Epistemica

In an attempted rebuke of progressivism and, by association, American institutions of higher learning, Clarence Thomas gave a rather bizarre speech at UT Austin. Perhaps better suited for an address on Fox News than at a college, the speech ended up being a highly selective, self-contradictory exercise in ideological theater. Thomas declared that “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government.” Thomas treated “progressivism” as a quasi-totalitarian force and blamed it for U.S. decline. Given the spate of internal contradictions, it’s tough not to read a transcript of the speech like Edmund Burke’s A Vindication of Natural Society. But Burke was being satirical.

In the Austin speech, Thomas warned that “we are slowly letting others control how we think and what we think.” But he also praised UT’s effort to “revitalize the teaching and research of Western civilization and the American constitutional tradition” and said he hoped it would “lead the way in the reform of our nation’s colleges and universities.” Thomas missed the irony of wanting his own views to be prominent in shaping higher education institutions. He denounces thought management while openly advocating intellectual management.

Thomas has been a reliable vote for the Trump administration, so his most laughable part of the speech may be his claim that many progressives no longer believe “all men are created equal” and deserve “unalienable rights” protected by limited government. The progressive movement explicitly defines itself in terms of “justice, dignity, and peace for all,” “equal justice under the law,” civil liberties, humane immigration laws, labor rights, and universal health care. It is unclear whether Thomas’s assertion was serious or simply an audition for Fox News.

Not mentioned in the speech was Thomas’s refusal to confront ICE, an immigration apparatus that courts have rebuked thousands of times for unlawful detention, that has pushed home-entry practices challenged as violating the Fourth Amendment, that has used airport-security data for routine immigration dragnets, and that has generated public outrage over masked agents, zip-tying children, and arrests, injuries, or killings involving U.S. citizens. Reuters found at least 4,421 cases in which federal judges ruled that ICE was holding people illegally; another report described policies allowing reliance on internal administrative warrants for home arrests; another found TSA shared more than 31,000 traveler records with ICE, leading to more than 800 arrests, even though the program was designed for counter-terrorism, not routine immigration enforcement. But Thomas didn’t mention that as a threat to the notion that “all men are created equal” and deserve “unalienable rights.”

Thomas also said that progressivism “holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government,” which in itself is unfounded, but internally reveals a deep, deep ignorance that one wouldn’t expect from a sitting justice. Thomas conflates the moral source of rights, the legal recognition of rights, and the institutional means by which rights are secured. The distinction between negative and positive rights is basic. Human-rights frameworks include negative rights, which bar governments from certain actions, and positive rights, which call on governments to provide certain services or protections. Legal rights are often enforceable because constitutions, statutes, regulations, and precedents make them so. Thomas collapses all of this into one slogan, as though any claim that government must secure education, health, labor protection, or anti-discrimination norms is a claim that government created human dignity out of nothing.

Throughout the speech, Thomas frequently turns to the Declaration of Independence, but the Declaration itself refutes him. It says people are endowed with unalienable rights and then immediately says that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,” which was a driving reason behind the document’s publication. Government is not God; government is the instrument through which rights are protected in the real world. Founding-era thought did not confuse the metaphysical source of rights with the positive law that secures them. Natural rights were not identical to positive law, while positive law helped define and protect natural rights. For a Supreme Court justice to blur that elementary line is either a category error or a rhetorical dodge; like many on the MAGA spectrum, Thomas actively challenges the distinction, failing to prove even basic civics knowledge while constantly contradicting himself. The speech raises legitimate questions about his capacity to serve as a serious constitutional judge.

The deeper problem is that Thomas invokes the Declaration while refusing to look directly at the form of power the Declaration actually feared: concentrated executive power sliding toward personal rule. The document is a direct indictment of arbitrary authority. It warns of “a long train of abuses and usurpations” designed to reduce a people under “absolute Despotism.” It complains that the king “has obstructed the Administration of Justice,” “has made Judges dependent on his Will alone,” and “has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people.” It is a record of grievances against the King for his authoritarian overreach.

