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Not only is DEI hiring creating bureaucracy bloat in higher education country-wide, it is beginning to fundamentally alter our institutions. One place where the erosion of excellence is already apparent? Our legal institutions – just last year, 12 Federal Judges boycotted hiring clerks from Yale Law School (some of the crème de la crème of legal education) due to the aspiring lawyers’ inability to practice good faith, unbiased law. And no wonder: The Federalist Society at Stanford Law School hosted Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals – he was shouted down by a group of students. Our guest Ilya Shapiro was nearly fired for tweeting about Biden’s Supreme Court nominations. We are, as a nation, beginning to forget… this is a representative democracy. We are not governed by a mob. Free speech is a foundational tenet of the Constitution that defines this country and its institutions. College sophomoric groupthink on social issues is one thing; but the next generation of Supreme Court prosecutors already radicalized enough that they are being barred by current sitting judges? That’s quite another problem.

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute, director of Cato’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, and publisher of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Shapiro is the author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court.

Download the transcript here.