Book Review: The One Black Man Democrats Love to Lynch (Electronically)

Ted Cruz’s bestselling book explores Clarence Thomas’s life and judicial philosophy.

Richard Kirk | October 3, 2026

Largely the product of nine and a half hours of one-on-one interviews between Justice Thomas and Senator Ted Cruz, Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas provides insight into the personal and constitutional bases for Thomas’s Supreme Court opinions.

Those opinions, alongside observations about the internal dynamics of the Court, are the focus of the last half of the book, topics with which Cruz has direct experience as a clerk to former Chief Justice William Rehnquist and as a litigator before a Court that included Justice Thomas. Cruz also provides commentary on Court cases throughout the book, generally linking Thomas’s life experiences to his later judicial opinions.

Thomas’s childhood days with his mother are covered briefly, including conditions of extreme deprivation made worse by the absence of a father from the family. Anyone seeking more information about those or later years should consult Thomas’s autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son. At age seven, Clarence was sent to live with his grandfather, Myers Anderson, whose work ethic and self-reliance in appalling circumstances helped mold Thomas’s character.

Accordingly, Thomas’s law office is filled with various colloquial sayings uttered by Myers, for whom education was all-important and who made sacrifices to send Clarence to Catholic school and later to seminary. Thomas’s work mastering Latin and overcoming his Geechee dialect, along with his subsequent academic achievements, clearly dispels any idea that he lacked the intellectual qualifications to serve on the Supreme Court—a canard Democrats should be loath to resurrect........

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