August 28, 2026 • 31 mins
In this episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz and Ben Ferguson discuss the inspiration behind Cruz’s new book, the extensive interviews he conducted with Clarence Thomas, the justice’s remarkable life story, his legal philosophy, and the contentious confirmation battle that brought him to the Supreme Court. They also reflect on why Thomas remains one of the most influential and debated figures in American law.
The release of Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas sparks a behind-the-scenes conversation about why Senator Ted Cruz spent years researching and writing a biography of one of the most consequential Supreme Court justices in American history. Fresh off the book’s debut and a rare two-part podcast interview with Clarence Thomas, Cruz explains why he believes Thomas’s personal journey, intellectual evolution, and judicial legacy matter today.From growing up in poverty in Pinpoint, Georgia, to becoming a Supreme Court justice, Thomas’s life story is central to Cruz’s argument that Americans should better understand the people who shape the nation’s laws and institutions. The discussion explores Thomas’s upbringing, his years in seminary, his move from radical activism to conservative constitutional thought, and the impact of his judicial opinions.
Topics Covered:
- The launch and early success of Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas
- Clarence Thomas’s childhood, family influences, and rise from poverty in Georgia
- His journey from seminary student and activist to conservative legal thinker
- The judicial philosophy and constitutional approach of Clarence Thomas
- The 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings and their lasting political impact
- Why Cruz considers Thomas one of the most consequential justices in modern American history
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
It is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
And we are back to regularly scheduled programming after what
was really cool, a two-part sit-down, Senator, that you did
with Clarence Thomas. Now it's my turn to get to
talk to you about how fun it was to do
this project and to write about someone that you had
so much admiration for.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Well, this has been a terrific week. On Tuesday, my
brand new book came out. Going Further, The Incomparable Clarence Thomas.
And it's my fifth book. This one has really been
a labor of love. I've loved writing it. It came
out on Tuesday. It immediately rocketed to being the number
one bestseller in the country on Amazon. It has been incredible.
(00:42):
I want to start by saying to Verdict listeners, to
all of you, thank you. Thank you for going onto
Amazon and buying the book. Thank you for going. We
have a website, goingfurther.com, goingfurther.com. Thank you for buying the book.
um it has been there's been a lot of enthusiasm
behind it and and we monday and wednesdays pods were
(01:03):
really special because justice thomas came and and i had
the chance to interview him one-on-one for the podcast this
was the first and it's the only podcast justice thomas
has ever done so he has done verdict and nothing
else and and and it was you know justice thomas
and i go back more than 30 years he he
is a good friend and i think he is truly
(01:24):
an american hero but He very rarely does interviews. He
does very few public speeches. And so for him to
come and participate in verdict and answer questions and just talk,
talk candidly about his life, about his childhood, his upbringing,
talk about his ideological and intellectual journey, talk about his jurisprudence,
talk about the demonization and vilification that has been directed
(01:48):
at him. And it's, I got to say, The interview
with Justice Thomas broke a ton of news. There have
been dozens and dozens of news stories, national news stories,
that came out of that podcast because Justice Thomas does
so few interviews and because when he sat down on verdict,
he was very honest and candid and direct, and so
(02:08):
he spoke from the heart. I will say, if you
didn't watch that whole video, it's two parts. Monday was
part one. Wednesday was part two. You should go back
and watch it because it really does give you I
know the man, I know him personally, but I will
say that interview, that interview now ranks right up there
with the interview you and I did with Elon Musk
(02:29):
as among my favorite podcasts we've ever done. And so
I would encourage you, make sure you watch it and
share that interview with others. And hopefully this one too,
as we talk more about the book, which we're going
to do right now.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
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(03:52):
let's just go back in time and let people understand
when this became an idea to do the biography of
Clarence Thomas. I remember we were at dinner in D.C.,
And we were talking about your next book idea, subjects, topics, ideas.
And then you grinned and you said, all right, what
do you think about me doing a book interviewing Clarence Thomas?
(04:16):
And usually I remember we were sitting around a small
group and it was like, well, that's not normally what
you do. And then you sold us on the idea
because we're normally it's a subject. It's going into midterm
election year. It'd be something that would be important to
what's happening now.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
And you're like, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Let me tell you why I think this book would
be amazing and why I think people would want to
read it. And you sold us because we were not
convinced in that moment without the details in the background.
And watching, just seeing your passion that night turn into
the hours you spent with Clarence Thomas, turning into this
bestselling book. I got to say, from sitting on the sidelines,
(04:53):
it has been so fun to watch.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
This has been a passion project. And we came up
with the ideas about two years ago. Uh, you know,
I was thinking about art. I want to do another
book and I like writing books. I enjoy it. This
is book number five. So I've done one about every
couple of years and, and it takes, you know, it
takes a ton of time. You have to carve out
a lot of time and I do a lot of
late nights. If I'm not doing verdict in late nights,
(05:17):
I'm writing the book that, that that's, you can tell
I have an exciting social life. It's really, really impressive. Uh, But,
you know, I like writing books. I was looking for
a topic and something I wanted to say. And what
got me.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Excited about this biography.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Is Clarence Thomas is someone who I think is genuinely
an American hero. He's an extraordinary person. And his life
journey is so inspirational. It's so powerful.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
But yet most people don't know it. Most Americans.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
It's interesting that this week I'm doing a ton of
media interviews. And almost to a person, the folks doing
the interviews, they say, well, when I read this book,
I learned a ton of things that I didn't know.
I didn't know this about Clarence Thomas. I didn't know
that about Clarence Thomas. And it's I want every American
to know his story and to know both his personal
(06:09):
story of going from abject poverty facing massive racism all
the way up to the pinnacle of American law. That
is an inspirational and amazing story. But I also want
people to understand the intellectual journey he traveled from being
a hardcore leftist, a radical leftist student activist.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
He was an OG activist, by the way. People don't understand.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
He was an old school college activist.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
A radical. A radical, yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
And all the way to being one of the most
important conservative activists thinkers in the history of america that
that's an amazing journey too and it's important to understand
and then third his jurisprudence so so clarence thomas is
right now uh the second longest serving justice in american
history in less than two years he will become the
(07:03):
longest serving justice in the history of the united states
that's a big damn deal uh and.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
By the way who is the longest serving because that's
got to be a history question people are asking right
now It's not.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
You're the first to ask that. The longest serving is
William O. Douglas. Interesting. And Thomas will pass him, I think,
in May of 28. Wow.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
But if you look at it in those more than
30 years, he has some extraordinary opinions. His jurisprudence has
been massively consequential. And most people, if you're not a lawyer,
if you're not a constitutional... lawyer, you probably don't know
what Clarence Thomas's opinions have said.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
And so what I wanted to do in this.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Book is talk about all three, his personal journey, his
intellectual journey, but also the body of work that he
has produced as one of the most consequential justices in history.
And what I try to do in the book is
what I try to do on the podcast, which is
explain things in terms that are understandable, that are real,
(08:07):
You don't have to be a lawyer to enjoy this book.
You don't have to be a constitutional law expert any
more than to listen to this podcast. You don't have
to be an expert or you don't have to be
a lawyer. You don't have to be a foreign policy expert.
I try to take issues that matter, that matter to
you in your life, and I try to explain them
with detail, with meat, with substance, but also in language
(08:28):
that is understandable. And actually, I would say some of
the philosophy of the book is, goes back to the
philosophy of this verdict podcast. We just launched it, what now,
five years ago. When we started going on air and
the podcast went from, the very first verdict podcast was
(08:49):
the first night of the first Trump impeachment. And I
spent all day on the Senate floor and the jury
of impeachment went over to the TV studio and recorded
the inaugural verdict. And we did it every night at
like midnight or one in the morning. assessing what happened.
And I remember my production crew at the time, they
said when we did the first few, their advice was
(09:12):
dumb it down. They said this is too sophisticated, too complicated.
And I really resisted that. I said, listen, I don't
believe that. I do not believe that people want dumbed down.
What they do want is understandable. And the analogy that
I've used many times is... If you or I go
(09:33):
to a doctor and we've got some horrible disease, nobody
wants the doctor to say, Ben, you've got a boo-boo.
You're like, Doc, tell me what the hell's going on.
But at the same time, you don't want the doctor
to use a bunch of medical jargon that you have
to have an MD to understand. So you want a
serious and complicated issue explained in English in a way
(09:57):
that you can follow it. That's what I try to
do on this podcast. I try to explain all sorts
of things. So during the first impeachment, that series of podcasts,
I would explain, you know, what is Ukraine? What is Burisma,
the natural gas company in Ukraine? What is impeachment? What
are high crimes and misdemeanors? Just basic questions, but that
(10:17):
if you're not an expert, there's no reason you should know.
That worked and the verdict podcast went from zero to
it became the number one ranked podcast in the world.
With the book, I try to do the same thing,
which is take really important and consequential issues before the
(10:37):
Supreme Court, but explain it in a way that everyone
can understand it. And I'll say, Ben, one thing that
makes that much easier is is that is also very
much Justice Thomas's approach to writing opinions.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
His opinions, by the way, if you've never read a
Justice Thomas opinion, when he was writing opinions and I
was younger and it was big cases... I would always grab,
if he wrote an opinion, whether it was in favor
or against you in dissent, I would read it because
I could understand exactly what he was saying, whereas there's
others on the Supreme Court, they write opinions, and if
(11:11):
you're not a lawyer or a constitutional law geek, you
do not understand exactly what they're saying.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
He very much writes opinions that are plain, prose, understandable.
There are justices who are renowned for highfalutin prose and
ten-penny words, and at times you can't understand what the
heck they're saying. Thomas believes every American ought to have
a right to understand what the Supreme Court is saying,
(11:44):
understand their Constitution, their rights, their Bill of Rights. I
tell a story in the book about how he was
visiting Gettysburg, and this fellow comes up to him, with
an opinion printed on parchment. And it was an opinion,
it was an admiralty opinion. It was not a high-profile opinion.
It was not an opinion that was known by a
lot of people. It was one Thomas has written. And
(12:06):
he said, you know, Justice Thomas, can you sign this
for me?
Speaker 1 (12:08):
He said, sure.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
And he said, the fellow said, this is what it's
all about. And Thomas looks at him confused, and he's
like looking out over the battlefield at Gettysburg. He said, Gettysburg,
this was all about an admiralty opinion? And the guy said, no, no, no.
This I can understand this. I can read it. I
know what it's saying. And that's what the battle where
(12:31):
the citizens, we should be able to understand our government.
And that was that is very much consistent with how
Justice Thomas tries to write his opinions. And it's how
I try to write this book.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
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and make that switch today. You know, this book, one
of the cool things about it is, is there's a
couple of really, I think interesting points, which readers will
love when they read this book. And it goes back to,
not only the upbringing of Clarence Thomas, which you cover,
and a lot of poverty, but also the fact, and
this got some headlines this week from the interview that
(14:53):
you did on this podcast with him. Clarence Thomas has
experienced two extreme forms of racism in his lifetime. The
first was just racism because he was African-American. The second
form of racism was later in life, and that is
where people assume because he was African-American, he should believe
(15:16):
or say certain things. And then when he went against
that narrative of what they believed he should say because
he's a black man, that was a second form of racism.
And part of you thinks, well, I bet you didn't
see that one coming when he was dealing with the
first type of racism when he was younger.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Well, but in many ways he did. And you look
at the two components.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Let's start with his life story and racism directed against
African Americans. Look, he was born in 1948, so just
three years after World War II ends. And he was
born in Pinpoint, Georgia, rural Georgia, on the coast of Georgia. Actually,
English was not his first language. His first language was
(15:57):
called Geechee, and it is a Creole dialect. Uh, that is,
is common on the Georgia and South Carolina barrier islands.
And in South Carolina, it's called Gala and Georgia is
called Geechee. Um, he was born and raised initially by
a single mom who had a lot of issues and
who struggled. They were in extreme poverty. They lived in
(16:19):
a tenement that did not have indoor plumbing. He did
not have a toilet in the house. They had an
outhouse outside. They used a chamber pot. And then he
tells a story when he was a little boy, he
was carrying a full chamber pot down the stairs.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
And he tripped and fell and the whole thing dumped
on him and.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
He was curled up in a ball at the base
of the stairs, just drenched in stale urine. And I
gotta say that is not a typical beginning for a
Supreme court justice.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Um, he, uh, from a young age, his mom was
not able to care for him. So he ended up
being raised by his grandparents, uh, and his grandparents, his grandfather,
Myers Anderson, who he called daddy, uh, was the most
important and influential man in Clarence Thomas' life. And he
was a hard man. He was a strict disciplinarian. The
(17:09):
day Clarence and his brother moved into their grandparents' house,
Myers-Anderson said, boy, the damn vacation is over. And it
says something like the life of squalor he was living in.
Not many people would call that a vacation. But Myers-Anderson did.
He believed in hard work. and he would work those boys,
(17:29):
he would get up at three or four in the morning,
and they'd go with him delivering heating fuel. And they'd
do it often in bitter early mornings in the winter
when it was cold outside. And he would not let
the boys wear gloves. He thought gloves were a sign
of weakness and you needed to be tough, you needed
to be strong. And he would work them, he'd work
(17:51):
them from before the sun came up till late, late
at night. And at one point when he was a teenager,
Clarence said to his grandfather, daddy, slavery is over. And
without missing a beat, his grandfather said, not in this house,
it's not. And he instilled discipline in those boys. The
(18:13):
one exception, the one way they could get out of
hard work was reading in school. And both of Clarence
Thomas's grandparents were illiterate. They couldn't read, they couldn't write,
and they wanted their grandsons to have a better life.
And so Young Clarence Thomas would spend hours in the
library just reading everything he could get his hands on,
(18:33):
and reading and reading. He became a very good student.
He still, to this day, devours books. And he was
an excellent student. And as a young man, he decided
he had found what he wanted to do in life.
And it wasn't to be a lawyer. It wasn't to
be a judge. He wanted to be a priest. His
grandfather was a very devout Catholic. And Clarence Thomas was
(18:57):
raised as an altar boy, and he really loved the discipline,
the ritual, the order, the structure of the Catholic Church.
He loved and respected that the priests and nuns, that
they cared for the community. The nuns who taught him
in Catholic school had a really profound impact on his life,
and so he decided, I'm going to be a priest.
And he went to seminary, both in high school and college,
(19:19):
he went to seminary. And he encountered real racism in seminary.
When he was in seminary in high school, he was
one of only two black boys in the seminary. And
he recounts a story of one of the white boys
who was there passing him a note. And the note said,
I like Martin Luther King. And he remembers being surprised.
(19:40):
He didn't expect him to say that. And then he
turned the paper over and on the back it said, dead.
And that really hit Clarence Thomas hard. Another instance, you know,
the kids in seminary would make fun of him. They
would call him WBC, world's blackest child. One of the
ways he responded to that was by excelling academically and
(20:04):
proving himself. And so, for example, Latin He became a
very good Latin student, and he liked, again, the structure
and order of Latin. And they had a competition, the
Latin Bee, where you competed translating Latin, and he won it.
He was the top Latin student at the school, and
they gave him a prize. It was a statue of St. Jude.
(20:26):
And he was really proud of that, and he put
it in his dorm room. And the next day when
he came, someone had broken the head off the statue.
and so he went and got some glue, and he
glued the head back on and set it back up
on his bookcase, and the next day, someone had broken
the head off again, and he glued it a second time,
and it stuck after that. They didn't break it a
(20:48):
third time, but when I went to interview him, and
Justice Thomas agreed to sit for nine and a half
hours of interviews in his chambers for this book, and
so he.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
And I went one-on-one.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
I'd come at 8 in the morning and sit down
in chambers, and it was just him and me. I'd
sit down a tape recorder and just ask questions. One
of the first questions I asked is I had heard
about the statue of St. Jude, which he kept with
him his whole life. And I said, hey, where's that statue?
I'd really like to see it. And he kind of chuckled.
He said, well, I don't have it anymore. And I said, well,
what happened? And he sent it to your friend and
(21:24):
to my friend, Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Rush was a dear friend of his, and when Rush
was sick, when Rush had cancer... Justice Thomas sent him
the statue of St. Jude to give him comfort and
peace as he was dying, and he never got it
back from Rush, but it's kind of that statue was well-served,
comforting another great American hero, Rush Limbaugh.
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(22:50):
You know, there's so many people that are listening or
watching this podcast, and they know Clarence Thomas as the
guy who had to defend himself from horrific attacks during
his confirmation hearing.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
There is so much about him that is not that.
One of those is the fact that he was, as
we mentioned earlier, a radical in school, and then there
was a turning point. You got to talk about that
as well.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Well, I did.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
After his high school seminary, he went to college seminary.
And there, he ended up becoming disillusioned with the Church,
and he got angry at God. And he was disillusioned
at the Church because he thought the Church was very
slow to condemn racial discrimination, racial prejudice, that the Church
was slow to defend civil rights. And a point that
(23:41):
I make in the book and that I discuss with
Justice Thomas is, look, that was true of the Catholic Church,
it was true of the Protestant Church, it was true
Christians as a whole were far too slow to stand
up on the side of justice and condemn bigotry.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
And, you know, Dr.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Martin Luther King, many people forget that he was also
Reverend King. He was a pastor. And when he wrote
the letter from a Birmingham jail, and for several years
I've gone to the Senate floor and participated in a
bipartisan reading of the letter from a Birmingham jail, where
you have Republicans and Democrats read it out loud, and
it is so powerful. We've all read it in school,
(24:20):
but reading the words out loud just gives it additional
weight and gravitas. But many people forget to whom that
letter was addressed. Do you remember who it was addressed to, Ben?
