Federal Judge Kyle Duncan Says His Piece

 - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics 

Let’s say the quiet part out loud: The mob came to target me because they hate my work and my ideas …. None of this spectacle, this obviously staged public shaming, had the slightest thing to do with free speech. It had everything to do with intimidation. And, to be clear, not intimidation of me …. The targets of the intimidation were the protesters’ fellow students.  

"The culture war is usually a cold one. Conservatives and liberals have been facing off on social issues for generations, fighting proxy wars in the courts or newspapers. And as secular progressivism becomes increasingly dogmatic — you’re a bigot, a racist, and a threat to democracy if you so much as question the premises of their ideology — it seems that our culture war is careening toward a mutually assured destruction, sans the atomic bomb. 

"But the Left has found a weapon that the Right fears to wield: the suppression of speech. It might not be a nuclear warhead, but whether used by the Global Disinformation Index or local troublemakers wearing black masks, suppression of speech helps the Left and hurts the Right. 

"This suppression is especially dangerous in the age of the internet, when everything can be controlled by a search algorithm or blacklisted behind the scenes. But, luckily for us, neophyte progressives can be clumsy in their fledgling attempts to prove themselves to be true believers. 

" 'Take, for example, the recent events at Stanford Law School. Student protesters and a DEI dean prevented Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals from delivering his invited lecture for the law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society. The events at Stanford Law School sparked a national conversation on free speech, stirring up commentary and launching op-eds — including one by the judge himself.

"This intimidation is a rather classic tactic for campus culture wars. By isolating an ideological opponent, the Stanford protestors sought to humiliate Duncan for “refus[ing] to enlist the federal judiciary in the project of controlling what pronouns people use.” But they moreover wanted to show their fellow classmates just how unwelcome their conservative beliefs are. If your fellow classmates are willing to shout down a federal judge, just imagine what they’ll do to you.

"But, as Duncan discussed in his lecture, such behavior is unbefitting of a lawyer or a lawyer-to-be. Our legal system operates almost entirely on the basis of sustained, reasoned argument, and, as Duncan said, “To be a lawyer, by definition, means that you have to occupy the same room with people that you seriously disagree with.” America might be a litigious society, but we seem to have forgotten that key element of the legal system.". . .