The Patriot Post® · HBO's 'Confirmation' Ignores Facts to Push Leftist Agenda

HBO is attempting to recast history with its dramatization of the nomination hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Twenty-five years ago, Thomas was in the midst of a defamatory confirmation hearing that makes Barack Obama’s spat with the Senate over his SCOTUS nominee Merrick Garland look boringly tame by comparison. Anita Hill, a black attorney who previously worked with Thomas, accused the would-be justice of sexual harassment. The trailer to HBO’s movie, titled “Confirmation,” implies that Hill’s accusations were a courageous stand against sexual harassment in the workplace. “It only takes one voice,” one frame of the trailer reads.

But that’s not how the hearings played out, notes Stuart Taylor Jr., who covered the hearings back in 1991 and now works as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Hill’s accusation almost destroyed Thomas’ chances of confirmation. A Democrat-majority Senate eventually confirmed him because even they couldn’t ignore that Hill’s account often changed and she contradicted what she said under oath. Meanwhile, woman after woman told the Senate committee investigating the allegations that Thomas treated them with utmost respect. Hill’s account was contrary to how Thomas was known to act.

“It is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves,” Thomas famously thundered at the hearing chaired by then-Senator Joe Biden. “It is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.” Unfortunately, “Confirmation” is yet another attempt by the Left to continue Democrats’ work to sully Thomas’ name, to sympathize with an accuser, any accuser, even if the facts get in the way of the story.