Be not discouraged. Our Lord warned that these days would come. Children betraying their father’s and mothers. The slander. The love of evil in the name of the greater good. The upside down room.
Rod, I too have my fists clenched when I see this. Being a nearly life-long resident of Berkeley, this is all pretty standard. However it is getting more and more belligerent and the children are more hollow. Its gonna continue to get more weird. I cant have intelligent conversations here on the bay with too many anymore. Its all dogmatic sludge. However, if you go one town North of Berkeley there is a blue collar remnant in El Cerrito (named by the Spanish “The Little Mountain of Saint Anthony.”). This is the home of Creedence and Metallica. Its not hard to find sane folks here.
...these little silver-spooned shithead brats have nothing but contempt for the working class. They are the wave before the jackboots start hob-nailing down the streets of torchlit syncopated gloom. They are the Einsatzgruppen, the left’s John the Baptist precursor for the coming false messiah, the voice of Puritanical Humanism. Anti Christ. The good news is that the Church of Jesus Christ always thrives in persecution. They mark themselves. We must be strong and remain anchored in the Holy Word. God always wins.
The finger snaps, the whining, the insults, the whole thing is so pathetic, so idiotic, and so dangerous, more dangerous than I want to admit, wanting to reflexively dismiss these horrifying people as incompetent, anti-social rejects, and yet, they obviously aren't. They are ideologues. They are successful. They are the future, or part of it, at the very least.
There's an old joke from the communist days: of course, we know what's going to happen, but what's going to happen until then?
Stanford Law's administration should be ashamed of itself and the childish antics it has fomented among a segment of its students. It should immediately issue an apology to Judge Duncan, the student branch of the Federalist Society, and the greater student body that it has failed. It should also immediately discipline the DEI administrator. I know, this is all more than wishful thinking, as the administration is a bunch of myopic cowards.
As a lawyer, I cannot conceive how any of these students will be able to effectively practice law. They will be terrible advocates for their clients because they will not be able to look at multiple factual and evidentiary perspectives with neutral eyes, they will be unable to interpret legal opinions without an ironclad bias, they will not be able to compromise or negotiate when it is in their client's interest, they will be disrespectful to other lawyers, to witnesses, and to the judiciary, and they will not be able to be honest with their clients about the challenges in their cases.
I cannot imagine working with such individuals, nor can I conceive that these students will understand and display the professionalism and decorum required to be a good lawyer, and to safeguard the profession as a whole.
One of the things I took away from my ethics class in law school all those years ago was the need to respect the judiciary, even when a judge issues opinions I might not agree with. The idea of publicly trashing a judge was impossible to imagine.
In fact, some lawyers who have avoided this ethical obligation have been professionally disciplined by their bar association. Take, for example, this comment in California's code of professional conduct, which all lawyers should adhere to: "To maintain the fair and independent administration of justice, lawyers should defend judges and
courts unjustly criticized. Lawyers also are obligated to maintain the respect due to the courts of justice and judicial officers."
Did anyone see any sign of respect for Judge Duncan at that lecture? Absolutely not. And the foremost violator of that principle was the DEI officer. For shame. She could truly be brought before the bar association for an ethics violation. She probably would not be disciplined, but I am confident she would be verbally admonished and warned, as she should be. What a disgusting example she is for those training to be lawyers.
And as for those students who engaged in insulting the judge, I highly doubt any of them have even read more than an excerpt or two from Judge Duncan's many written opinions. They have no courtroom experience, and they are in for a rude awakening when they actually have to go before a judge and argue a case. Their arrogance won't be tolerated by the overwhelming majority of judges and opposing attorneys who (thankfully) attended state schools and not such an arrogant and blindly out of touch school like Stanford.
Lastly, you better believe that many federal judges will privately choose not to employ Stanford law students as their law clerks after watching these shenanigans. I can only hope other employers will see the faces of the students in the video so that they can protect themselves from making an awful hire.
