What did he expect? Erwin Chemerinsky helped radicalize three generations of law school students. Now, he’s shocked! Shocked! They’re holding far-left, antisemitic protests around the country.
He’s now the dean of the University of California–Berkeley School of Law and one of the most influential legal theorists in the country. He’s a friend and fellow Harvard Law alumnus of Attorney General Merrick Garland; both are proteges of famed Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe. Previously, Mr. Chemerinsky was a founder and dean of the University of California—Irvine (UCI) School of Law and a law professor at the University of Southern California, where he became one of my contacts regarding free speech law, on which he has long been a good source. He always returned my calls and is a charming fellow.
“Nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now,” he wrote.
Mr. Chemerinsky is right to be outraged.
“I am a 70-year-old Jewish man, but never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks,” he wrote.
He cited several antisemitic incidents that he has suffered through or witnessed over the years.
“But none of this prepared me for the last few weeks,“ Mr. Chemerinsky wrote. ”On Friday, someone in my school posted on Instagram a picture of me with the caption, ‘Erwin Chemerinsky has taken an indefinite sabbatical from Berkeley Law to join the I.D.F.’ Two weeks ago, at a town hall, a student told me that what would make her feel safe in the law school would be ‘to get rid of the Zionists.’ ...
I now live in Irvine, whose UCI Law grads he influenced for a decade. On Oct. 29, as I was coming home from church, at 3:30 p.m., I witnessed a large group of demonstrators on Jamboree Road west of Barranca Parkway waving Palestinian flags.
Mr. Chemerinsky, like his two fellow Harvardians, is a liberal professor who has undermined, in my belief, the rule of law in America, despite his correct beliefs on free speech. He has pushed radicalism at almost every turn.
Mr. Chemerinsky instructs: “What I mean by unstated affirmative action is, what if the college or university doesn’t tell anybody, doesn’t make any public statements, about doing so? I’ll give you an example from our law school, but if ever I’m deposed, I’m going to deny I said this to you. When we do faculty hiring, we’re quite conscious that diversity is important to us, and we say diversity is important, it’s fine to say that.
“But I’m very careful when we have a faculty appointments committee meeting. Any time somebody says, we should prefer this candidate, or this candidate, because this person would add diversity—don’t say that. You can think it. You can vote it. But our discussions are not privileged. So don’t ever articulate that that’s what you are doing. Well, that works more easily with regard to faculty hiring. With regard to student admissions, it becomes more difficult because there’s a statistical measure.”
The comments below the post are interesting.
Mr. Rufo wrote: “This man must be sued, deposed, fired, and sent into retirement. He’s a virulent, proud racist—and an enemy of equality. If you’ve recently applied to Berkeley Law as faculty and received a rejection, which you suspect might have involved discrimination, send me an email at [email protected]. I will connect you with public interest lawyers who might want to sue.”
Scott Adams wrote, “He wouldn’t be qualified for his own job under his plan.”
Mr. Rufo responded, “And, as such, his employment should be terminated immediately.”
Hiring Radical Chesa Boudin
Chesa Boudin was the district attorney in San Francisco, where he often refused to prosecute criminals, plunging that once charming city into a morass of crime. He was so bad that even America’s most liberal city recalled him on June 7, 2022.He said in an interview: “My earliest memory is visiting them in prison, but I didn’t see the trial or anything like that. My mother negotiated a plea deal, and my father went to trial. I think one thing we notice in their case that kind of stands out is how, in some ways, arbitrary the outcomes in the criminal justice system can be. And they did basically the same thing, identical thing.”
Settler Colonialist States
Mr. Chemerinsky wrote in his recent op-ed: “An oft-repeated mantra among some is that Israel is a settler colonialist country and should be forced to give the land back to the Palestinians. I have no idea how it would be determined who is rightly entitled to what land, but I do know that calling for the total elimination of Israel is antisemitic.”“We can begin by defining settler-colonialism as it relates specifically to Indigenous peoples of North America. The goal of settler-colonization is the removal and erasure of Indigenous peoples in order to take the land for use by settlers in perpetuity.
So does that mean everybody in America who isn’t a Native American will have to leave?
Dean Chemerinsky and Guns
I recently wrote in The Epoch Times about how Israel’s strict gun control left its people unarmed before the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7 in the article “Are California Leaders Willfully Blind on the Need for Guns Against Terrorists?” And I wrote about how they abandoned that policy on Oct. 8 and armed their people.He wrote of the decision involving a New York law: “California has a similar law that requires a permit for possessing a concealed weapon. Getting such a license requires, among other things, showing that having a concealed weapon is necessary because the person or a family member is in danger. These laws recognize that concealed weapons in public pose a grave danger, including to law enforcement officers.”
You know what’s also a grave danger? Hamas terrorists gunning for your family. They aren’t following any gun-control laws.
On antisemitic attacks here, he said, “I will say that this is a threat that is reaching in some way sort of historic levels.”
“‘Individuals inspired by, or reacting to, the current Israel–Hamas conflict may attempt travel to or from the area of hostilities in the Middle East via circuitous transit across the Southwest border,’ reads the notice, sent Friday, in part,” the report reads.
Change of Heart?
Mr. Chemerinsky promotes lawlessness in U.S. cities, then complains about antisemitic lawlessness? Doesn’t he see the connection? Perhaps he will.“Why do Jews vote Democratic?“ Mr. Mamet wrote. ”Partly from tradition—conservatives have heard a Liberal Jew, when asked to defend or explain various absurd or inconsistent Democratic positions, shrug and joke: ‘I’m a Congenital Democrat.’ I understand, for I was one, too.”
“A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed? ...
“Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.
“The reaction to the attacks—from outwardly pro-Hamas protests to the mealy-mouthed statements of college presidents, celebrities, and CEOs—has exploded the comforting stories many on the center-left have told themselves about progressive identity politics. For many years, they opted for the coping mechanism of pretending that the institutional capture of universities, corporations, and media organizations by the woke mind virus was no big deal. ‘Sure, students shutting down events they disagree with is annoying,’ they would say, ‘but it’s just students doing what students do.’
“October 8 was a wake-up call for those who didn’t appreciate that the ideology of the campus has spread to our cities, supercharged by social media.
Some of us, such as yours truly, have been warning about such dangers for not years, but decades. Perhaps, it’s Mr. Chemerinsky’s time to wake up to the damage of his own radicalization of three generations of students.
