Ilya Shapiro
Appearances
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Yeah.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
I felt sick to my stomach and especially come around noontime when the dean issued his statement. I thought, OK, I'm going to get fired. I was transitioning jobs from from Cato to Georgetown. How can I provide for my family? I have two little boys who are four and six. This is horrific. I've blowed up my life. I've you know, it was honestly, Megan, the probably the second worst day of my life.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
The worst being when my mom passed when I was in college.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Great to be back, Megan. And of course, you played that clip. You were a central part of the denouement of that whole saga. And I'm glad to be back stronger. As you said, they tried to cancel me. They tried to ruin my career. And I turned it around on them. And, you know, I thought I knew what I was getting into, and I thought I knew about the problems in higher ed and law school specifically.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
But looking at this stuff, using my so-called lived experience as a jumping off point, you can see the failures in ideology, bureaucracy, and leadership. We're not in a good state.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
And you saw the masks, by the way. This is 2022. This whole investigation, so-called, was conducted via Zoom because if we had if I'd I never even had talked to the dean since in person, because if we had gotten together, we would have had to all been masked. given the COVID hysteria, which I talk a little bit about in the book as a symptom of the failed leadership.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
And Megan, look, these deans, you saw two of them there in those clips. They're generally not woke radicals. They're generally not social justice warriors. They're spineless cowards. They're bureaucrats who try to climb the greasy pole. And that means placating this illiberal mob. It's a kind of cascade of failures in higher education.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
or Yale or a couple of other. I mean, it's a particularly dangerous thing at the so-called elite schools who turn out the next generation leaders and who give each other prizes for these sorts of things. But universally, it's a lot of things going on that don't necessarily make the national news. It's not just shout downs of a federal judge or me.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
This happened to me at a different school, also in the Bay Area, what used to be called UC Hastings until they renamed it because it turns out Mr. Hastings did some politically incorrect things. the culture of silence and of self-censorship and of teaching that avoids taking serious legal theories seriously.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Originalism, say, the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted based on the original public meaning of its words, which a majority of the Supreme Court, about half the federal judiciary uses. Just to do their basic jobs, they don't have to agree with it. They should teach it. And at best, you have kind of snide remarks about how it's inappropriate and why would anyone think this way.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
We have broken systems of education that's really more activism on the teaching and the faculty front. but also on the bureaucratic front. So we have now in most places, including law schools, more non-teaching staff than faculty. I don't know what all of these bureaucrats are doing. Well, actually, I do.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
They're orientating and training and imbuing a culture where, well, there's no such thing as objective truth and one's rights and freedoms depend on where you are in some sort of privilege hierarchy or intersectional matrix, all this mumbo jumbo that is directly contrary to the structure of the law.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
They're basically saying, you students in law school, what you're learning, all of these systems and structures and institutions are illegitimate. You need to question them and turn them down. I mean, this is a huge disservice to our nation.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Right. I'm optimistic, cautiously optimistic in society writ large. Like Brett Kavanaugh, I live on the sunrise side of the mountain as kind of normal people realize these excesses and what's going on. And there are market forces, after all, in the corporate world. But in academia, it's different. And the left hand doesn't know what the far left hand is doing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
There are 0.05% non-progressive professors. That's why I was so threatening that I was going to be joining the Georgetown faculty. I would have increased the number of non-progressives from two to three out of 150. And that's why we need external forces, exogenous shocks.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
employers, state legislatures abolishing these bureaucracies in state schools, trustees and donors, as we've seen since October 7th in the disastrous testimony of the university presidents, putting pressure on these schools saying, look, you're going to get you are getting big black eyes for your handling of these things, for not enforcing your own rules.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Because I tell you what, Megan, this is not rocket science. we don't need higher education institutions don't need to go out and theorize a whole new way of how to deal with disruption or what is the meaning of free speech or how to promote open inquiry civil discourse that you know this is all established It's a failure of will. It's a failure of not enforcing your own policies.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
So we're very much in the eye of the storm with respect to higher ed generally and law schools specifically. And it goes even to the accreditor. There's a monopoly on law school accreditation by the American Bar Association, which I hope is something that the Trump Department of Education changes. But the ABA puts in all sorts of nefarious rules that even
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Those deans that want to reform find it hard to do so sometimes. So a lot of challenges there. And regardless of the green shoots and the pushback that we're seeing in society writ large, which we have to keep going, even if we've passed peak woke, we can't keep our foot, take our foot off the gas.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