Christopher Rufo substack today shared an essay from Heather Mac Donald on the “mass nervous breakdown on campus.” It almost gave me a nervous breakdown reading it.
“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. “
Brilliantly stated, Brother Rod. My thoughts exactly. I am all in to resist those sons of Belial.
Where's the rest of the post? ;) just kidding. Substack is not TAC is not a newspaper column, and you'll find a "fit" for this place as well. And if Substack doesn't do something you want it to, there's always letting them know repeatedly that you would like it. *L* It worked for Mark Belling in Milwaukee on the radio. IHeartMedia bought out the station that he was on (WISN radio) and he noticed that on their Milwaukee music stations, the names and artists come up for the songs that play. He wanted the same thing to happen for his bumper music, and he kept pushing until he got it to happen. He's still the only one that this happens for, and when there are fill-ins for him, it doesn't happen, but he got them to do things the way he wanted for his show.
Very distressing to see a federal judge mistreated in this way - I’m not sure what the long term strategy is, like do they expect to act this way in an actual courthouse? They’ll take you into custody right there at the podium if you talk to a judge that way.
That said, I’ve been a law student recently enough to respond that this was not the norm, at least where I went to school. The other students in that classroom are paying $60k a year in tuition, and I wasn’t there to hear about other people’s sensibilities. I also found that in practice, isolation has a lot to do with this kind of behavior - many of my classmates had largely stopped speaking to the 7 or 8 wokesters in our section after the first 4ish weeks. After all, there was nothing I could do or say that would be queer enough, or anti-racist enough, or anti-capitalist enough to satisfy, so why interact? They literally end up funnelled into parallel educational systems - while the rest of us were actually helping low income people file their taxes, or helping immigrants become documented, they’d be cosseted in their CRT and gender and the law echo chambers.
I’ve often wondered if requiring law students to interact more face to face and emphasize practical coursework (some of the most no-nonsense instructors I ever had were adjunct professors who were still actively working as lawyers, you’re not going to lecture the head of the Innocence Project on being insufficiently anti-racist) would be another way of coming at this issue. The truth is that when I actually took the time to talk to several people who I would probably consider this woke, many of them feel the way they do for semi-decent reasons (at least from their perspective) and they’re much less insane one-on-one.
It won't be soft totalitarianism when they have vanquished free speech rights. We have here a consolidation of Woke, government, secret police, institutions and corporations into a fasces of unbreakable power. Hope it fares as badly as the previous incarnations last century.
Protesting a speaker, outside the hall, is one thing. Silencing him and preventing him from speaking at all is quite another.
In the fall of 1979, my first semester at the University of Texas, one of the several international organizations on campus arranged for the Hon. Fereydoon Hoveyda, former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, a former deputy foreign minister, and a long time state secretary in the Iranian foreign ministry. He had an interesting background -- he'd been born in Syria when his dad was Consul-General in Damascus, mom was a Qajar Princess (the dynasty that preceded the Pahlavis), raised in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and France and educated at the Sorbonne (PhD, Int'l. Relations).
Among other things, he was one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; as well as being an author and film critic. His brother had been one of the Shah's last prime ministers.
In any case, they'd reserved a room for him on the second story of the Texas Union for him to come and talk and the house was packed. There were some pickets outside which, at the time, I didn't pay a lot of attention to. Anyway, a girl I knew slightly (can't recall her name just at the moment) gave a nice little speech introducing Dr. Hoveyda, and he came up to speak.
He never got a word out. There were a couple hundred people in this room. But there were about 15-20 people in the back, mostly a combination of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, and pro-mullah students, who started shouting and putting up quite a din, so much you could never have heard anything.
This went on for about 20 minutes. Professor Hoveyda,stood at the podium, a little smile on his face. I had the distinct impression that he was not very surprised; but the University types were all milling around quite a flutter.
Finally there was a conclave at the front and a few minutes later somebody from the University announced that the speech would not take place.
