Verdict with Ted Cruz - Justice Clarence Thomas—a True America Hero

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00:00:54.580 Welcome.

00:00:55.280 It is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz.

00:00:57.020 Ben Ferguson with you.

00:00:58.420 And we are back to regularly scheduled programming after what was really cool, a two-part sit-down center that you did with Clarence Thomas.

00:01:07.100 Now it's my turn to get to talk to you about how fun it was to do this project and to write about someone that you had so much admiration for.

00:01:16.320 Well, this has been a terrific week.

00:01:18.080 On Tuesday, my brand-new book came out, Going Further, The Incomparable Clarence Thomas.

00:01:24.340 And it's my fifth book.

00:01:26.260 This one has really been a labor of love.

00:01:27.980 I've loved writing it. It came out on Tuesday. It immediately rocketed to being the number one bestseller in the country on Amazon. It has been incredible. I want to start by saying to Verdict listeners, to all of you, thank you. Thank you for going onto Amazon and buying the book. Thank you for going. We have a website, goingfurther.com, goingfurther.com. Thank you for buying the book.

00:01:50.400 it has been there's been a lot of enthusiasm behind it and and we Monday and Wednesday's pods

00:01:57.820 were really special because Justice Thomas came and and I had the chance to interview him one-on-one

00:02:02.800 for the podcast this was the first and it's the only podcast Justice Thomas has ever done so he

00:02:08.520 has done verdict and nothing else and and and it was you know Justice Thomas and I go back more

00:02:15.160 than 30 years. He is a good friend, and I think he is truly an American hero. But he very rarely

00:02:21.860 does interviews. He does very few public speeches. And so for him to come and participate in verdict

00:02:26.760 and answer questions and just talk, talk candidly about his life, about his childhood, his upbringing,

00:02:33.100 talk about his ideological and intellectual journey, talk about his jurisprudence,

00:02:37.860 talk about the demonization and vilification that has been directed at him. And it's, I got to say,

00:02:45.160 The interview with Justice Thomas broke a ton of news.

00:02:47.960 There have been dozens and dozens of news stories, national news stories, that came out of that podcast.

00:02:53.920 Because Justice Thomas does so few interviews and because when he sat down on verdict, he was very honest and candid and direct.

00:03:02.680 And so he spoke from the heart.

00:03:05.160 I will say, if you didn't watch that whole video, it's two parts.

00:03:09.180 Monday was part one.

00:03:10.440 Wednesday was part two.

00:03:11.520 you should go back and watch it because it really does give you I know the man I know him personally

00:03:17.100 but I will say that interview that interview now ranks uh right up there with the interview you and

00:03:22.760 I did with Elon Musk as among my favorite podcast we've ever done uh and so so I would encourage you

00:03:29.380 make sure you watch it and and and share share that interview with others and and hopefully this

00:03:34.820 one too as we we talk more about the book which we're going to do right now yeah it's really

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00:04:45.780 All right, Senator, so let's just go back in time and let people understand

00:04:50.080 when this became an idea to do the biography of Clarence Thomas.

00:04:55.460 I remember we were at dinner in D.C., and we were talking about your next book idea,

00:05:00.520 subjects, topics, ideas, and then you grinned and you said,

00:05:04.820 all right, what do you think about me doing a book interviewing Clarence Thomas?

00:05:10.980 And usually, I remember we were sitting around, it was a small group,

00:05:13.980 and it was like, well, that's not normally what you do.

00:05:16.860 And then you sold us on the idea because normally it's a subject,

00:05:21.160 it's going into midterm election year,

00:05:22.740 it'd be something that would be important to what's happening now.

00:05:25.860 And you're like, no, no, no, let me tell you why I think this book would be amazing

00:05:29.200 and why I think people would want to read it.

00:05:31.440 And you sold us because we were not convinced in that moment

00:05:34.420 without the details in the background and watching, just seeing your passion that night

00:05:40.620 turn into the hours you spent with Clarence Thomas, turning into this bestselling book.

