Free Republic

I didn’t think it was possible for Stanford University to sink any lower into the woke abyss, but they have found a way. This week the Stanford Law Federalist Society invited Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan to speak. A mob of students decided to heckle him such that he could not speak.Judge Duncan requested that an administrator come and address the situation, and hence arrived Tirien Steinbach, Stanford’s Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Who then took the side of the heckling students, lecturing Judge Duncan about how his rulings and views inflicted “harm” on Stanford’s students.Here is the...

Ben Savage, who starred in the 1990s sitcom "Boy Meets World," is running for U.S. Congress in a Los Angeles-area district, aiming at a seat being vacated by Representative Adam Schiff, who is now running for Senate. "I'm running for Congress because it's time to restore faith in government by offering reasonable, innovative and compassionate solutions to our country's most pressing issues," Savage, 42, said in an Instagram post announcing his campaign. Savage graduated from Stanford University with a degree in political science.

The founder of FTX used executives as cut-outs for donations, prosecutors allege... That Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former chief executive of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX that recently filed for bankruptcy, was aggressively using campaign donations as part of a campaign to woo Washington toward his vision of cryptocurrency regulation was no secret — nor was it a secret that other FTX executives quickly became some of the country’s biggest political donors to both Republicans and Democrats, especially those who work on financial regulation. But a new federal criminal indictment alleges that things may have been even simpler than they...

The Twitter Files show how the FBI deputized Twitter to conduct illegal censorship of American citizens and undermine the First Amendment. ... Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the “Twitter Files” by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most important news stories of our time. The “Twitter Files” story encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the “Twitter Files” reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to...

Two academics at Stanford University secured the $250 million bond on behalf of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried ahead of his trial, court documents revealed on Wednesday. Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty last month to eight charges, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and conspiracy to defraud the Federal Election Commission through campaign finance violations. His cryptocurrency empire collapsed at the end of last year after users and investors learned that FTX had improperly commingled funds with sister trading company Alameda Research. Mark Cohen, a lawyer for Bankman-Fried who previously defended Jeffrey Epstein confidant Ghislaine Maxwell,...

A former dean of Stanford's law school and a computer science researcher at the university co-signed indicted FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried's bond, according to court records made public on Wednesday. Bankman-Fried, 30, has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges over the collapse of the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange. He has been out on $250 million bond co-signed by his parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, who pledged their Palo Alto, California, home as collateral for his return to court. His parents are both professors at Stanford Law School. The names of two other sureties had been redacted until Wednesday,...

Excellent interview (youtube video) with Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia, who grew up in New Jersey and he doesn't even have a Jersey accent. :-) Do yourself a favor and watch it.

Shortly before Christmas, FTX founder Samuel Bankman-Fried, indicted on federal charges of fraud and money laundering, was released on a $250 million bail bond that was secured by his parents’ Palo Alto-area home. The size of the bail bond — 25 times bigger than Bernie Madoff’s — garnered considerable attention. The prosecution termed it “the largest ever pretrial bond.” What hasn’t drawn notice is the fact that Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, who are professors at Stanford Law School, are not typical homeowners. Their property is a faculty home on the Stanford campus itself. Stanford owns the land, and Bankman...

Researchers at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Medicine have developed a Theranos-like test that screens for health measures using a single drop of blood. The approach, relayed in a Jan. 19 study in Nature Biomedical Engineering, combines a finger-prick device with multiomics technologies that assess a variety of proteins, fats, metabolism byproducts, and inflammatory markers. "Even more importantly, we've shown you can collect the blood drop at home and mail it into the lab," said Michael Snyder, PhD, director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine and senior author of the study, in a Jan. 19 university news release....

(The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.)Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration and self-described COVID lockdown skeptic, blasts the university in a powerful piece in Tablet that describes the administration’s attempts to censor and intimidate him for scientifically (and correctly) pointing out that mandatory lockdowns didn’t work. He was an early and influential voice in objecting to the harmful, draconian policies enforced on populations here and abroad, and he’s paid a heavy price for it.In his piece, titled “How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test,”...

One of the nation’s most prestigious academic institutions is urging its students to avoid using the term “American.” Yet it’s not the first time Stanford or other institutions have altered language policies to reflect the political or cultural climate. Here's a list of seven other times political, religious, educational and government entities have tried to strip certain words or gendered language from our lexicon. 1. Stanford University bans the word AmericanAfter launching its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) in May, Stanford University published a list of “harmful language” that it plans to remove from all Stanford websites and other...

