Reporter Aaron Sibarium rips Stanford law students for demanding anonymity after protest: 'Double standard'
Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium joins 'Fox & Friends Weekend' to weigh in on Stanford Law students' demands to keep their identities anonymous after they heckled a conservative judge.
Stanford Law School protesters faced criticism after heckling Trump-appointed U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan during an event on campus and for plastering the names and faces of campus Federalist Society members all over the school last week.
Now they are demanding their names be redacted from a Washington Free Beacon report covering the incident, arguing that keeping their names public could invite "abuse and harassment."
Aaron Sibarium, a reporter for the Free Beacon, said not so fast.
Tirien Steinbach, the Stanford University Law School associate dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, slams U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan during his presentation at the school as an invited guest on March 9, 2023. (Screenshot/ Vimeo - Ethics and Public Policy Center)
"[Our] reaction was ‘no way. We're not going to do that,'" he told Fox News' Will Cain on Sunday. "For one reason, they just have no reasonable right or expectation of anonymity given that they were caught on tape and protesting in a highly public forum…
"The other thing too is that they didn't just shout down a sitting federal judge, they also posted the names and faces of every member of the Stanford Federalist Society, every board member who helped invite him," he said. "They posted those names and faces around the school in a concerted effort to shame their peers and pressure them out of hosting the event."
A general view of the buildings of the Main Quadrangle and Hoover Tower on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. (David Madison/Getty Images)
Sibarium said Stanford National Lawyers Guild board member Lily Bou's request to remove her name and the names of others came shortly after the Free Beacon published a report publicizing them.
"Those exact students [who plastered conservative students' names on campus] emailed me to say, ‘Oh, by naming us in the story, you’re ginning up harassment, so it's really quite hypocritical," Sibarium told Cain.
He also tweeted last Thursday that a request from a Mary Cate Hickman demanded the face of a student in a red hoodie be "anonymize[d]" because "California is a two-party consent state."
NEW VIDEO SHOWS STANFORD PROTESTERS HECKLING FEDERAL JUDGE AS DEI DEAN APPEARS TO SMIRK
Hickman alleged the Free Beacon had no right to publish the student's identity without consent.
"It's quite concerning. A key precondition of the rule of law is that the law applies equally to everyone… and yet, these students seem to think that the rules don't apply to them."
He blasted the "double standard" of protesters demanding their names being revoked from reports while they sought to publicly shame their conservative counterparts for engaging in free expression by hosting Duncan at the on-campus event.
"It's antithetical to the rule of law. Pretty soon, I think that double standard is going to be more mainstream among lawyers and judges," he said.
