what the Duncan story misses

[freepcrusher]

I am of the view that both sides of the case are wrong in there own way. In isolation, the Duncan story is appalling. But this belies the fact that he is facing another 15-25 years on the bench (or whenever they take senior status) and could very well be elevated to the ussc. He also serves on a circuit where his views are very much in the mainstream. It would be one thing if we had term limits and we could be like "oh well, at least he won't be there forever". But if you're in a position where the other side has to wait for you to die and hope that he doesn't hit the "reset button" (i.e. senior status) before such thing happens - shouldn't you be expecting this kind of stuff at a minimum?

Also, Duncan's remarks afterwards don't exactly make himself seem like a good guy. If he had a more winsome approach and said something like "it's a shame that they don't value free speech anymore and I hope they realize that tolerance should go both ways". He seems just as arrogant (talking about the law descending into barbarism) as the students who were heckling him. Also, when you have that King Jong Un lookalike who's also on the fifth circuit talking about blacklisting clerks from those campuses - I'm sort of in the "boo f---ing hoo" category.

This is the one thing that concern for minority opinions misses. I'm naturally sympathetic to being a democrat in Oklahoma or a republican in Vermont. So if you normally vote republican in Oklahoma, you might be willing to vote dem for governor because there's no worry that they will actually be that much of a threat. In many ways the point of electing an opposite party governor in those states is to protect against the excesses of the majority party. But that's not the case here.

In isolation having someone like Kyle Duncan go into the Bay Area, I would be like "he's clearly in the minority in this part of the country, so let's humor him". But that belies the fact that he is in the majority in the circuit he serves on and while the FedSoc guys at Stanford are deeply outnumbered - they might end up in places where they are the majority (i.e. ending up being in the chambers of such enlightened luminaries as Bill Pryor).

I always have a hard time articulating my views and some here even think I'm mentally ill. But does anyone here kind of see what I'm talking about? I feel like I'm sort of talking about the idea of a fifth column without explicitly saying so. I also think there's a technology angle here where if you're in the minority where you are, but your audience is all elsewhere, you have the same phenomenon. Like Buck Sexton was a lifelong Manhattanite until a few months ago, but he's as rabid a conservative as anyone from Alabama and his audience clearly wasn't in his own community. Here's what I wrote in October on a separate thread:

I feel that my argument is sort of an echo of another argument I've heard from immigration restrictionists. The argument goes like this: if you come to america with no english skills, you're going to have a crash course in learning english by attempting to speak to the locals. But if you just move to a part of America where hardly anyone speaks english (or at the very least can understand your language) - then you can theoretically get by without ever learning english. It's the old assimilation argument.

I feel there's the same argument going the other way. If you're a democrat in rural Nebraska or a republican in Boston - you probably learn to make peace with the fact that you're in the minority and not make too big of a deal about politics. But if the minority is like that in a state - but said minority is also clustered - then you end up with a kind of fifth column scenario. Like the Georgia democratic party is historically moderate and/or culturally conservative. Think Joe Harris, Sam Nunn, Zell Miller etc. That would probably still be the case now - except that the democrats now are all clustered in one mega-metro area. So in said metro area, you can "let your freak flag fly" and not care what anyone else thinks about your views. So it's a less obvious version of the whole rajneeshpuram incident in Oregon in the 80s.