(5/28, 4 p.m. update) At 2:30 p.m., law professor Glenn Reynolds plugged this post on his “Instapundit” blog with a title, as usual, more clever than we are able to come up with: “LARRY TRIBE AND Harvard Law’s Useful Idiots.” We now know what an “Instalaunch” looks like — Glenn’s plug generated 1,500 visits to our blog in just an hour and a half (according to the WordPress stats). Thank you!
If you like this post, please RT this tweet, which uses Glenn’s attention-getting title.
Also, to encourage people to view the short (less than 2 minutes) video of the Royall Asses disrespecting Dean Minow at an event in which she was being honored, please RT this.
(4 p.m. further update): Additional visits to our blog via Glenn’s plug of just two hours ago now exceed 2,000!
(6:30 p.m. further update): A total of 3,289 readers have now visited this blog based on Glenn’s post just four hours ago. If you like the video, please RT this tweet: “Watch what students at Harvard Law School did after Laurence Tribe urged them not to do it.”
(5/29, 4:30 p.m. update) Our 2-minute video of the Royall Asses heckling Dean Minow (excerpted from the 10-minute original they posted on April 17; details here) has now gone viral, thanks largely to last night’s tweet by Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers who, ironically, earned her Ph.D (in philosophy) from the institution to which the Asses traveled to heckle Dean Minow, Brandeis University (Minow was there to receive the university’s Gittler Prize).
Sommers certainly wrote an attention-getting tweet: “Chilling tape of fanatical students heckling Harvard Law Dean. Academic Left has created a monster it can’t control.”
So far it has generated 505 retweets (including by heavyhitters such as Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos), 708 “likes,” and many interesting comments — both under Sommers’ tweet and under the YouTube video — addressing the weird, cult-like behavior reflected on the video. A total of 3,292 people have now viewed the video. The best tweets responding to Sommers’ tweet are retweeted on our Twitter account.
Also, Dave Huber of College Fix has done this excellent piece: “Leaked email: Harvard race protesters ignored liberal icon’s advice to tone down rhetoric, tactics.” If you like it, please retweet this.
(5/30, 4:30 p.m. update) The video now has 7,171 views, and many more interesting comments. Thanks to the folks at Maggie’s Farm for their plug this morning. Total views of our blog have zoomed past 90,000, from around 77,000 only a week ago. We have updated our Twitter account by retweeting the best additional tweets, commenting on Sommers’ tweet, made in the past day. Two tweets stand out:
1. By Professor Nicholas A. Christakis, who linked to our video with this note: “Harvard Law students heckling Dean Martha Minnow are engaged more in weak sloganeering than in persuasive arguments.”
2. By Professor Donald Douglas, who tweeted this interesting question asked by Glenn Reynolds in reflecting on the Daily Caller piece on Harvard professor Ken Mack: “How far left do you have to be, to have to lie about how left you are at Harvard Law?” The comments to Glenn’s post contain some interesting suggested answers. E.g.: “Far enough left that the cumulative result will be indistinguishable from a right-wing plot to destroy Harvard Law’s influence — that is, having law professors do to legal education what journalists have been doing to newspapers.” And: “Far enough out in left field, far enough out where the buses do not run, to believe that stuff Sharpton was spouting about pharaonic Egypt being a Black super-civilization?”
(6/1, 6 p.m. update) The video how has 9,172 views, thanks in large part to yesterday’s retweet by @HughHewitt (105K followers) of this @CHSommers (106K followers) tweet, as well as this tweet by David Burge (127K followers). Sommers responded that she had to agree with Burge’s observation.
Meanwhile, law professor Brian Leiter has linked to the video in a short post, and law professor John O. McGinnis has linked to this blog in an essay noting parallels between the current unrest at Harvard Law School and his time at the school as a student during the 1980s. George E. Clark has documented (with a photo) that “Belinda Hall” is history. Finally, in a year-end retrospective on protest activity at the Law School, the Harvard Crimson has, for the first time, finally informed its readers of the existence of this blog (in an article linked here), although it still has not linked to the blog, nor has it addressed any of the facts set forth on the blog — in particular, the overwhelming evidence that the black-tape incident was a hoax; the leaked e-mails regarding the Royall Asses’ efforts to have us investigated by the FBI; and the leaked notes showing that these student protesters radicalized their movement at the behest of ultra-left-wing professors, and in so doing rejected the advice of Laurence Tribe urging them not to take that course.
[end updates]
Was it inevitable that the Royall Asses would fall into the clutches of the left-wing professors with whom they met on December 5 and 14 (see earlier posts here and here), who convinced them to intensify their radical protest tactics and plunge Harvard Law School into months of bitter acrimony, in an effort to fulfill the professors’ long-held objective to transform our already incredibly liberal school into a far-far-far-left institution?
Were these students fated to serve as useful idiots, so that their movement would end up devolving into little more than a front group for leftist professor-puppeteers such as critical race theorist Kenneth W. Mack, racialist-flame-stoking Stephanie Robinson, and CLS-founder Duncan Kennedy?
With a little adult supervision — with some sound advice by a level-headed, more mainstream liberal, countering the input the student agitators were receiving from the leftist fringe — might have things turned out differently?
Continue reading Laurence Tribe on the Royall Asses’ misguided radicalism →