Meet Nick Wallace

Will the candidates from the School of Law please stand if you are able?

Welcome to a special episode of 5-4.

Michael and I will be talking to Nick Wallace.

He just graduated from Stanford Law, but you may know him as the guy who nearly had his diploma withheld because of a satirical email that he sent to a law school listserv.

That email lampooned the Federalist Society's connections to the January 6th insurrection attempt,

which are more than just ideological.

John Eastman, the chair of the Federalist Society's Federalism and Separation of Powers practice group, was a hugely vocal proponent of overturning the election, and in fact, spoke at the rally right before the attack on the Capitol.

Yet the Federalist Society refused to condemn him.

So our buddy Nick sent around an email making fun of them a bit, and the Federalist Society kids at Stanford Law did not handle it well.

We talked to Nick the day after he graduated from Stanford Law.

Congrats, Nick.

We asked about why he did it, what exactly happened, and what's next.

I've got to take the bar this summer, and then I'm going to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Very cool.

All right.

You just graduated from Stanford Law.

Roll it back a few months.

It's, I think, late January.

You're a third-year law student.

You create a satirical flyer for a fake event titled, The Stanford Federalist Society Presents the Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.

The date is set as January 6th.

The bottom of the flyer says riot information will be emailed the morning of the event.

Senator Josh Hawley and Texas AG Ken Paxton are named as guests.

And you sent this out on what I believe is some sort of listserv.

Is that right?

Yeah, I sent it out to a student, a law student listserv called Law Talk, which is kind of the listserv for political commentary and that kind of thing.

How many people on that listserv?

You know, I don't know.

I think it's most of the student body, and then I believe some alumni are still on it.

So it's at least a few hundred.

So, can you walk us through what, through your eyes, happens from there?

Yeah, so I send out the email, I think it's a Monday morning, and right away start getting a lot of responses, get some just personal responses where people are saying, hey, that's pretty funny.

And then there's kind of a long conversation in the reply all email thread with some people are chiming in saying, hey, this is in poor taste.

Like the insurrection isn't funny.

Don't make a joke out of it.

Other people chime in to say,

you've missed the point of the satire here.

It's actually not making light of the insurrection.

So that was kind of the day I sent the email.

There's a lot of back and forth.

About a month later, I organized an event, an actual event, not a satirical event, on campus with Slate journalist Mark Joseph Stern to talk about the insurrection and the Federalist Society's connections to the insurrection.

And that was, as far as I knew, that was the end of my Federalist Society story until about three weeks ago, the end of May, my last day of classes, I received a notice from the university telling me that I was under investigation for violating something called the fundamental standard, which I had never heard of before.

I thought they were just saying the honor code.

Well, it's self-explanatory.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I thought they were accusing me of violating the honor code.

And I'm thinking, did I accidentally cheat on a test without realizing it?

What happened here?

Yeah.

So as it turns out, some members of the Federalist Society, the president and a few other high-ranking officers, filed a complaint against me.

And it started actually back in March, a few weeks after that Mark Joseph Stern event.

They approached this office that handles honor code violations and that kind of thing.

And there's some kind of back and forth.

They approached this office.

They said, if we file a complaint against this guy, what happens?

So that was in late March.

They sat on it for two months, the Federalist Society guys did.

And

then on May 22nd, which was right at the start of our last week of classes, they reached out to the office again and said, We want to move forward with this complaint.

We want you to investigate this guy for sending this email.

They didn't tell them that it was a satirical email.

What they said in their letter was, this guy was impersonating the Federalist Society, and he

defamed Josh Hawley and Ken Paxton and the Federalist Society, and he harmed all of our reputations.

So they kind of dropped that in my way.

Then I filled my diaper.

Yeah.

I love that they're bringing in the defamation of public figures into this.

Yeah.

I feel like they should know that the standard's a little bit higher.

You're going to require some actual malice in that case.

You would think that, but federal society, you know, they're not their bright.

I feel like they know a lot about defamation these days.

I feel like most of conservatism these days is just claiming defamation when someone when someone talks shit.

Which maybe shows that they don't know a lot about a deaf man.

Fair enough.

So this office, this is, from what I could gather from your public comments on this, the office that they're dealing with is like not Stanford law itself.

It's Stanford more broadly.

Is that right?

Yeah, it's a university-wide office.

Stanford law like doesn't do their own investigations.

They just, the university takes control of all of it.

So it's a university-wide office.

The vast majority of what they do is plagiarism plagiarism and cheating on tests and that kind of thing.

And then they do a few of these fundamental standard violations, which is like, it's Stanford's like, be good people, do good things, don't be mean to each other, that kind of thing.

Right.

