Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner joins the chorus defending Ilya Shapiro. And he adds some context to what is really going on:
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.