Canceled prof: Bad things shouldn’t happen to people who post bad tweets – New York Post

Shut up.

Thats the response, cleaned up for publication, that I got from students at the University of California Hastings College of Law when I tried to speak there on March 1. They prevented the event from taking place, chanting and banging as if it were Occupy Wall Street.

Although a student organization had booked a room and invited me to discuss a timely subject on which Id written a book the politics of judicial nominations a hecklers veto prevailed. Applying a bad-faith lens to a poorly phrased tweet in which I criticized President Bidens Supreme Court criteria, activists judged me a racist misogynist and my expertise illegitimate.

On Jan. 26, I tweeted that Judge Sri Srinivasan was the best candidate to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. I felt and still feel that Biden should have considered all possible nominees, rather focus solely on black female candidates. Given Twitters character limit, I in-artfully said that whomever the president picked would be a lesser black woman. Though I deleted the tweet and apologized, I was suspended from my position at Georgetowns Center for the Constitution pending an investigation into whether my social-media comments violated university policy. And now I wasnt even allowed to express my ideas on another campus.

My experience was no isolated incident not even for March 2022! The following week, a similar thing happened at Yale, ironically over a panel bringing together lawyers from the left and right who agreed on the importance of free speech. Then it happened again at the University of Michigan, when students obstructed a debate on Texas heartbeat bill. And thats just law schools; forget the craziness thats been going on for some time on undergraduate campuses!

The only thing these events had in common was that non-progressive speakers were presenting ideas that some students found objectionable, offensive, even repulsive. Weve gotten to a place where questioning affirmative action or abortion is outside the academic Overton window, the acceptable range of policy views. Its a damning indictment of the state of academia at a time when a toxic cloud has enveloped all of our public discourse.

But this problem isnt limited to ivory towers and leafy quads. The trend of canceling speakers rather than challenging them also represents the loss of grace in our culture more broadly, the desire to ascribe malign motives to ones political enemies and unwillingness to think of them as merely wrong, rather than evil.

Given the lefts control of the commanding heights of culture, education and technology, those expressing conservative views are much more frequently targeted by both online and real-world mobs and boycotts. But it happens to left-wingers too, like Whoopi Goldberg who was ignorant about the Holocaust, not anti-Semitic. Even worse, it happens to regular people whose meager donations to politically incorrect causes gets them doxed, boycotted, fired, or, in Canada, frozen out of their bank accounts.

Although this cancel culture is easy to diagnose, its hard to remedy. Too many people have lost sight of the golden rule of treating others as they want to be treated. Although often ascribed to the Bible, that principle predates Christianity and indeed needs not be tied to any faith. Still, as American society has secularized, politics has replaced religion to fill the spiritual needs that humans have had since time immemorial. In that context, its easy to see ones political opponents as heretics and then of course their sacrilege isnt worth hearing.

The problem goes far beyond academic freedom or speech on campus, worrying as developments in those areas are for the next generation especially young lawyers, wholl face much more challenging situations than bad tweets. How are we to continue as a nation if every policy disagreement is existential and every election a Manichean battle?

Two months ago, I jokingly tweeted at Whoopi that she and I ought to go on Joe Rogans podcast to hash stuff out. Indeed, Im willing to go anywhere, or on any media program Bill Maher might be good to debate constitutional law or the importance of civil discourse.

But itll take more than canceled professors and pundits to get us back to a place where we can disagree without wanting to ruin the lives of people with whom we have those disagreements. Itll take real courage from political leaders and cultural influencers to disrupt the current toxic moment.

Ilya Shapiro, author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of Americas Highest Court, is on still leave from his position as senior lecturer and executive director of Georgetowns Center for the Constitution as he awaits the result of the universitys investigation (now in its third month).

Link:

Canceled prof: Bad things shouldn't happen to people who post bad tweets - New York Post