00:05:45.660 I got to say, from sitting on the sidelines, it has been so fun to watch.

00:05:50.380 This has been a passion project.

00:05:53.200 And we came up with the ideas about two years ago.

00:05:56.200 You know, I was thinking about, all right, I want to do another book.

00:05:58.540 And I like writing books.

00:05:59.600 I enjoy it.

00:06:00.560 This is book number five.

00:06:01.640 So I've done one about every couple of years.

00:06:04.420 And it takes, you know, it takes a ton of time.

00:06:06.320 You have to carve out a lot of time and I do a lot of late nights.

00:06:09.140 If I'm not doing verdict in late nights, I'm writing the book.

00:06:13.140 That's, you can tell I have an exciting social life.

00:06:15.500 It's really impressive.

00:06:16.800 But, you know, I like writing books.

00:06:19.280 I was looking for a topic and something I wanted to say.

00:06:22.440 And what got me excited about this biography is Clarence Thomas is someone who I think is genuinely an American hero.

00:06:31.760 He's an extraordinary person.

00:06:33.040 and his life journey is so inspirational it's so powerful but yet most people don't know it

00:06:40.900 most americans it's interesting that this week i'm doing a ton of media interviews

00:06:44.700 and and almost to a person uh the the folks doing the interviews they say well when i read this book

00:06:51.120 i learned a ton of things that i didn't know i didn't know this about clarence thomas i didn't

00:06:54.300 know that about clarence thomas and it's i want every american to know his story and to know both

00:07:01.480 his his personal story of going from abject poverty facing massive racism all the way up to

00:07:08.420 the pinnacle of american law that that is an inspirational and amazing story but i also want

00:07:14.820 people to understand the intellectual journey he traveled from being a hardcore leftist a radical

00:07:21.660 leftist student activist he was an og activist by the way like people don't understand he was an

00:07:26.900 old school college activists and talk about a 180 radical yeah yeah and and all the way to to being

00:07:36.980 one of the most important conservative thinkers in the history of america that that's an amazing

00:07:43.180 journey too and it's important to understand and then third his jurisprudence so so clarence thomas

00:07:49.700 is right now uh the second longest serving justice in american history in less than two years

00:07:56.420 he will become the longest serving justice in the history of the united states that's a big

00:08:01.580 damn deal uh and by the way who is the longest serving because that's got to be a history

00:08:06.920 question people are asking right now uh it's not you're the first to ask that the longest serving 0.98

00:08:11.820 is william o douglas uh and uh and and thomas will pass him uh i think in may of 28 wow but

00:08:21.580 if you look at it in those more than 30 years, he has some extraordinary opinions. His jurisprudence

00:08:28.800 has been massively consequential. And most people, if you're not a lawyer, if you're not a

00:08:33.800 constitutional lawyer, you probably don't know what Clarence Thomas's opinions have said. And so

00:08:39.340 what I wanted to do in this book is talk about all three, his personal journey, his intellectual

00:08:44.620 journey, but also the body of work that he has produced as one of the most consequential justices

00:08:52.340 in history. And what I try to do in the book is what I try to do in the podcast, which is explain

00:08:58.220 things in terms that are understandable, that are real. You don't have to be a lawyer to enjoy this

00:09:03.520 book. You don't have to be a constitutional law expert any more than to listen to this podcast.

00:09:07.920 You don't have to be an expert or you don't have to be a lawyer. You don't have to be a foreign 0.88

00:09:10.940 policy expert. I try to take issues that matter, that matter to you in your life,

00:09:16.800 and I try to explain them with detail, with meat, with substance, but also in language that is

00:09:23.900 understandable. And actually, I would say some of the philosophy of the book goes back to the

00:09:30.320 philosophy of this Verdict podcast. We just launched it, what now, five years ago. When we

00:09:37.480 started going on air and the podcast went from we the very first verdict podcast was the first

00:09:44.980 night of the first Trump impeachment. And I spent all day on the Senate floor and the jury of

