Reflections on the Path Forward for Americans | OLD PARKLAND CONFERENCE

[Music] well um good evening everybody uh my name is uh john yoo the only thing i've ever done of note is i've clerked for justice clarence thomas in 1994-1995 what about those i don't talk about memos anymore justin okay and it's uh my pleasure to introduce the justice and also tell you all about a change in the format the justice said he would rather have a conversation with all of us for the next hour so i'm going to ask him a few questions for the first half of that and then i will take questions from the audience for the second half of that um also i just want to remember to uh say on behalf of uh the american enterprise institute whose president robert dorr is here and uh hoover institution and manhattan institute i know right reihan where i know you're here rihanna thank you i want to thank you for uh joining us this evening and i think uh i'm sure you and all of us want to join uh harlan thank harlan crowe and his family for making this wonderful facility available [Applause] i know harlan hates that no so i knew we had that's why i wouldn't say it i knew we had to do it i like to keep that friendship [Laughter] oh so it's going to be like that kind of evening yeah yeah you're used to being thrown under the bus [Laughter] you're a very good bus driver which we're going to get oh yeah [Laughter] so let me just you all know justice thomas's biography of course he was from pinpoint georgia went to holy cross for college yale law school he then became an aide in the senate to senator john danforth from missouri he became an official in the education department in the early years of the reagan administration and then from there became chairman of the eeoc and then the first president bush appointed him to the u.s court of appeals for the d.c circuit the same court on which judge brown who you saw earlier today served and then in 1991 justice thomas joined the supreme court at the tender age of 42 43 years old who's counting when he just celebrated last year his 30th year on the court [Applause] and so just as a means of introduction before i ask the first question i was trying to think of the thing i think that defines your tenure on the court the most i mean some people say you are the most committed to interpreting the constitution based on the understanding of those who drafted and ratified it some people say you're the person who's most likely to say the emperor has no clothes when the court goes off on some long uh trail of precedent then increasingly doesn't make sense you're the one who brings them back to reality but i just wanted to read briefly uh what i think would be meaningful for many of the people here was the way you ended your speech uh before the national bar association um you said a long time ago long time ago yes um but i it sounds like you just wrote these yesterday actually this uh so this is uh for those who don't know this is a bar association was set up by uh leaders of the black bar and bench and uh you there were some controversy about a lot of invitations so it follows me around we'll get to that too don't worry and so you said to them at the end of your speech you said i have come here today not in anger or to anger though my mere presence has been sufficient obviously to anger some nor have i come to defend my views but rather to assert my right to think for myself to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though i was an intellectual slave because i'm black i come to state that i'm a man free to think for myself and do as i please i have come to assert that i am a judge and i will not be consigned the unquestioned opinion of others and so to me i think what your time on the quarter show and then we're going to get to the questions i'm going to stop buttering you up is that it's a year that you really show the importance of ideas more than anything else your my time working for you and watching you since then you're not there to assemble five votes to win your uh influence has come because of what you've written on the page and over time i think we we're seeing more and more that you have persuaded your colleagues and we're seeing now that opinions i used to insert into into opinions 30 years ago i had no idea why you were doing it and now actually i i get it the ideas took 30 years oh we had enough introduction so uh justice first question is there anything going on at the court these days when you go back to washington could you tell your colleagues that next time they leak an opinion could they just give it to me and i'll link it for them why are they going through these other methods you have too much character but in seriousness justice uh you know one theme that's come out of this conference i think is the importance of institutions yeah and that institutions are under attack these days um so i thought you might want to comment on the leaks the protests at justice's homes and what we're seeing in the wake of this leak of the alleged dobbs draft opinion well i've first of all it's um a real honor to be here this is it's hard to believe that 40 more than 40 years passed since um i was at fairmont conference which was i was no more enthusiastic about that than i am about this one um and i think it started off with an i thought on very electric speech by glenn lowry and it has continued with the thoughtfulness and that's really all we ever wanted and not to replace one orthodoxy with another orthodoxy we had enough of that but rather to assume that people are able to think for themselves to have different ideas because they're unique to exchange different perspectives and perhaps have others uh either agree with them or sharpen their disagreements but to have a civil discussion that was all that's why it was called new alternatives uh it was an alternative to uh it's the kind of alternatives you would want in a what we thought at least in a civil society and it certainly was did not was not treated that way and that sort of we were treated very shabbily after that and the the whole idea that your point about institutions i think we are in dangers of destroying the institutions that are required for a free society you can't have a a civil society a free society without a stable legal system you can't have one without stability in things like property or an interpretation