Way back on Friday, May 10, 2024, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito issued their takes on the state of affairs in America. Though their remarks were delivered separately, they ended up having similar views, noting that general public support for freedom of speech is “declining dangerously,” and Washington DC has gone from being a gorgeous city to a “hideous” place full of crime and cancel culture.
The twin evens were Justice Thomas speaking on that Friday at a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit conference in the town of Point Clear, Alabama, and Justice Alito delivering a commencement address at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. That is a Roman Catholic College located in Ohio. Both justices, as mentioned above, painted a very dark future, one that’s still relevant given the general trendlines though Trump might be able to fix a great deal of it.
Justice Thomas, when asked what it is like to work in a “world that seems meanspirited,” a seeming reference to claims that he is corrupt, said, “I think there’s challenges to that,. We’re in a world and we—certainly my wife and I the last two or three years it’s been—just the nastiness and the lies, it’s just incredible.”
Continuing, Justice Thomas told the audience that Washington, D.C. had become a “hideous” place. Explaining why, he said that in the city, “people pride themselves in being awful.” He contrasted that with elsewhere in America, saying that outside the D.C. Beltway, people “don’t pride themselves in doing harmful things.”
He further noted that the way court decisions are written now is mostly unintelligible to the average person, further alienating them from how things are decided in this country and thus from its direction. He said, “The regular people I think are being disenfranchised sometimes by the way that we talk about cases.”
Justice Alito, meanwhile, had a somewhat similar message. Jokingly paraphrasing the character Thornton Melon in the movie “Back to School,” played by Rodney Dangerfield, who tells students “it’s rough out there” and that they should let their parents food the bills, Alito said, “As Mr. Melon said, it is rough out there. It’s probably rougher out there now than it has been for quite some time. But that is precisely why your contributions will be so important.”
Commenting on the freedom of speech issue, the justice noted that “Support for freedom of speech is declining dangerously” across the country, with the problem being particularly acute on America’s college campuses. He added, “Very few colleges live up to that ideal. This place is one of them … but things are not that way out there in the broader world.”
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The SCOTUS justice went on to say that freedom of religion has been “imperiled” by wokeness in America, with graduates being likely to find themselves in jobs or settings where they must renounce their beliefs that the woke society finds objectionable. “It will be up to you to stand firm,” Alito told the graduates.
Watch Justice Alito here: