Moments after the Supreme Court issued its majority opinion in Trump v CASA, leftwing Redditors were apoplectic. One of my favorites:
Amy Coney Barrett is another racist Supreme Court justice giving Trump the power to be a fascist.
It never ceases to entertain me that the same movement that has for decades delighted itself in persistently demeaning Clarence Thomas solely along racial lines, thinks it has the moral credibility to accuse anyone of being a racist. A safe rule to live by is when the log in your own eye permits you to castigate a black man as "Uncle Tom" simply because he refuses to live on your thought plantation, it's best to avoid commenting on the speck in others'.
But abiding by that rule would require an element of self-introspection, an admirable quality that is unfortunately in short supply in the American political universe, particularly on its left-wing.
Evidence of this abounds on progressive Temu Twitter, "Bluesky":
I defy any man or woman with a functioning brain to read the Barrett opinion, which was admittedly scathing in its dismissal of Ketanji Brown Jackson's embarrassing dissent, and find any racial overtones. They're not there.
Barrett's words are void of any "racialized disrespect," though they are full of intellectual disrespect.
I get that, for a movement grounded in identity politics, it's difficult to distinguish between the two. And yet the distinction is there, and if anyone is to blame for Brown Jackson's humiliation, it is former President Joe Biden, who elevated her to a position she is not qualified to hold.
He put her on a stage she lacks the chops to perform on, and now she is being regularly exposed as an intellectual lightweight. That isn't Barrett's fault. ACB didn't make Brown Jackson eschew academic writing in deference to Gen-Z colloquialisms like "wait for it" and "full stop" in her dissent.
(Never mind she used "full stop" right before a paragraph of not stopping.)
Scholars who are black, white, and every shade in-between recognize social-media internet jargon isn't suited for the highest court in the land.
To that end, it bears mentioning that Brown Jackson's legal and ideological colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor is widely regarded as similarly intellectually outclassed.
This phenomenon is the result of having one liberal justice, Elena Kagan, who is exceptionally bright and has a mastery of the law. It's not that she agrees ideologically with the Court's 6 more conservative justices, it's that she's not an activist posing as a judge. The same cannot be said for Sotomayor and Brown Jackson.
That has nothing to do with race, other than the fact that the presidents who nominated both Sotomayor (Obama) and Brown Jackson (Biden) had an unfortunate preoccupation with it as some kind of ultimate qualification.
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