Ilya Shapiro, still under suspension from his position at Georgetown Law because of the campus cancel-culture mob there, went to speak at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law on Tuesday. He was prevented from speaking by a screeching, anti-speech mob that howled him down for 45 minutes. This is the brownshirt mindset at work: People one disagrees with should be forcibly prevented from presenting their side of the story, even and perhaps especially on a university campus. Speech should be met, not with more speech, but with brute force. It is an attitude that is not just illiberal but wholly inappropriate coming from people who aspire to be members of the bar. It is not legitimate political discourse but mob rule and the handmaiden of riot and oppression.
Nobody did more to summon up angry mobs against Shapiro than Mark Joseph Stern of Slate, who knowingly, falsely attributed to Shapiro “overt and nauseating racism, which has been a matter of public record for some time.” Stern claimed, knowing that it was false and defamatory of Shapiro’s professional reputation and would incite precisely this sort of reaction, that “to Shapiro, the nomination of any woman of color is inherently suspect. . . . He cannot accept that a woman of color deserves to sit on SCOTUS. His assessment of nominees is contaminated by his own racism.” Shapiro has, as Stern doubtless knows, previously and repeatedly touted Janice Rogers Brown, who is African American, as a good candidate to serve on the Supreme Court (see here in 2009 and here in 2016). Stern claimed the contrary, knowing it to be false, with calculated malice. Yet Stern has claimed that he bears no responsibility whatsoever for his own campaign of character assassination.
Now that he has successfully summoned an illiberal mob to shout down speech, how does Stern react? Left-wing writer Jay Willis shared video of the mob of protesters yelling and pounding their desks to prevent Shapiro from being heard by the people who came to see him and commented, “this f***ing rules” (apologies for the profanity contained in the tweet below). Stern responded with a raising-hands applause emoji:
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) March 1, 2022
Stern has dropped the mask. He is in favor of shouting down speakers. Never let him claim again that he is against that sort of thing, or complain if it should ever happen to him.