Stanford University published an index of "harmful language" it plans to eliminate from the school’s websites and computer code, offering terms to be used as replacements. The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, which was revealed in May, is a "multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford," according to the guide. Many of the terms in the index offered longer alternatives for terms that described a person by one characteristic. These terms include replacing "immigrant" with "a person who has immigrated," "prisoner" with "a person who is/was incarcerated" and "homeless person" with "a person without housing." Other...

Stanford University released a guide this week on “harmful” language that it wants to remove from its online properties — noting that the term “American” is a no-go. The language guide, which was published Monday, aims to “eliminate many forms of harmful language, including racist, violent, and biased … language in Stanford websites and code.”

Sam Bankman-Fried appeared Tuesday at a hearing in the Bahamas with his parents in attendance, according to multiple reports, including from The New York Times and the cryptocurrency site CoinDesk. At the hearing, which largely focused on whether Bankman-Fried would be released on bail, the former FTX CEO indicated that he was not waiving his right to challenge his extradition to the US, the CoinDesk report said. The site, which was reporting live from Nassau in the Bahamas, broke the news in November of the financial links between FTX and Bankman-Fried's trading firm, Alameda Research. During the proceedings, Bankman-Fried's mother,...

As Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried sat in a Bahamian courtroom Tuesday, the popular Stanford law professors had to be worried about more than whether their FTX founder son, Sam Bankman-Fried, will go to prison for orchestrating what a federal prosecutor described as “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.” The couple also have to be concerned about their own legal jeopardy, a criminal law expert said, given reports that they were involved, at some level, in their son’s efforts to build his allegedly fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange into a $32 billion business. They face scrutiny on multiple fronts...

Almost a full two weeks after first filing for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, the insolvent cryptocurrency exchange FTX finally held its first-day motion requests on Tuesday (Nov. 22). The hearing took place in Wilmington, Delaware, the traditional city where corporate bankruptcy cases are heard.Presided over by Judge John T. Dorsey of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, the Tuesday session focused on what assets FTX has, to whom they are owed, and where the overall bankruptcy case for FTX and its affiliates should be held.The remaining “how” of the once-popular crypto exchange’s implosion has been widely covered;...

Jumping to conclusions is sometimes a big mistake. I recently became puzzled and mildly infuriated when I read that Stanford University was going to have a conference on freedom of expression and academic freedom—but was admitting only invitees, allowing no press or other interested persons to attend. That sounded like limiting expression and dissent to me. Then I read the news accounts further and realized that Stanford’s graduate business school was making a prudent decision. More specifically, the school’s Classical Liberal Initiative was inviting a blue-chip group of serious scholars, entrepreneurs, and free-speech activists for what looked like a stellar...

Kevin Moen has four grandchildren. That provides a passage-of-time perspective on The Play, the amazing, five-lateral Big Game kickoff return in 1982 that will mark its 40th anniversary on Sunday, one day after this year’s Cal-Stanford game. Moen was the Cal player who scored the touchdown on The Play, then slammed the ball into Stanford trombonist Gary Tyrrell, putting them both into Big Game history forever and beginning a life-long relationship between the two. “He was one of the guys at Stanford that kept a good perspective with what The Play was,” said Moen. “It wasn’t life or death. It...

Why? Because that's what the policy is! Nobody is allowed to ask why, not even Stanford faculty. The policy is: "Just shut up, do what you are told, and don't ask questions." That's how science works. ... My previous article on Stanford’s vaccination policy was incorrect. I was fooled because they issued very unclear guidance on Oct 17, 2022 which basically said they encourage people to take the shots. I clarified this with Lucia Sinatra of NoCollegeMandates: the primary series and a booster is required for Stanford students. Why? This makes no sense. Well, it’s the policy. And even Stanford...

Stanford administrators and the public safety department have been aware since at least December 2021 that William Curry, the Alabama local who was removed from campus Thursday, had pretended to be a Stanford student and lived in multiple University dorms, according to communications obtained by The Daily. The University kept silent about the security threat posed by Curry despite his removal multiple times from campus and a student’s police report of harassment. He continued to return, interacting again and again with residential staff who had not been made aware of the man posing as a student and living in dorms....