an impartial judiciary and i've been in this business long enough to know just how fragile it is and the institution that i'm a part of if someone said that one line of one opinion would be leaked by anyone and you would say oh that's impossible no one would ever do that there's such a belief in the rule of law belief in the court a belief in what we were doing that that was verboten it was beyond anyone's understanding or at least anyone's uh imagination that someone would do that and look where we are where now that trust or that belief is gone forever um the and when you lose that trust especially in the institution that i'm in it changes the institution fundamentally you begin to look over your shoulder it's like kind of an infidelity on that you can explain it but you can't undo it and the and i think you're seeing it go through any number of our institutions whether it's in the political branches or whether it's in the universities when i went to a university to college it was the fun place where you were not that well informed but boy you debated all night and then the people with whom you argue just like the supreme court uh no no [Laughter] um the so the but the friends that you made during that time you kept for life you you and you pick up the arguments 10 years later and you're still arguing and you're still loving being around each other you remember the bad pizza and too many mugs of beer and a reason why many of us don't drink anymore but my point is simply that there's that even the universities have changed i was at the university of georgia about a year ago and i met with a lot of students and their question was why can't we in the general society debate difficult things anymore and i said to them and these were small groups i met with a group of 10 students 15 separate groups for about an hour it was very uh exhausting but enormously enormously informative and the on the you know i said to them that to me the epicenter of free speech when i was in it was at the university that's where you learn how to to engage with people who disagreed with you that's where you learned how to deal with ideas and address ideas that you had not you were not with which you were not familiar previously or with which you disagreed and it was back and forth and i just loved it and we called them rap sessions back then and they said i said but now look at your university at this is university of georgia i said how many of you can take a view on this campus of traditional families and of course nobody or you got a lot of people staring at the floor how many of you can take a pro-life position on this campus staring at the floor and as you go on and on you take positions that are obviously at odds with the current mood on these campuses now this is a this is where you learn how to deal with views that are different now if you don't learn at that point the law schools are just as bad now at john's alma mater yale uh the um they just did you give your degree back again [Laughter] uh yale does not recognize me me either oh so we're in the same boat but um they just protested uh a group uh and made it very difficult for others to come and certainly had a chilling effect now yale was when i was there visiting it was anything goes as you do your thing i do my thing and maybe too much of that but it certainly wasn't prior restraint and it certainly wasn't censorship but here we are where that's acceptable at one of the elite universities it's and it's pretty much acceptable at all the universities and if they if we're there with these institutions how do we recover so yeah i do think that the the what happened at the court is tremendously bad i think it's um i wonder how long we're going to have uh these institutions at the rate we're undermining them and then i wonder when they're gone or they are destabilized what we will have as a country and i don't think that the prospects are good if uh if we continue to lose them thank you well i know you can't speak much more about the court so uh maybe we could start with the uh uh how you got to the fairmount conference back in 1980 and so um i dug up a story about the fairmount conference by a washington post reporter at the very end of his story he said he met clarence thomas a young aide to senator john danforth who spoke with barely controlled exhilaration quote it's really kind of good to be here cause someone might agree with me for a change [Laughter] [Applause] so in 30 years some things still don't change except i couldn't care less of it so how did you what's the intellectual journey that got you from me and i'll try to be brief i grew up at a time when i liked where i grew up and i liked when i grew up how i grew up uh and and where i grew up uh you had segregation which wasn't good but i had a stable you know and stable a neighborhood i had a stable household they're my grandparents but it was the essence of stability they had no education my grandfather had nine months my grandmother's six years and uh went to the sixth grade i don't know how many months she went and but they believed in education for us so they were not educated but they believed with all their heart that education was critical devoutly religious religious neighborhood we were catholic so we were in oddity my grandmother was baptist and you went to church on sunday you rode you got your western flyer bike and you rode all over town since nothing was open on sundays you rode all over savannah's your little kids 10 11 12 years old riding all over savannah you had your u.s army backpack and you walked to school every day in the inner city how many kids walk to school in the inner city at nine at six seven eight nine years old now and you i served six o'clock mass walk by myself in the dark and my biggest fear was stray dogs which there were a lot of back then and um but i liked it but when i got up north suddenly you take sociology and and suddenly you're told that you were alienated i wasn't alienated from anybody i liked i liked my life and i the terms that i'd never heard of like anime you know um the it's almost as suddenly we're supposed to be pathological which are we're supposed to convert a past that we've always thought of as a positive pass into this sort of negative this pathological past and i would i couldn't do that and i couldn't disavow my grandparents i couldn't