Speaker 1 (24:32):
I do not. It was addressed to the clergy of America.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Wow. And it was Reverend King saying to the pastors,
to the priests, stand up and fight for what's right.
Do not be silent. And my favorite line of that
whole letter was Reverend King saying the church should be
a thermostat and not a thermometer. We should be changing
(24:58):
the temperature of our environment. We shouldn't just reflect what's
around us. So Thomas becomes disillusioned. He becomes angry, angry
at God. He leaves seminary and he leaves the church.
He goes to Holy Cross for college and then Yale
for law school. And for years he refuses to attend mass.
I mean, he's really angry. He is now once again,
a very devout Catholic. He came back to God, came
(25:20):
back to his faith, but it took many years. And
when he was in college, when he was in law school,
he went hard left, and he became a bitter, angry radical.
He was mad at God, he was mad at the church,
he was mad at America, he was mad at white men.
And I will tell you, his leaving the seminary ruptured
(25:41):
his relationship with his grandfather. His grandfather was adamant that
when you do something, you don't quit. And when he quit...
His grandfather threw him out of the house. And it
may well be the single hardest chapter in Clarence Thomas'
life when his grandfather, who he called Daddy, who raised him,
the man he admired more than anyone else, threw him out.
(26:03):
It was crushing to Clarence Thomas. And he was a radical.
He wore camo pants and combat boots. He had a
poster of Malcolm X on the wall. He would go
to Black Panther rallies. He participated in a riot in
Harvard Square. He was a young, angry man in college.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
You hear that part of the story, and this is
where it goes back to faith. God used all of
that to then turn him and probably prepare him for
the biggest, I would say, personal attack we had ever
seen publicly at that time on somebody either, A, I
think in the political world, certainly trying to get on
the Supreme Court, where the left decided, we believe that
(26:49):
this man is such a threat that we're going to
try to stop him. And he was a threat on
so many different levels as a conservative, as a conservative
African-American man. As someone that they understood by his age,
he could serve for a very long time. We talked
about that earlier. You've known him for a long time.
But what are the takeaways now looking back on his
confirmation hearing? And the whole world stopped, certainly all of America,
(27:12):
to watch it. And some of the horrific things that
were thrown at him trying to derail his confirmation. Now,
others have had to deal with it since then. It
was almost a playbook now by the left. If you
want to get rid of somebody, I've heard it be
said before by Democrats, we need to Clarence Thomas that nominee.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
You're absolutely right. His confirmation hearing was brutal. It was
a character assassination. It was, as he famously said on
national television, it was a high-tech lynching for uppity Negroes.
And I will tell you those words silenced the Senate
Judiciary Committee. In the book, I walk through the behind
the scenes of that brutal confirmation hearing. They follow the
(27:53):
same strategy that they did with Brett Kavanaugh. I talk
about that in the book, comparing the two. Obviously, Brett
Kavanaugh was a very active part of that confirmation hearing.
But in both instances, the Democrat senators had allegations of
sexual assault or sexual harassment. They had them for weeks
ahead of the hearing. They sat on them. They did
(28:13):
nothing with them. They didn't ask the nominees about them.
And then on the eve of the vote, they leaked
them to the press and just smeared them in the press.
By the way, Justice Thomas talks about the chairman of
the Judiciary Committee during his hearing, that was Joe Biden,
who Joe Biden was deeply dishonest with him, said one
thing to Thomas and then just broke his word and
lied repeatedly. And it was in both instances, Clarence Thomas
(28:37):
was confirmed because the American people looked him in the
eye in the hearing and they looked Anita Hill in
the eye and by a two to one margin, two
thirds of Americans believed Clarence Thomas and did not believe
Anita Hill's allegations. The same thing was true with Brett Kavanaugh.
That's why he was confirmed. You know, the book that
I wrote, it begins with the following. Imagine a man
(29:00):
who came from nothing, who endured bleak poverty, who stood
up to crushing racism, who is right now on track
to become the longest serving Supreme Court justice in American history.
You don't have to imagine that man, of course, is
the incomparable Clarence Thomas. There is nobody else quite like him.
(29:26):
Somebody so extraordinary, you would think, would be venerated. And
if he were politically liberal, he would be. Change that
one small fact and dozens of law schools would have
given him an honorary degree. Elementary schools would be named
after him. Late night hosts would invite him on adoringly.
(29:52):
And chic t-shirts, think notorious RBG, would be aggressively marketed
to young people. Instead, the response is silence and hate.
It's time for that silence to end. I wrote this
book because this man is a hero, and this is
(30:15):
a time where we're so divided, we're so angry, we
distrust each other so.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Much, that we need heroes. We need role models. Amen
to that.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
And I wrote this book because I admire Clarence Thomas,
and I want people to know his story. And if
you're looking for a role model in life, and if
you're not, you should be, because we all need role models.
It would be very hard for you to do better
than Clarence Thomas. So I just want to ask our
wonderful verdict listeners, and you guys are the best and
(30:45):
most passionate and engaged and informed group of Americans and
patriots on planet Earth. If you haven't gone and bought
the book, please go buy it. You will enjoy it.
I'm promising you this is a fun read.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
You will learn. You will laugh.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
You will have insight for the same reason you listen
to the podcast, because hopefully when you're done, you learn
something that you didn't know when you sat down to it.