The way you told the story, I'm wondering, is your sense that they purposefully sat on this until like the last week, maybe to, you know, extract maximum stress from you, right?

Like at a very high stress time?

Or,

or do you think that's just like a happenstance?

Yeah, that's definitely how it feels.

That's definitely how it looks, especially just the fact that they first reached out in March and then they sat on it for two months.

It's hard to think of another explanation.

The only other thing I might think that they were doing is they just didn't want to have to actually participate in an investigation themselves.

Usually the investigations take a few months and they didn't want to have to, you know, like sit through a hearing or whatever.

So they thought if they dropped it on me on the last day they could, then they could graduate and get out of there and I'd be stuck dealing with it.

So eventually the investigation was dropped and your diploma was released so you were able to graduate on time.

But what are you hearing from Stanford now?

What are they communicating to you?

So I actually had a long call with Dean Martinez, the dean of the law school, a few days ago.

And the law school was super upset about this.

They know it's not a good look for like clear First Amendment protected speech to lead to this kind of investigation.

The faculty was furious about it.

They put out a statement saying that they needed to see some changes.

So there's a lot of action at the law school, and a few different faculty and the dean are working on fixing some things with the university.

The university itself has been a little bit more quiet.

Actually, they haven't said anything to me directly.

But the president of the university a few days ago in an address to the faculty senate kind of half apologized and said they mishandled it and and said they're gonna they're gonna fix some things and then the office itself that investigated me and acted the whole time like it was a perfectly normal investigation and there was nothing weird about it they haven't said anything they put out a public statement when they ended the investigation that they said we just handled our normal process here and everything went according to plan and then we figured out that this was satire so we withdrew the investigation so i haven't heard anything from them uh-huh and who who runs that office is that run by stanford faculty or is it just like staffers that they hire?

Yeah, it's just staffers.

A lot of them are actually attorneys.

So the people who originally looked at this complaint and decided they should start an investigation and put a hold on my degree, they were actually attorneys.

That's a sick job.

That's a job I didn't know I wanted until right now.

Just some whiny student is like, I'm mad at this guy.

And you're like, I'll handle it.

You know, it'll just give us a few weeks to process.

Yeah.

So, like, how common are these types of shenanigans on the listserv?

Is this a place where this sort of, you know,

there's a lot of jokes flying around?

Yeah, I mean, usually there's a lot of like kind of political back and forth, and

usually it's not like the jokey kind of back and forth.

It's more like, hey, you suck or hey, your idea sucks.

It's a little bit more straightforward.

There is some.

I think I've seen some kind of more comedic stuff on there before, but definitely this kind of just like flat-out satire.

This might have been a first.

I do want to ask, like, what was your experience with these particular students who reported to you prior to all of this?

Did you know them at all?

Did you know them well?

This is one of the really interesting things because, you know, the Federalist Society is all about debate and conversation and, you know, dialogue and difficult ideas.

They love that.

Sure.

I have never in my life had a conversation with any of these three.

By these three, you mean the president president of the Federal Society and like two senior officers, is that right?

Yeah, and it's the board from last year, so there's some new people in there now, but yeah.

Got it.

And you know, Stanford Law School is a pretty small place.

You know, I've met most of the people in my class, but these three, I've never had a conversation with them.

They never, after I sent the email, none of them reached out to say, hey, you hurt my feelings with this.

This was a defamatory whatever.

Right.

So none of them has ever talked to me about it.

Well, you know, they probably, they weren't at all the cool cool parties, you know.

Is this the first time that you like had any sort of run-in with the Federalist Society generally?

Yeah, I think so.

I went to some of their events during 1L year back when events were in person.

And, you know, I might have raised my hand and asked a tough question or something at some point, but I never really had any kind of confrontation with them before this.

Right.

And what's their presence like on campus?

I mean, you've, you've said that these guys have like pretty prestigious appellate clerkships lined up.

And obviously, to some extent, the Federalist Society is like less of a student org and more of a pipeline that moves conservatives from campus into positions of power.

And so I'm curious what it looks like from the campus level.

I'm curious how visible that pipeline is at a school like Stanford.

Is it something you can clearly see or does it just look like a run-of-the-mill sort of active student org from the outside?

I mean, it's kind of an open secret.

The pipeline is something everyone's aware of.

And I think for a lot of students who are kind of like moderate, you know, centrist, they think about whether they want to jump into FedSOC, even if they don't agree with it, just for the clerkships.

And there are a lot of kind of conversations about whether people should do that.

And then like on campus, they, I mean, part of what led to my email is they hold more events than basically any other student group.

And they also have the best food because they're getting money from their national organization.

So they're really visible on campus because they hold all these events.

Oh, they also get the most like prestigious speakers.