If the language of the Declaration of Independence were updated, it would sound as if it were against Trump. When Trump called for the impeachment of Judge James Boasberg after an adverse ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public rebuke, writing that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” The United States is not eighteenth-century Britain, and judges are not literally dependent on Trump’s will for tenure. But the instinct is recognizable, as adverse rulings are treated as illegitimate and judges as enemies to be removed. That is an authoritarian habit. The “swarms of Officers” grievance feels even closer to the mark in a period of aggressive ICE raids, airport dragnets, home-entry policies challenged as unconstitutional, and the rollback of limits on arrests near schools, hospitals, and churches. Thomas wants the gravitas of the Declaration without acknowledging the executive behavior that makes its grievances feel current.

Further, the Declaration denounces rule “For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury” and “For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.” As a modern analogue, the use of state power to remove people from the country, or into foreign custody, without meaningful due process is prevalent today. In 2025 the Supreme Court itself had to remind Trump’s administration that “the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law” and that detainees must receive notice and an opportunity to be heard. A month later, the Court held that roughly 24 hours’ notice without information on how to exercise due-process rights “surely does not pass muster.” Consider the Abrego Garcia case, in which the administration admitted it had deported a man to El Salvador “in error”; Justice Sotomayor wrote that the government had cited “no basis in law” for his warrantless arrest, removal, or imprisonment there. That is a present-tense warning label.

Thomas’s role in Trump v. United States completely undermines his UT lecture. The Court’s syllabus states that the indictment alleged Trump, after losing the 2020 election, conspired to overturn it by spreading knowingly false claims. Thomas joined the majority holding that a former president has absolute immunity for actions within his exclusive constitutional authority and at least presumptive immunity for all official acts; he also filed a concurrence. The ruling is sweeping enough to place a vast sphere of presidential conduct behind criminal accountability. A president alleged to have tried to overturn an election is exactly the kind of figure for whom that shield is most dangerous. So when Thomas denounces “subservience and weakness” and invokes the signers’ courage against power, he is speaking as a justice who helped build perhaps the most expansive shield for presidential impunity in modern American law. Just another contradiction from Thomas.

In his own concurrence in Trump v. United States, Thomas quoted the Declaration’s complaint that the king “ha[d] erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.” He was using the grievance to attack the institutional footing of the special counsel. Fine. But then he went to Austin and blamed “progressivism” for threatening the Declaration while refusing to acknowledge an actual administration whose officers have been accused of unconstitutional home entries, warrantless sweeps, unlawful detentions, and fear-based enforcement across civic life. Thomas can apparently recognize the Declaration’s anti-tyrannical energy only when it can be turned against his ideological opponents, not when it points toward the executive power he has helped immunize, reflecting selective indignation, if not complete ignorance.

George Washington warned the country to “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” Thomas’s speech is a performance of founding-era reverence deployed to defend contemporary power and redirect public anger away from the most obvious source of authoritarian danger. And as a line commonly attributed to Samuel Adams puts it, “For true patriots to be silent, is dangerous.” Adams isn’t saying that patriots must flatter rulers draped in national symbols but that patriotism becomes real when citizens refuse silence in the face of aspiring tyranny. On that standard, Thomas’s lecture is an instrument of authoritarianism.

Thomas’s Austin speech follows a long pattern of public remarks by MAGA proponents that are best explained as some combination of projection and propaganda. The speech itself is a complete disconnection from reality. It recites the Declaration while evading the executive abuses, due-process violations, judicial intimidation, and presidential impunity that make the Declaration urgently relevant right now. It condemns thought control while advocating ideological reform of universities. It claims to defend equality while caricaturing the political camp that most explicitly speaks in the language of universal rights and ignoring a right-wing enforcement regime that has made liberty more precarious for the vulnerable. It is not serious constitutional thought. It is culture-war mythmaking from a justice better fit to serve on Jesse Watters Primetime than the nation’s once-prestigious bench.