When Ilya Shapiro attempted to discuss “all or nothing battles” for Supreme Court nominations 11 months ago at the invitation of a Federalist Society chapter, it wasn’t just a university-mandated mask inhibiting the libertarian legal scholar’s speech.

Student activists at the University of California College of Law, then known as UC Hastings, repeatedly shouted down Shapiro for his quickly removed “lesser black woman” tweet criticizing President Biden’s black women-only SCOTUS nomination promise.

The tweet had already gotten him suspended by Georgetown’s law school near Capitol Hill in D.C. Shapiro would resign shortly after a four-month investigation cleared him on the narrow grounds that he hadn’t started at Georgetown Law’s Center for the Constitution when he tweeted — and implied that he’d be fired next time he offended a student.

Nearly a year later, now leading a comparable research center at the Manhattan Institute, a maskless Shapiro faced a relatively sedate Federalist Society crowd of prelaw students at Georgetown’s main campus across town, ranked the fourth-worst university for “speech climate” last fall.

“We need security for some reason,” he said at the Monday night event on campus free speech, motioning toward a guard near the door as evidence of the censorious campus climate.