They get the most judges and that kind of thing.

So you got the food, you got the interesting speakers, and it's every week.

Well, yeah, they got Josh Hawley.

That's impressive, you know?

Yeah.

Sitting U.S.

Senator and an attorney general can't beat that.

So is there like, I'm wondering, it's been a bit since we've been in law school.

I'm wondering, obviously there's nothing on the left that sort of matches their influence, but do you see any counterweights to the Federalist Society emerging at all?

Not really.

You know, there's the American Constitution Society, which is

supposed to be kind of the counterweight, but even people in ACS

don't think that they're a counterweight.

And they also, they hold a lot of events together, which is a little strange.

But yeah, I don't really see any equivalent kind of, especially especially with the judicial pipeline thing.

I just, I don't see anything like that happening on the left.

So, you know, I do want to give you a moment.

I know it was satire and maybe satire is usually best left unexplained, but since it's visual satire, if there was a serious point you were trying to make, I think it might be worth telling our listeners what you wanted to say.

Yeah, I think there are a few things that I had in mind.

We'd had all of these conversations in the weeks between the insurrection and when I sent the email about the Federalist Society and what they were doing on our campus.

I think a lot of folks were upset by the fact that they had all these connections to the insurrection and then they didn't disavow it or say anything about it afterwards.

So a lot of folks are thinking like, if an organization that clearly, at least its officers, supported violent insurrection, can remain on our campus and keep having events, like what, where do we draw the line?

And there were calls for the Federalist Society to actually be removed from our campus, to be deplatformed.

And then our dean came out with a pretty strong email saying, we don't de-platform people on this campus.

That's censorship.

We support free speech.

We're not going to do something like that.

So

I felt like I wanted to make the point that

an organization that has at least tacitly supported insurrection, that's a whole different thing than your kind of run-of-the-mill free speech where you're you're just debating interesting ideas or complicated ideas.

You know, it's insurrection is kind of the most direct threat to the rule of law that there is.

And that's kind of what the law school is all about and what they have had been preaching to us for two years.

So I think that's kind of where I was coming from.

And then also just the Federalist Society, like their whole strategy is they use law schools kind of for the branding and for the networking.

And the debates are kind of beside the point for them.

Like they hold these debates just to have an excuse to be on campus.

And I wanted to kind of draw attention to how ridiculous that strategy really is

when you get right down to it and when they are out there supporting insurrection.

Yeah.

The sort of irony, I guess, is that as, you know, even though it wasn't your intent, nothing could have done a better job than this flyer and their reaction to it to sort of expose that their commitment to free speech is aesthetic.

Right.

That there's a deep irony to the law school coming out in defense of their free speech, and then they immediately file a complaint

about this fucking flyer, which obviously they are not completely stupid.

They realize is just a joke, but they don't give a shit, right?

I mean, the whole point is just to lash out at their enemies and to make it painful to make fun of them, right?

Right.

Hopefully, the next time someone has this idea, they think twice or whatever.

Right.

I I think unfortunately this is backfired and if anything it feel it feels to me like if Stanford is a normal place the listserv will now involve a lot more satirical flyers.

Yeah.

It's already started actually.

One of the guys who is behind the one of the FedSat guys sent an email out to a different listserv actually, but to another campus listserv saying he had some furniture for sale.

And someone responded like within two minutes with a all the email was is the originalist case for selling my furniture

what I really appreciated about your flyer that I want to add is that I think there's a tendency in some circles to sort of

view the insurrection as a bunch of, you know, for lack of a better word, like hicks, right?

Like either like, you know,

dumb QAnon types or like militias or whatever.

But it really was like a full cross-section of the Republican Party, including religious conservatives, including the business side.

And I think it's important.

And the names you mention, you know, like the image of Josh Hawley with his fist up, like, I think it's good to really draw that out and highlight it whenever we can.

Yeah.

And to draw the connection between the Federalist Society and those more like violent fringe.

We can actually call them fringe elements of the conservative movement when the Federalist Society's primary purpose in national politics, if you put aside the pipeline for conservatives, is to just kind of provide academic gloss for a lot of fringe conservatism.

Yeah.

Totally.

I mean, when I sent the email, I was already kind of infuriated that there wasn't going to be, it looked like there wasn't going to be accountability for the like really powerful people and organizations who had pushed the insurrection.

It was just going to be the dolts who had walked onto the Capitol and filmed themselves, you know, pushing over statues and that kind of thing.

And now we're six months on, and it's pretty obvious that none of the people who are really behind it are going to face any accountability.

Right.

Yeah.

It is, it's infuriating.

Another unfortunate part of this is: if you were on the right, this would have gotten you a great job, this whole ordeal.

