There is an interesting development in the controversy at Stanford Law School where U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan was shouted down by law students and condemned by a law school dean for discussing his conservative judicial views. Student protesters reportedly published the names of students in the Federalist Society online as part of their cancel campaign. However, Aaron Sibarium, a journalist for the Washington Free Beacon has said that a board member of the Stanford National Lawyers Guild, sent an email demanding the Free Beacon remove her name and those of other students from their reporting because it is threatening and dangerous.
Sibarium tweeted that “On Sunday, I identified board members of the Stanford National Lawyers Guild–one of the groups responsible for the posters–who in a public statement described the protest as ‘Stanford Law School at its best.’ A few hours later, the board demanded I redact their names.”
It was a highly ironic moment to be sure. However, I am more interested in another aspect of the controversy. I wrote earlier about the joint apology letter of Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Law School Dean Jenny Martinez. Neither Tessier-Lavigne nor Martinez promise to hold these students accountable or to sanction Steinbach. They merely express regret that “staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.”
This latest controversy highlights the fact that the identity of some of these students (including those on videotape) who disrupted a speaker at the law school are known to the school. In this case, it was a federal appellate judge but we have seen this type of “deplatforming” at other schools. These students — and many faculty — voice a twisted view that silencing the free speech of others is a form of free speech.
A chilling poll was released by 2021 College Free Speech Rankings after questioning a huge body of 37,000 students at 159 top-ranked U.S. colleges and universities. It found that sixty-six percent of college students think shouting down a speaker to stop them from speaking is a legitimate form of free speech. Another 23 percent believe violence can be used to cancel a speech. That is roughly one out of four supporting violence.
They are getting these values from faculty members. Many schools have largely purged their ranks of conservative and libertarian faculty. This trend is supported by anti-free speech websites like Above the Law where Editor Joe Patrice defended “predominantly liberal faculties” and argued that hiring a conservative professor is akin to allowing a believer in geocentrism to teach. He also mocked surveys showing that conservative students are fearful of speaking freely in class, dismissing these students as “just… conservatives being sad that everyone else makes fun of them.”
What is notable is that Martinez did not even pledge to hold students accountable for stopping the speech by Judge Duncan. Yet, that is still more than other law deans. When Professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about “the importance of free speech” at CUNY law school, CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech. (Bilek later cancelled herself after using a controversial term in a meeting and resigned).
At the University of California, Santa Barbara, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.
These students have been raised from elementary schools to law school in a speech phobic environment where free speech is treated as harmful. That was evident in the disgraceful Stanford event.
Now, however, they want to be able to target others while objecting to being named themselves. Much like the Yale law students who cancelled an event and then objected to campus police being present, this objection from Stanford law students illustrates the sense of privilege and exceptionalism by many in the anti-free speech movement.
How funny, that it’s dangerous to publish the names of the snowflakes, but not publishing the names of Federalist Society members.
ABA should review accreditation for Stanford as they are failing to teach professional behavior.
Who do you think runs the ABA these days?
These liberals are such hypocrites. This is very similar to the Taylor Lorenz story. It’s okay when they hurt or deny rights to others. But no one should point them out as they take their winner lap in the media spotlight.
The liberal cries out in pain as he strikes you.
those spoiled lout mouth haters will have a very difficult time their entire lives and it will be deserved. i wonder if they have considered the possibility that they just might run upon the wrong person to visit their hate upon? they should because one day, the way they act, they certainly will do so.
I’ll be curious to see how the graduating class of this year and those following fare in the job market. I don’t care how liberal an establish potential employer may be, attorneys with that firm know what happens in a courtroom when/if an attorney behaves the way these kids behaved with Judge Duncan. When state supreme courts allow an individual a license to practice law, the court is authorizing that person to take money from another person to speak on his or her behalf. Try speaking like that to the judge in his courtroom and see how far your client’s position gets and how quickly you get put in timeout — with bars for doors
Any student in any school or university who disrupts a speech or presentation should be expelled and any faculty members encouraging or engaging in such behavior should be fired. High school and college students should have to sign a legal agreement upon entry that lists accepted and non-accepted behavior and mandate they adhere or be expelled. These immature toddler tantrums would end after just a few expulsions.
