MSNBC commentator Elie Mystal claimed that Associate Justice Clarence Thomas aimed to make black votes count less than white votes in elections, citing Thomas’s wife of 37 years, Virginia Thomas, who is white, as evidence.
“Yeah, the through line between the Alito flag story, the Clarence Thomas coup story, and their wives, and what we saw today from the Supreme Court in this gerrymandering decision, the through line is that they don’t want black people’s votes to count equally,” Mystal remarked on All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC Thursday.
“I mean, he ain’t married to Ginni Thomas for nothing, all right — like, that’s what the man thinks,” the black pundit stated.
He was discussing a 6-3 Supreme Court decision last week to maintain a South Carolina congressional map that a lower court had ruled included a racially designed gerrymander. The court found that the challengers had not proven their case. The decision was authored by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who has faced criticism for his wife’s use of the American flag in the “distress” signal.
From Thursday’s All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC:
CHRIS HAYES: I want to start on what we got from the court today and the fact it was an Alito-authored decision. It was an Alito-authored decision from the Trump majority, 6-3 majority, liberals in dissent, holding up a Republican gerrymander.
ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, the through line between the Alito flag story, the Clarence Thomas coup story, and their wives and what we saw today from the Supreme Court in this gerrymandering decision, the through line between all of that is that they don’t want black people’s votes to count equally.
HAYES: Do you think that is true of Clarence Thomas?
MYSTAL: I know that it’s true of Clarence Thomas, all right. Their idea and Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence today, wrote straight up that he does not think the 14th Amendment and the equal protection clause of that amendment can be used to protect the voting rights of black people.
HAYES: Yes.
MYSTAL: I mean, he ain’t married to Ginni Thomas for nothing, all right — like, that’s what the man thinks. He wrote it today. The through line — understand this, Chris, when these people like Alito and Thomas support the insurrection, right, what are they really saying? They’re saying that Trump won — lost the election but won the white vote, which is true, he did, he won the white vote by a lot, white people should probably do something about that, but he won the white vote by a lot. And what Alito and Thomas are saying is that it is that white vote that Trump won is that’s the only votes that matter.
That we should do what the white voters want and when they write these decisions like they did in the gerrymandering case, what they are straight up saying is that black voters can be diluted, can have their voting rights taken away, simply because black voters happen to vote Democrat.
Brent Baker, the vice president of research and publications for the Media Research Center, commented:
How insidious an attitude to have toward an American institution when your ideological contention is that it’s Trump and MAGA who are destroying democracy. No, you’re doing that with such a disreputable, race-based attack on the court because you don’t agree with a ruling, compounded by a cheap shot at the first conservative African American on the Supreme Court as a self-hater because the race of his wife doesn’t match his. Can’t go much lower.
– Brent Baker
