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As I sat and watched in horror, I wondered how and why so many brainless screamers were allowed to disgrace the halls of the SLS. The only thing they're qualified for is digging ditches, and that's an offense to ditch diggers.

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Mar 30, 2023·edited Mar 30, 2023

Totally orthogonal to the particular incident at Stanford Law and this particular post, but I’m actually curious how Glenn and others feel about the recent push by many Republican China hawks to push through a ban of TikTok. Most readers here are focusing on the assault against free speech by the political left, but interestingly enough it seems that progressives like AOC and Jamaal Bowman are the ones coming out to defend TikTok against a ban in part based on First Amendment grounds, although Republican Senator Rand Paul recently did the same as well.

I feel like we live in truly interesting times. Threats to free speech in this country seem to abound from all sources. Given the work Matt Taibbi has done reporting on the Twitter Files, I'd personally love to hear him dive into the First Amendment implications of a potential TikTok ban.

https://www.racket.news/p/my-statement-to-congress

https://www.thefp.com/p/trudeaus-battle-against-a-free-internet/comment/14073509

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There is nothing surprising here.

Lines have been drawn.

A Conservative Christian is shouted down.

Books on Black history are banned

Discussions of race in schools is suppressed

Neither side is going to give an inch.

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Marxists and those who follow derivative ideologies like postmodernism don't exactly believe in free speech.

https://unskool.substack.com/p/howard-zinns-legacy-of-encouraging

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Free speech on campus is an anachronistic as the quaint notion of live and let live. The only thing even remotely unusual about what happened at Stanford is who the target was. One has to wonder how these galaxy brain students will respond the first time a judge in a courtroom rules against them, or a colleague in a law firm says something that gives them the vapors.

With the Twitter files, four years of "Russian collusion," the Covid caper, and the recent Congressional testimony from Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, it becomes obvious that free speech as we once knew it is dead. At the very least, it's on life support when govt agencies are routinely outsourcing the task to various shadow groups and working in conjunction with big tech and big media. The evidence has been laid out for all to see and predictably, the left's response has been to attack the messengers. And as a bonus, we now have stories of federal agents engaging in mob-like intimidation tactics by showing up unannounced at people's homes. Actually, this insults the mob as those folks have some honor and a code in how they go about things; increasingly, govt feels no such constraints because what are we gonna do about it?

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So sad. Such a lack of civility from both sides of many important issue. Praying.

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Mar 29, 2023·edited Mar 29, 2023

David French has a piece on the Stanford Law controversy in the New York Times. I suggest everyone go through as many of the 900+ reader comments on the piece as it takes to dispel any illusion that free speech matters to liberals.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/opinion/free-speech-campus.html

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I appreciated the willingness of these two young men to put their hand up for freedom of thought on campus. It is concerning; however, that neither of them seemed willing to make this a categorical value. While I may be misunderstanding their meaning, they seemed to leave the door open to protesting this or other speakers with whom they might disagree. And they could not bring themselves to support any form of consequence for the students involved in the most egregious abuse of Judge Duncan.

The future does not, at present, look bright.

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Agree. She has a lot of money and supporters but that hasn't protected her from the mob. Death threats against her and her family are frequent. They've published her home address on social media and targeted her daughter and her school. Her money has not prevented her life from being disrupted daily. Therefore my comment about Glenn showing real courage.

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This looks like a bunch of whites whining that one of their own wasn’t allowed to spew more of his White Privileged logic using big fancy words that are utter violence to marginalized peoples everywhere and always. Best he just keep his oppressor words to himself then assault young Stanford minds. They are the real victims. And of course the Dean who was suspended for doing her job I’m ensuring a fair debate in which no student becomes even more of a victim of mean words. Well done, Dean. You are brave and my new hero. We need more like you to ensure whites, particularly the males that like females of the species, don’t utter another word in challenge to DE&I. Controlling speech is very effective and the best way to ensure the correct voices and messages are published.

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Zeno:

Was it Voltaire who said, "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend with my life your right to say it."?

True then, true now, true forever if one believes in free speech, which does not exist in China, N. Korea, Turkey, Russia or its satrap states, Egypt, Libya, El Salvador, Hungary, certain African states south of the Sahara, the Phillipines and a few other states. Thus Stanford Law is an outlier unfamiliar with Constitutional Law, according to this accusation. Amazing that the instructors at this venerable institution have not been heard from. Whatever became of pinciple?

Time was when anyone attempting to abrogate the right of free speech would immediately be challenged. Defilers of that right need to be restrained while the speaker makes a hero/heroine of him/herself, or digs an intellectual hole so deep he/she must crawl out of it.

Which triggers another pithy, old-school aphorism: "Better to remain silent and thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."

The originator of the following aphorism is forgotten, but its wisdom is equally valid: "Whoever knew truth to come out the worse in a free and open verbal encounter?"

I rest my case.

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Thank you Glenn for giving this issue more airtime. Resistance to this suppression of free speech will have to led by people like you with sufficient gravitas who are less vulnerable to the mob. The mob can take out anybody (see JK Rowling); I respect the considerable courage you have shown.

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Yeah. I heard about it last week on The 5th Column (my favorite Substack podcast). Atrocious behavior by the lefties, and the "DEI" leader. I wrote a draft of an essay on this as well and will probably post it in the next few days or week at most. Glad you are covering it. The left once believed in freedom of speech. Those days seem to be largely over, at least from the far-left on campuses. Reminds of the Harper's Letter from 2020.

Michael Mohr

"Sincere American Writing"

https://michaelmohr.substack.com/

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You voted for this and now you're getting it good and hard.

The chickens are coming home to roost.

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The protest was an organized event, Alan Dershowitz named them on Megyn Kelly's show.

It's really despicable that this is the future generation of lawyers. To say we are doomed is putting it mildly...

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In my view, a lawyer who isn’t willing to listen to an argument, shouldn’t be in law school. My father was a lawyer, and there are quite a few lawyers in my family, so I find this sort of thing to be inexcusable.

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