Libertarian legal scholar Ilya Shapiro made a bad tweet. It didn’t express any bad ideas; it just made an unpopular argument, perhaps poorly worded.
You see, President Joe Biden has made it clear that he has excluded from his Supreme Court search all Hispanic people, all Indian Americans, all Pakistani Americans, all Chinese Americans, all Native Americans, all Italian Americans, all Irish Americans, all Polish Americans, and all men.
That’s a lot of jurists to rule out. Shapiro believes, not unreasonably, that Biden’s single-minded race-based and sex-based criterion has excluded the best possible choice for the Supreme Court from an intellectual legal perspective: Sri Srinivasan.
Srinivasan’s story reflects the American dream. He was born in India, immigrated to Kansas, and went to Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, an MBA, and then a law degree. He has been a Supreme Court clerk and served in the Office of the Solicitor General under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
President Barack Obama appointed Srinivasan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, a position universally recognized as the second-highest court in the land. Today, he is the chief judge of that court.
To nominate Srinivasan to the Supreme Court would be like a Major League baseball team calling up its No. 1 starter on the triple-A team to fill a bullpen opening.
You may disagree that Srinivasan is the best possible pick to replace Stephen Breyer, but it’s a very defensible position. And there is no reason to doubt Shapiro honestly holds that position.
But recall, Biden has said that all Indian Americans (or at least the ones who are not also black) are excluded from consideration for this Supreme Court vacancy before any considerations about the potential nominees’ professional achievements or their personal character. This Biden rule excluded the jurist whom Shapiro believes is the best pick. Logically, that entails that Biden is relegated to choosing second-best or worse — because Shapiro believes that anyone besides Srinivasan is an inferior pick to Srinivasan.
It’s possible, in a very fast and uncharitable reading of Shapiro’s tweets, to mistakenly think he’s broadly disparaging black female judges. That’s why Shapiro apologized for his tweet and deleted it. But Democratic commentator Mark Joseph Stern saw an opportunity to skewer Shapiro, and so, he brigaded him on Twitter, calling for all of left-wing Twitter to attack him. He even tagged Shapiro’s new employer in his tweets, misrepresenting Shapiro’s bad (and now deleted) tweet.
Dan McLaughlin at National Review covered the misleading and dishonest Democratic and left-wing attacks on Shapiro.
What remains to be answered is why so many tweeters and writers on the Left, many of whom are intelligent people who generally have a good grasp of logic and excellent reading comprehension, insist on believing or pretending to believe the worst possible interpretation of Shapiro’s tweets, even after he deleted and apologized.
A hundred different liberal tweeters will have a hundred different reasons for behaving the way they did, and I can’t read anyone’s mind. But we know for a fact that there is, on the Left, a common practice of baselessly accusing conservatives and libertarians for its political advantage.
During the 2008 election cycle, liberal journalist Spencer Ackerman spelled out this tactic in an email to other liberal journalists. “Take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists,” wrote Ackerman. He was trying to devise a way to help distract from tough questions Barack Obama began facing about his extremist, anti-American, and racist pastor Jeremiah Wright. “Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.”
Ackerman didn’t suggest this because he thought the people in question were racists or because he wanted to battle racism. Rather, Ackerman explained his motivation for this tactic: “What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear.”
This is the simplest explanation for leftist Twitter’s attack on Shapiro. Nobody is actually offended or harmed by anything he said — they just want to “raise the cost on the right of going after” Biden’s decisions on this and anything else. It is just a fancy version of the “argumentum ad baculum” fallacy.
If they succeed in their efforts to strip Shapiro of his job, that will accomplish two things. First, it will make non-leftist legal scholars more reluctant to accept jobs at elite left-leaning institutions. Second, it will make scholars who want jobs at elite institutions less likely to express any non-left opinions in public.
It’s despicable. It’s dishonest. But it often works.
If Georgetown Law rewards this campaign by unloading Shapiro, they are incentivizing more dishonest exploitation and mob warfare.
