This is no time for groveling
Ilya Shapiro apologized for his “poor choice of words” in a series of tweets about Joe Biden’s potential Supreme Court pick. Here’s what he should have said instead.
By now most readers are familiar with the Ilya Shapiro “controversy.” I use sneer quotes because, like virtually every cultural outrage these days, it’s aggressively dumb, clearly a bad-faith hit job perpetrated by deeply unhappy ideological fanatics without hobbies, and the target of the mob’s ire has said something true, if also sloppily, on Twitter.
Bari Weiss has provided the necessary background, as well as the standard classical liberal call for Georgetown Law to live up to its commitment to freedom of expression—just as it did when a Georgetown professor tweeted during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018: “All of [the white men defending Kavanaugh] deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”
Briefly, Ilya Shapiro, late of the Cato Institute, was tapped to be the next executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, beginning February 1. That is, until he made the mistake of posting some tweets of his own about who should replace the retiring Justice Stephen A. Breyer. (A good rule of thumb: Don’t use Twitter.)
Read the rest at American Greatness.
In a lot of ways I think this relates to what you've previously written about courage in your early article about Romney and morality. Our instincts tell us to apologize, and to seek common ground, and in most cases that is the right approach. But in situations like these, where neither the offense nor the desire for reconciliation are real, it is the wrong one. Nobody is really upset by Shapiro's use of the words "lesser black woman," regardless of whether that was the best turn of phrase. People are upset because he challenged the concept of identity politics, and they do not want him or anyone else to be able to question their orthodoxies. Likewise, none of the people complaining about Shapiro genuinely want to come to a mutual understanding; they want him and everyone who agrees with him about identity politics to be unable to present their views. Nothing short of unconditional surrender, and perhaps not even that, would be enough to save Shapiro from their ire. Apologies are not only a waste of time, they make it harder for the undecided actually to evaluate the ideas in the ring. Because Shapiro has already apologized, it is hard to defend him (this is why I encourage my clients not to make apologies unless and until they have decided to plead guilty). Once someone has heard that the speaker apologized, they assume that he is wrong; otherwise, why would he have backed down? The net result is that the mob wins; maybe Shapiro keeps his job, maybe he doesn't, the average American isn't going to care what he thinks anyway. Standing up to the mob is a hard thing to do, but resisting our own urge to make nice and second guess ourselves is, in some ways, harder altogether. It flies in the face of what we think we should do, of what we ought to do in most other circumstances; but apologizing to the mob when our underlying point is right "wrongly conflates morality and virtue with mere pleasantness" and fails to show the courage needed to defend the things worth defending.
Well said, Deion! And, if a guy with tenure can't speak his mind, what hope is there for everyone else in America? I agree: damn the torpedoes, and full speed ahead!