The Great Thomas & Hill Show: Stopping the Monstrous Regiment

This file is a single-author polemical political essay from December 1991. Its immediate scope is the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill confirmation controversy, but Rothbard uses the episode to attack organized feminism, sexual-harassment law, civil-rights doctrine, media liberalism, and what he calls American neo-Puritanism. The essay’s central move is to insist that Thomas’s confirmation was less important as a defense of Thomas than as a defeat for a broader “victimological” politics.

Let it be said: I was never a Thomas enthusiast.

That opening disclaimer frames the whole argument. Rothbard does not present Thomas as a libertarian hero: he criticizes affirmative action, ethnic “seats” on the Court, Thomas’s juristic depth, and his connection to Straussian/Jaffaite natural-rights egalitarianism. The defense of Thomas is therefore strategic and negative. Rothbard’s real target is the feminist and media response to Hill, which he casts as an attempt to replace evidentiary standards with automatic belief in accusation.

Unsupported charges must never be given credibility.

The early sections attack the hearings as a collapse of fairness: Rothbard argues that even outside a criminal trial the presumption of innocence remains a basic norm. He treats Hill’s charge as unverifiable, late, politically timed, and vulnerable to impeachment, then reads the Senate conflict as a contest between adversarial scrutiny and feminist “victim” immunity. His rhetoric is deliberately aggressive and often abusive, but the conceptual claim is clear: if accusation itself confers truth, then legal and social judgment become instruments of group power.

The essay’s middle sections turn from evidentiary dispute to populist interpretation. Rothbard argues that television viewers were not persuaded by the pro-Hill media climate and that the Thomas victory revealed a class divide between professional elites and working-class voters.

The great thing about the Thomas victory was that the masses were not conned.

This populist reading is crucial to the essay’s relevance: Rothbard makes the hearings an early example of elite “political correctness” defeated by ordinary judgment. He also introduces a libertarian distinction between assault and speech, claiming that many women understood alleged verbal misconduct as socially unpleasant but not a matter for law. The section “Who Don’t Get What?” rejects the feminist continuum from verbal harassment to rape and defends sharp distinctions among physical aggression, coercive threats, and crude workplace talk.

The legal argument is the essay’s core. Rothbard identifies sexual-harassment doctrine not as a natural extension of criminal law but as a product of civil-rights regulation and administrative power.

Very simply, there ain’t no such crime as “sexual harassment.”

For Rothbard, old-fashioned law already punished rape and assault; the new category criminalizes speech, manners, and workplace atmosphere. He locates the root not in the hearings but in anti-discrimination law itself.

The start of the evil can be pinpointed precisely: the monstrous Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically Title VII, prohibited discrimination in employment on the basis of race, religion, sex, and other possible characteristics.

From this premise follows the essay’s most explicitly libertarian demand: property rights and freedom of association must replace civil-rights enforcement. Rothbard even notes that Thomas, as head of the EEOC, helped expand the very doctrine that nearly destroyed him, making this the strongest anti-Thomas argument in the piece.

The entire legal structure, from top to bottom, from discrimination through harassment, must be replaced.

The later “Miscellaneous Peeves” extend the same logic to power, representation, mentoring, and quotas. Rothbard argues that feminist complaints about male senators, male bosses, and male mentors tend toward state allocation of offices and careers by group identity.

The goal of the Regiment is power, and a social revolution.

The closing European comparison reframes the controversy as a symptom of American moralism. Rothbard contrasts American public “sin-hunts” with what he presents as European tolerance of private imperfection, and concludes that feminism has become a substitute civic religion.

All of American life has been poisoned by this killjoy neo-Puritan spirit.

The essay’s significance lies in how it fuses Rothbard’s property-rights libertarianism with a hard-edged anti-feminist and populist cultural politics. Its structure moves from reluctant neutrality on Thomas, to denunciation of feminist epistemology, to legal theory, and finally to a civilizational critique of Puritanism and victim politics.