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This is an update to an article I posted yesterday. Read here.
So after apologies were sent out to a federal judge because of the bad behavior by students and a affirmative action dean(appointed before the change was made), The loons were at it again.
The ‘Outnumbered’ panel discussed the incident and the broader debate surrounding free speech on college campuses.
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.
Tirien Steinbach, the Stanford University Law School associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion, slams U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan during his presentation at the school as an invited guest on March 9, 2023. (Screenshot/ Vimeo – Ethics and Public Policy Center)
“They gave us weird looks if we didn’t wear black” and join the crowd, first-year law student Luke Schumacher said. “It didn’t feel like the inclusive, belonging atmosphere that the DEI office claims to be creating.”
Another student, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the experience was “eerie.”
“The protesters were silent, staring from behind their masks at everyone who chose not to protest, including the dean,” the individual said.
The protest was even larger than the one that occurred days earlier and came after the Stanford National Lawyers Guild said Martinez had thrown “capable and compassionate administrators” under the bus. Similar comments were made by the school’s Immigration and Human Rights Law Association and the school’s chapter of the left-wing American Constitution Society.
Last Thursday, Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter invited Duncan to speak. However, the Trump-appointed judge was shouted down and heckled by hundreds of students who made it impossible for him to deliver his speech.
Video footage widely shared on social media shows that the school’s associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), Tirien Steinbach, did nothing to quell the disruption as protesters hurled verbal abuse at the judge.
A view of Stanford’s campus. (Google Maps)
Instead, Steinbach gave a minutes-long and emotional speech at the event, accusing Duncan of causing “harm” through his work on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and questioning the school’s policies on free speech.
The students were particularly angry at Duncan for a 2020 opinion in which he refused to use a transgender sex offender’s preferred pronouns. In comments to the Free Beacon, the judge described the incident as a “bizarre therapy session from hell.”
Duncan was never given a chance to read his prepared remarks. After a hostile and profane Q&A session, he was escorted out the back door by federal marshals, who were there to protect him, the Free Beacon reported.
Following the event, Steinbach claimed the students hadn’t violated any law school policies and alleged that Duncan hadn’t prepared a speech, a claim contradicted by video footage and Duncan himself, according to students. She also allegedly said he was a “serial provocateur” who made fun of students in order to rile them up for the cameras.
A skyline view of the Stanford campus in California. (David Madison)
Over the weekend, the university apologized to Duncan for the incident.
“We write to apologize for the disruption of your recent speech at Stanford Law School,” Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Martinez wrote in a joint statement. “As has already been communicated to our community, what happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus.”
The letter also claimed that staff members failed to enforce university policies and “intervened in inappropriate ways” that did not align with the school’s commitment to free speech, but the letter did not mention Steinbach by name.
Speaking with the National Review, Duncan said he appreciated the apology, particularly Stanford’s acknowledgment that the administrator’s behavior “was completely at odds with the law school’s mission of training future members of the bench and bar.”
“Such an apology would also be a useful step towards restoring the law school’s broader commitment to the many, many students at Stanford who, while not members of the Federalist Society, nonetheless welcome robust debate on campus,” Duncan added.
Fox News’ Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report.
Gabrielle M. Etzel | Reporter
A growing number of colleges and universities are expanding their curricula to include degree programs in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice (DEISJ).
While certain schools are requiring DEISJ coursework for graduation, others are designing minors, majors, and master’s degree programs with identity politics at their core.
Tufts University, for example, offers a Masters in DEIJ Leadership, designed to make its students “effective leader[s] in anti-racist and anti-bias efforts” by blending critical theory with “practical tools…to implement institutional change.”
U.S. Military Academy at West Point also offers a Diversity and Inclusion Studies minor, which requires classes in “Power and Difference” and “Social Inequality.”
In response to Campus Reform’s request for comment, West Point clarified that the program was started in 2018 in part to balance faculty and student interest with the “Superintendent’s Strategic Goal of leveraging diversity and fostering inclusion.”
