The Conservative View of Race in a Nutshell

Shorter Jeffrey Lord: Accusations that a conservative African-American engaged in sexual harassment is lynching, whether or not he is guilty. Extralegal killings of African-Americans, of course, are not lynchings.

One thing to add is that the “high-tech lynching” nonsense implies that Thomas was innocent. While we cannot know to an absolute certainty what happened between Hill and Thomas, thanks to Mayer and Abramson’s superb book on the subject we know that Hill’s accusations are credible, coherent, and backed up by contemporaneous sources, while Thomas’s story generally lacks these qualities. Being fair and balanced, however, I must acknowledge this rigorous evaluation of the evidence by Roger El-Simon, another right-wing hack willing to grotesquely misuse the term “lynching”:

Back in 1991, during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, I believed Anita Hill. Years later, my life had changed, and I came to meet Thomas himself at a social gathering. He turned out to be a delightful, unassuming person — it was hard to believe a Supreme Court justice could be so down to Earth and decent to be with on a social level.

I liked him a lot and am now skeptical that I was right about Hill. Maybe it had been just a high-tech lynching.

Well, I’m convinced!