer, you are, but I've been illegally sat and then you have now a grifter and his wife, right, grifting off of his position in Clarence thomasin and Jinny Thomas. Has the room of law been bent to the breaking point because without the function of rule of law, Dahlia, we are a Banana republic. I have faith in those young revolutionaries, right, I have faith that they're gonna keep pushing because they don't want to have the fear of going into school
every day and possibly dying. They don't want to have the fear of being forced to carry babies that they don't want and can't care for.
They don't want the.
Fear of moving through a life where they're chewing the air or can't go outside because it's no longer safe because of climate change, like they are already seeing, and because they are young, don't have yet the voice to be able to vote, but then watching democracy die. So I'm not concerned about those revolutionaries because I believe that they are coming. I believe that they are awakening, one by one by one, unplugging from the matrix, if you will.
I am, however, looking at all of these establishments, and I'm like the rest of us feel like we're under attack. What the fuck are you seeing?
So I want to say one point of correction slash clarification, which is that Clarence Thomas and Jinny Thomas are not grifting. The crime to me isn't the grifting. The crime is that they are bought and sold. In other words, Okay, it's not just you know, Evranka Trump getting you know, patents to make shitting, getting heels and you know, using child labor.
This is so much worse.
This is Harlan Crowe apparently Nazi Insignia Ensusius.
Oh yes, enthusiasts, horribly tail napkins. He has cocktail napkin.
And a sculpture guard, because who among us does not have a sculpture garden dedicated to and assigned copy of Mind.
Hand Mind Cume.
But he is pouring millions of dollars into gifts and into helping prop up organizations that Ginny Thomas pays herself from, and he is pouring dark money into all these cases and causes. So I'm not bothered. I mean I'm bothered that Clarence Thomas takes you know, free super jets and yachts and cruises only in so far as you know, the load star of the Judicial Ethics Statute is the appearance of impropriety. He's supposed to care how things look.
And I'm bothered, I mean, at least pretend to. Yeah, I'm bothered that he doesn't care. I mean, I'm enough of an institutionalist that I think that when a justice on the Supreme Court says I don't care what the American public thinks, that institution is dead.
It's gone. So that bothers me.
But but I want to pan back because I think, and this is why, you know, your very first sort of anime question is the right one. These things are all of a piece, because you know how we got supermajority, the jerrymandered state houses by a long string of five to four and then six to three decisions come on by the Supreme Court that is bought and sold by
people like Harlan Crowe. Right, So, whether it's Citizens United opening the spigot to dark money, whether it's Shelby County functionally ending the Voting Rights Act, whether it's Bernovich functionally ending the rest of the Voting Rights Act, Rucho allowing jerry mandery, you can pick the case. All of the cases that destroy unions and organizing all of the cases that put the thumb on the scale for big business. So the grift for me isn't Clarence Thomas's grift. It's
Harlan Crow's grift. It's him and people like him and all those people in that painting in a painting, sitting there with Leonard Leo, with Mark Poletta, with Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow buying constitutional democracy out from under us and then commemorating it in art. And so the world we live in now, the world that ejected the justice from the Tennessee State House, that's the world that Clarence Thomas helped to build. And he did it with Harlan
Crowe's money. And so I just want to be really clear that these stories are connected. It is not just the outrage. I don't give a damn a buck quid pro quote corruption from Clarence Thomas. I don't care what he grifted off. But I care so very deeply that.
We are not focused on the.
Part of the story that is how easy and cheap it was to buy a Supreme Court. And once you bought that Supreme Court, you could create state legislatures in fifty to fifty states that are seventy five to twenty five legislatures. That was a gift to Harlan Crowe and his ilk. That's the thing we should be crazy about right now.
I don't even know what to say. I'll say this because other than the people pouring into the streets, other than the people saying that we have had enough, other than the people not going silently into the cold, dark night and just accepting their fate, because we have allowed a process by which a multi billionaire can buy and sell the Supreme Court like it's a piece on a fucking monopoly board.
Right, it is.
Going to be the will of the people that is going to be the decision maker between whether we are Hungry two point zero or America two point zero. And it's like, you know, the last question I have for you, Dahlia is shake your magic eight balls, shake your crystal ball from me? What's your money on?
Oh boy?
You know, whenever you're betting on the likelihood of being becoming hungry, are in a like dark, dark place. And you and I have gone to dark places, but maybe this is the darkest.
I mean, I think.
I think that the reason we are seeing what we saw in Tennessee. The reason we are seeing Ron DeSantis do what he is doing in Florida, the reason Greg Abbott wants to preemptively pardon the next Kyle Rittenhouse is because, as I said at the beginning, we are really on the line. In other words, they are so far out over their skis on abortion, they are so far out
over their skis on vote suppression. They are so way misaligned with the public will, on book bands, on all of this like woke stuff that it turns out nobody cares about except Ron DeSantis. They miscalculated, They miscalculated how much I'm going to mix metaphors because I've just gone from skis, but you know how much landing strip they had to land the like Vashist plane.
They don't have a lot. People hate this.
The medication abortion decision, if it is allowed to stand, will cause a revolution in this country, without a doubt, because then it's no longer blue state's red states. It's no longer I don't know any woman who's had an abortion. It's that there is nowhere to go. And I think that we should be equal parts terrified and inspired by the fact that the GOP is well aware of this. They know that they've run out of road and that the lawlessness is everywhere. That's for a reason, right, the
lawlessness is everywhere. And we have, by the way, a Supreme Court term that's going to end in the next couple of months that is going to again shake the landscape, including voting rates, including affirmative action, including you know, so many huge cases. They're all going to go the wrong way. And so I think that you are seeing this ram up, Danielle, of lawlessness just in your face, power grabs that don't even pretend to be democracy. That's what we saw in Tennessee.
That's what the medication abortion decision is. And so then really the question is.
Who wins this race? Right? Who wins it? Is it this.
Angry, engaged, I think, affronted public that suddenly understands, oh, I have to be on my school board. Oh I have to see what's happening in local elections. I can't sit around and watch polsters predict what's going to happen in twenty twenty four, because that's not the fight. The fight is now today, yesterday, And in response to an increasing sense of urgency, these terrifying crackdowns like shutting, like taking away funding from an entire public library system. Right,
that's what it is. So I don't know what to predict except to say that famous Ernest Hemingway quote, you know, when they asked him, how does bankruptcy happen? And he said slowly and then quickly, like this is how it's.
This has happened. We're at the quickly phase.
I don't know which way it's going to go, but I know it's not gonna slow down.
Mm hmmmm, which means that the rest of us need to speed up. My friend, Dahlia Lipwick, I hope that sometime we get to have a conversation, you know that is on the good side of something. We did a good mixed bag today because lifting up what is happening in Tennessee, the young people, the groundshaking that is happening there, I think is important and I think it's indicative of
where we're going to go. Folks, if you have not gotten your hands on a copy of Lady Justice, Women, The Law and the Battle to Save America, do if you have not checked out all of Dahlia's writings at Slate, you should, and also take a listen to Amicus her own pod.
Thank you, friend, I appreciate you so very much. Breathe, my friend, Breathe.
That is it for me today.
Dear friends on Woke af AS always, power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.