The book will do the same.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Go buy it.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
And I want to encourage you to give it to
your loved ones. Give it to your kids or your
grandkids or your brother or your mom or your dad.
It's a Christmas gift. It's a birthday gift. I wrote
this book. Because I want people to know this story,
and there is nobody better than the Verdict listeners to
ensure that people know the extraordinary hero.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Know who the man is.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
You will read this book, and you will understand and
know Clarence Thomas in a very different way than you
know him right now.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
All right, don't forget, grab the book, and also don't
miss a single episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz wherever
you get your podcasts. We do this show Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
so hit that subscribe or auto-download button, and the Senator
and I will see you back here in a couple
of days.
Welcome.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
It is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
And we are back to regularly scheduled programming after what
was really cool, a two-part sit-down, Senator, that you did
with Clarence Thomas. Now it's my turn to get to
talk to you about how fun it was to do
this project and to write about someone that you had
so much admiration for.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Well, this has been a terrific week. On Tuesday, my
brand new book came out. Going Further, The Incomparable Clarence Thomas.
And it's my fifth book. This one has really been
a labor of love. I've loved writing it. It came
out on Tuesday. It immediately rocketed to being the number
one bestseller in the country on Amazon. It has been incredible.
(00:42):
I want to start by saying to Verdict listeners, to
all of you, thank you. Thank you for going onto
Amazon and buying the book. Thank you for going. We
have a website, goingfurther.com, goingfurther.com. Thank you for buying the book.
um it has been there's been a lot of enthusiasm
behind it and and we monday and wednesdays pods were
(01:03):
really special because justice thomas came and and i had
the chance to interview him one-on-one for the podcast this
was the first and it's the only podcast justice thomas
has ever done so he has done verdict and nothing
else and and and it was you know justice thomas
and i go back more than 30 years he he
is a good friend and i think he is truly
(01:24):
an american hero but He very rarely does interviews. He
does very few public speeches. And so for him to
come and participate in verdict and answer questions and just talk,
talk candidly about his life, about his childhood, his upbringing,
talk about his ideological and intellectual journey, talk about his jurisprudence,
talk about the demonization and vilification that has been directed
(01:48):
at him. And it's, I got to say, The interview
with Justice Thomas broke a ton of news. There have
been dozens and dozens of news stories, national news stories,
that came out of that podcast because Justice Thomas does
so few interviews and because when he sat down on verdict,
he was very honest and candid and direct, and so
(02:08):
he spoke from the heart. I will say, if you
didn't watch that whole video, it's two parts. Monday was
part one. Wednesday was part two. You should go back
and watch it because it really does give you I
know the man, I know him personally, but I will
say that interview, that interview now ranks right up there
with the interview you and I did with Elon Musk
(02:29):
as among my favorite podcasts we've ever done. And so
I would encourage you, make sure you watch it and
share that interview with others. And hopefully this one too,
as we talk more about the book, which we're going
to do right now.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Yeah, it's really awesome. All right, I want to take
a moment real quick and talk to you about something
that's extremely important. Right now, somewhere in the world, there's
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(03:04):
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(03:28):
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(03:52):
let's just go back in time and let people understand
when this became an idea to do the biography of
Clarence Thomas. I remember we were at dinner in D.C.,
And we were talking about your next book idea, subjects, topics, ideas.
And then you grinned and you said, all right, what
do you think about me doing a book interviewing Clarence Thomas?
(04:16):
And usually I remember we were sitting around a small
group and it was like, well, that's not normally what
you do. And then you sold us on the idea
because we're normally it's a subject. It's going into midterm
election year. It'd be something that would be important to
what's happening now.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
And you're like, no, no, no.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Let me tell you why I think this book would
be amazing and why I think people would want to
read it. And you sold us because we were not
convinced in that moment without the details in the background.
And watching, just seeing your passion that night turn into
the hours you spent with Clarence Thomas, turning into this
bestselling book. I got to say, from sitting on the sidelines,
(04:53):
it has been so fun to watch.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
This has been a passion project. And we came up
with the ideas about two years ago. Uh, you know,
I was thinking about art. I want to do another
book and I like writing books. I enjoy it. This
is book number five. So I've done one about every
couple of years and, and it takes, you know, it
takes a ton of time. You have to carve out
a lot of time and I do a lot of
late nights. If I'm not doing verdict in late nights,
(05:17):
I'm writing the book that, that that's, you can tell
I have an exciting social life. It's really, really impressive. Uh, But,
you know, I like writing books. I was looking for
a topic and something I wanted to say. And what
got me.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Excited about this biography.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Is Clarence Thomas is someone who I think is genuinely
an American hero. He's an extraordinary person. And his life
journey is so inspirational. It's so powerful.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
But yet most people don't know it. Most Americans.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
It's interesting that this week I'm doing a ton of
media interviews. And almost to a person, the folks doing
the interviews, they say, well, when I read this book,
I learned a ton of things that I didn't know.
I didn't know this about Clarence Thomas. I didn't know
that about Clarence Thomas. And it's I want every American
to know his story and to know both his personal
(06:09):
story of going from abject poverty facing massive racism all
the way up to the pinnacle of American law. That
is an inspirational and amazing story. But I also want
people to understand the intellectual journey he traveled from being
a hardcore leftist, a radical leftist student activist.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
He was an OG activist, by the way. People don't understand.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
He was an old school college activist.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
A radical. A radical, yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
And all the way to being one of the most
important conservative activists thinkers in the history of america that
that's an amazing journey too and it's important to understand
and then third his jurisprudence so so clarence thomas is
right now uh the second longest serving justice in american
history in less than two years he will become the
(07:03):
longest serving justice in the history of the united states
that's a big damn deal uh and.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
By the way who is the longest serving because that's
got to be a history question people are asking right
now It's not.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
You're the first to ask that. The longest serving is
William O. Douglas. Interesting. And Thomas will pass him, I think,
in May of 28. Wow.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
But if you look at it in those more than
30 years, he has some extraordinary opinions. His jurisprudence has
been massively consequential. And most people, if you're not a lawyer,
if you're not a constitutional... lawyer, you probably don't know
what Clarence Thomas's opinions have said.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
And so what I wanted to do in this.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Book is talk about all three, his personal journey, his
intellectual journey, but also the body of work that he
has produced as one of the most consequential justices in history.
