In the wake of ProPublica’s reporting on Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and the decades’ worth of undisclosed gifts he has received from billionaire Harlan Crow, a cadre of conservative pundits and operatives have rushed to play defense.

Early out of the gate was the Manhattan Institute’s Ilya Shapiro, who declared just after the story was published, “Unless Harlan Crow has some business before the Court, the @propublica report about Justice Thomas is a big breathless nothingburger.” Responding to the revelation that Crow maintains a bizarre collection of Nazi memorabilia — including, among other things, two paintings by Adolf Hitler and a signed copy of Mein Kampf — conservative editor Jonah Goldberg commented: “Harlan Crow is a deeply honorable, decent, and patriotic person,” adding that the “garden of evil” on his property represents “an attempt [to] commemorate the horrors of the 20th century in the spirit of ‘never again’” (a defense that elided the absence of Nazis from said “garden”).

Sounding like a man trying to reassure himself, Goldberg later added: “My conscience is clear. Harlan Crow is a good man and the farthest thing from a Nazi.” The chorus of tortured Harlan Crow apologism was soon joined by the likes of former National Review editor David French and racist pseudoscientist Charles Murray.