Law school students are again throwing tantrums over listening to speakers with whom they might disagree.
Supreme Court scholar Ilya Shapiro, who was suspended just before starting at Georgetown University simply for disagreeing with President Joe Biden’s decision to limit his Supreme Court nominee options to black females, was again at the center.
Earlier this year, Shapiro said an Indian-born chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals would be a better choice than Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“I argued that Judge Sri Srinivasan was the best candidate, meaning everyone else was less qualified, so if Mr. Biden kept his promise, he would pick what, given Twitter’s character limit, I characterized as a ‘lesser black woman,’” Shapiro wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “I deleted the tweet and apologized for my inartful choice of words, but I stand by my view that Mr. Biden should have considered ‘all possible nominees,’ as 76 percent of Americans agreed in an ABC News poll.”
Fast forward a month, and Shapiro prepared to speak at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, but a group of totalitarian students wouldn’t allow the libertarian to take the stage.
“It’s clear that a vocal minority of Hastings students wanted to hear neither my reasoning about Mr. Biden’s selection criteria nor my broader analysis now that there is a nominee,” Shapiro explained. “They screamed obscenities and physically confronted me, several times getting in my face or blocking my access to the lectern, and they shouted down a dean.”
This scene is egregious and yet typical.
A couple weeks later on the opposite coast, Yale Law School attempted to hold a conference on free speech. Did these supposedly elite students want to hear what a speaker who promotes liberty had to say? Of course not.
The hypocritical leftists shouted down Kristen Waggoner. The anti-speech radicals were so vitriolic that police needed to escort Waggoner out of the venue for her safety.
It’s worth noting that in neither locale were these 18-year-olds just out of high school; these were law school students, theoretically headed for a career revolving around discourse. Cancel culture infests most college campuses, but you’d think law schools might differ.
Yale Law School Dean: “This behavior was unacceptable. This is an institution of higher learning, not a town square … YLS is a professional school, and this is not how lawyers interact.” 👏 https://t.co/jQlfLMkLhY
— Andy Grewal (@AndyGrewal) March 28, 2022
The fatuous university decided not to punish the intolerant students.
Douglas Murray believes half the country is being silenced, while entire professions succumb to this lunacy.
“Conservatives thought at the beginning of the sort of woke stampede that this was only going to be in certain areas, but people didn’t really expect that it would go all the way through,” the renowned author explained. “And we can’t just give over really important things like the law to activist left-wing mobs … the law students there at Yale do not understand the most basic things, not just about America, including the right to free speech, not just about academia, where free speech is absolutely crucial, but they don’t understand that in the profession they want to go into you have to hear views that you may not like.”
Finally, a state school in New York planned a speaking event with Anthony Bottom, a convicted ambush murderer of two cops.
Bottom, who converted to Islam and now calls himself Jalil Abdul Muntaqim, was arrested in 1971 and released in 2020. The description of the event audaciously called the former Black Panther a “political prisoner.”
The event caused Darren Varrenti, a lecturer and former police chief, to resign his position at SUNY Brockport.
“I do not want to be affiliated with a college that hosts cold-blooded murderers as guest,” Varrenti commented. “When you wind up in prison for murdering two people, you’re considered a prisoner of the prison system, and that’s where you belong.”
A.J. Kaufman
A.J. Kaufman is an Alpha News columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Israel National News, Orange County Register, St. Cloud Times, Star-Tribune, and across AIM Media Midwest and the Internet. Kaufman previously worked as a school teacher and military historian.