And what I try to do in the book is
what I try to do on the podcast, which is
explain things in terms that are understandable, that are real,
(08:07):
You don't have to be a lawyer to enjoy this book.
You don't have to be a constitutional law expert any
more than to listen to this podcast. You don't have
to be an expert or you don't have to be
a lawyer. You don't have to be a foreign policy expert.
I try to take issues that matter, that matter to
you in your life, and I try to explain them
with detail, with meat, with substance, but also in language
(08:28):
that is understandable. And actually, I would say some of
the philosophy of the book is, goes back to the
philosophy of this verdict podcast. We just launched it, what now,
five years ago. When we started going on air and
the podcast went from, the very first verdict podcast was
(08:49):
the first night of the first Trump impeachment. And I
spent all day on the Senate floor and the jury
of impeachment went over to the TV studio and recorded
the inaugural verdict. And we did it every night at
like midnight or one in the morning. assessing what happened.
And I remember my production crew at the time, they
said when we did the first few, their advice was
(09:12):
dumb it down. They said this is too sophisticated, too complicated.
And I really resisted that. I said, listen, I don't
believe that. I do not believe that people want dumbed down.
What they do want is understandable. And the analogy that
I've used many times is... If you or I go
(09:33):
to a doctor and we've got some horrible disease, nobody
wants the doctor to say, Ben, you've got a boo-boo.
You're like, Doc, tell me what the hell's going on.
But at the same time, you don't want the doctor
to use a bunch of medical jargon that you have
to have an MD to understand. So you want a
serious and complicated issue explained in English in a way
(09:57):
that you can follow it. That's what I try to
do on this podcast. I try to explain all sorts
of things. So during the first impeachment, that series of podcasts,
I would explain, you know, what is Ukraine? What is Burisma,
the natural gas company in Ukraine? What is impeachment? What
are high crimes and misdemeanors? Just basic questions, but that
(10:17):
if you're not an expert, there's no reason you should know.
That worked and the verdict podcast went from zero to
it became the number one ranked podcast in the world.
With the book, I try to do the same thing,
which is take really important and consequential issues before the
(10:37):
Supreme Court, but explain it in a way that everyone
can understand it. And I'll say, Ben, one thing that
makes that much easier is is that is also very
much Justice Thomas's approach to writing opinions.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
His opinions, by the way, if you've never read a
Justice Thomas opinion, when he was writing opinions and I
was younger and it was big cases... I would always grab,
if he wrote an opinion, whether it was in favor
or against you in dissent, I would read it because
I could understand exactly what he was saying, whereas there's
others on the Supreme Court, they write opinions, and if
(11:11):
you're not a lawyer or a constitutional law geek, you
do not understand exactly what they're saying.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
He very much writes opinions that are plain, prose, understandable.
There are justices who are renowned for highfalutin prose and
ten-penny words, and at times you can't understand what the
heck they're saying. Thomas believes every American ought to have
a right to understand what the Supreme Court is saying,
(11:44):
understand their Constitution, their rights, their Bill of Rights. I
tell a story in the book about how he was
visiting Gettysburg, and this fellow comes up to him, with
an opinion printed on parchment. And it was an opinion,
it was an admiralty opinion. It was not a high-profile opinion.
It was not an opinion that was known by a
lot of people. It was one Thomas has written. And
(12:06):
he said, you know, Justice Thomas, can you sign this
for me?
Speaker 1 (12:08):
He said, sure.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
And he said, the fellow said, this is what it's
all about. And Thomas looks at him confused, and he's
like looking out over the battlefield at Gettysburg. He said, Gettysburg,
this was all about an admiralty opinion? And the guy said, no, no, no.
This I can understand this. I can read it. I
know what it's saying. And that's what the battle where
(12:31):
the citizens, we should be able to understand our government.
And that was that is very much consistent with how
Justice Thomas tries to write his opinions. And it's how
I try to write this book.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
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(14:33):
and make that switch today. You know, this book, one
of the cool things about it is, is there's a
couple of really, I think interesting points, which readers will
love when they read this book. And it goes back to,
not only the upbringing of Clarence Thomas, which you cover,
and a lot of poverty, but also the fact, and
this got some headlines this week from the interview that
(14:53):
you did on this podcast with him. Clarence Thomas has
experienced two extreme forms of racism in his lifetime. The
first was just racism because he was African-American. The second
form of racism was later in life, and that is
where people assume because he was African-American, he should believe
(15:16):
or say certain things. And then when he went against
that narrative of what they believed he should say because
he's a black man, that was a second form of racism.
And part of you thinks, well, I bet you didn't
see that one coming when he was dealing with the
first type of racism when he was younger.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Well, but in many ways he did. And you look
at the two components.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Let's start with his life story and racism directed against
African Americans. Look, he was born in 1948, so just
three years after World War II ends. And he was
born in Pinpoint, Georgia, rural Georgia, on the coast of Georgia. Actually,
English was not his first language. His first language was
(15:57):
called Geechee, and it is a Creole dialect. Uh, that is,
is common on the Georgia and South Carolina barrier islands.