00:09:48.860 impeachment went over to the TV studio and recorded the inaugural verdict. And we did it every night

00:09:55.180 at like midnight or one in the morning assessing what happened. And I remember my production crew

00:10:00.740 at the time, they said when we did the first few, their advice was dumb it down. They said,

00:10:08.360 this is too sophisticated, too complicated. And I really resisted that. I said, listen,

00:10:13.860 I don't believe that. I do not believe that people want dumbed down. What they do want

00:10:21.220 is understandable. And the analogy that I've used many times is if you or I go to a doctor

00:10:28.640 and we've got some horrible disease, nobody wants the doctor to say, Ben, you've got a boo-boo.

00:10:36.020 Yeah. Like you're like, doc, tell me what the hell's going on. But at the same time,

00:10:40.920 you don't want the doctor to use a bunch of medical jargon that you have to have an MD to

00:10:45.160 understand. So you want a serious and complicated issue explained in English in a way that you can

00:10:52.580 follow it. That's what I try to do on this podcast. I try to explain all sorts of things.

00:10:57.400 So during the first impeachment, that series of podcasts, I would explain, you know, what is Ukraine?

00:11:04.860 What is Burisma, the natural gas company in Ukraine?

00:11:07.960 What is impeachment?

00:11:08.960 What are high crimes and misdemeanors?

00:11:10.180 Just basic questions, but that if you're not an expert, there's no reason you should know.

00:11:16.800 That worked, and the verdict podcast went from zero to it became the number one ranked podcast in the world.

00:11:23.000 um with the book i try to do the same thing which is take uh really important and and consequential

00:11:31.620 issues before the supreme court but explain it in a way that everyone can understand it

00:11:36.480 and i'll say ben one thing that makes that much easier is that is also very much justice thomas's

00:11:42.500 approach to writing opinions that that exactly there are just by the way if you've never read

00:11:47.280 a justice thomas opinion as a when i when he was writing opinions and i was younger and it was big

00:11:52.100 cases. I would always grab if he wrote an opinion, whether it was in favor or against

00:11:57.780 you in dissent, I would read it because I could understand exactly what he was saying,

00:12:02.480 whereas there's others on the Supreme Court. They write opinions. And if you're not a lawyer

00:12:06.440 or a constitutional law like geek, you do not understand exactly what they're saying.

00:12:12.580 He very much writes opinions that are plain, prose, understandable. There are justices who are

00:12:19.580 are renowned for highfalutin prose and 10-penny words, and at times you can't understand what

00:12:28.040 the heck they're saying. Thomas believes every American ought to have a right to understand

00:12:33.860 what the Supreme Court is saying, understand their Constitution, their rights, their Bill

00:12:41.780 of Rights. I tell a story in the book about how he was visiting Gettysburg, and this fellow comes

00:12:48.060 up to him uh with an opinion printed on on parchment and it was an opinion it was an

00:12:53.340 admiralty opinion it was not a high profile opinion it was not an opinion that was known

00:12:56.880 by a lot of people was one thomas has written and he said uh he said you know justice thomas

00:13:02.460 can you sign this for me he said sure and he said the fellow said this is what it's all about

00:13:07.540 and and thomas looks at him confused and he's like looking out over the battlefield at

00:13:12.460 Gettysburg? He said, Gettysburg? This was all about an admiralty opinion? And the guy said,

00:13:18.000 no, no, no. This, I can understand this. I can read it. I know what it's saying. And that's what

00:13:25.540 the battle, we're the citizens. We should be able to understand our government. And that was,

00:13:30.940 that is very much consistent with how Justice Thomas tries to write his opinions. And it's

00:13:37.260 how I tried to write this book. All right. I want to take a moment. I want to talk to you about

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00:15:29.300 You know, this book, one of the cool things about it is, is there's a couple really, I

00:15:33.560 I think, interesting points, which readers will love when they read this book.

00:15:37.760 And it goes back to not only the upbringing of Clarence Thomas, which you cover, and a lot of poverty,

00:15:44.520 but also the fact, and this got some headlines this week from the interview that you did on this podcast with him.

00:15:51.720 Clarence Thomas has experienced two extreme forms of racism in his lifetime.

00:15:57.380 The first was just racism because he was African-American.

00:16:00.960 The second form of racism was later in life.

00:16:04.760 And that is where people assume because he was African-American, he should believe or say certain things.

00:16:11.980 And then when he went against that narrative of what they believed he should say because he's a black man, that was a second form of racism.

00:16:21.180 And part of you thinks, well, I bet you didn't see that one coming when he was dealing with the first type of racism when he was younger.

00:16:26.860 Well, but in many ways he did.

00:16:28.440 And you look at the two components. Let's start with his life story and racism directed against African-Americans.

00:16:35.140 Look, he was born in 1948, so just three years after World War Two ends.

00:16:39.960 And he was born in Pinpoint, Georgia, rural Georgia, on the coast of Georgia.

00:16:46.580 Actually, English was not his first language. His first language was was called Geechee.

00:16:52.580 and it is a creole dialect uh that is is common on the georgia and south carolina barrier islands

00:17:00.420 and in south carolina it's called gulla and georgia it's called gucci um he was born and

00:17:06.600 raised initially by a single mom who who had a lot of issues and who struggled they were in extreme

00:17:12.700 poverty they lived in a tenement that did not have indoor plumbing he did not have a toilet in the

00:17:17.960 house they had an outhouse outside they used a chamber pot and he tells a story when he was a

00:17:22.980 little boy he was carrying a full chamber pot down the stairs and he tripped and fell and the whole

00:17:28.680 thing dumped on him and he was curled up in a ball at the base of the stairs just drenched in stale

00:17:34.000 urine and i gotta say that is not a typical beginning for a supreme court justice yeah um he

00:17:41.340 from a young age his mom was not able to care for him so he ended up being raised by his

00:17:48.440 grandparents and his grandparents his grandfather Myers Anderson who he called daddy was the most

00:17:55.920 important and influential man in Clarence Thomas's life and he was a hard man he was a strict

00:18:01.300 disciplinarian the day Clarence and his brother moved into their grandparents house Myers Anderson 0.99

00:18:08.600 said, boy, the damn vacation is over. And it says something like the life of squalor he was living 0.98

00:18:16.400 in. Not many people would call that a vacation. But Myers Anderson did. He believed in hard work

00:18:22.240 and he would work those boys. He would get up at three or three or four in the morning

00:18:26.260 and they'd go with him delivering heating fuel. And they do it often in bitter early mornings

00:18:33.660 in the winter when it was cold outside and and he would not let the boys wear gloves he thought

00:18:39.540 gloves were a sign of weakness and you needed to be tough you needed to be strong and he would

00:18:45.240 work them he'd work them from before the sun came up till late late at night and at one point when

00:18:51.500 he was a teenager clarence said to his grandfather daddy slavery is over and without missing a beat

00:18:59.800 his grandfather said, not in this house, it's not. And he instilled discipline in those boys.

00:19:07.460 The one exception, the one way they could get out of hard work was reading in school. And both of

00:19:14.060 Clarence Thomas's grandparents were illiterate. They couldn't read, they couldn't write,

00:19:18.720 and they wanted their grandsons to have a better life. And so young Clarence Thomas would spend

00:19:24.940 hours in the library just reading everything he could get his hands on and reading and reading.

00:19:29.140 He became a very good student. He still, to this day, devours books. And he was an excellent

00:19:35.380 student. And as a young man, he decided he had found what he wanted to do in life. And it wasn't

00:19:41.640 to be a lawyer. It wasn't to be a judge. He wanted to be a priest. His father, or his grandfather,

00:19:48.320 rather, was a very devout Catholic. And Clarence Thomas was raised as an altar boy. And he really

00:19:54.360 loved the discipline, the ritual, the order, the structure of the Catholic Church. He loved and

00:20:01.860 respected the priests and nuns, that they cared for the community, the nuns who taught him in

00:20:06.280 Catholic school had a really profound impact on his life, and so he decided, I'm going to be a

00:20:10.520 priest. And he went to seminary, both in high school and college, he went to seminary. And he

00:20:16.320 encountered real racism in seminary. When he was in seminary in high school, he was one of only two

00:20:23.940 black boys in the seminary, and he recounts a story of one of the white boys who was there

00:20:29.740 passing him a note, and the note said, I like Martin Luther King, and he remembers being

00:20:34.500 surprised. He didn't expect him to say that, and then he turned the paper over, and on the back it

00:20:38.840 said, dead, and that really hit Clarence Thomas hard. Another instance, you know, the kids in

00:20:48.500 seminary would make fun of him. They would call him WBC, world's blackest child. One of the ways

00:20:54.960 he responded to that was by excelling academically and proving himself. And so, for example, Latin,

00:21:01.620 he became a very good Latin student, and he liked, again, the structure and order of Latin.

00:21:07.100 And they had a competition, the Latin B, where you competed translating Latin, and he won it.

00:21:13.320 He was the top Latin student at the school, and they gave him a prize.

00:21:17.640 It was a statue of St. Jude, and he was really proud of that.

00:21:22.600 And he put it in his dorm room, and the next day when he came,

00:21:26.660 someone had broken the head off the statue.

00:21:29.620 And so he went and got some glue, and he glued the head back on

00:21:32.980 and set it back up on his bookcase, and the next day someone had broken the head off again.

00:21:38.180 And he glued it a second time, and it stuck after that.

00:21:41.520 They didn't break it a third time.

00:21:43.320 but when I went to interview him, and Justice Thomas agreed to sit for nine and a half hours

00:21:49.820 of interviews in his chambers for this book, and so he and I went one-on-one. I'd come at

00:21:56.220 eight in the morning and sit down in chambers, and it was just him and me. I'd sit down a tape

00:22:00.220 recorder and just ask questions. One of the first questions I asked is I had heard about the statue

00:22:05.360 of St. Jude, which he kept with him his whole life, and I said, hey, where's that statue? I'd

00:22:09.600 really like to see it and he kind of chuckled he said well i don't have it anymore and i said well

00:22:14.200 what happened and he and he sent it to to your friend and to my friend rush limbaugh wow rush

00:22:22.160 was a dear friend of his and when rush was sick when rush had cancer uh justice thomas sent him

00:22:27.780 the statue of saint jude to give him comfort and peace as as he was as he was dying and and he never

00:22:33.740 got it back uh from from rush but it's kind of that that that statue was was well served comforting

00:22:39.200 another great great american hero rush limbaugh all right i do want to take a moment and talk to

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00:23:45.180 You know, there's so many people that are listening or watching this podcast,

00:23:49.420 and they know Clarence Thomas as the guy who had to defend himself from horrific attacks

00:23:55.640 during his confirmation hearing.

00:23:57.580 There is so much about him that is not that.

00:24:01.620 One of those is the fact that he was, as we mentioned earlier, a radical in school,

00:24:06.540 and then there was a turning point.

00:24:08.320 You got to talk about that as well.

00:24:10.900 Well, I did.

00:24:11.880 After his high school seminary, he went to college seminary.

00:24:15.780 And there, he ended up becoming disillusioned with the church, and he got angry at God.

00:24:23.060 And he was disillusioned at the church because he thought the church was very slow

00:24:27.660 to condemn racial discrimination, racial prejudice, that the church was slow to defend

00:24:32.840 civil rights. And a point that I make in the book and that I discuss with Justice Thomas is,

00:24:39.620 look, that was true of the Catholic Church. It was true of the Protestant Church. It was true

00:24:43.080 Christians as a whole were far too slow to stand up on the side of justice and condemn bigotry.

00:24:51.620 And, you know, Dr. Martin Luther King, many people forget that he was also Reverend King.

00:24:57.600 He was a pastor.