If you just flipped all of the actors here,

they tried to cancel you,

and you fought back and rallied public support and defeated them.

And if you were on the right, this would make you, you would have been on Fox News.

Right, a cause celeb.

And instead, you're on the sixth most popular legal podcast

in America.

Maybe fifth.

I don't know where we are.

But

it's the sad state of the left, man.

We need these pipelines between anyone who gets canceled and national media spotlight.

This interview needs to be run by Chris Hayes, I think, like primetime TV.

That's right.

Yeah, MSNBC, if you're listening.

They are.

They are.

Begrudgingly.

So it sounds like you take these issues pretty seriously and you're pretty thoughtful about it.

But I think it would be easy for someone to say, yeah, but what's the point of a flyer on a little student listserv, right?

Like that's not praxis.

That's not like.

advancing your ideological goals.

And so, so I'm wondering, was it just for laughs or was there something behind it?

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I've kind of picked up during the course of three years in law school is just how kind of fragile our entire rule of law system really is.

Like, it's all just words and people, and people believing in the words that they're saying.

And when you start messing with the foundation of that, when you start messing with our democratic processes and our institutions, I think it's a really, really quick decline to that system falling apart because that trust goes away.

So, I mean, obviously it was terrifying for everyone and it was especially terrifying for the people in D.C.

But just the way that that kind of threatens the trust in our system and threatens the rule of law, I just felt really frustrated and kind of helpless watching that and then seeing, like we talked about, kind of the lack of accountability.

And, you know, a satirical poster isn't necessarily the most powerful way to counteract that, but it was kind of what I had available to me.

And it seemed to me, you know, we had right here on campus an organization that was directly connected to the insurrection.

So I felt like in some way countering their power and limiting their power was

something I should try to do.

I think that's right.

I think a lot of the federal society's power and prestige comes from the refusal of like the academic left to say things like that, to call them out, to say they're bad faith actors.

And they still haven't put out a statement, right?

Yeah, nothing.

Yeah.

Like their official position is like, go fuck yourselves.

Don't give a shit.

Don't give a shit.

Yeah.

All right.

I do have one last question.

Have you ever listened to Five to Four?

I have this week.

Michael, are you on another podcast?

I am.

I am.

I'm on A-Lab.

I listen listen to A-Lab.

I don't listen to a lot of podcasts, but I listen to A-Lab the Neil Cottiol episode.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was a good one.

All this says to me is that we are not penetrating our market as effectively as we should be.

If there are people publicly making fun of the Federalist Society who aren't listening to us consistently,

that's a huge missed opportunity for us.

Yeah.

Can I say one more thing about the Federalist Society?

Absolutely.

I think, like you were saying about them kind of trading on the reputations of law professors, I think really the most important thing for them is that they have the respect of the legal community and they have kind of this veneer of respectability.

So just the ability to laugh at them and the fact that, you know, when my flyer kind of started getting a lot more attention, there were thousands of people laughing at them.

I actually think that's really powerful if we can just kind of make them look silly.

Yeah, no, I agree.

It should be a joke.

Yeah.

and I think especially when they are so reliant on recruitment within law schools and are drawing from a relatively small pool of conservatives, right?

Yeah.

The more you can make organizations at each law school look like a bunch of dumb assholes, the better, right?

And since we don't have like the money to create structural opposition to the Federalist Society, it does feel like that's the best route, at least in the short term, to create the general sense that they are

assholes, that they're stupid, and that they're not like to be taken seriously in any intellectual discourse.

I do want to commend you on goading them into creating what turned out to be a, you know, semi-national story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I hope that they see a lot more satirical flyers on email listservs in the years to come.

Yeah.

Well, you know, they are like trolls themselves, right?

Right.

But I don't think they can take it.

No.

Yeah.

They're intellectual trolls.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There was like the Chicago, whatever.

I don't want to get into it, but like they had like their federalist pride shit.

They were like making fun of Pride Month a few years back.

And

they just, they like poking liberals.

So apparently at Stanford a few years ago, they tried to get kind of registered as an affinity group, as you know, one of the student organizations that represents minorities and disadvantaged groups on campus.

They tried to register themselves as one of those.

Yeah, perfect.

All right.

nick thanks for coming on man we appreciate your time it's a lot of fun and congratulations on making your way through this what a what a hellish last couple weeks uh at law school but now you're you're sitting on one of the fancy degrees dude and you can do whatever you want you could probably leverage this into a clerkship with tavanaugh if you really want to that's been my dream for a long time so i'm excited about that yeah

good luck on the bar dude yeah good luck.

Thanks, guys.

5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects.

This episode was produced by Rachel Ward with editorial support from Leon Napok and Andrew Parsons.

Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at ChipsNY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations.