The Stanford Mob Isn't Going Away

What exactly is the stopping point of intimidation?

It is almost universally understood, or it was up until last week, that shouting down a speaker is an infringement on, not an exercise of, free speech. Those who disagree with the speaker should have, and at Stanford they do have, the opportunity to express their dissent in a different but equally accessible forum, which likewise has the right not to be shouted down.

This is not merely the obvious consequence of a commitment to free speech. It’s necessary if there is to be any speech at all, much less discussion or dialogue. Any other regimen will produce, not speech (which can at least be understood) but just people yelling over each other (which can’t, and which is not infrequently the flashpoint for violence).

It is against this should-be-taken-for-granted backdrop that Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez, together with the University’s President, wrote a letter of apology to US Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan after he was shouted down last week while attempting to give a talk at the Law School.

The Brownshirts who effectively ended Judge Duncan’s chance to speak (and their fellow students’ chance to hear him) are not happy with Dean Martinez and her apology.

What did they do about it? Send in a petition? Ask for a meeting with her? Invite her to be a speaker at an event of their own and face their questions?

Not exactly. That’s not how Brownshirts work. Their response to Dean Martinez, who also teaches a class in constitutional law, is described in this news report, titled “Hundreds of silent masked students surround Stanford Law dean for apology to heckled federal judge.”

Hundreds of student protesters wearing masks and all-black clothing lined the hallways outside Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez's classroom after she apologized to U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan for the disruption of his recent speech.

On Monday, Martinez, who teaches constitutional law, arrived to find her whiteboard covered in fliers ridiculing Duncan and defending those who disrupted his speech. The fliers echoed the opinion of student activists and some administrators who claimed hecklers derailing Duncan's talk was a form of free speech.

After her class ended, protesters, obscuring their faces with masks that said "counter-speech is free speech," stared at Martinez as she left. The protesters formed a "human corridor" that stretched from the class to the building's exit and contained nearly a third of the school's student body, according to students who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon.

Approximately 50 out of the 60 students in Martinez's class also joined the protest and scowled at those who did not join in.

Let’s think about this. About half of Dean Martinez’ students are going to be men. What that means is that Dean Martinez, a woman in her fifties, was effectively forced to walk the gauntlet of two dozen men in their twenties, masked and in black “uniforms,” just to get out of the building. All because she and the University President had the temerity to do what any marginally civil professional would do, namely, apologize when someone invited to a forum for which you are responsible is met with menacing, snarling rudeness.

Behavior like this might be thought of as many things. Education is not one of them. Normal decency isn’t either.

Where is this going to end? I wish I knew. I don’t have a good feeling. The “diversity” mavens might already have reached critical mass at Stanford Law, something that has been an explicit goal of affirmative action for a long time. But it’s not a critical mass of racial comity, even on the unlikely assumption that that was the actual goal. It’s a critical mass of something different and darker — enough power to impose and enforce uniformity of thought.

How do you think someone like Tirien Steinbach, Associate Dean for Getting Your Mind Right, gets hired to begin with?

The shouting down of Judge Duncan, and now running the gauntlet for Dean Martinez, are not the end of this. Worse still, they tend to feed the Left’s angrier and more mentally unstable followers. If the Judge and those ideologically aligned with him are characterized as destroyers of lives, what principle precludes violent action being taken against them?

Which leads me to my pop quiz: Who is James Hodgkinson? Who is Nicholas Roske?

I wouldn’t expect you to know, because those name are kept well out of sight (unlike, for example, George Floyd’s). Hodgkinson was the leftwing activist who shot and nearly killed House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Roske was the pro-abortion activist arrested in the dead of night in Bethesda for attempting to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh — Kavanaugh having famously been the target of a hate campaign during his confirmation hearing.

As the Left often reminds us, hate is not a family value. And it can spread in directions which, like arson, are not all that predictable. The Left has a problem right now with the shouting down of Judge Duncan, something that is not playing well for its PR purposes (which is why the NYT and the WaPo are staying so quiet about it). Hence it has launched its counteroffensive, consisting of (what has become) blasting away with the standard smears, see, e.g., yesterday’s piece in Slate. And now the more-or-less undisguised physical intimidation of Dean Martinez.

Are there more Hodgkinsons and Roskes out there taking all this in and lathering themselves for some sort of dreadful act the Left will claim to be shocked about? In reality, probably not. People that crazy and vicious are exceedingly rare. But I’m very much hoping not to find out.