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Friday, June 4, 2021

Right-wing cancel culture & FAIR

As anybody who isn't brain-dead was already aware, the Right is incredibly hypocritical when it comes to "cancel culture" but their hypocrisy doesn't matter because they are also shameless. 

So no surprise to see a branch of the Federalist Society stomping on the First Amendment by retaliating against a law student for mocking the Federalist Society.

It was the final day of classes at Stanford Law School, May 27, when Nicholas Wallace said he was blindsided by a message from one of the deans informing him that his graduation was in jeopardy for potential misconduct.

His offense: sending an email flier to fellow law students in January that he pretended was from the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative and libertarian group with a chapter at the law school.

The satirical flier promoted a discussion about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, featuring Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. The title of the mock event: “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.”

The chapter’s leaders were not amused. They filed a complaint on March 27 with the university, which said in a message to Mr. Wallace that it wasn’t until May 22 that the complainants had asked the administration to pursue the matter. 

Speaking of the Federalist Society, one of the members of the FAIR Board of Advisors, Samantha Harris, is a contributor of the Federalist Society

And the Board has a new member who pushes the Board even further right: Hoover Institute employee  Niall Ferguson, husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and all around creep, who was involved in another controversy in which a liberal student was targeted, as discussed by Krugman in 2018:

Ferguson is, as it happens, one of those conservative intellectuals who hyperventilate about the supposed threat campus activists pose to free speech — indeed, calling the campus left the “biggest threat” to free speech in Trump’s America. At Stanford, he was one of the faculty leaders of a program called Cardinal Conversations, which was supposed to invite speakers who would “air contested issues.” 
Among the invited speakers was Charles Murray, famous for a much-debunked book claiming that black-white differences in I.Q. are genetic in nature. Not surprisingly, the invitation provoked student protests. This was the context in which Ferguson engaged in a series of email communications with right-wing student activists in which he urged them to “unite against the S.J.W.s” (social justice warriors), “grinding them down.” And he suggested “opposition research” against one left-wing student. A student!

To date FAIR has not expressed any thoughts about the Federalist Society's targeting of a student, but certainly having a history of targeting a student is no bar to joining the Board of Advisors of FAIR.

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