By Nate Hochman
Monday, May 09,
2022
In late January, Ilya Shapiro was
suspended from his new faculty position at Georgetown Law for a tweet that
criticized the Biden administration’s use of racial preferences in Supreme
Court nominations. Shapiro’s indefinite suspension, which came on the heels
of a pressure campaign from student activists and left-wing Twitter
pundits, was announced “pending an investigation into whether he
violated our policies and expectations on professional conduct,
non-discrimination, and anti-harassment, the results of which will inform our
next steps,” according to an email from the law school’s dean.
Wednesday will mark the 100th day of that
“investigation.” Given that the tweet in question was just 45 words — some of
which were single-letter abbreviations such as “v,” “&,” etc. — that will
add up to an average of 2.2 days per word. The Georgetown Law administration
is very meticulous.
But the same administrators seem
significantly less scrupulous when it comes to investigating
controversial remarks from the progressive end of the political spectrum. Just
a couple of weeks ago, a Palestinian activist with a long history of
antisemitic comments — including celebrating the Second Intifada, repeatedly calling for violence against
Israeli Jews, fantasizing about Israeli settlers dying “in the most torturous & slow
ways,” and writing in his book that Israelis “harvest the organs of the
martyred” to “feed their warriors our own” — was invited to speak on
campus. But when a group of Jewish students raised concerns, Mitch Bailin, the
law school’s dean of students, defended the event on free-speech
grounds: “We allow a huge amount of latitude even where speech is deeply
offensive to some members of the community, some or even many,” he told the
students in a meeting. When pushed for specific examples, Bailin cited the fact
that “the university has had speakers who have definitely said they find gay
marriage, gay practice, gay individuals, completely immoral. We have had
speakers who have said the same thing about trans people.”
Georgetown Law’s free-speech protections,
then, extend to calls for the ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews, but not to
defenses of the principle of colorblind equality under the law.
So don’t hold your breath for an analogous
“investigation” into yesterday’s tweets from Georgetown Law’s Josh Chafetz. On
Sunday afternoon, Chafetz — who has since made his Twitter account private in
the face of a firestorm of criticism from other users — wrote: “The ‘protest at
the Supreme Court, not at the justices’ houses’ line would be more persuasive
if the Court hadn’t this week erected fencing to prevent protesters from coming
anywhere near it.” In response to the ensuing controversy, Chafetz tweeted that
he was “not opposed” to activist “attempt[s] to pressure judges” to rule in
favor of upholding Roe v. Wade. “And before the ‘oh so you
support [January 6] lmao!’ trolls show up: the difference is *substantive*,” he
maintained in a separate tweet. “When the mob is right, some (but not all!)
more aggressive tactics are justified. When not, not.”
Ah. Free speech for me, but not for thee;
mob rule for me, but not for thee. Kudos to Professor Chafetz, at least, for
his honesty.
Activists have, in fact, been holding
protests outside the homes of Supreme Court
justices in a blatant attempt to pressure the Court to uphold Roe. Chafetz’s
framing of the issue — that the moral validity of those protests is somehow
dependent on exactly how close protesters are allowed to get to the Supreme
Court — is odd, given that the fencing around the Court is just far enough away
to prevent the unruly
protests from spilling onto the steps of the
Court itself.
Of course, Chafetz — in textbook lawyerly
fashion — maintained that his tweets were not an outright endorsement
of a mob assault on the Supreme Court, despite his subsequent argument that
“aggressive tactics are justified” when “the mob is right.” But when repeatedly prompted to specify exactly how close the protesters would
need to get for him to find the argument against protests at the justices’
homes “persuasive,” Chafetz neglected to answer.
Chafetz can rest assured that he will not
meet the same fate as Shapiro, however. He said as much toward the end of last
night’s controversy: “Folks can snitch tag @GeorgetownLaw all they want (I’m so
sorry, public affairs folks!), they’re not going to fire me over a tweet you
don’t like.” Of course, Shapiro’s indefinite suspension was initiated
by a prominent progressive writer “snitch tagging” Georgetown Law. But in all likelihood, the
administration won’t be placing Chafetz on administrative leave “pending an
investigation” into his tweets. Unlike Georgetown Law’s Black Law Student
Association, the school’s Federalist Society is unlikely to hold a sit-in
demanding “reparations” in the form of a designated place to cry about the
emotional trauma inflicted by Chafetz’s words. That’s because the Georgetown
Law Federalist Society, in contrast to the activists gunning for Shapiro’s
termination, is ostensibly run by students with at least a modicum of emotional
maturity.
To no one’s surprise, Chafetz had
previously endorsed the mob pile-on against Shapiro: When Steve Vladeck, a
professor at the University of Texas School of Law, criticized Georgetown Law’s
hiring of Shapiro — “When people tell you who they are, over and over and over
and over and over again, maybe we should believe them,” Vladeck wrote, followed by a “snitch tag”: “Great hire, @GeorgetownLaw!” — Chafetz
wrote in a since-deleted tweet that “Steve’s absolutely right.” But unlike his
colleagues’, Shapiro’s commitment to academic freedom has been consistent.
“Josh Chafetz should not be ‘investigated’ or otherwise disciplined for his
tweets — and neither should I for mine,” he told National Review. “This
episode yet again exemplifies the ideological double standard in academia and
on Twitter.”
Chafetz and Georgetown Law had not
responded to requests for comment at the time this article was published.
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