“any faculty members encouraging or engaging in such behavior should be fired” That takes care of 99% of most professors at universities these days!
Furthermore, those displaying such conduct and lack of decorum should never be granted admission to the bar where such conduct would not be tolerated.
Until I have a list of the students who protested, I will not be hiring any Stanford educated lawyers in the foreseeable future!
Amend the constitution to make it a crime to deny any of the Bill of Rights from an American citizen, especially by officials under the color of authority; punishable by loss of citizenship and deportation to a more hospitable country of intolerance to freedom; Pakistan; China; South Korea; Iran; Russia; Great Britain or Canada.
…or disallow dual citizenship, which will have the same effect and remove several suspect legislators from Congress.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1983
Title 18, U.S.C., Section 241 – Conspiracy Against Rights
Title 18, U.S.C., Section 242 – Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law
Title 18, U.S.C., Section 245 – Federally Protected Activities
hey!…dont send us your junk, eh
I think you mean North Korea?
Fools names and Fools faces, are always seen in public places.
The buried point being displayed by these childish, illogical Stanford students/faculty, et al, is that there are indeed a class of people in this world who are NOT SUITED to live in a democracy nor a democratic republic. It takes all kinds of people to make up our world, but people like these simply need their own tribe/nation reserved for themselves alone. Their challenge is that they are trying to survive in the USA, which is and will continue to be a democratic republic. These jerks just need to leave and set up their own nation elsewhere, or move to China/North Korea.
James you have more faith that we will remain a democratic republic than myself. Us patriotic conservatives are being attacked at every level of our society including our courts. Even the Supreme Court is acting sort of squishy. In effect, we have lost the 1st amendment, we’ve lost the 4th after 9/11, the political prisoners of Jan 6 has shown that we lost the 4th, and 6th amendments, 2020 showed that we lost the 12th amendment. Every single day there is a full on assault of our second amendment! As per our Founding Fathers, the 2nd Amendment exist to protect the Citizenry from tyrannical government. I say we are there already. The elites are more and more brazen in their actions. Eg. Jan 6th prisoners, “public/private partnerships” in their suppression of free speech.
Keep exposing them….it works. It’s working for the jab and for the Biden crime family….just sooooo slowly. We cannot give up this chose nation.
Their goal (and that of their puppetmasters)–it appears–is to break (not fix or improve) all that works well in America.
These so-called liberals are the new Khmer Rouge and National Socialist German Workers Party rolled into one.
i.e. Today’s students are ‘CommuNazis’.
Nazunists?
Yes ,,, NO SOUP FOR ANYONE.
It’s the bad parenting of we boomer generation having indulged these entitled anarchic youths who don’t know what they don’t know. Like those running the SVB bank. The result will total collapse of civilised nations. How will they get on when we all expire and no one with any sense to guide the basic principles of life. They will starve unless some radical authoritarian necessarily needs to take over.
Since Shakespeare and the classics of Western Civilization, the Bible, and historical figures are canceled or defamed they will know even less of what they don’t know. Their virtuous annihilation will render them helpless vessels of artifical intelligence.
Creating helpless vessels and destroying America is the goal, so far, their efforts have succeeded splendidly. With emasculation, female emancipation, and the destruction of the nuclear family, there will be no children to replace the current population. Heck all you need is a dog or a cat, they pay taxes don’t they?
Not boomers that raised these craven degenerates.
The boomers raised the liberals who are rearing these authoritarians. The a large portion of the liberal 60’s generation was indoctrinated into communism and then took up government and university jobs while raising little authoritarians who like their parents think they are smarter than everyone before them and can run a centralized government better than all those that have tried before. Hopefully there are enough traditional constitutional conservatives left to swing this pendulum back while this 60’s communist generation fades into retirement and history.
Well some boomers perhaps, excluding the 58,150 that died in Vietnam fighting for Liberty against Communism. Bold statement, once you look behind the curtain it’s hard to believe what is there.
I wonder how many people remember that North Vietnam was the aggressor?
