Of course they do!

This reminds me that one of the epiphanal moments in my philosophical development was when the fellow students at my college who took over a building, rifled though records, precipitated a riot and the shutting down of classes that I had every right to attend, included among their demands to allow the school to re-open their immunity from any discipline or adverse consequences whatsoever. At that moment I learned what kind of ethical principles revolutionaries respected: none. I never forgot that lesson, and nothing has occurred in the intervening years to alter my assessment.

Hilariously, the same students who posted the names and faces of the Stanford Federalist Society all over the school prior to disrupting its program featuring a conservative Federal judge’s remarks are now demanding anonymity from the Washington Free Beacon, the conservative news source that has thoroughly covered the law school’s disgrace. “They say we’ve violated their right to privacy by identifying them. You can’t make it up,” tweeted Aaron Sibarium, a Free Beacon reporter.

Well, you don’t have to make it up; the demand was completely predictable and in character with today’s mutant breed of progressive totalitarians.

The school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, the far-left force behind the exercise in the Heckler’s Veto handled so atrociously by the Stanford staff papered the school’s hallways prior to U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan’s scheduled speech with the names and photographs of the Federalist Society’s board members. Nevertheless, when Sibarium quoted the group’s board members describing the censorship exercise as “Stanford Law School at its best” and named those board members, the board’s demanded that that the Beacon redact her name and those of her classmates. “You do not have our permission to reference or quote any portion of this email in a future piece,” she wrote.

Translation: “You do not have our permission to reveal that we behaved like bullies and assholes even though we have said that we are proud of behaving like bullies and assholes.”

Among similar demands was that of Mary Cate Hickman, a second-year Stanford law student who insisted that the Free Beacon “anonymize the face of the student in the red hoodie” because “California is a two-party consent state, and you have no right to publish this student’s identity/likeness/face without consent.”

Hey, you’ve got one hell of a law school there, Stanford! That is absolute legal nonsense. The two-party consent refers to the electronic recordings of oral conversations, not public events or videos posted on social media of newsworthy controversies. There is no presumption of privacy in such situations, and there was no such presumption when Judge Duncan was silenced and Stanford’s diversity officer supported the student censors as cell phone cameras took it all in.

Legal Insurrection ends its report on this further embarrassment for Stanford by saying, “The names and photos of these students should be made available to the public for future reference. You know, if one of them decides to run for office or gets nominated to sit on a bench someday.”

Or applies to a respectable law firm for a job. Or ProEthics.

I concur completely.