disavow my nuns the education i had but all the inputs that i was getting up north was that it was all bad and i was a little bit and i was very angry about the race issue which is a bad combination i mean i was really angry we were over at harvard um harvard square we tried to burn that down and uh so you can just see how angry we were and it's a that was a stupid thing to do but hey i was at the stupid age and i was very upset about race and what we had done with race in the society but the the the the ideology of us having to um negate the lives that we had had previously in order to support the prevailing ideological attitudes was uh it was very difficult for me anyway when i finished law school and couldn't get a job in georgia that's another thing that ticked me off i was really had a lot of reasons to be mad at a lot of people so i wound up in in jeff city missouri with which was very comforting because it was quiet and peaceful and it was the people were honest finally include especially senator danforth and i started thinking about trying to reconcile what people were saying and what i knew in other words what they were saying about the world and the world i actually knew that i grew up in the experiences i had in the seminary and elsewhere and so a friend of mine who knew about this he was a quadriplegic from polio and a very close buddy of mine he calls me up in my office and said clarence i'm reading this review in the wall street journal there's another black guy like you his name is thomas sowell [Laughter] and it's a review of his book race and economics i'll let you i bring it over tomorrow and i said no i'll come get it so i ran down and just like got this uh book review by michael novak and there it was there was tom soul and i got his book eventually read it after some trouble read it like a thirsty person off the desert drinking water and there it was it was reconciled finally somebody was telling the truth and the i went to st louis and this is 76 and 78 i go to st i'm working at monsanto someone says they know how passionate i am about this thomas owl guy and um they mentioned that he's going to be at washington university law school where he was in a on a panel with professor ruth bader ginsburg and so i go over and i follow the poor man around he was trying to leave and i was a stalker and hey i admit it and he signed my book he autographed my book and looked at me kind of awkwardly and i would see him again after i moved to washington when a bunch of black staffers were giving him a hard time and i defended him and he would come over to my office i shared with three others and we would talk and he took my number and i took his calling him you may as well just forget the number if he gives it to you just burn it you'll never get him uh i learned that the hard way and but i can't now but back then he wouldn't there's no way and he called me he took that number that i'd given him and he called me to come to the fairmont conference and that's how it started it and that started a friendship that has lasted from 19 uh the late 70s to the present or maybe the 1980 to the present and one failure for us after all that exuberance at the conference is we haven't had nothing to show for it other than one little report we had no organization [Music] clarence pendleton tried to do it and they isolated him and beat him up and he went to civil rights commission eventually then um who am i thinking of lee walker had a small branch of it in chicago and he kept it going he was a great guy but the the negativity was overwhelming so one of the things we hoped that would come out of this is we don't have that similar failure where it ends when we close the conference door uh there's got to be more than that or you'll be here 40 years from now telling people that 40 years ago you had a conference and nothing came of it and you're thinking that is two generations that is two generation that is four score well uh justice you um uh have been going to all the panels you've got yes i missed one because they were talking about your case court case but other than that one you've i've seen you've been like you're back in uh high school again oh yeah taking notes arguing with people i took pic i took pictures of your notes because i know you're going to try to destroy them later but you're going to leak them [Laughter] yeah well i know where to go politico politico is going to politico publish anything i give him now but what i ask is um you seem like he's you're excited now as you were 40 years ago did you what have you heard here today in all these panels uh that's different than what you were thinking about studying 40 years ago at the last conference you know fortunately or unfortunately it's the same story different day it is probably farther down the road the out of wedlock birth rate wasn't where it is we warned about that tom professor soul constantly warned about single-parent households and the damage that was going to do and it has particularly with poverty uh and the the sort of the pathologies that flows from flows from that um but i just think it's a lot of the same and the there was one point where people you know the point it was reiterated that eventually we may not have caused this problem on our own but eventually we have to be the ones to lead us out of it but that is something that i have known virtually my entire life and certainly a point that i made when i was uh and others made at the fairmont conference but the sad thing for me is that it's the same thing it's probably done a lot better this conference is a lot better organized i think than ours was all right and i love the panels i love the discussion the but the the i love the in-depth attitude um the the um shelby steel was um his insights for me were very important and you know things like such as being free and i especially liked it since he wrote a review of my book and said i was the freest black man in america and i thought that was probably one of the best essays ever written about me in one of the few that i actually read but it was and his point was really quite i really and i took it to heart i mean what i did it is i felt coming from that conference i felt as though i had company i felt that i wasn't crazy that and now of course i know i'm not the people that i have run into across this country people