I will exclude myself from the group of boomers who indulged these entitled youths. My kids are hardly conservative but they’re absolutely respectful and know how to behave. These kids clearly believe they have no obligation to show respect — to the position if not the person — and they obviously do not know how to behave.
I’m a late “boomer” but I can say that each of my 8 kids learned accountability at an early age and that action resulted in consequences. They also learned to take responsibility for both their action and the consequences. I honestly don’t know where they stand politically but I do know that they look at things with a discriminating eye.
This is absolutely critical.
One of the more important roles of a parent is to allow children the freedom to make mistakes and then not protect them from the consequences of those mistakes, While concurrently making sure they can not make mistakes that have lifelong consequences.
We want children to suffer consequences – if possible the natural consequences of their actions – so long as those consequences are missing a meal, spraining an arm, losing a privilege, rather than losing an arm, or ending up in jail.
My children are young adults. With rare exceptions I have little ability to protect them from the consequences of their actions any more.
So far as a result of their rearing, They have made pretty good decisions, and they are good at avoiding bad ones.
For most of us that is LEARNED. We either learn it with small consequences as a child or big ones as an adult.
F Stanford and these ignorant “students.
FJB
The federal funding of these institutions must end now!
The behavior of these studenrts is akin to the behavior of the staff of the Cleveland Plain Dealer nineteen years ago.
My longtime Usenety ally, Christopher Charles Morton, posted about this on Usenet newsgroups.
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.politics.guns/c/enIZtN4Tw1c/m/mSW7bKYnTt0J
The Leftists on here say freedom of speech includes the right to shout someone else down so they cannot speak (hey, I was just shouting, which is speech).
Just like the right to bodily integrity includes the right to stab someone else (hey, I was just using my own body to stab him).
Just like property rights includes the right to steal from others (hey, I was just increasing my own property).
Just like religious freedom includes the right to burn down someone else’s church (hey, it’s mandated by my religion).
Very good analogies!!!!
As a commenter correctly noted: “The left uses mob rule, and thus the mob veto, to silence those they disagree with.”
And notice the Left’s rationalizations: They’re our shock troops, with “noble” goals — so all is permitted.
Sam,
They see their cause as just. That just cause justifies the use of everything from harassment, cancel culture, mob rule and mob veto, and we are getting closer and closer to real violence.
As GEB asks, what will our answer be to their attempt to burn down the American village for them to keep power?
What is noble about the anarchistic behavior?
“What is noble about the anarchistic behavior?”
Nothing — which is why “noble” is in scare quotes.
They claim that their goals are noble.
The ignorance demonstrated by the leftists on this blog by persons such as Svelaz, Dennis, and Tom (probably one in hiding) is disgraceful. They don’t have the intellect or desire to separate truth from fiction. They believe everyone’s opinions need to be the same. They are intellectually deficient and on the level of grade school children.
Below I list some places where Turley was a legal expert. The list spans between the left and the right. It’s time for these two to stop slandering a man whose point of view is consistent and logical, even when one disagrees. They and a few others are fools who cannot change because they are terminally ignorant.
Turley “has had articles published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal. … with more than two-dozen appearances on Meet the Press, ABC This Week, Face the Nation, and Fox News Sunday. He served as a contributor on Countdown with Keith Olbermann from 2003 until 2011 on MSNBC, and later on Current TV[24] in 2011 and early 2012.
Since the 1990s, he has been a legal analyst for NBC News, CBS News, the BBC and Fox News, … He is on the board of contributors of USA Today and is a columnist with The Hill. He is currently a legal analyst with Fox News. …
In appearances on Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show, he called for criminal prosecution of Bush administration officials for war crimes, including torture.
In USA Today in October 2004, he argued for the legalization of polygamy, provoking responses from writers such as Stanley Kurtz. … In October 2006, in an interview by Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, he expressed strong disapproval of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.”
“The ignorance demonstrated by the leftists on this blog . . .”
You’re being too kind. It’s far worse than mere “ignorance.” It’s willful blindness, active deception, and an attempt to whitewash evil.
Yet Turley is not brave enough to go all out as a patriot.
While we’re on the topic of Progressive mob action-
Does Madonna still want to blow up the White House?