I was gobsmacked, and hugely disappointed. Instead of summoning the police and carting the screaming scumbags off to jail -- they gave the scumbags what they wanted and cancelled the speech. So, freedom of speech to these people meant the right for an organized minority, using fascist tactics (Mussolini's mobs used to break up speeches of their opponents just that way) to stop somebody else from speaking -- somebody who many others wanted to hear.
I was angrier at the University than the demonstrators. No doubt the demonstrators had their story to tell, but they had no right to break-up the man's speech. But I thought the University administrators were a bunch of craven jellyfish for folding and letting that mob break up the speech. What did they have a police force for?
I never did hear Professor Hoveyda speak, or see him again, but I read several of his books. He died in Virginia in his 80's (06).
Even remotely right-of-center judges must stop accepting invitations to speak at these schools. Watching it, I tried to think of something he could have said to that horrid woman, but there's nothing. She and the students would have LOVED to have him say anything. If he had even raised a finger and said "excuse me" she would have started crying and the students would have swarmed. What about walking out? Nope. Then their story would be "We invited him to speak, and we pleaded with him to stay, but he refused to talk to us because he was unwilling to hear any side but his own...."
Nope, the only avenue open to him was to stand there and listen to all that nonsense.
It does no good for anyone to speak at these schools or to employ their graduates. Regardless, people love to say they "spoke at Stanford" and they pay their graduates massive salaries because they have this idea that they are smart.
“It’s not going to be persecution like the older Romans, or even communist Russia…”
In my more paranoid or despairing moments, I worry that that kind of persecution isn’t that far fetched. How to not give in to despair and fear?
Madame defarge… exactly.
I couldn't help laughing at the young termagant who shrieked, "Your racism is showing!!"
No, we won't give up our guns. I hate what that implies.
A relevant essay by Heather Macdonald:
https://www.city-journal.org/the-great-feminization-of-the-american-university
Pearls before swines.
Be not discouraged. Our Lord warned that these days would come. Children betraying their father’s and mothers. The slander. The love of evil in the name of the greater good. The upside down room.
Rod, I too have my fists clenched when I see this. Being a nearly life-long resident of Berkeley, this is all pretty standard. However it is getting more and more belligerent and the children are more hollow. Its gonna continue to get more weird. I cant have intelligent conversations here on the bay with too many anymore. Its all dogmatic sludge. However, if you go one town North of Berkeley there is a blue collar remnant in El Cerrito (named by the Spanish “The Little Mountain of Saint Anthony.”). This is the home of Creedence and Metallica. Its not hard to find sane folks here.
...these little silver-spooned shithead brats have nothing but contempt for the working class. They are the wave before the jackboots start hob-nailing down the streets of torchlit syncopated gloom. They are the Einsatzgruppen, the left’s John the Baptist precursor for the coming false messiah, the voice of Puritanical Humanism. Anti Christ. The good news is that the Church of Jesus Christ always thrives in persecution. They mark themselves. We must be strong and remain anchored in the Holy Word. God always wins.
“God is dead” - Nietzsche
“Nietzsche is dead.” -God
Be strong.
God bless.
The finger snaps, the whining, the insults, the whole thing is so pathetic, so idiotic, and so dangerous, more dangerous than I want to admit, wanting to reflexively dismiss these horrifying people as incompetent, anti-social rejects, and yet, they obviously aren't. They are ideologues. They are successful. They are the future, or part of it, at the very least.
There's an old joke from the communist days: of course, we know what's going to happen, but what's going to happen until then?
Stanford Law's administration should be ashamed of itself and the childish antics it has fomented among a segment of its students. It should immediately issue an apology to Judge Duncan, the student branch of the Federalist Society, and the greater student body that it has failed. It should also immediately discipline the DEI administrator. I know, this is all more than wishful thinking, as the administration is a bunch of myopic cowards.
