OPINION / COMMENTARY
ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
There are certain places in America that are “presumptively off limits” to conservatives — and one of the most powerful jurists in the country just said it out loud.
Justice Clarence Thomas, an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, sat down with Peter Robinson on the Hoover Institution’s “Uncommon Knowledge” and delivered a line that ought to embarrass every dean, provost, and diversity commissar in American higher education. “You know, I have never been to Stanford Law School,” Thomas said. Then he told us why.
“That’s the reality,” he said. “That’s the world we’re in, because there’s certain places that are just presumptively off limits. This is the way it works. And that’s true. I mean, I’ve been to Yale Law School, but that’s the way it works. And to say it isn’t, is to lie.”
Read that last part again — to say it isn’t, is to lie. A sitting Supreme Court justice, a man who has read more briefs and heard more arguments than any faculty lounge full of tenured activists will manage in three lifetimes, is telling you flatly that some of the “best” law schools in the country have quietly hung an invisible sign on the door: Conservatives Need Not Apply. He has been to Yale, his own alma mater. He has not been to Stanford Law. And he isn’t guessing about the reason.
This is the rot at the heart of the modern American university, stated by a man who lived through the real thing and refuses to pretend otherwise. Thomas warned that the ideas of economist Thomas Sowell — the thinker who helped shape his own worldview — would be lost to an entire generation of students if not for YouTube, precisely because such views are “unpalatable” to the campus. “And so what these kids are getting is all that stuff [that] is not there,” Thomas said. “It’s just on YouTube. It’s available to everybody, and they get to make up their own mind.”
Sit with that. The most consequential black intellectual of the last half-century has been all but scrubbed from the reading lists of the schools that lecture the rest of us about “diversity.” The only reason a curious eighteen-year-old can find Sowell at all is a video platform, the digital samizdat of our age. The gatekeepers couldn’t keep him out, so students route around them. That is not a healthy academy. That is a closed one.
Naturally, Stanford rushed to deny the charge. A spokesperson insisted the school “would be honored to host Justice Thomas at Stanford Law School,” pointing to its Constitutional Law Center — run by Professor Michael McConnell, himself a former federal appeals judge on the Tenth Circuit — which “regularly hosts members of the judiciary.” Fine words. But Stanford’s problem was never its press office. Its problem is what happens when the invitation is actually accepted and a conservative walks through the door.
We don’t have to speculate, because Stanford Law wrote the indictment itself. On March 9, 2023, Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan accepted a Federalist Society invitation to campus. He was shouted down by student protesters. And when he asked the administration for help restoring order, the school’s own Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, walked to the podium — not to defend the invited guest, but to scold him. “For many people here, your work has caused harm,” she told a federal judge, before asking whether the “juice” was “worth the squeeze.”
The spectacle was so humiliating that Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Law Dean Jenny Martinez apologized to Duncan in writing, the school ordered mandatory free-speech training for its law students, and Steinbach eventually left the university. That is the reality behind the “we’d be honored” press release. Thomas didn’t name Duncan, and he didn’t have to. Stanford’s own recent history says everything he declined to spell out.
And Duncan wasn’t a fluke. Around 2020, when then-Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins came to speak at the same law school, twelve student organizations staged a walkout over his role in litigation to end DACA. Roughly three-quarters of the audience stood up and left about five minutes into his remarks. Two speakers, two mobs, one message: dissent from the campus orthodoxy and you will be treated as a hostile intruder, not a guest.
This is what the “presumptively off limits” world looks like from the inside. The elite academy no longer argues with conservatives; it quarantines them. It has decided that certain arguments are so dangerous they cannot be heard, only shouted down — and then it acts wounded when a Supreme Court justice describes the room exactly as it is.
Clarence Thomas has spent his entire career being told which doors are closed to men like him. He knows a locked one when he sees it. When he says these places are off limits, believe him — and remember that the people calling him a liar are the same ones who needed a dean with a bullhorn to survive a single afternoon of disagreement.
Sources: