“I’m mad about today. I’m mad that justices can’t do the bare minimum to uphold the Constitution. I’m mad that the law and our history, which I have dedicated so much of my life to, is an inconvenience than an inheritance to many. I’m mad that the academy, which I love, rewards and enables it.”

Pfaff went on the condemn conservative legal scholar Ilan Wurman, whose analysis was cited by Justice Thomas in his dissent:

“If there are no costs to that — and only the upside to fancy dinners funded by antidemocratic oligarchs and the ‘nonpartisan institutions’ they have endowed — then we can only reward this behavior. Everyone involved in this canard should be frozen out of academic life until they recant. Academics cannot simultaneously complain about the inability for facts and reality to drive policy while simultaneously refusing to confront the fabulists in our midst. Wurman et al do not just demean originalism or history. They demean ALL of us, by making ALL of us less credible.”

This is pretty funny when you think about it, because it is Pfaff’s arrogant certitude and unwillingness to be open to opposing views that makes him less credible, indeed not credible at all. I was reminded of the late actress Lauren Bacall’s statement to Larry King in a 2005 interview. She said that “being a liberal is the best thing on Earth you can be. You are welcoming to everyone when you’re a liberal. You do not have a small mind.”

Ah, those were the days!

Wurman responded to Pfaff with appropriate mockery, “Ah yes, time to push for that traditional tool of academic thought and freedom—the recantation!”

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, disgusted at the illiberal trend in his profession (and, I will add, scholarship and education generally, the law, entertainment, and journalism as well), writes, “These exchanges give outsiders a chilling insight into the rationalization of many in higher education to maintain orthodoxy. Many others would not voice such views openly, but their hiring records demonstrate a similar intolerance of opposing views.”