Bentley University in Massachusetts told Campus Reform that its DEI Bachelor of Arts or Science degrees were created in 2021 to “[prepare] students for a growing number of roles in the business and non-business worlds.”
“The ability of organizations to strategically leverage the range of skillsets and experience brought by a diverse workforce is key to their long-term success,” Bentley’s program description reads.
Various other institutions have similar degree options, including Texas State, Michigan Tech, and the Wharton School.
By contrast, classical liberal arts institutions that reject DEI are seeing enrollment increases and expansions. Campus Reform reported earlier this month that several Christian liberal arts colleges including Hillsdale College, Liberty University, and Grove City College are experiencing double-digit increases in admissions or enrollment.
Higher Education Fellow Nicholas Giordano observes that, across the country, “Enrollment is down, companies are dropping degree requirements, and it’s all through self-inflicted wounds like” an overemphasis on DEISJ issues.
What’s more, DEI-related degrees do not seem to be what students or employers actually want.
In the job market, private sector businesses with reputations for wokeness are experiencing massive layoffs and record financial losses.
Disney announced this month that it will be letting go roughly 3% of its workforce worldwide and cutting $5.5 billion in costs after having lost $123 billion in market value in 2022.
Similarly, Microsoft is eliminating approximately 5% of its employees, and Coca-Cola is shrinking its American workforce by 12%.
Critics of DEI in academia are also more broadly concerned with the philosophical framework of identity politics.
Giordano argues, “DEISJ pushes propaganda and a political agenda that ultimately forces people into groups and pits groups against each other….This is not 1920s America, and no one has a problem with diversity.” Rather, the problem is that DIE examines all issues “through the lens of race, privilege, and oppression.”
Tufts, Texas State, and Michigan Tech have not yet responded to Campus Reform’s request for comment. The Wharton School denied the request for comment.
Stanford University Apologizes to Judge for bad behavior by Students, Faculty.
Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne and law school dean Jenny Martinez apologized to Judge Kyle Duncan after students and faculty accosted him during a Federalist Society event.
In a joint statement to the Fifth Circuit judge, Tessier-Lavigne and Martinez said, “We write to apologize for the disruption of your recent speech at Stanford Law School.”
“As has already been communicated to our community, what happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus,” the continued.
The apology comes after multiple students and the university’s dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, berated Duncan and would not allow him to speak. At least three other members of faculty were present and allowed the judge to be shouted down.
Judge Duncan event at Stanford from Ethics and Public Policy Center on Vimeo.
“Staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech,” the letter says. “We are taking steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again.”
The letter falls short of describing disciplinary action for the students or faculty members, both of which Duncan called for in the aftermath of the incident — including the firing of Steinbach who brought a six-minute prepared monologue.
In response to receipt of the letter, Duncan told National Review, “I particularly appreciate the apology’s important acknowledgment that ‘staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.’”
Stanford President and Law-School Dean Apologize to Judge Duncan. From @EdWhelanEPPC https://t.co/bnlEoM7hA9
— Byron York (@ByronYork) March 12, 2023
“Particularly given the depth of the invective directed towards me by the protestors, the administrators’ behavior was completely at odds with the law school’s mission of training future members of the bench and bar,” Duncan continued before calling on the school to issue a similar apology to the law students who invited him to speak at Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter.
“The apology promises to take steps to make sure this kind of disruption does not occur again,” the judge concluded. “Given the disturbing nature of what happened, clearly concrete and comprehensive steps are necessary. I look forward to learning what measures Stanford plans to take to restore a culture of intellectual freedom.”
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News.
Sign for the California Department of Health Care Services and Public Health Building – Sacramento, California. (Matthew Corley/Dreamstime.com)
Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., is now learning fortunes can change quickly in the Golden State. Less than a year ago, Newsom was celebrating a projected $100 billion budget surplus — a fiscal boon that prompted the governor and legislature to craft a budget exceeding $300 billion.
