Stanford Law Students Are The Enemy

By humiliating federal judge, ruling class shows contempt for liberal democracy

Fifth Circuit Federal Judge Kyle S. Duncan attacked at Stanford Law School

This is shocking stuff from a Federalist Society event at Stanford Law School. A woke mob of law students shouted down Federal Judge Kyle Duncan as he tried to deliver a lecture. Watch as the gutless whinypants DEI administrator nearly breaks into tears talking about the “pain” of and “harm” to these privileged shitbirds, and lambasting a federal judge about how wicked he is.

Here’s Ed Whelan’s take:

Ed Whelan @EdWhelanEPPC

With the acquiescence of @StanfordLaw administrators, Stanford law students yesterday shouted down Fifth Circuit judge Stuart Kyle Duncan at a scheduled event on topic of “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter." 1/

I watched the video. I hope you do too. I can’t be neutral about this. Judge Duncan is a friend of mine. I know him to be a Catholic man of great character and compassion, as well as conviction. It made me ball up my fists watching him humiliated by these brats and by that mewling, pathetic DEI Dean Steinbach. She performed EXACTLY as DEI officers are taught to perform. That is why we must abolish it at every opportunity. No compromise with it: full abolishment, to the extent of the law. If we don’t, you mark my words: that Madame Defarge will be knitting inclusivity shawls to catch the heads as they tumble down from the guillotine.

Tirien Steinbach lectures Federal Judge about his wickedness

I cannot bear these people, these Stanford Law students and their grotesque Dean Steinbach. These people are the Enemy. I will vote for anybody who will stop them. They are destroying our liberal democracy. Every one of those students are going to go into the ruling class, and will spend their careers in the law trying to oppress the people they have decided don’t have a right to be free, or respected, or anything but crushed as wrongthinkers and Bad People.

Someone said on Twitter that the “emerging conservative narrative” is wrong, that the video shows a dean “deftly navigating a hard situation” in a way that allows the talk to proceed. I presume that writer was not drunk when he watched the video and wrote that. Here’s one response:

This event is a good example of the soft totalitarianism I’ve been writing about. They don’t believe that Duncan had a right to speak to a student law society about the law. After disrupting his speech at length, and sitting through that disgusting lecture by Dean Steinbach, half the students in the room left. They only came to prevent him from talking, and to prevent their classmates from hearing him.

Don’t you get it? Don’t you see where this is going? These people are the ruling class! They do not believe in free speech, reasoned debate, and other hallmarks of liberal democracy. And they will be the judges of tomorrow appointed by a Democratic administration.

I would have been emotional about this anyway, because I loathe these privileged brats with everything in me. But I am beside myself because they did this to my friend, who is one of the gentlest souls I know. You don’t like his jurisprudence? Fine. That’s your right. But you don’t have the right to treat him like this — or anyone else. Not a conservative judge, and not a progressive judge. Not at South Bumblefutz State law school, and not at Stanford law school. Nobody. Nowhere. If they’re allowed to get away with this — and of course they will — then we won’t long have a country.

I hope you will watch the clip and listen to the language of Dean Steinbach. All that mealy-mouthed therapeutic nonsense about “pain” and “harm” suffered by the students simply for having a judge they don’t like on campus. Liberal tears get cried because liberal tears work. The administration of Stanford is complicit in this disgrace too.

I cannot stand Donald Trump. I wish he would go away. He’s not good for our country. But I tell you this: if he is on the ballot in 2024, I will crawl over broken glass to vote for him as a strike against these ruling-class woke totalitarians, and hope that President Trump will appoint many more federal judges to hold the line against the Jacobins. Personally, I’d rather have Ron DeSantis, who is demonstrating right now that he has the spine and the smarts to attack wokeness. If you think these Stanford radicals are going to respect the basics of liberal democracy when they make it to the bench, you’re dreaming. They are the products of an academic law system that despises half the country, and the liberal democracy that gives them a say-so in how they are governed.

Now is a good time to go back to April 3, 2015, and read this piece I did about a conversation I had with a professor closeted as a Christian inside one of the country’s top law schools, who would only speak with me anonymously. I called him “Prof. Kingsfield”. We spoke after woke capitalists compelled the Indiana state legislature to repeal the state version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, alleging that it was bigoted against LGBTs. Excerpts:

What prompted his reaching out to me? “I’m very worried,” he said, of events of the last week. “The constituency for religious liberty just isn’t there anymore.”

Like me, what unnerved Prof. Kingsfield is not so much the details of the Indiana law, but the way the overculture treated the law. “When a perfectly decent, pro-gay marriage religious liberty scholar like Doug Laycock, who is one of the best in the country — when what he says is distorted, you know how crazy it is.”

“Alasdair Macintyre is right,” he said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.

But only one side has the power. When I asked Kingsfield what most people outside elite legal and academic circles don’t understand about the way elites think, he said “there’s this radical incomprehension of religion.”

“They think religion is all about being happy-clappy and nice, or should be, so they don’t see any legitimate grounds for the clash,” he said. “They make so many errors, but they don’t want to listen.”

To elites in his circles, Kingsfield continued, “at best religion is something consenting adult should do behind closed doors. They don’t really understand that there’s a link between Sister Helen Prejean’s faith and the work she does on the death penalty. There’s a lot of looking down on flyover country, one middle America.

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”

He went on to say, of Christians:

“We have to fall back to defensive lines and figure out where those lines are. It’s not going to be persecution like the older Romans, or even communist Russia,” he added. “But what’s coming is going cause a lot of people to fall away from the faith, and we are going to have to be careful about how we define and clarify what Christianity is.”

“If I were a priest or pastor, I don’t know what I would advise people about what to say and what not to say in public about their faith,” Kingsfield said.

More:

On the political side, Kingsfield said it’s important to “surrender political hope” — that is, that things can be solved through political power. Republicans can be counted on to block the worst of what the Democrats attempt – which is a pretty weak thing to rely on, but it’s not nothing. “But a lot of things can be done by administrative order,” he said. “I’m really worried about that.”

And on the cultural front? Cultural pressure is going to radically reduce orthodox Christian numbers in the years go come. The meaning of what it means to be a faithful Christian is going to come under intense fire, Kingsfield said, not only from outside the churches, but from within. There will be serious stigma attached to standing up for orthodox teaching on homosexuality.

“And if the bishops are like these Indiana bishops [who capitulated — RD], where does that leave us?” he said. “We have a problem in the current generation, but what I really worry about is what it means to transmit the faith to the next generation.”

Can you not open your eyes and see the future they have prepared for us? This is not just a bunch of spoiled elite law school kids acting out — the kind of college students who will grow up once they get into the Real World. Dean Steinbach comes from the Real World. She validates them. All elite culture does. Liberal tears have corroded the girders of liberal democracy. Watch the video. Think about what you saw. Understand that not a damn thing is going to come of this.

Prepare. Read Live Not By Lies. Effective preparation begins by ceasing to lie to yourself about the state of our country and the kind of people who run it.