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Justice Clarence Thomas gave a rare public address on Wednesday that started as a benign celebration of the Declaration of Independence before devolving into a bitter attack on progressivism, steeped with grievance, bad history, and self-regard. In the speech, delivered at the University of Texas at Austin, Thomas blamed progressives for the worst crimes of the 20th century, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were all “intertwined with the rise of progressivism,” as was “racial segregation,” “eugenics,” and other evils. The justice also bemoaned the “unfair criticism and attacks” that he and other tellers of truths must withstand as the price for courageously “not budging” on their principles.

On this week’s Slate Plus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed Thomas’ characteristically resentful, solipsistic talk, and what it reveals about the justice’s nostalgia for Gilded Age corruption and plutocracy. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: This is a speech that’s supposed to be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But it then veers off into a land that I never want to visit or speak of again. He styles it as a critique of the progressive movement, which he pins to Woodrow Wilson, then blames for everything bad that happened in the 20th century but also today?

Mark Joseph Stern: The speech is ostensibly bemoaning the progressive movement of the early 20th century, but the New Republic’s Matt Ford has a fantastic piece about how his history is completely wrong. Thomas claims that the American progressive movement was founded by Wilson and imported from Germany, neither of........

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