I’ve long assumed that Samuel Alito was the worst.

Alito – who authored the majority opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the case that ended constitutional abortion rights by merely asserting that the high court’s prior opinion in Roe v Wade (1973) was wrongly decided; who accepted a 2008 luxury fishing trip to Alaska, including private jet travel, from hedge fund billionaire and GOP donor Paul Singer yet failed to disclose it on Alito’s financial forms and didn’t even recuse himself from decisions involving Singer’s subsequent business before the supreme court; who hoisted an inverted American flag outside his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 Capitol riot, a symbol of support for Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election – has the moral and intellectual stature of a poisonous toad.

But I’ve come to revise my view of the court’s worst justice.

Clarence Thomas is 77 years old. He has now served on the supreme court for more than 34 years, making him the longest-serving member of the court. He is a bitter, angry, severe hard-right, intellectually dishonest ideologue. After reading his latest thoughts on America, I’ve concluded Thomas is even worse than Alito.

On 15 April, Thomas gave a rare public address at the University of Texas in Austin that began as a banal tribute to the Declaration of Independence before degenerating into a misleading screed against progressivism.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream,” Thomas intoned. “The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.”

Thomas went on to blame 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.

This is pure rubbish.

In reality, America’s Progressive era emerged at the start of the 20th century from the corruption and excesses of America’s first Gilded Age (we’re now in the second, if you hadn’t noticed): its record inequalities of income and wealth, its “robber barons” who monopolized industries and handed out sacks of money to pliant legislators, its dangerous factories and unsafe working conditions, its violent attacks on workers who tried to form........

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