SALT LAKE CITY, UT – During a speaking engagement held at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City on the evening of March 11th, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas addressed the topics of cancel culture and attempts by Democrats to stack the Supreme Court, warning of the long-term negative impacts both could have on the courts and in society.

In the leadup to the 2020 election, calls by some Democrats to expand the Supreme Court – often referred to as “packing” or “stacking” – began receiving a fairly heavy degree of mainstream attention.

Those calls from progressives had even resulted in Joe Biden convening a commission in April of 2021 that would study the effects of expanding the Supreme Court, with Democrat senators having even attempted to introduce a bill at the same time that would add four Supreme Court justices.

However, said court packing bill effort proved to be too much for some of the more moderate Democrats.

Nonetheless, the mere utterances of such radical approaches to disrupting the Supreme Court doesn’t sit well with Justice Thomas.

“You can cavalierly talk about packing or stacking the court. You can cavalierly talk about doing this or doing that. At some point the institution is going to be compromised. By doing this, you continue to chip away at the respect of the institutions that the next generation is going to need if they’re going to have civil society.”

Though it isn’t merely the concept of packing the courts that unsettles Justice Thomas nowadays, as he’s also concerned about the widespread mainstreaming and embracement of cancel culture.

“I’m afraid, particularly in this world of cancel culture attack, I don’t know where you’re going to learn to engage as we did when I grew up. If you don’t learn at that level in high school, in grammar school, in your neighborhood, or in civic organizations, then how do you have it when you’re making decisions in government, in the legislature, or in the courts?”

Justice Thomas is no stranger to cancel culture, particularly the earlier iterations of it when he faced as sort of cancel culture mob of outrage during his 1991 confirmation process to the high court when dealing with unfounded allegations of sexual harassment. In his own words, Justice Thomas called the humiliating process as “high tech lynching.”

 

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