As a lawyer, I cannot conceive how any of these students will be able to effectively practice law. They will be terrible advocates for their clients because they will not be able to look at multiple factual and evidentiary perspectives with neutral eyes, they will be unable to interpret legal opinions without an ironclad bias, they will not be able to compromise or negotiate when it is in their client's interest, they will be disrespectful to other lawyers, to witnesses, and to the judiciary, and they will not be able to be honest with their clients about the challenges in their cases.
I cannot imagine working with such individuals, nor can I conceive that these students will understand and display the professionalism and decorum required to be a good lawyer, and to safeguard the profession as a whole.
One of the things I took away from my ethics class in law school all those years ago was the need to respect the judiciary, even when a judge issues opinions I might not agree with. The idea of publicly trashing a judge was impossible to imagine.
In fact, some lawyers who have avoided this ethical obligation have been professionally disciplined by their bar association. Take, for example, this comment in California's code of professional conduct, which all lawyers should adhere to: "To maintain the fair and independent administration of justice, lawyers should defend judges and
courts unjustly criticized. Lawyers also are obligated to maintain the respect due to the courts of justice and judicial officers."
Did anyone see any sign of respect for Judge Duncan at that lecture? Absolutely not. And the foremost violator of that principle was the DEI officer. For shame. She could truly be brought before the bar association for an ethics violation. She probably would not be disciplined, but I am confident she would be verbally admonished and warned, as she should be. What a disgusting example she is for those training to be lawyers.
And as for those students who engaged in insulting the judge, I highly doubt any of them have even read more than an excerpt or two from Judge Duncan's many written opinions. They have no courtroom experience, and they are in for a rude awakening when they actually have to go before a judge and argue a case. Their arrogance won't be tolerated by the overwhelming majority of judges and opposing attorneys who (thankfully) attended state schools and not such an arrogant and blindly out of touch school like Stanford.
Lastly, you better believe that many federal judges will privately choose not to employ Stanford law students as their law clerks after watching these shenanigans. I can only hope other employers will see the faces of the students in the video so that they can protect themselves from making an awful hire.
Christopher Rufo substack today shared an essay from Heather Mac Donald on the “mass nervous breakdown on campus.” It almost gave me a nervous breakdown reading it.
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=1248321&post_id=107282132&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyNTc3NDQ4MCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTA3MjgyMTMyLCJpYXQiOjE2Nzg0NjA5MDEsImV4cCI6MTY4MTA1MjkwMSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTEyNDgzMjEiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.Xmm2bgIjQPFBrdOx-7-SAT3xWjuMKdOKGNoH7IJOOeg
“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. “
Brilliantly stated, Brother Rod. My thoughts exactly. I am all in to resist those sons of Belial.
Where's the rest of the post? ;) just kidding. Substack is not TAC is not a newspaper column, and you'll find a "fit" for this place as well. And if Substack doesn't do something you want it to, there's always letting them know repeatedly that you would like it. *L* It worked for Mark Belling in Milwaukee on the radio. IHeartMedia bought out the station that he was on (WISN radio) and he noticed that on their Milwaukee music stations, the names and artists come up for the songs that play. He wanted the same thing to happen for his bumper music, and he kept pushing until he got it to happen. He's still the only one that this happens for, and when there are fill-ins for him, it doesn't happen, but he got them to do things the way he wanted for his show.
If I were king there would be one response to these spawn of Trotsky:
We they leave the building they are escorted by USMC DI’s. “Get on the bus. Now. You are late for class”. Ship their asses off into two groups:
Group 1: Paris Island
Group 2: Camp Pendleton
Time for 6 weeks of attitude adjustment.
Semper Fidelis🇺🇸
Very distressing to see a federal judge mistreated in this way - I’m not sure what the long term strategy is, like do they expect to act this way in an actual courthouse? They’ll take you into custody right there at the podium if you talk to a judge that way.
