I am extremely wary of any sort of take that presumes two married people share the same brain and that a career path taken by one must necessarily bar their spouse from following a career of their own. So I’ve never been fully on board with demands that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a certified crackpot, recuse himself from cases that share ideological headspace with the many fixations of his arch-conservative pro-fascism sedition-backing McCarthyite crackpot wife. The Washington Post is again probing whether Thomas’ relentlessly archconservative stances represent a conflict of interest given Ginni Thomas’ career advocating for things that end up being uncannily close to those stances. But it is perfectly reasonable for us to believe that Justice Thomas and his wife got married because they each believed the same batshit things to begin with, and that the courtroom Thomas would be the same sneering reactionary force whether his wife were a Heritage Foundation bigwig or was serving fries at McDonalds.

That’s the more respectful thing to believe, and it’s the one both Thomases are insisting on. There’s still no particular evidence to suggest that the bizarre legal revisionism Thomas has adopted as the farthest-farthest-right of any of the Supreme Court’s conservatives would change much even if Ginni Thomas were not in the press for supporting Donald Trump’s traitorous coup attempt. Or boosting a relentless stream of conspiracy theories against everyone from school shooting victims to supposedly Trump-disloyal enemies of the state.

If it just happens to be the case that Clarence, alone among the court’s justices, also believes that Trump ought to be shielded from investigation for fomenting an outright coup, and also believes that this supposed presidential right is more important than maintaining democracy itself, then that is a malicious—but not particularly out-of-the-Republican-mainstream stance that big boy Clarence Thomas can come to all on his own. After all, most of the Republican Party has gone on the record numerous times to assert that it doesn’t matter if Republican presidents do crimes. It doesn’t matter if Republican presidents make cash money off their own presidencies. If the U.S. Capitol is sacked by a violent mob assembled by a Republican president as part of a multipronged attempt to topple the United States government rather than abide by an election loss, then what happens next is the fault of whoever on the other side failed to stop it.

Ginni Thomas is, as a public activist, a relentless conspiracy theorist whose passions align mostly with a new pro-fascism McCarthyism. Ginni Thomas presented Trump with a list of the supposedly disloyal. Ginni Thomas believes that Black Lives Matter is an attempt at “cultural revolution,” calls school shooting victims “dangerous” for demanding gun law reforms, and—just to reemphasize the point—is such a blazing fascist that she is even now insisting that the House not investigate Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow democracy outright. She is a true Fox News believer, a one-woman conspiracy network with access to any niche of conservative high society she cares to enter, and she backs Republican hegemony over the right of the Republican opponents to visibly exist.

And Clarence Thomas, from all his public statements and written opinions, is very close to the same person simply because he is. What could be more conducive to a happy marriage than believing the same reactionary batshit nonsense? Why must critics suggest that the two Thomases are corrupt when the more reasonable answer is that they’re both equally out of their damn minds?

Neil Gorsuch has also piped up with legal opinions that seem to have been written by the drunkest intern the Federalist Society could lob into his office window, but nobody’s arguing he’s in it for the money. Mere financial corruption would be the least of the Supreme Court’s problems; a far more pressing concern is that least a third of the court is writing new laws based on things they apparently heard from conservative radio shock-jocks. I wish the only problem with Clarence Thomas was that he’s married to a pro-fascist conspiracy promoter.

But the hard truth is more likely that Thomas wants Trump’s version of fascism to win because he, personally, believes that democracy these days has been going too far and giving too many people too many rights, and all of it needs to be reined in—even if it requires Trump-style government purges and the erasure of the most basic premises of the last century of law.

That’s not to say that the Thomas situation is not dodgy. It is a fact that the Thomases are making bank off of the eagerness of Republican, conservative, and corporate America’s rush to secure Ginni Thomas’ “consulting” services in the hopes of getting their own talking points injected into the Thomas household. Ginni Thomas is cashing checks for “consulting” services that may or may not result in, as the Post hints at, Ginni Thomas helping to write “friend of the court” briefs for clients that just happen to use whatever arguments Ginni Thomas knows her own husband will find the most persuasive.

That is dodgy as hell—and is part of the daily pay-to-play corruption that every last elected office and “consultant” and “lobbyist group” soaks in on every last damn issue, every election cycle, all the time. The people who are most adjacent to the people writing the laws sell themselves based on that access, whether they be family members, ex-staffers, ex-colleagues, or the guy who takes care of an important person’s yacht. It’s the companies asking Ginni Thomas for help on issues that might come before the court that are crooked. Ginni Thomas may well be crooked for accepting the requests. If Clarence Thomas just happens to know who his wife consults for when he’s thumbing through the cases to be decided during a given term, well, now, that would be interesting.

But Clarence is insisting that it’s nonya business whether he knows those things or not. Ginni is insisting that companies are flocking to the most conspicuously batshit conspiracy theorist who lives in a Supreme Court justice’s house because they like the batshit things she says. The Supreme Court and Congress both are very sure that the entire country will collapse into a dystopian hellscape if well-connected Americans weren’t allowed to advertise their connections to even more important people as a primary reason why everyone else should write them fat checks. So we’re at an impasse here.

Again, though, we ought to start from a place of skepticism in any conversation about whether one marriage partner’s career ought to preclude the other partner’s ability to pursue whatever career they themselves might want. It’s difficult to call that corruption, in and of itself. If Clarence Thomas is living in a house that just happens to be paid for by corporate checks written to his wife in the hopes that dinner conversation one night might roll around to why requiring safety checks during widget production is inherently un-American, however, that would be a separate thing that would have to be proven with specific, concrete evidence.

I personally don’t think it’s that. I think Clarence Thomas is a far-right radical extremist all on his own, with no help from his far-right pro-fascist McCarthyite conspiracy-peddling wife, and that he writes far-right extremist opinions because he truly, genuinely believes the last century of law needs to be shredded and the rights of everyone who is not him need to be taken down a peg. He is one of six Supreme Court justices who were explicitly picked by conservatives because they were willing to be more extremist than anyone else, leading us to a new place in which Fox News-styled conspiracy nonsense is the stuff Supreme Court opinions now soak in.

That’s an entirely separate problem. Our Supreme Court is a radical entity rewriting laws in ways that leave the country unable to predict just what the “rule of law” might look like six months down the line. They have willfully enabled a wave of racist voter suppression that only a liar would claim they could not see coming. They have turned sucks to be you into the cornerstone of pandemic employment law because sure, why not add that to the current mix?

Whether they’re doing it because they’re corrupt or because they were put in the position to put democracy in its place from the outset will make for some fascinating historical reading, but the results are the results. And the results say the conservative Supreme Court intends to tear up laws and doesn’t particularly care if they can “justify” it or can’t.