assume that i've had difficulties when i've been around members of my race it's just the opposite the only people with whom i've had difficulties are white liberal elites who consider themselves the anointed and us the benighted as tom soul would say i have never had issues with members of my race uh you sit i went to university of georgia some years ago and of course people from what they heard they were a little bit upset and then we sat and three hours later do you get you know like you think that we all grew up in the same neighborhood because in a sense we had shared experiences but what they have been doing i just think of this and this is a question i ask young people particularly members of our race my race afterwards i say now explain to me after three hours one thing you heard that you found objectionable and the answer is invariably nothing and i said well what is it those people who are doing all this and printing all this negative stuff all this flag what don't they want you to hear because they haven't changed me what is it they don't want you to know and that's the way i sort of take it they you know the the the the discussions today about the police for example i don't have all that data but ask yourself they're not necessarily censoring you they don't want others to hear and what you have to say and if they do hear it they don't want them to believe it so they load you up with negativity and they give you challenges as far as credibility to brent prevent you from getting to their ears and the most most interesting thing i've heard over the years is when i meet people they said well i thought you were someone else you're not as one guy told me i was in atlanta giving a speech and this very tall imposing black gentleman came up to me tears streaming down his face he said why are they lying about you and because he knows this wasn't about me it was about people who needed to hear about that part of the life that they knew little about about the court about law i mean it's about let's just say economics wouldn't you want to know the truth about economics why don't you want to know the truth if you look at tom soul's writings look at rhetoric in reality he's telling you he's saying look here's what they're saying here's the reality you know my quote this year that has become one favorite of mine i got into salts and nits and i don't know i read all over i tend to wander around and it's one minute you're reading about the vikings the next minutes of salza nietzsche and um and it's he has this wonderful little short essay live not by lies and that the that's sort of the a different version of tell the truth live not by lies and i think we have been allowing people to force us to live by their lives that they say things that are obviously not true obviously not supportable and we take it as fact and then we move from that and tom soul if you look at him he talks often about false premises if you look at his interviews he always attacks the premise and much of my own opinions the the starry decisis issues is attacking the false premises and so again even if you take nothing away from the time i spend here just live not by lies just read that sosa needs an essay you don't repeat lies you don't you don't tell other people things that you know are untrue you don't give it wings you don't give it a life you end it you tell the truth that is what got us in trouble we refuse to tell lies i was recently wrote an opinion on and the difference between crack and powder cocaine i was interested in seeing how many people did not want it known that black politicians agitated for a crackdown on crack cocaine they said there was a crisis of crack cocaine they wanted higher penalties and it had unintended consequences but it was it wasn't i'm not saying it's right or wrong this is a fact and but people want to now reconfigure the facts to fit the current narrative and it's not that is a lie in order now you can say i'm sorry i supported it 20 or 30 years ago when i thought there was a bigger problem but you don't lie about it and i think we're living by many many lies and many lies are being told about us and the beauty of tom soul i think he's a great man i think he is to me one the single greatest intellectual alive and this this conference is the one thing he wanted to happen this is his dream he is in his 90s he is not where he was in that film that you saw but his dream is for this conference and having spent many many many hours with him he's a man who doesn't lie he doesn't want accolades for himself he doesn't want awards what he wants is he wants the truth and he wants people he cares about to prosper if you go to his house you don't see it lined is with awards you don't see him uh in fancy this or fancy that if anything he's up there typing another book he said usually you usually have three or four going he wants this country and people who look like him who unders and fellow citizens to prosper and he wants them to know the truth just read anything any book of his he always contrasts what people believe or what they the myth with the facts and uh so i think one thing you can do to honor him in addition to what you've done so far with this wonderful conference is to live not by lies and not to tolerate it when you know it's not true we all don't have time to do all the research that the these brilliant economists have done but they're things we know are not true and we don't stand up and stop it and they get wings and they they get lives of their own and this is how you wind up losing institutions so live not by lies it's a motto of mine and at the court that's why i get in trouble i'm not going to go along with this nonsense if it's not true that's a lie so yeah i admit that i have deviated from time to time from where the court is going but if it isn't true i'm not going to go along with it and a lot of the policy recommendations you said you heard today a lot of them don't involve the work of the court they're you know the court's not going to repair the family structure in the country for blacks or the rest of the country i think they're not going to make people take personal responsibility for their actions like yet the court uh but i just want to say uh but you're on the court and i think you have tried to uh carry some of the ideas you had 42 years ago so i just wanted to read