Now, California faces a $22.5 billion deficit, leaving the governor scrambling for ways to tighten the state’s monetary belt.
He can start by calling off his plan to expand California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, to all undocumented immigrants.
The expansion was a bad idea when the state’s coffers were flush. Now that California is struggling to make ends meet, using taxpayer money to cover non-citizens is simply irresponsible.
Newsom has been working for years to usher more and more undocumented immigrants into Medi-Cal, which already covers roughly one-third of the state’s 39 million residents.
That process began in 2016, when Newsom’s predecessor Gov. Jerry Brown expanded Medi-Cal to cover undocumented children up to age 18.\
In 2020, Newsom went a step further, granting Medi-Cal coverage to undocumented immigrants under the age of 26. More recently, Newsom has allowed illegal immigrants age 50 and older to enroll in Medi-Cal.
The final leg of this expansion — which would offer Medi-Cal to 700,000 illegal immigrants ages 26 to 49 — is supposed to take effect next January. But the state’s current fiscal situation makes this massive taxpayer-funded giveaway impossible to justify.
This latest proposed expansion is projected to cost a whopping $2.6 billion a year. That might have been easier to swallow in the days of a $100 billion budget surplus. But those days are gone.
But there’s no reason to stop there. Rolling back the previous Medi-Cal expansions would bring California that much closer to eliminating the budget deficit. The state currently spends an estimated $1.3 billion a year providing Medi-Cal to unauthorized residents 50 and older — a cost borne entirely by Golden State taxpayers without any federal support.
Even those estimates likely understate the real cost of the expansions by a significant margin. A program that rewards those who come to California illegally by providing them taxpayer-financed health insurance will almost certainly lead to more undocumented immigrants making their way to the Golden State. How could it not? In the long term, Medi-Cal’s rolls will swell — and the cost of the program will exceed today’s projections.
California can ill afford to make open-ended spending commitments, given that the state’s tax take is quite volatile from year to year.
California’s budget is largely financed through income taxes. Tax revenues are highly sensitive to the performance of the stock market and of industries like film and tech that dominate the state economy.
In other words, this current budget crisis won’t be the last one for California.
The argument in favor of expanding Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants gets even weaker after considering the questionable quality of care the program provides.
Consider evidence from Oregon.
A landmark study of the Medicaid program in California’s northern neighbor compared health outcomes between patients who gained access to Medicaid through a random lottery and similar patients who remained uninsured.
According to that analysis, after two years, there were “no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes” for patients covered by Medicaid compared to the uninsured control group.
How can California justify spending billions of scarce taxpayer dollars providing coverage that delivers little benefit to people in the country illegally?
Gov. Newsom has some tough decisions to make to eliminate California’s budget deficit this year. But rolling back Medi-Cal coverage for undocumented workers shouldn’t be one of them.
Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO, and the Thomas W. Smith fellow in healthcare policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is “False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All,”
On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” Columbia University Professor and New York Times newsletter author John McWhorter argued that “equity” is a “sneaky, terrible” “weasel word” for “bringing people into positions that they’re not qualified for yet” and that doing so is “dehumanizing” and “diversity and equity” are just new terms for tokenism.
McWhorter said the difference between equity and equality “is a truly sneaky, terrible thing. Equity is this wormy word, the idea is that you’re going to have equality by forcing the issue, by bringing people into positions that they’re not qualified for yet so that everything looks ‘like America.’ So, it sounds like equality and you say equity and you figure it’s the same thing, but it’s a euphemism. They’re trying to slip in without letting you know that it’s going to be equality accomplished in a way that you probably wouldn’t like. It’s like if you say to somebody, ‘well, before I let you go,’ and you say that to them and they didn’t say that they wanted to be let go, really you just want to get rid of them. Or if you talk about diversity, well, imagine talking to Franklin D. Roosevelt about diversity. When we say diversity, what we mean is changing standards for various reasons for black and Latino and sometimes Native American people. That’s what diversity means. You just don’t want to say it. Equity means that you force equality and you kind of weasel your way through it. And so, it’s like you take the word equality and you kind of knock the ‘al’ out of it.”
