For many years, an elite group of ultrawealthy and influential Individuals has boasted the membership of Supreme Courtroom Justice Clarence Thomas, and each the justice and the rich members of that community have benefited, a brand new investigation reveals.
Over the previous months, Thomas’s monetary relationship with conservative billionaire Harlan Crow has made headlines. However, as a new report by The New York Instances revealed over the weekend reveals, Thomas truly has entry to a a lot wider group of rich beneficiaries — entry that has allowed Thomas to dwell a lavish life-style usually solely loved by the richest Individuals, regardless of Supreme Courtroom justices’ comparatively modest salaries.
Simply months after Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Courtroom in 1991, he was welcomed into an unique group referred to as the Horatio Alger Affiliation, named for an creator identified for writing novels with “rags to riches” themes as a result of group’s personal objective of selling the supposed “bootstraps” narrative of the legendary American dream.
Earlier than becoming a member of Horatio Alger, Thomas was well-connected by most requirements, attending Yale Regulation College and serving underneath President Ronald Reagan because the chair of the Equal Employment Alternative Fee within the Eighties. However membership in Horatio Alger gave Thomas an much more high-powered set of connections, marking his entry into the huge world of unmitigated wealth solely accessible to the elite of the elite.
The group and its membership get pleasure from a degree of entry to energy and wealth that’s unimaginable to peculiar Individuals; folks conversant in the group say that becoming a member of Horatio Alger is akin to being knighted, whereas being in it’s like being a member of the little-known aristocracy of the U.S. Its members include people like Reagan, Oprah Winfrey, Fox Information chairman Roger Ailes and Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. In the meantime, by welcoming Thomas into its ranks, the group has the ear of one of the vital highly effective folks within the U.S.
Simply as a member, Thomas has been capable of attend unique occasions throughout the nation — and the world. He has attended conferences by the group’s board of administrators in locations like Jamaica and Vancouver, Canada, which had been accompanied by occasions like an unique efficiency by Johnny and June Carter Money a 12 months earlier than Johnny Carter’s demise, or an tour to billionaire industrialist Dennis Washington’s island property in British Columbia.
Exterior of the group’s common enterprise, fellow members of Horatio Alger have given Thomas “proximity to a way of life of unimaginable materials privilege,” as The Instances famous. Via Horatio Alger associates, Thomas has had VIP entry to non-public retreats, lavish celebrity-filled events and sporting occasions. Some even helped finance the advertising and marketing for a fulsome documentary about Thomas after an HBO movie resurfaced particulars about his alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill.
Thomas has been deeply concerned within the group, usually assembly with and mentoring college students who obtain among the tens of millions of {dollars} that Horatio Alger offers away in scholarships every year.
The group has responded by naming Thomas an honorary board member and naming two scholarships after his son, Jamal Thomas. These scholarships had been directed to 2 Virginia prep faculties — a college attended by a scholar Thomas was mentoring and a college attended by Thomas’s nice nephew. Notably, Harlan Crow provided money to ship Thomas’s nice nephew, who the justice was elevating as a son, to a distinct boarding faculty two years later.
In return, Thomas fairly actually offers the scholarship recipients and different Horatio Alger members entry to the Supreme Courtroom. Yearly, as a part of a sequence of celebrations, Thomas welcomes the group into the Supreme Courtroom, the place the group holds its induction ceremony of roughly 10 new members — and the place only a few different members of the general public are ever welcomed.
“They actually handled him like a brother, like he mattered and, in return, he opened up the Supreme Courtroom,” Armstrong Williams, conservative commentator and former shut good friend to Thomas, who helped the justice get into the group, informed The New York Instances.
“Let me inform you, Horatio Alger has been among the finest issues that has ever occurred to him,” Williams stated. “That is additionally about energy and status…. I imply, Thomas is on the Supreme Courtroom. Though they supply for these children, that is the true aristocracy of America.”
