We spend so much time worrying about the discrimination faced by women who are sexually harassed or minorities routinely treated to humiliating slights if not blatant acts of bias. But have we really taken enough time to consider the horrific conditions that face America’s #MAGA law students and professors every day? All too often, these brave souls dot America’s lecture halls, forced to do the unthinkable, like “respect criminal procedure” or “believe in the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Won’t someone please think of the children!

Finally, conservative law professors are standing up and demanding to be heard over their place in academia. They’ve started pining for something called “intellectual diversity” or “viewpoint diversity” to cajole law schools into, basically, hiring more Alito clerks. Over the weekend, they even held a panel at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting to #telltheirstories about how rough it is when law schools don’t see any value in your scholarship.

That’s when NYU Law professor Christopher Sprigman revealed just one of the many horrors he unleashes on his conservative colleagues:

Yes. I just want to let you know that you all are persecuted. When I run across a conservative colleague in the faculty lounge, I pants him. I can't resist. — Christopher Sprigman (@CJSprigman) January 9, 2018

Ha.

This would be the point where a rational person would step back from the “intellectual diversity” language and realize how silly it sounds, but don’t worry, that’s not at all what happened:

It’s not just the astonishing lack of self awareness. It’s his obvious not caring whether discrimination actually occurs. — kurt lash (@kurtlash1) January 9, 2018

Holy hell. Doubling down on the rhetoric of discrimination. Get a f**king grip, people.

Why is it when leftists see complaints from marginalized communities their first question is always "what did we do to make them feel this way?" UNLESS the marginalized community is conservative lawyers, in which case the marginalization is deemed non-existent or self-inflicted? — Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) January 9, 2018

Because those communities have fixed and immutable characteristics that subject them to discrimination, and being conservative is literally a choice? The last time we went through this, I coined the Martin Luther King test: if you’re being judged on your content and not the color of your skin, or your sex, or gender identification, or religion, or national origin, that’s why nobody cares.

Some folks are facing discrimination over their very personhood. These people are just spouting a philosophy that most in the field find bereft of scholarly value and then complaining that the free market doesn’t appreciate it. And, yes, ironically the bogeyman for these conservative professors is the free market. There are multiple employers and multiple candidates, schools are under no obligation to hire any specific professor, and professors are under no obligation to join any particular faculty. It is the very definition of a free market. Oh, “the people making hiring decisions have views on what constitutes quality work that don’t mesh with mine”? Too f**king bad. That’s how every market works once you step out of Micro 101.

Obviously intellectual diversity is valuable in the abstract. That said, “scholarship would be enhanced by more conservative law professors” isn’t exactly what I thought when I read Wax and Alexander’s bursting hemorrhoid of psuedo-science and blatant falsehoods about how upper-class white people are superior to other cultures. There’s intellectual diversity and there’s crowbarring open an artificial Overton Window to let in shoddy, retrograde worldviews to cater to students incapable of appreciating that the law requires deeper thought than reading the back of a Cracker Jack box. Schools should never shy away from challenging viewpoints, but there’s a difference between fostering different perspectives and squandering resources on easily debunked mind nuggets from Wax and Alexander.

Yet this is probably the most damning insight from this panel.

Interestingly, @RandyEBarnett noted at our panel that he didn't know of any conservative who was denied tenure for political views, but he did know of far-left law profs to whom it had happened. — Carissa Byrne Hessick (@CBHessick) January 8, 2018

Oh my God. Really? Not even one unrepresentative, possibly fictitious anecdote? That’s just lazy preparation.

It’s easy to laugh off all this stuff as rank hypocrisy. Modern conservatism is seemingly riddled with it. They like the word “snowflakes” because they’re snowflakes. They complain about “trigger warnings” because they’re so easily triggered. But it’s not really about hypocrisy — it’s about hacking. Tired of all those protesting students with their “free speech”? Redefine free speech as sitting quietly while the Nazis are at the podium. Tired of freedom of religion allowing all those people to be gay without punishment? Redefine freedom of religion as taking away their wedding cakes. The hope is that they can hoist the “libs” by their own petards, and if in the process they stretch and pervert these values until they lose all meaning, so much the better.

So conservatives losing in the academic marketplace is suddenly a “discrimination” issue about promoting “diversity.”

Sure it is.

Earlier: Conservative Law Profs Want ‘Viewpoint Diversity,’ Which Is Kinda Racist

Conservative Law Profs: Just Say You Need ‘Affirmative Action’ for Intellectual Diversity and We’ll End Hiring Discrimination Against You

Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.