He continued, “And the people who do this think that that’s the right thing because they are on the side of the angels and we have to have this fake equality. And what it means is this: This DEI, it’s not an accident that DEI is the first three letters of deity. These people think of themselves as gods. None of this is an accident. So, that’s what equity means…it’s a weasel word.”
McWhorter added that pushing for change is needed, but “if you force it to that extent that you say that next week, everything has to be equal — what it comes down to is this: What that does to, for example, black people, is that you go through an entire life knowing that nothing that you’ve been asked to do, nothing that you’ve been granted can be completely separated from the fact that somebody wasn’t thinking about the fact you were a pretty color and it would make them look good to bring you in. You spend your whole life that way, yes that does include me. That is something that we have to think about with these sorts of policies where you force it really quickly and you drag people in to be what used to be called — what happened to the term ‘token black?’ Remember, we used to say that. Now, it’s called diversity and equity. It won’t do. So, yes, but you can’t do it too much, too fast, or you’re dehumanizing everybody but white people.”
The trial of Dominic Pezzola, one of the defendants of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach, was paused on Thursday due to classified FBI messages revealed in court, which the defense attorneys say show FBI agents discussing the altering of evidence.
Pezzola is one of the Proud Boys members on trial for obstruction and conspiracy charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol breach. He was arrested on Jan. 15, 2021, and indicted the same month. Pezzola’s trial began in January of this year.
“There are a couple of emails between FBI agents casually discussing altering a document and destroying hundreds of pieces of evidence. It’s very disturbing and right now we have more questions than answers,” Roger Roots, an attorney at John Pierce Law, wrote to The Epoch Times. Roots confirmed that Washington District Court Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee, paused the trial on Thursday after the leaked messages were shown in court.
The exchange Roots referred to came into light on Wednesday during the testimony of FBI special agent Nicole Miller, who was involved in the agency’s investigations of the Jan. 6 defendants.
When cross-examining Miller, Nick Smith, an attorney representing Proud Boys member Ethan Nordean (listed as co-defendant on Pezzola’s case), revealed classified FBI emails that were hidden in a tab in an Excel spreadsheet. Roots, in Pezzola’s case, used this evidence to support a motion to dismiss (pdf) the charges against Pezzola, which Roots’s team filed on Wednesday.
In the motion, Pezzola’s team said the emails showed that the FBI monitored communications between Nordean and his lawyer, violating the Sixth Amendment, which prohibits invasions of the right to counsel (Matter of Fusco v. Moses).
“In the Nordean case, confidential attorneys-client trial/defense strategy and position was wrongfully obtained by the government, about which was overheard, shared, utilized, where potentially ‘338 items of evidence’ were ordered to be ‘destroyed,’ said Pezzola’s legal team in the motion to dismiss.
According to a separate filing by Nordean’s lawyers, Miller said in one correspondence that “[her] boss assigned [her] 338 items of evidence [she has] to destroy”; Nordean’s lawyers allege that another email show an agent requesting Miller to “go into [a] CHS [informant] report” that Miller “just put [together] and edit out that [the agent] was present.”
The emails show Miller “admitted fabricating evidence and following orders to destroy hundreds of items of evidence,” Pezzola’s lawyers wrote in its motion to dismiss, and that the government obtained information that benefitted itself in the trial, causing substantial prejudice to each of the defendants, including Pezzola.
“If justice means anything, it requires this case to be dismissed,” Pezzola’s lawyer said.
Roots is representing Pezzola on a pro bono basis. Legal non-profit National Constitutional Law Union (NCLU) is helping cover Roots’s expenses while he is in Washington, according to NCLU Executive Director Natalie Danelishen.