a quote that i thought was particularly striking and this is the case of greta versus bollinger in 2003 you quoted frederick douglass in the opinion and he said if the negro cannot stand on his own legs let him fall also all i ask is give him a chance to stand on his own legs let him alone and then you said like douglas i believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of american life without the meddling of university administrators oh i said that you did yeah well that might have been the leaked version i'd have to check i'm sure it's the actual yeah um but i mean once again it's the elites i mean they're telling us what we need and there there are some really good insights here that that the observation that they're not allowing us to excel you know i i am enormously blessed that i was allowed in high school very very challenging high school to excel so what does it do once you excel in that environment you build confidence to take on the next challenges and they take that away from you why are you robbing i rece some years ago i was with some of my college classmates from holy cross and one of them really great guy he'd gone to stanford law school and holy cross had fairly strict grading rules when i was at very strict grading rooms and he we were having lunch and a number of us and he said clarence do you realize that you ranked higher in cl our class and i did and i said yeah i said steve uh how does it feel not to have your achievements discounted and i think unfortunately that's what they're doing they're taking away a chance to excel by changing the rules i was fortunate in high school and the only black kid in the high school and the only obviously the only one in my class to excel in that environment in the 60s well what does that do that the subsequent challenges are done with much more confidence because of that so the i think that these administrators these people with these grand schemes are coming up with something that they want i i got into an argument with the guys on about admissions years ago and asked him if he would do to his own kids what he's doing to black kids and he said no that's why i mean if you won't do it to your own kids and i have recommended nothing and advocated nothing that i wouldn't do for my own son and i did the exact same thing for him he went to virginia military institute so you know that's the school he got in and that's where he went and he's glad he did and with my grandson i would do the exact same thing although i don't have that kind of control but i would never do to others what i would not do to my own but these people some of these people are what they will with two-face uh with this sort of janice-like approach they will do to your kids one thing into theirs another thing we heard today that they live their lives a certain way and then they tell other people not to follow that right so i just think that um that that's the point of so uh i'm sorry i went on so long with my questions but it was really your answers that went on too long so i will now uh like i like to well you see what i have to put up with just imagine there's four of us at once oh my god and three of them from yale so i'm gonna uh call on people uh to ask questions um so uh just a point of law professor privilege um ask a short question i will cut you off and silence you if it's not a question you're giving a speech uh the second point if you if i don't like your question i'm just gonna ask my own question so ask good questions and um you know and oh if no one has a question i'm just going to call people randomly and you know make fun of you for getting things wrong but right over here go ahead here so just very brief question so we can get in as many as possible i'm jimmy kemp it's tough for me to be brief i run the jack kemp foundation um jack was my father he was never brief justice thomas gk chesterton said was asked what the problem with the world was his answer as you probably know two words i am is the misunderstanding of human nature in our country one of the top problems today that needs to be addressed and if so what can we do about it uh actually i don't know i think we have a lot of misunderstandings about a lot of things but i can't tell you that it just goes to human nature and i would i haven't thought about that let someone on this side all the way in the back so i don't have a question but you told me that i could say this when we met on the bus earlier i have i have no memory of this song justice thomas i just want to say thank you for achieving and giving us no excuses you made it to the highest court in the land and i want to say thank you to all the men that are in this place today i think that traditional men and masculinity have been demonized so much that in so many areas men have checked out so i want to say thank you for taking a stand and leading this country we appreciate it [Applause] that i just say that that was not what you said you were going to say on the bus how about right over here oh actually was someone on this are there microphones on both sides right here oh just she's right there oh right here right here yes yes justice thank you so much for being here my question is how do you view the pipeline of legal talent that's coming through the system today is it a problem that we don't have enough people that think i'll keep it simple like you or is the pipeline strong oh i think that there is after 30 years of defense i think it's stronger than you think it is and i think they are running the risk of inoculating a lot of kids against the nonsense so the way that we choose we are able we are actually inundated with talent i had a young woman and i'm not going to tell you her name i interviewed her and i'm not going to give you any of her of her particulars because i don't want anybody bothering her but she walks into my office we have a long process screening process to hire law clerks because there's so few of them so few that you hire and she comes into my office after many rounds of screening and it was the first time i realized she was black no one it was so irrelevant in our process that no one had bothered to mention that she was black and i and and i remember telling the clerks to tell her that i said wow that's interesting i didn't know she was black but she made it through and then when she was told that what do