Mike Pence's appearance on the Stanford University campus on Thursday evening was not as raucously protested as, say, Ann Coulter's late 2019 appearance at UC Berkeley. But it was protested!

Chanting "We are the woke left!" outside the auditorium where Pence was giving a sold-out, 30-minute lecture titled "How to Save America From the Woke Left," a bevy of Stanford students made their presence known — and their unhappiness with Pence being there.

The student in the red overalls in the tree with the megaphone seen below also reportedly led students in chants of "Not my Stanford!" and "Fuck Mike Pence!"

As the Chronicle reports, Pence did his predictable best to parrot the talking points of your average Fox News host or right-wing pundit — "cancel culture": check, "freedom" from "big government": check. And of course he had to celebrate Tuesday's landslide recall vote ousting three SF school board members, as right-wing Twitter and Fox have been all week. Pence praised parents who are "starting to take our schools back, even here in California," and he said the school board members were examples of "woke" figures whom Democrats have backed in elections, to their certain peril.

"This week in San Francisco, parents recalled three woke school board members who cared more about renaming schools than reopening," Pence said. "Those results, I gotta tell ya, those results are sending shockwaves across the country. Democrats who supported cancel culture and school closures are starting to wake up. The truth is, many on the woke left have been spending years trying to agitate for a culture war. It looks like they might just get one. And they’re gonna lose."

(The Chronicle Editorial Board published an editorial on Wednesday countering this argument, because as we all know this recall had less to do with politics than with the perceived competence of the school board overall, and the fight about lottery admissions at Lowell High. But good luck explaining all that on Twitter or Fox News.)

Pence was, as the Chronicle tells us, heckled by protesters inside the auditorium who had tickets to the event, and there were ample boos and "Fuck you"s throughout. Pence apparently ignored all these, and praised Ronald Reagan as a hero and "outsider" conservative.

As the Mercury News reports, Pence also defended his actions on January 6th in helping to certify — and not overturn — the 2020 election results, something that he doubled down on in the media in recent weeks.

Responding to an audience question, Pence said, "I know in my heart we did our duty that day. I don’t know if the president and I will ever see eye to eye on that. I really don’t."

He also praised the moronic recent Republican National Committee resolution that referred to the actions of the January 6th rioters as "legitimate political discourse."

He called the uproar over that a misunderstanding, saying that it wasn't referring to anyone who engaged in violence.

The Merc suggests that Pence's remarks "sounded like a campaign stump speech" in a number of ways, with plenty of praise of Trump and the appointment of conservative Supreme Court justices.

So is Pence preparing to make a 2024 campaign official? Will that even get off the ground so long as Trump is still alive and tearing him to shreds every chance he gets? Probably not! We can only hope, setting aside the horror show of having Trump be the GOP's 2024 candidate, that Trump makes some jokes about Pence referring to his wife as "Mother."

Previously: Mike Pence Is In the Bay Area, Invited By Stanford Republican Club; Student Protest Planned

Top image: Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images