Ilya Shapiro
speaker
143 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 30 Jun
Ilya Shapiro’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yep.
Six years from now, President AOC may really hate this opinion, but we'll all be the better for it.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I felt sick to my stomach and especially come around noontime when the dean issued his statement. I thought, OK, I'm going to get fired. I was transitioning jobs from from Cato to Georgetown. How can I provide for my family? I have two little boys who are four and six. This is horrific. I've blowed up my life. I've you know, it was honestly, Megan, the probably the second worst day of my life.
The worst being when my mom passed when I was in college.
Great to be back, Megan. And of course, you played that clip. You were a central part of the denouement of that whole saga. And I'm glad to be back stronger. As you said, they tried to cancel me. They tried to ruin my career. And I turned it around on them. And, you know, I thought I knew what I was getting into, and I thought I knew about the problems in higher ed and law school specifically.
But looking at this stuff, using my so-called lived experience as a jumping off point, you can see the failures in ideology, bureaucracy, and leadership. We're not in a good state.
And you saw the masks, by the way. This is 2022. This whole investigation, so-called, was conducted via Zoom because if we had if I'd I never even had talked to the dean since in person, because if we had gotten together, we would have had to all been masked. given the COVID hysteria, which I talk a little bit about in the book as a symptom of the failed leadership.
And Megan, look, these deans, you saw two of them there in those clips. They're generally not woke radicals. They're generally not social justice warriors. They're spineless cowards. They're bureaucrats who try to climb the greasy pole. And that means placating this illiberal mob. It's a kind of cascade of failures in higher education.
or Yale or a couple of other. I mean, it's a particularly dangerous thing at the so-called elite schools who turn out the next generation leaders and who give each other prizes for these sorts of things. But universally, it's a lot of things going on that don't necessarily make the national news. It's not just shout downs of a federal judge or me.
This happened to me at a different school, also in the Bay Area, what used to be called UC Hastings until they renamed it because it turns out Mr. Hastings did some politically incorrect things. the culture of silence and of self-censorship and of teaching that avoids taking serious legal theories seriously.
Originalism, say, the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted based on the original public meaning of its words, which a majority of the Supreme Court, about half the federal judiciary uses. Just to do their basic jobs, they don't have to agree with it. They should teach it. And at best, you have kind of snide remarks about how it's inappropriate and why would anyone think this way.
We have broken systems of education that's really more activism on the teaching and the faculty front. but also on the bureaucratic front. So we have now in most places, including law schools, more non-teaching staff than faculty. I don't know what all of these bureaucrats are doing. Well, actually, I do.
They're orientating and training and imbuing a culture where, well, there's no such thing as objective truth and one's rights and freedoms depend on where you are in some sort of privilege hierarchy or intersectional matrix, all this mumbo jumbo that is directly contrary to the structure of the law.
They're basically saying, you students in law school, what you're learning, all of these systems and structures and institutions are illegitimate. You need to question them and turn them down. I mean, this is a huge disservice to our nation.
Right. I'm optimistic, cautiously optimistic in society writ large. Like Brett Kavanaugh, I live on the sunrise side of the mountain as kind of normal people realize these excesses and what's going on. And there are market forces, after all, in the corporate world. But in academia, it's different. And the left hand doesn't know what the far left hand is doing.
There are 0.05% non-progressive professors. That's why I was so threatening that I was going to be joining the Georgetown faculty. I would have increased the number of non-progressives from two to three out of 150. And that's why we need external forces, exogenous shocks.
employers, state legislatures abolishing these bureaucracies in state schools, trustees and donors, as we've seen since October 7th in the disastrous testimony of the university presidents, putting pressure on these schools saying, look, you're going to get you are getting big black eyes for your handling of these things, for not enforcing your own rules.
Because I tell you what, Megan, this is not rocket science. we don't need higher education institutions don't need to go out and theorize a whole new way of how to deal with disruption or what is the meaning of free speech or how to promote open inquiry civil discourse that you know this is all established It's a failure of will. It's a failure of not enforcing your own policies.
Showing 101–120 of 143 · page 6 of 8
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