you think she felt she was delighted because she knew that nothing that that played no role in her achievements that her achievements were hers and you know the it is it's but no there's no problem and and and the craziness in the law schools are waking a lot of these young kids up and i think you're going to see that in the future they're not going to put up with a lot of this nonsense all the way over there the professional interviewer another quotation from gk chesterton oh well brother it is the job of liberals to make mistakes and the job of conservatives to keep the mistakes from being corrected does that strike you as a good working definition of starry decisis you know i have no idea these gk chester you know he was a brilliant guy and that's sort of um i think the i think there was a word that was used today uh that was really interesting because i think it's a central word and it's courage and the way that walter williams did it in one of his books from the 1980s is all it takes as guts and i think a lot of people lack courage like they know what is right and they're scared to death of doing it and then they come up with all these excuses for not doing it so even with starry decisis you will see in a lot of those instances where people start they run out of arguments i always say when someone uses starry decisis that means they're out of arguments and um that that now they're just sort of waving the white flag and then that's i just keep going then and just i think if you have an argument you make it but i'm not going to go along with something if you buy that argument and plus it should never been overruled is it no way i mean you cannot overrule plessy and when you raise that with them then they don't well they give you uh uh or uh you know right here i'll wait for that wait for the mic wait for the mic okay there it is justice thomas we know there are deep ideological differences on the court but we also hear that besides the politics or the issues that the justices get along very well and we hear about ruth bader ginsburg and scalia had a great relationship they both enjoyed opera how can we foster that same type of relationship within congress and within the general population well i'm just worried about keeping it at the court now this this is not the court of that era i sat with ruth ginsburg for almost 30 years and she was actually an easy colleague for me you knew where she was and she was a nice person to deal with sandra day o'connor you can say the same thing david suited and go on down the list nino was he could be agitated but then he forgot he was agitated on the but it was it was a the court that was together 11th year was a fabulous court it was one you look forward to being a part of what you i go back to the point i made about the institutions what you've got to be concerned about is just like you see the law clerks remember the last four appointees of the courts including the newest one i knew as law clerks these law clerks with these attitudes i'm available by the way for if you're looking for more uh you're a little you have some confirmation but uh and you know you do but you know i just think that the they bring that anybody who would for example have an attitude to leak documents dozier that general attitude is your future on the bench and you need to be concerned about that and we never had that before we actually trusted it was we may have been dysfunctional family but we were a family and we loved it i mean you trusted each other you laughed together you went to lunch together every day and i can only hope you can keep it so what was it ben franklin that said yes we gave you a republic if you can keep it and i think that you have a court and i hope you can keep it can i just follow up briefly what's changed between what has changed between that court and the current one i think the what's changed in society modernity or post-modernity uh i think attitudes have changed i think the when i got to the court you still had world war ii veterans on the court you still had people like john stevens who was a nice man uh you had byron white who was a rhodes scholar when rhodes scholars were real athletes and number one in their class the nfl football player navy veteran and you had sandra day o'connor it was i mean so you that's a different generation and we were living off the the the the sort of the treasures of that generation that generation is gone i am the only member of the court ever to have been born in 1940s okay everybody else is subsequent to that now and the other when i got to the court they were born in the 1930s in the 1920s and we're now dealing with post-world war ii generation and as you see it play out in society i think you're going to see it play out in the institution so what's the difference it's a different set people who grew up in a different era and i don't know what where that's going to lead you but we know it's different right there yeah yes you i'd like to ask you about your autobiography i've taught it in my undergraduate class on uh black conservatism and it's been well received and i wanted to know um one how did you feel about how the book was received two would you consider writing a sequel because that book only goes up to when you got on the court and um three why did you write the book uh one was what okay one was how the book was received it was very well received i think the publisher could have sold a lot more if they knew it was going to be that well received remember it debuted number one yes and the new york times had to rush out and do a book review because it debuted number one in the new york times and uh no i think it was and the people could not have been especially regular people for whom i wrote it it was that's the order that was my audience and um would you right consider writing a sequel that goes only if i'm convicted of a heinous crime [Laughter] what's the last one why why did why did why did you write it why did you write the why did i write it justice scalia told me to

Channel: American Enterprise Institute

Views: 6,470

Keywords: AEI, American Enterprise Institute, politics, news, education, clarence thomas, supreme court, supreme court justice, thomas sowell, old parkland, old parkland conference

Id: fMKuFj7k7WQ

Length: 50min 21sec (3021 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022