And in South Carolina, it's called Gala and Georgia is
called Geechee. Um, he was born and raised initially by
a single mom who had a lot of issues and
who struggled. They were in extreme poverty. They lived in
(16:19):
a tenement that did not have indoor plumbing. He did
not have a toilet in the house. They had an
outhouse outside. They used a chamber pot. And then he
tells a story when he was a little boy, he
was carrying a full chamber pot down the stairs.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
And he tripped and fell and the whole thing dumped
on him and.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
He was curled up in a ball at the base
of the stairs, just drenched in stale urine. And I
gotta say that is not a typical beginning for a
Supreme court justice.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Um, he, uh, from a young age, his mom was
not able to care for him. So he ended up
being raised by his grandparents, uh, and his grandparents, his grandfather,
Myers Anderson, who he called daddy, uh, was the most
important and influential man in Clarence Thomas' life. And he
was a hard man. He was a strict disciplinarian. The
(17:09):
day Clarence and his brother moved into their grandparents' house,
Myers-Anderson said, boy, the damn vacation is over. And it
says something like the life of squalor he was living in.
Not many people would call that a vacation. But Myers-Anderson did.
He believed in hard work. and he would work those boys,
(17:29):
he would get up at three or four in the morning,
and they'd go with him delivering heating fuel. And they'd
do it often in bitter early mornings in the winter
when it was cold outside. And he would not let
the boys wear gloves. He thought gloves were a sign
of weakness and you needed to be tough, you needed
to be strong. And he would work them, he'd work
(17:51):
them from before the sun came up till late, late
at night. And at one point when he was a teenager,
Clarence said to his grandfather, daddy, slavery is over. And
without missing a beat, his grandfather said, not in this house,
it's not. And he instilled discipline in those boys. The
(18:13):
one exception, the one way they could get out of
hard work was reading in school. And both of Clarence
Thomas's grandparents were illiterate. They couldn't read, they couldn't write,
and they wanted their grandsons to have a better life.
And so Young Clarence Thomas would spend hours in the
library just reading everything he could get his hands on,
(18:33):
and reading and reading. He became a very good student.
He still, to this day, devours books. And he was
an excellent student. And as a young man, he decided
he had found what he wanted to do in life.
And it wasn't to be a lawyer. It wasn't to
be a judge. He wanted to be a priest. His
grandfather was a very devout Catholic. And Clarence Thomas was
(18:57):
raised as an altar boy, and he really loved the discipline,
the ritual, the order, the structure of the Catholic Church.
He loved and respected that the priests and nuns, that
they cared for the community. The nuns who taught him
in Catholic school had a really profound impact on his life,
and so he decided, I'm going to be a priest.
And he went to seminary, both in high school and college,
(19:19):
he went to seminary. And he encountered real racism in seminary.
When he was in seminary in high school, he was
one of only two black boys in the seminary. And
he recounts a story of one of the white boys
who was there passing him a note. And the note said,
I like Martin Luther King. And he remembers being surprised.
(19:40):
He didn't expect him to say that. And then he
turned the paper over and on the back it said, dead.
And that really hit Clarence Thomas hard. Another instance, you know,
the kids in seminary would make fun of him. They
would call him WBC, world's blackest child. One of the
ways he responded to that was by excelling academically and
(20:04):
proving himself. And so, for example, Latin He became a
very good Latin student, and he liked, again, the structure
and order of Latin. And they had a competition, the
Latin Bee, where you competed translating Latin, and he won it.
He was the top Latin student at the school, and
they gave him a prize. It was a statue of St. Jude.
(20:26):
And he was really proud of that, and he put
it in his dorm room. And the next day when
he came, someone had broken the head off the statue.
and so he went and got some glue, and he
glued the head back on and set it back up
on his bookcase, and the next day, someone had broken
the head off again, and he glued it a second time,
and it stuck after that. They didn't break it a
(20:48):
third time, but when I went to interview him, and
Justice Thomas agreed to sit for nine and a half
hours of interviews in his chambers for this book, and
so he.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
And I went one-on-one.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
I'd come at 8 in the morning and sit down
in chambers, and it was just him and me. I'd
sit down a tape recorder and just ask questions. One
of the first questions I asked is I had heard
about the statue of St. Jude, which he kept with
him his whole life. And I said, hey, where's that statue?
I'd really like to see it. And he kind of chuckled.
He said, well, I don't have it anymore. And I said, well,
what happened? And he sent it to your friend and
(21:24):
to my friend, Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Rush was a dear friend of his, and when Rush
was sick, when Rush had cancer... Justice Thomas sent him
the statue of St. Jude to give him comfort and
peace as he was dying, and he never got it
back from Rush, but it's kind of that statue was well-served,
comforting another great American hero, Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
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(22:50):
You know, there's so many people that are listening or
watching this podcast, and they know Clarence Thomas as the
guy who had to defend himself from horrific attacks during
his confirmation hearing.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
There is so much about him that is not that.
One of those is the fact that he was, as
we mentioned earlier, a radical in school, and then there
was a turning point. You got to talk about that
as well.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Well, I did.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
After his high school seminary, he went to college seminary.
And there, he ended up becoming disillusioned with the Church,
and he got angry at God. And he was disillusioned
at the Church because he thought the Church was very
slow to condemn racial discrimination, racial prejudice, that the Church
was slow to defend civil rights. And a point that
(23:41):
I make in the book and that I discuss with
Justice Thomas is, look, that was true of the Catholic Church,
it was true of the Protestant Church, it was true
Christians as a whole were far too slow to stand
up on the side of justice and condemn bigotry.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
And, you know, Dr.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Martin Luther King, many people forget that he was also
Reverend King. He was a pastor. And when he wrote
the letter from a Birmingham jail, and for several years
I've gone to the Senate floor and participated in a
bipartisan reading of the letter from a Birmingham jail, where
you have Republicans and Democrats read it out loud, and
it is so powerful. We've all read it in school,
(24:20):
but reading the words out loud just gives it additional
weight and gravitas. But many people forget to whom that
letter was addressed. Do you remember who it was addressed to, Ben?
Speaker 1 (24:32):
I do not. It was addressed to the clergy of America.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Wow. And it was Reverend King saying to the pastors,
to the priests, stand up and fight for what's right.
