Ginni Thomas’s lunatic delusions are shared by the vast majority of Republicans

I was driving between Denver and Boulder yesterday afternoon, explaining to my son that the huge cloud of smoke we were seeing over the southern part of Boulder from a wildfire, and the emergency evacuation order it generated that stopped six blocks west of our house, did not mean that we were seeing a repeat of the fire from December that burned down the house we have lived in until September (these explanations are getting more complicated all the time), when we passed car that had a bumper sticker that simply said “The Election Was Stolen.” This was placed right under a Trump/Pence 2020 bumper sticker, so there wasn’t a lot of ambiguity about which election.

I glanced over at the driver, who shockingly was a 70something white guy.

Speaking of shocks, here’s the headline to Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas’s dozens of tweets to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, imploring him to “stop the steal:”

Legal Scholars Are Shocked By Ginni Thomas’s “Stop the Steal” Texts

I realize Mayer doesn’t write the headlines for her articles, but the content of her piece reveals that the headline is a fair summation of the contents: people like NYU law prof Stephen Gillers are shocked enough by these texts that they’re now arguing that Clarence Thomas is legally and ethically required to recuse himself from SCOTUS cases involving the Trump administration’s attempts to overturn the election.

Ginni Thomas is a nut, but her particular brand of nuttiness is in no way idiosyncratic:

 The vast majority of Republican voters say they agree with Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen. In our most recent University of Massachusetts at Amherst poll, fielded online Dec. 14-20 by YouGov among a nationally representative sample of the U.S. voting-age population, only 21 percent of Republicans say Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate. This is nearly identical to what we found in our April poll, in which just 19 percent of Republicans said Biden was legitimately elected. Other universities, media outlets and polling firms have found nearly identical results.

I’m not very interested in the question of whether these people “really believe” what they tell pollsters they believe, or whether this is just all identity politics (I realize it’s illegal to use the phrase identity politics to describe the behavior of white conservatives), because in the paranoid world of cult logic — which is what Republicans now inhabit — this is a distinction that breaks down very quickly.

Here’s something that does interest me: Does Clarence Thomas believe the same things about the election that his wack job wife believes? Maybe somebody should ask him.

The larger point here is one that the elite media in this country are constitutionally incapable of ever grasping, which is that what once upon a time was the paranoid fringe of the Republican party is now the very core of that institution.

That’s why these people are somehow going to manage to be surprised when Donald Trump is the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, when this outcome is in fact practically certain, short of some extremely prejudicial medical event in the interim. They’ll also be surprised when Trump spends the entire campaign claiming the election is going to be rigged against him, and they’ll be surprised again when these claims have very negative social effects in the wake of the election, which Trump may well “win” via massive Republican state legislative skullduggery, even though Joe Biden gets ten million more votes or whatever.

Every accusation is a confession, part infinity.