00:24:59.560 And when he wrote the letter from a Birmingham jail, and for several years I've gone to the Senate floor

00:25:04.260 and participated in a bipartisan reading of the letter from a Birmingham jail,

00:25:08.860 where you have Republicans and Democrats read it out loud, and it is so powerful.

00:25:13.320 We've all read it in school, but reading the words out loud just gives it additional weight and gravitas.

00:25:20.620 but many people forget to whom that letter was addressed.

00:25:25.840 Do you remember who it was addressed to, Ben?

00:25:27.300 I do not.

00:25:28.640 It was addressed to the clergy of America.

00:25:32.580 Wow.

00:25:32.840 And it was Reverend King saying to the pastors, to the priests,

00:25:37.000 stand up and fight for what's right.

00:25:39.320 Do not be silent.

00:25:40.500 And my favorite line of that whole letter was Reverend King saying,

00:25:46.240 the church should be a thermostat and not a thermometer. We should be changing the temperature

00:25:54.080 of our environment. We shouldn't just reflect what's around us. So Thomas becomes disillusioned.

00:25:59.320 He becomes angry, angry at God. He leaves seminary and he leaves the church. He goes to Holy Cross

00:26:05.540 for college and then Yale for law school. And for years he refuses to attend mass. I mean, he's

00:26:11.040 really angry. He is now, once again, a very devout Catholic. He came back to God, came back to his

00:26:15.840 faith, but it took many years. And when he was in college, when he was in law school, he went hard

00:26:21.860 left, and he became a bitter, angry radical. He was mad at God. He was mad at the church. He was

00:26:27.120 mad at America. He was mad at white men. And I will tell you, his leaving the seminary 1.00

00:26:33.740 ruptured his relationship with his grandfather. His grandfather was adamant that when you do

00:26:41.720 something, you don't quit. And when he quit, his grandfather threw him out of the house. And it

00:26:47.060 may well be the single hardest chapter in Clarence Thomas's life when his grandfather,

00:26:52.320 who he called Daddy, who raised him, the man he admired more than anything else,

00:26:56.460 anyone else threw him out. It was crushing to Clarence Thomas. And he was a radical. He wore

00:27:03.820 camo pants and combat boots. He had a poster of Malcolm X on the wall. He would go to Black

00:27:09.600 Panther rallies. He participated in a riot in Harvard Square. Yeah. He was a young, angry man

00:27:17.680 in college. You hear that part of the story, and this is where it goes back to faith. God used all

00:27:25.160 of that to then turn him and probably prepare him for the biggest, I would say, personal attack we

00:27:32.760 had ever seen publicly at that time on somebody either, A, I think, you know, in the political

00:27:38.680 world, certainly trying to get on the Supreme Court, where the left decided, we believe that

00:27:43.880 this man is such a threat that we're going to try to stop him. And he was a threat on so many

00:27:48.700 different levels. As a conservative, as a conservative African-American man, as someone

00:27:53.580 that they understood by his age, he could serve for a very long time. We talked about that earlier.

00:27:59.020 You've known him for a long time, but what are the takeaways now looking back

00:28:02.640 on his confirmation hearing? And the whole world stopped, certainly all of America, to watch it

00:28:08.020 And some of the horrific things that were thrown at him trying to derail his confirmation.

00:28:12.700 Now, others have had to deal with it since then.

00:28:14.300 It was almost a playbook now by the left of if you want to if you want to get rid of somebody.

00:28:19.400 I've heard it be said before by Democrats, we need to Clarence Thomas, that nominee.

00:28:24.980 You're absolutely right. His confirmation hearing was brutal.

00:28:28.500 It was a character assassination. 1.00

00:28:30.280 It was, as he famously said on national television, it was a high tech lynching for uppity Negroes. 0.88

00:28:38.240 And I will tell you, those words silence the Senate Judiciary Committee in the book. 0.99

00:28:42.900 I walk through the behind the scenes of that brutal confirmation hearing.

00:28:46.720 They follow the same strategy that they did with Brett Kavanaugh.

