Allow me to share a similar experience of my own. By way of background, the issue at hand was the case of Ilya Shapiro, a law professor who had just been appointed executive director of Georgetown Law School’s Center for the Constitution. This was right at the time Justice Stephen Breyer had announced his retirement from the Supreme Court.
Before assuming the post at Georgetown, Shapiro had posted a series of tweets in favor of his preferred candidate for the open Court seat, Sri Srinivasan, calling him the “objectively best pick for Biden.” He then went on to lament, shall we say inartfully, that Srinivasan was ruled out of consideration because of Biden’s campaign pledge to appoint a black woman to the seat, and thus “alas doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get a lesser black woman.”
This triggered the predictable uproar on the Georgetown campus, accusing Shapiro of racism and white supremacy and “denigrating” all black women. (I love it when they use that word “denigrate,” patently oblivious to its underlying meaning.) I don’t know how much national play the story got; as I live in the D. C. suburbs, I followed it as a local story in the local paper. (The Post—maybe you’ve heard of it?) Shapiro was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation, but was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing—not on free speech grounds, mind you, but on the technicality that the offending tweets were posted before he began his employment at the university and so lay outside their jurisdiction. He then turned around and resigned anyway, since the storm of vituperation and abuse had rendered him unable to function effectively in the post.
Into the midst of this stepped I, responding to a Medium article by a Georgetown law student. She had posted a tirade against Shapiro, applauding his resignation and closing with “he will not be missed.” I replied with a two-word response: “ . . . by you.”
I no longer have access to her answer, because she eventually ended up blocking me. So all I have left is my half of the conversation; you’ll have to fill in some of the blanks for yourself from quotes and references on my end. Rather than quote the thread at length here, I’ll just give you the links to read my posts for yourself. Go ahead, I’ll wait . . .
It was at this point that she blocked me, cutting off any further discussion. As you can see, I strove to maintain nothing but a civil tone throughout. Merely expressing opinions different from hers was sufficient cause to flush me entirely from the conversation.
Nevertheless, I can’t share your “cautious optimism” about the incoming Trump administration. Inflicting pain on sanctimonious scolds is not a sound basis for governance, nor a good reason to hand virtually unlimited power to a manifestly malignant personality like Trump. I see nothing but catastrophe ahead, of global proportions.
