The Trump-appointed judge who was shouted off Stanford’s campus by law students and the school’s DEI dean is now returning fire, calling the protest a “mob” that is “unfit to be members of any bar.”
Fifth Circuit Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan was visiting the campus as a guest speaker, only for protesters and a faculty member to hurl abuse and shut down the event in a spectacle widely shared on video. Stanford has since issued an apology, but Duncan is now warning about the future of America’s “best and brightest.”
“[T]his is one of the best law schools in the world,” Duncan said in an interview published on writer Rod Dreher’s Substack. “The students are the cream of the crop. The future judges, senators, presidents, leaders of industry. And yet here is a mob of the best and brightest, shouting down a federal judge who’s been invited to campus, and thereby demonstrating that they don’t have the foggiest grasp of the basic concept of legal discourse.”
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“[T]their operating principle is: If I don’t like what you say or think, I will silence you. Power trumps reason.”
Duncan was appointed judge by President Trump in 2018. The school’s Federalist Society had invited him to speak about his work concerning big tech, gun laws, and the COVID mandates.
Before Duncan could give his speech, he was mobbed by students who accused him of racism and anti-LGBTQ bigotry. Protesters shouted, calling him a “liar” and a “scumbag.” At one point, the school’s dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion seized the lectern, giving a pre-written speech that accused Duncan of creating “division.”
VIDEO: a DEI bureaucrat in action
Stanford Law's associate dean for DEI, Tirien Angela Steinbach, is an obvious moron, appointed only because she is a black woman. Here, she starts crying because FedSoc invited a conservative circuit judge.
$100k per year for this "education" pic.twitter.com/jGnuIGgZlg
— Maxwell Meyer (@mualphaxi) March 10, 2023
“I’m uncomfortable because this event is tearing at the fabric of this community that I care about, and I’m here to support,” Dean Tirien Steinbach said.
“She did exactly the opposite of what a law school administrator was supposed to do,” Duncan said in his recent interview. “She accused me of causing ‘hurt’ and ‘division’ in the law school community by my mere presence on campus. So, this had the effect of validating the mob.”
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Stanford has since apologized for the spectacle, adding that staff members “intervened in inappropriate ways,” but it is unclear whether the school intends to punish any of the protesters involved. Hours after the talk was disrupted, Stanford encouraged the Federalist Society members to “reach out” to a number of administrators–one of whom was Steinbach herself.
“The attack was intimately personal and, frankly, disgusting. If I talked to a dog the way those students talked to me, I’d feel ashamed.”
Duncan says that while people might be tempted to write off the incident, they should be deeply concerned about what it means for the future.
“The law students we graduate from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and the like are the ones who, inevitably, will be occupying the commanding heights of government, academia, big business, philanthropy, and so on… And if it doesn’t seem to matter as much right now, just wait five or ten years. Then they will have percolated up through the ranks and will be calling the shots.
When asked by the Stanford Review what the school should do to correct the situation, Duncan suggested, “firing Dean Steinbach is a good start.”
“The university’s apology will be completely meaningless unless concrete actions are taken to rid the administration of anti-speech zealots.”
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