But in educational institutions and especially in law schools or medical schools where these things are a life and literally a life and death situation, we need to pursue all of the above kind of strategies.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Well, that's seemingly what happened in the presidential election. Americans across the board of every demographic woke up, if you will, from the woke and said, this is just too much. It doesn't make sense. And so there is some hope, and there's certainly hope that the students coming in – reject some of the mumbo-jumbo that they're being taught.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
But again, part of the problem is admissions officers. It's not just DEI officials or the head dean. If you write in your application that you want to change the world and revolutionize structures and change injustice and what have you, there's going to be a thumb on the scale for you rather than if you say,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Well, I want to go into corporate antitrust to make things better for the American consumer, have our markets run more efficiently, or I want to be a prosecutor to go after child molesters or something like this. So there is a lot of there are a lot of pathologies in higher ed, in law schools.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
And as Bill Ackman wrote recently, the same day this essay came out that Claudine Gay resigned the presidency of Harvard. Anti-Semitism, that spur of anti-Semitism that we've seen is based in our most progressive, educated places. That is the canary in the coal mine, the tip of the iceberg that reveals so many pathologies underneath.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
The academic corruption, the moral relativism, the failures of leadership. This is a... I wrote my book to show that it's not just about me, the thriller part of my story, which by the way, I also published for the first time ever anywhere, the actual full report of the DEI office that investigated me. It is just amazing. That's one of the appendix of the book.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
But the moral rot in general, I've been using this opportunity starting with when I went on your show in June of 2022 to expose all of this stuff.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
and make people aware and so i don't know where this ends uh we have the university of austin for example as an alternative institution just born their first cohort i'll be speaking there later this month they don't have a law school uh but there's centers and institutes starting up in various institutions across the country to teach excellence and rigor and civics all of these things that dei trainers consider to be white supremacist tropes and uh and even deans at yale for example i i uh
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
tally a lot of Yale's missteps, Yale Law's missteps. Heather Gerken, the dean there, wants to be president of one of the Ivy League institutions. And she recognizes that what's gone on is not good. And so she went out and hired scholars, including a former Alito clerk, to kind of right the ship a little bit.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
So we are seeing some progress, but we need to keep pushing and not accepting this rot, this degradation, this illiberalism in law schools and beyond.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
I'm hiring. Absolutely. Young lawyers want to come work for the Manhattan Institute. Send your resume.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Conservatives and libertarians get great training. They are exposed to lots of ideas. They know how to see every different argument. And... You know, this is the this is one of the ironies. These law schools are doing a disservice to their progressive students by not teaching them what the argument is from the other side. And then they go into federal court and they don't know what to do.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
They don't know how to argue.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Sidebar, Your Honor, I need to cry for a moment.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
They're graduating students who aren't qualified to do much of anything other than to be HR officials or DEI deans or what have you. I hope that some institutions seize on the market opportunity that's created, and I think some are. For example, University of Chicago, University of Virginia are generally better their law schools on these metrics than than Yale and Stanford, for example.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Or, you know, Georgetown is particularly bad. Harvard. Well, Harvard is an institution writ large. Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, recently gave them a zero for the second consecutive year for their education. But anyway, there are gradations.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
And so a talented entrepreneurial dean or other educational leader who doesn't have to be conservative or mega or anything else, but just doing their job, trying to attract higher quality faculty and students and donors just by not being crazy can capitalize in this moment. And we see bits of that here and there.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
Judge Cannon generally has been – had a thoughtful approach to the litigation. So if she sees that it's justified to release parts of it – I haven't started to study the legal issues as closely as she has. I'm sure she has some reason to do so.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
But more broadly, I do hope that the incoming administration, the Justice Department, looks at all the lawfare that has been thrown at President Trump and anyone who supported him and investigates the causes of that.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
That doesn't mean doing exactly the same thing at the other side, but it does mean looking at whether members of the deep state have violated their oaths of office in leaking things or working counterproductively to orders that they've received, things like that, because we have a clear breakdown
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
An institutional breakdown that has led to the public eventually not trusting any institutions writ large, which is not good for the country. So whether it's with the Jack Smith investigation or anything else, I hope there is a dedicated office in the Justice Department that looks at this use of lawfare.