“My thoughts are we need a longer pause to get to the bottom of some of Agent Miller’s emails,” Roots told The Epoch Times.
As of Thursday evening, the court has not issued an order responding to the motion to dismiss.
In addition to their argument about the Sixth Amendment, Pezzola’s lawyers also argued in their motion to dismiss that newly surfaced footage of events of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach constitutes exculpatory evidence. The defendants’ lawyers say the government, by withholding that evidence, violated their client’s constitutional rights as defined in Brady v. Maryland, a 1963 case in which the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must make available exculpatory evidence to defense counsel.
The defendants’ motion comes two days after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) released more than 40,000 hours of Jan. 6 footage to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who then aired some of the footage on his show on Monday and Tuesday.
One tape aired Monday showed Capitol Police officers walking alongside Jacob Chansley, a Jan. 6 defendant serving a 41-month sentence after pleading guilty to an obstruction charge. Chansley was unarmed and walked past several Capitol police officers.
The aired footage “is plainly exculpatory,” Pezzola’s lawyers said in the motion.
Thanks to the folks at American Greatness for this article.
In another example of Washington’s inexorable slide into banana republic territory, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) took to the floor of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday to call for the removal of an American journalist.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an anchor treat the American people, and American democracy, with such disdain,” Schumer said during his seven-minute authoritarian tirade. “And he’s going to come back tonight with another segment. Fox News should tell him not to. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch—tell Mr. Carlson not to run a second segment of lies. You know it’s a lie.”
Schumer later reiterated his demand to a group of journalists who, rather than denounce one of the most powerful government officials in the country attempting to silence an influential member of the media, dutifully reported Schumer’s bleating without question.
Republican senators including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) joined the fray, echoing Schumer’s faux concerns over “national security.”
Clearly, it’s panic time. The White House, Congress, and the Democratic Party propaganda arm that is the corporate media realize their carefully engineered narrative about January 6 is imploding in real time. Which is why they’re accusing Carlson of “whitewashing” and “rewriting” the events of January 6. Anything less than total fealty to regime-approved talking points about what happened before and after that day now is considered a “threat to democracy.”
But facts are facts. And no amount of pearl-clutching by the hags on “The View” or threats made by U.S. senators can alter the reality of January 6. Between video recordings, witness testimony, court filings, and news reporting, the undeniable truth about January 6 cannot be willfully wished away even by the most skilled spinmeisters.
Here’s what we know:
Plenty of other falsehoods and misrepresentations animate the fable of January 6. But for those honestly seeking the truth, consider this a cheat sheet for future use.
Trying something different. Running with headline news from Newsmax, FOX, and Breitbart.
House Democrats attempted to defend social media censorship at a hearing of the new U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Thursday on the Twitter files.
Winning. The Minnesota Wild admitted on Wednesday that it decided as a team not to wear their gay pride jerseys for its warmup period during Tuesday’s gay pride night game.
It also appears that the auction to benefit the LGBTQIA+ community was deleted from the team’s website.
The team has worn pride-themed jerseys in the past. However, the last time was in March of last year, Fox added.
This instance of refusing to wear a gay pride jersey is only the latest in a mounting number of teams worldwide that are turning away from wearing gay pride-themed paraphernalia.
In Jan., Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov skipped warmups because he refused to wear the gay pride jersey the team sponsored for its gay pride night game. Provorov said that bowing to the gay agenda violated his religious freedom and First Amendment rights.
That same month members of the New York Rangers team celebrated Pride Night on Friday but did not wear pride-themed jerseys or use rainbow tape during the event.
In 2022 several members of a rugby team in Sydney, Australia, refused to participate during the team’s gay pride pandering.
About seven members of the Sea Eagles refused to wear the gay pride jersey during the team’s game in July last year. Players added that the team planned its gay pride night without consulting them.