U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas embarked on a wild and fanciful journey of historical revisionism this week, delivering a speech that portrayed progressivism as a dire threat to America because Woodrow Wilson was a segregationist, and somehow that led to the rise of Hitler.

Thomas delivered the hour-long lecture at The University of Texas at Austin School of Law on Wednesday in honor of the 250th anniversary of the founding of America.

After a fairly routine look back at America’s founding ideals, Thomas settled in particular on the Declaration of Independence, and, for some reason, Wilson, whom he seemed to regard as the only proponent of the early progressive movement who mattered. Thomas made no references to contemporary progressives or policies.

Since Wilson, a southern Democrat who grew up in Georgia, was also an avowed segregationist, Thomas deemed him ― and, therefore, also the modern progressive movement ― to be at odds with the Declaration’s “self-evident” claim that “all men are created equal.”

“Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many inroads into our system of government and our way of life,” said Thomas. “It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”

(Thomas conveniently ignored that after President Lyndon Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, southern Democrats became Republicans. “We’ve lost the south for a generation,” Johnson, a Democrat, famously remarked.)

Undeterred by fact, the Supreme Court justice proceeded to lose the thread entirely, blaming progressivism for all of the ills of the century that followed.

“The century of progressivism did not go well,” Thomas said of the 100 years that followed Wilson’s presidency.

(In fact, the 100 years that followed Wilson’s presidency coincide with an unprecedented decrease in global poverty, and, especially in the U.S., a massive increase in per-capita wealth and standards of living.)

Thomas then blamed progressives for the rise of global fascism, offering no supporting facts for the claim.

“Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism,” he said, “and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration are based.”

At one point, the senior conservative justice also brought eugenics into the mix, suggesting the racist and long-disproven theory was of particular interest to progressives.

“It comes as no surprise that progressives embraced eugenics,” he asserted. “Progressives believed that Darwinian science, the idea of ever-advancing progress, written into biology itself, had proven the inherent superiority and inferiority of the races.”

Ironically for Justice Thomas, its most powerful modern champion is arguably President Donald Trump.

There may be an explanation for Thomas’ nostalgia for the era predating Wilson, when rapid industrialization birthed billionaires such as Rockefeller and Carnegie.

The 77-year-old justice is himself the beneficiary of a billionaire’s largesse. Thomas has gone on numerous luxury trips funded by Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow and accepted countless gifts from wealthy benefactors that he failed to disclose publicly.