20 United States The EconomistJune 27th 2020
21outlet is taken over by allies of an oligarch
or political party. The editors resign or are
fired. Next comes an abrupt shift to a gov-
ernment-friendly editorial line. Can the
same happen in America? “I never imag-
ined I would witness something like this,”
says Marius Dragomir of the Central Euro-
pean University in Budapest.
Part of the anxiety stems from Mr Pack’s
cv. The Claremont Institute has produced
some of the most radical alt-right thinking
of the Trump era. (In 2016 it published “The
Flight 93 Election”, an essay arguing that
Hillary Clinton’s election would lead to the
destruction of America.) But part stems
from his confirmation process. Opposed by
Democrats and backed only tepidly by Re-
publicans, Mr Pack’s nomination lan-
guished in the Senate for two years.
Then in April the White House unex-
pectedly attacked voafor allegedly prais-
ing China’s response to covid-19. (It had re-
published an innocuous Associated Press
article on the reopening of businesses in
Wuhan.) Suddenly Republicans pushed Mr
Pack through on a party-line vote.
The roles played by the American-fund-
ed news agencies vary. The most important
in eastern Europe is rfe/rl, which broad-
casts in native languages and sponsors lo-
cal subsidiaries. In Romania, Bulgaria and
Ukraine, where most newspapers and tele-
vision channels are owned by oligarchs
who use them to slander their enemies, it
provides a rare source of impartial infor-
mation. In Hungary, nearly all media have
fallen into the hands of businessmen
friendly with Prime Minister Viktor Orban
or of a foundation controlled by his Fidesz
party. To counter that, rfe/rlplans to open
a branch this autumn.
Independent news websites like At-
latzso in Hungary and Hromadske in Uk-
raine have excellent investigative report-
ers, but they are vulnerable to retaliation.America’s diplomatic support for rfe/rl
outlets, like Bulgaria’s Svobodna Evropa,
helps protect them. Then there are authori-
tarian regimes like Vietnam and China.
There, voa and the regional services
(rfe/rl, Radio Free Asia and the Middle
Eastern and Cuban outlets) serve the same
function as during the Soviet era: getting
information past the firewalls of censors.
Of course, Mr Pack could yet hew to the
legal firewall that protects the agencies’
editorial independence. Peter Kreko of Po-
litical Capital, a Hungarian think-tank,
praises the plans developed by Jamie Fly,
the fired rfe/rlhead. One test will be
whether the news services go easy on thosewhom the White House favours. (Last year
America’s ambassador in Budapest unsuc-
cessfully lobbied rfe/rlto promise that its
Hungarian outlet would not be too harsh
on Mr Trump’s friend, Mr Orban.)
At risk is the credibility these agencies
have built over half a century of indepen-
dence. Their reporters are worried. “We are
so stunned by the news that no one knows
what to expect,” says a staffer at an rfe/rl
subsidiary in eastern Europe. Mr Pack’s
new appointees should respect their agen-
cies’ editorial freedom. Otherwise, audi-
ences will think them just as untrustwor-
thy as those controlled by their own
oligarchs and politicians. 7The sound of libertyW
hen hisnomination to the Supreme
Court was approved by a 52-48 Senate
vote in 1991, Clarence Thomas was in the
bath. “Whoop-de-damn-doo!” he cried to
his wife, who had delivered the news. Near-
ly three decades after his confirmation bat-
tle, in which he was bruised by charges of
sexual harassment, America’s second black
justice has cultivated a defiant jurispru-
dence. He also has the distinction of being
Donald Trump’s favourite judge.
The most conservative jurist on the Su-
preme Court, now aged 72, disdains affir-
mative action, abortion and gay rights (but
views gun rights as fundamental). He re-
buffs challenges to the death penalty and
seeks to rein in federal power and agencies
like the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, which he chaired under Ron-
ald Reagan in the 1980s. His lone vote to gut
the Voting Rights Act in 2009 presaged
Shelby County v Holder, a 5-4 decision that
did just that four years later. Justice Anto-
nin Scalia (who was a close friend) once
called him a “bloodthirsty” originalist: he
hews to his perceptions of what the consti-
tution meant when it was ratified.
Mr Thomas has travelled a lonely road.
He grew up impoverished in Georgia in the
1950s, dropped out of a Catholic seminary
and embraced black nationalism—the mil-
itant approach of Malcolm X and Stokely
Carmichael—as a college student. At Holy
Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, Mr
Thomas and friends founded a black stu-
dent union to forge “a sense of racial iden-
tity and group solidarity” and “expose and
eradicate social inequities and injustices.”
Some of the organisation’s demands were
similar to those heard on campuses today:more black students and faculty, courses in
black history and literature, celebration of
black culture. Other principles might
sound less familiar: the “black man” wants
“the right to perpetuate his race” and “does
not want or need the white woman.”
Mr Thomas’s radicalism crested in 1969
when he took part in a sit-in to protest
against campus recruiters for General Elec-
tric, a company thought to discriminate by
race. The next year, he joined a violent
march on Harvard Square against the Viet-
nam war and the jailing of Black Panther
leaders. Back at Holy Cross, he resolved to
quell his anger at the assassination of Mar-
tin Luther King and at the Catholic church’s
failure to stand up to racism. After a dalli-
ance with leftist activism, he wrote in his
memoir of 2007, “I grew up.”
Mr Thomas’s move to the right began at
Yale Law School, where his admission un-
der a racial-quota programme became, he
wrote, “the soft underbelly of my career”.
White liberals might not be openly racist,
but they were “more likely to condescend
to blacks” and (he discovered after gradua-
tion) just as unlikely to offer him a job.
When at last he secured a position working
for Missouri’s attorney-general, Mr Thom-
as found his muse in Thomas Sowell, a
Marxist-turned-conservative economist.
Black grit and self-sufficiency, Mr Sowell
wrote—not reliance on white benevo-
lence—were the way forward.
As a lawyer for Monsanto and through
eight years in the Reagan administration,
Mr Thomas became increasingly sceptical
that racism could be unravelled from the
fabric of American society. “There is noth-
ing you can do to get past black skin,” heNEW YORK
Will Justice Thomas stick it out for a 30th year on the court?Clarence ThomasRadical justice