Do not be silent. And my favorite line of that
whole letter was Reverend King saying the church should be
a thermostat and not a thermometer. We should be changing
(24:58):
the temperature of our environment. We shouldn't just reflect what's
around us. So Thomas becomes disillusioned. He becomes angry, angry
at God. He leaves seminary and he leaves the church.
He goes to Holy Cross for college and then Yale
for law school. And for years he refuses to attend mass.
I mean, he's really angry. He is now once again,
a very devout Catholic. He came back to God, came
(25:20):
back to his faith, but it took many years. And
when he was in college, when he was in law school,
he went hard left, and he became a bitter, angry radical.
He was mad at God, he was mad at the church,
he was mad at America, he was mad at white men.
And I will tell you, his leaving the seminary ruptured
(25:41):
his relationship with his grandfather. His grandfather was adamant that
when you do something, you don't quit. And when he quit...
His grandfather threw him out of the house. And it
may well be the single hardest chapter in Clarence Thomas'
life when his grandfather, who he called Daddy, who raised him,
the man he admired more than anyone else, threw him out.
(26:03):
It was crushing to Clarence Thomas. And he was a radical.
He wore camo pants and combat boots. He had a
poster of Malcolm X on the wall. He would go
to Black Panther rallies. He participated in a riot in
Harvard Square. He was a young, angry man in college.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
You hear that part of the story, and this is
where it goes back to faith. God used all of
that to then turn him and probably prepare him for
the biggest, I would say, personal attack we had ever
seen publicly at that time on somebody either, A, I
think in the political world, certainly trying to get on
the Supreme Court, where the left decided, we believe that
(26:49):
this man is such a threat that we're going to
try to stop him. And he was a threat on
so many different levels as a conservative, as a conservative
African-American man. As someone that they understood by his age,
he could serve for a very long time. We talked
about that earlier. You've known him for a long time.
But what are the takeaways now looking back on his
confirmation hearing? And the whole world stopped, certainly all of America,
(27:12):
to watch it. And some of the horrific things that
were thrown at him trying to derail his confirmation. Now,
others have had to deal with it since then. It
was almost a playbook now by the left. If you
want to get rid of somebody, I've heard it be
said before by Democrats, we need to Clarence Thomas that nominee.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
You're absolutely right. His confirmation hearing was brutal. It was
a character assassination. It was, as he famously said on
national television, it was a high-tech lynching for uppity Negroes.
And I will tell you those words silenced the Senate
Judiciary Committee. In the book, I walk through the behind
the scenes of that brutal confirmation hearing. They follow the
(27:53):
same strategy that they did with Brett Kavanaugh. I talk
about that in the book, comparing the two. Obviously, Brett
Kavanaugh was a very active part of that confirmation hearing.
But in both instances, the Democrat senators had allegations of
sexual assault or sexual harassment. They had them for weeks
ahead of the hearing. They sat on them. They did
(28:13):
nothing with them. They didn't ask the nominees about them.
And then on the eve of the vote, they leaked
them to the press and just smeared them in the press.
By the way, Justice Thomas talks about the chairman of
the Judiciary Committee during his hearing, that was Joe Biden,
who Joe Biden was deeply dishonest with him, said one
thing to Thomas and then just broke his word and
lied repeatedly. And it was in both instances, Clarence Thomas
(28:37):
was confirmed because the American people looked him in the
eye in the hearing and they looked Anita Hill in
the eye and by a two to one margin, two
thirds of Americans believed Clarence Thomas and did not believe
Anita Hill's allegations. The same thing was true with Brett Kavanaugh.
That's why he was confirmed. You know, the book that
I wrote, it begins with the following. Imagine a man
(29:00):
who came from nothing, who endured bleak poverty, who stood
up to crushing racism, who is right now on track
to become the longest serving Supreme Court justice in American history.
You don't have to imagine that man, of course, is
the incomparable Clarence Thomas. There is nobody else quite like him.
(29:26):
Somebody so extraordinary, you would think, would be venerated. And
if he were politically liberal, he would be. Change that
one small fact and dozens of law schools would have
given him an honorary degree. Elementary schools would be named
after him. Late night hosts would invite him on adoringly.
(29:52):
And chic t-shirts, think notorious RBG, would be aggressively marketed
to young people. Instead, the response is silence and hate.
It's time for that silence to end. I wrote this
book because this man is a hero, and this is
(30:15):
a time where we're so divided, we're so angry, we
distrust each other so.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Much, that we need heroes. We need role models. Amen
to that.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
And I wrote this book because I admire Clarence Thomas,
and I want people to know his story. And if
you're looking for a role model in life, and if
you're not, you should be, because we all need role models.
It would be very hard for you to do better
than Clarence Thomas. So I just want to ask our
wonderful verdict listeners, and you guys are the best and
(30:45):
most passionate and engaged and informed group of Americans and
patriots on planet Earth. If you haven't gone and bought
the book, please go buy it. You will enjoy it.
I'm promising you this is a fun read.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
You will learn. You will laugh.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
You will have insight for the same reason you listen
to the podcast, because hopefully when you're done, you learn
something that you didn't know when you sat down to it.
The book will do the same.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Go buy it.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
And I want to encourage you to give it to
your loved ones. Give it to your kids or your
grandkids or your brother or your mom or your dad.
It's a Christmas gift. It's a birthday gift. I wrote
this book. Because I want people to know this story,
and there is nobody better than the Verdict listeners to
ensure that people know the extraordinary hero.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Know who the man is.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
You will read this book, and you will understand and
know Clarence Thomas in a very different way than you
know him right now.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
All right, don't forget, grab the book, and also don't
miss a single episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz wherever
you get your podcasts. We do this show Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
so hit that subscribe or auto-download button, and the Senator
and I will see you back here in a couple
of days.
Host
Ben Ferguson
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