David French for president

I stand with David French.

I don’t stand with him on social issues, at least not most of the time. I don’t stand with him on many geopolitical issues — though I note that he’s willing to back up his views by volunteering for military service rather than merely sending other people to risk their lives to advance them.

I stand with him as someone I respect, admire, and trust.

I met David in 1991 at Harvard Law School. He stood out. In a class awash in people from Princeton and Stanford and Yale, he came from a small private college in Nashville, but was manifestly intellectually qualified to be there. He was open about his faith in a positive and friendly way. He was unapologetic, firm, but polite about his political views, which were very substantially to the right of Harvard’s rather unreflectively lefty ethos. These were the days of the Clarence Thomas hearings and the run-up to the 1992 elections, and political discourse mostly consisted of expressing disdain and disbelief at the existence of different viewpoints. David got hissed in class — that’s what people did before there was Twitter — by the usual suspects.