Alinskyites of the Left and Right Attack Thomas and Sotomayor

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” That’s the 13th rule in Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” and reporters at ProPublica have followed it to a T with their recent attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas. They may soon need to invoke the seventh rule: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”

On Thursday the ProPublica troika—Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski—published the third in a series of hit pieces about Justice Thomas and his wealthy friend Harlan Crow. Whatever else one may say about the first installment, it was lurid rather than boring. In the first paragraph alone, “Thomas boarded a large private jet” for “nine days of island-hopping . . . on a superyacht staffed by a coterie.”