SCOTT ATLAS, NIALL FERGUSON, AND VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: On Free Speech at Stanford.
The accusations against us three last week were as various as they were untrue. And all were presented regardless of clear and published evidence to the contrary.
Professors Landy, Monismith, Palumbo-Liu and Spiegel alleged that one of us, Atlas, “violated the American Medical Association’s standards for ethical medical conduct” while serving in government as a presidential adviser, and was indirectly responsible for the deaths of “tens of thousands of Americans.” Those serious charges were based on straw-man arguments and gross distortions of Atlas’s words, as pointed out by others. In misrepresenting Atlas’s statements, Stanford faculty members intended to delegitimize him and his analysis.
Landy et al. accused Hanson of having written articles that “formed the backdrop to an insurrection that cost 5 lives and threatened the lives of Representatives, Congressional staff, and the Vice President, as well as our constitutional democracy.” In reality, the articles in question discussed real problems with mail-in and early balloting, often requiring progressive efforts to change state voting laws—all problematic voting changes acknowledged by scholars at Stanford University Law School itself. Hanson has never questioned the legitimate inauguration of President Biden. The alleged connection between his written work and the events of January 6 in Washington is entirely spurious. In unequivocal terms, Hanson criticized the January 6 riot at the Capitol and called for punishment of any and all street violence during the entire 2020 election year and its aftermath.
A third, Ferguson, was alleged to have “conspired with College Republicans to conduct ‘opposition research’ on a Stanford undergraduate.” But no such “conspiracy” occurred and no such research was ever done, as was made perfectly clear at the time.
The purpose of this article is not to rebut these false and derogatory claims, however. We and others have each done this elsewhere or shall shortly do so. Our aim instead is to object to a group of professors’ deliberate misuse of the Faculty Senate and the student newspaper to act as purveyors of their defamation.
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