That said, I’ve been a law student recently enough to respond that this was not the norm, at least where I went to school. The other students in that classroom are paying $60k a year in tuition, and I wasn’t there to hear about other people’s sensibilities. I also found that in practice, isolation has a lot to do with this kind of behavior - many of my classmates had largely stopped speaking to the 7 or 8 wokesters in our section after the first 4ish weeks. After all, there was nothing I could do or say that would be queer enough, or anti-racist enough, or anti-capitalist enough to satisfy, so why interact? They literally end up funnelled into parallel educational systems - while the rest of us were actually helping low income people file their taxes, or helping immigrants become documented, they’d be cosseted in their CRT and gender and the law echo chambers.
I’ve often wondered if requiring law students to interact more face to face and emphasize practical coursework (some of the most no-nonsense instructors I ever had were adjunct professors who were still actively working as lawyers, you’re not going to lecture the head of the Innocence Project on being insufficiently anti-racist) would be another way of coming at this issue. The truth is that when I actually took the time to talk to several people who I would probably consider this woke, many of them feel the way they do for semi-decent reasons (at least from their perspective) and they’re much less insane one-on-one.
It won't be soft totalitarianism when they have vanquished free speech rights. We have here a consolidation of Woke, government, secret police, institutions and corporations into a fasces of unbreakable power. Hope it fares as badly as the previous incarnations last century.
Protesting a speaker, outside the hall, is one thing. Silencing him and preventing him from speaking at all is quite another.
In the fall of 1979, my first semester at the University of Texas, one of the several international organizations on campus arranged for the Hon. Fereydoon Hoveyda, former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, a former deputy foreign minister, and a long time state secretary in the Iranian foreign ministry. He had an interesting background -- he'd been born in Syria when his dad was Consul-General in Damascus, mom was a Qajar Princess (the dynasty that preceded the Pahlavis), raised in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and France and educated at the Sorbonne (PhD, Int'l. Relations).
Among other things, he was one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; as well as being an author and film critic. His brother had been one of the Shah's last prime ministers.
In any case, they'd reserved a room for him on the second story of the Texas Union for him to come and talk and the house was packed. There were some pickets outside which, at the time, I didn't pay a lot of attention to. Anyway, a girl I knew slightly (can't recall her name just at the moment) gave a nice little speech introducing Dr. Hoveyda, and he came up to speak.
He never got a word out. There were a couple hundred people in this room. But there were about 15-20 people in the back, mostly a combination of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, and pro-mullah students, who started shouting and putting up quite a din, so much you could never have heard anything.
This went on for about 20 minutes. Professor Hoveyda,stood at the podium, a little smile on his face. I had the distinct impression that he was not very surprised; but the University types were all milling around quite a flutter.
Finally there was a conclave at the front and a few minutes later somebody from the University announced that the speech would not take place.
I was gobsmacked, and hugely disappointed. Instead of summoning the police and carting the screaming scumbags off to jail -- they gave the scumbags what they wanted and cancelled the speech. So, freedom of speech to these people meant the right for an organized minority, using fascist tactics (Mussolini's mobs used to break up speeches of their opponents just that way) to stop somebody else from speaking -- somebody who many others wanted to hear.
I was angrier at the University than the demonstrators. No doubt the demonstrators had their story to tell, but they had no right to break-up the man's speech. But I thought the University administrators were a bunch of craven jellyfish for folding and letting that mob break up the speech. What did they have a police force for?
I never did hear Professor Hoveyda speak, or see him again, but I read several of his books. He died in Virginia in his 80's (06).
Even remotely right-of-center judges must stop accepting invitations to speak at these schools. Watching it, I tried to think of something he could have said to that horrid woman, but there's nothing. She and the students would have LOVED to have him say anything. If he had even raised a finger and said "excuse me" she would have started crying and the students would have swarmed. What about walking out? Nope. Then their story would be "We invited him to speak, and we pleaded with him to stay, but he refused to talk to us because he was unwilling to hear any side but his own...."
Nope, the only avenue open to him was to stand there and listen to all that nonsense.
It does no good for anyone to speak at these schools or to employ their graduates. Regardless, people love to say they "spoke at Stanford" and they pay their graduates massive salaries because they have this idea that they are smart.