00:28:51.360 And that's I talk about that in the book, comparing the two.

00:28:53.960 Obviously, Brett Kavanaugh was a very active part of that confirmation hearing.

00:28:57.060 But in both instances, the Democrat senators had allegations of sexual assault or sexual harassment.

00:29:04.080 They had them for weeks ahead of the hearing. They sat on them. They did nothing with them.

00:29:08.580 They didn't ask the nominees about them. And then on the eve of the vote, they leaked them to the press and just smeared them in the press.

00:29:14.860 By the way, Justice Thomas talks about the chairman of the Judiciary Committee during his hearing.

00:29:19.200 That was Joe Biden, who Joe Biden was deeply dishonest with him, said one thing to Thomas and then just broke his word and lied repeatedly.

00:29:28.040 And it was in both instances.

00:29:31.100 Clarence Thomas was confirmed because the American people looked him in the eye in the hearing and they looked Anita Hill in the eye.

00:29:37.800 And by a two to one margin, two thirds of Americans believed Clarence Thomas and did not believe Anita Hill's allegations.

00:29:44.660 The same thing was true with with Brett Kavanaugh. That's why he was confirmed.

00:29:48.900 You know, the book that I wrote, it begins with the following.

00:29:53.580 Imagine a man who came from nothing, who endured bleak poverty, who stood up to crushing racism,

00:30:03.260 who is right now on track to become the longest serving Supreme Court justice in American history.

00:30:09.000 You don't have to imagine. That man, of course, is the incomparable Clarence Thomas. There is

00:30:18.020 nobody else quite like him. Somebody so extraordinary, you would think, would be

00:30:24.960 venerated. And if he were politically liberal, he would be. Change that one small fact and

00:30:34.120 dozens of law schools would have given him an honorary degree. Elementary schools would be

00:30:40.600 named after him. Late night hosts would invite him on adoringly. And chic t-shirts, think notorious

00:30:50.440 RBG, would be aggressively marketed to young people. Instead, the response is silence and hate.

00:31:01.300 it's time for that silence to end i wrote this book because this man is a hero and this is a

00:31:09.940 time where we're so divided we're so angry we distrust each other so much that we need heroes

00:31:16.160 we need role models amen to that and and i wrote this book because i admire clarence thomas and i

00:31:21.840 want people to know his story and and if you're looking for a role model in life and if you're

00:31:27.640 not you should be, because we all need role models, it would be very hard for you to do better

00:31:33.480 than Clarence Thomas. So I just want to ask our wonderful Verdict listeners, and you guys are the

00:31:39.800 best and most passionate and engaged and informed group of Americans and patriots on planet Earth,

00:31:46.780 if you haven't gone and bought the book, please go buy it. You will enjoy it. I'm promising you

00:31:51.760 This is a fun read. You will learn. You will laugh. You will have insight for the same reason you listen to the podcast, because hopefully when you're done, you learn something that you didn't know when you sat down to it.

00:32:04.040 The book will do the same. Go buy it. And I want to encourage you to give it to your loved ones.

00:32:09.900 Give it to your kids or your grandkids or your brother or your mom or your dad.

00:32:13.660 It's a Christmas gift. It's a birthday gift.

00:32:15.940 I wrote this book because I want people to know this story.

00:32:21.540 And there is nobody better than the Verdict listeners to ensure that people know the extraordinary hero.

00:32:30.020 Know who the man is.

00:32:31.600 You will read this book and you will understand and know Clarence Thomas in a very different way than you know him right now.

00:32:38.460 All right.

00:32:38.800 Don't forget.

00:32:39.500 Grab the book.

00:32:40.080 And also, don't miss a single episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz wherever you get your podcasts.

00:32:45.940 We do this show Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so hit that subscribe or auto-download button.

00:32:50.140 And the Senator and I will see you back here in a couple of days.

00:32:53.280 Why should you listen to Armstrong and Getty On Demand?

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Verdict with Ted Cruz - August 28, 2026

Justice Clarence Thomas—a True America Hero

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