Ilya Shapiro was placed on administrative leave over a tweet criticizing Biden’s prioritization of race and gender in his search for Breyer’s replacement.
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review News Desk. This week, we look at the outrage mobs against Joe Rogan and Ilya Shapiro, the hypocritical reaction to President Biden’s shocking attack on the free press, and hit more media misses.
Grab Your Pitchforks
This past week saw multiple social-media pile-ons against figures that dissent from left-wing and public-health orthodoxy.
At Georgetown Law, the Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into whether he violated the school’s non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies with a poorly worded tweet criticizing President Biden’s insistence of prioritizing race and gender in the search for his Supreme Court nominee.
Referring to Biden’s pledge to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, Shapiro made the following comments on Twitter last week:
“Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog & v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman. Thank heaven for small favors?”
“Because Biden said he’s only consider[ing] black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached. Fitting that the Court takes up affirmative action next term.”
Shapiro, who was recently named a senior lecturer and executive director of the school’s Center for the Constitution, is undoubtedly guilty of poor phrasing, as he himself has acknowledged. He did not mean to imply that prospective black female nominees were inherently less, only that limiting candidates to any very particular demographic would weaken the process as well as the eventual nominee.
Nevertheless, the vultures swept in and they’ve now gotten what they clearly wanted: Shapiro will be banned from campus pending the results of the investigation.
Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern led the mob, tweeting “I hate to draw attention to this troll because attention is what he craves. But now that @GeorgetownLaw has hired him, I feel an obligation to condemn his overt and nauseating racism, which has been a matter of public record for some time. I am deeply ashamed of my alma mater.” Of course, Stern provided no examples from Shapiro’s supposedly long track record of bigotry.
When confronted about his dishonest effort to bring heaven and earth down on Shapiro — Georgetown Law dean William Treanor issued a statement saying “the tweets are antithetical to the work that we do here every day to build inclusion belonging and respect for diversity” and promising that Shapiro remain on leave and off campus “pending an investigation into whether he violated out policies and expectations on professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harrassment” — Stern cowardly claimed to have done no such thing.
https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1486816111903576072?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Stern’s response perfectly exemplified the true face of the modern mob: The preferred tool of cowards bent on silencing, rather than confronting, political opponents before slinking back into the vengeful crowd they’ve assembled, and that Trainor so meekly kneeled before.
Meanwhile, popular Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan, who has brought several guests on his show who have espoused minority views on the pandemic and various public-policy responses to it (including the safety and efficacy of the coronavirus vaccines), is facing a similar backlash.
As a result, some artists whose music appears on Spotify — most notably Neil Young and Joni Mitchell — have taken their work off of the platform. In a statement delivered via video, Rogan consented to new Spotify policies that would ensure labels accompany his coronavirus-related episodes, doubled down on his own policy of bringing on heterodox guests, acknowledged that he should ensure guests with contrasting views on the pandemic appear in close proximity to each other, and spoke to his affinity for Young and Mitchell’s discographies.
Rogan’s cool-headed response to criticism stood in sharp contrast with the anger directed at him by mainstream media sources. Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, retweeted an NYU professor who wrote that Rogan has “millions of listeners and influence” but does “no diligence at all,” for his show, mischaracterizing Rogan’s assertion that he approaches the show as an open-minded conversation.
Stelter also seemingly endorsed some kind of punishment for Rogan from Spotify, amplifying Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel’s view that “Spotify is trying very hard to make itself seem like any other open social platform in response to criticism of Rogan – but there are no answers here to the criticism of the company spending $100m to exclusively distribute the show and promote it across its platform.”
One journalist, the New York Times’ Matthew Rosenberg, showed some self-awareness and willingness to be constructive, writing “Joe Rogan is what he is. We in the media might want to spend more time thinking about why so many people trust him instead of us.” Rosenberg’s musing elicited anger from his colleague and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, who replied, “We need to understand why millions of Americans don’t mind the open racism? It’s not a mystery. Been reporting on it for years. So, what do we do with that?” It’s unclear where racism fits into the controversy, but if you’re the type to take Hannah-Jones seriously, it’s probably no mystery to you. What’s apparent to all is how she would likely answer her own question: Rogan being deplatformed.
Headline Fail of the Week
The Hill downplayed President Biden calling a reporter a “son of a b****” this week: “Biden frustration with Fox News breaks through surface.”
“Biden in the last week has twice snapped at reporters for Fox News and was caught on a live mic on Monday describing the network’s White House correspondent Peter Doocy in decidedly impolitic terms after a question about inflation, which is widely seen as cutting into the president’s approval ratings,” reads the piece.
“Will you take a question on inflation?” Doocy asked Biden on Monday. “Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?”
“No, it’s a great asset,” Biden responded on a hot mic. “More inflation. What a stupid son of a b****.”
Somehow, some way, it’s Fox News, and not the president, whose behavior needs work.
Media Misses
-CNN host Jim Acosta had a pair of media misses in the last week. On Tuesday, he suggested Republican governor Glenn Youngkin is running Virginia like a “Soviet-style police state.” Acosta criticized an email tipline Youngkin’s administration created to allow parents to report teachers who teach “divisive” topics to their children, including critical race theory.
“You know, I seem to remember Glenn Youngkin campaigning in a fleece vest in Virginia. He was running as a different kind of Republican. I was told there was going to be a vest, not a Soviet-style police state across the Potomac from Washington,” Acosta said.
Jim Acosta thinks that Virginia has become "a Soviet-style police state" pic.twitter.com/UmgFTyRIgR
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 26, 2022
One night prior, Acosta took Biden’s insulting language toward Doocy as an opportunity to say he and others at CNN “never got an apology” from former President Trump.
“Today we had the president of the United States refer to a reporter as an SOB,” Acosta said on the network on Monday night. “Ya know, Don [Lemon], you and I got called a lot worse back in the day. We never got an apology. I don’t remember that from the commander in chief. So maybe things are a little bit better to some extent.”
-Two cheers for CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who pushed back last week when late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel suggest Biden was right to call Doocy a “dumb son of b****.”
“I know you don’t usually give out opinions but that reporter, Peter Doocy, is he a dumb son of a bitch?” Kimmel asked.
“I don’t think any president should be calling any journalist a ‘dumb son of a bitch.’ And to be fair to Peter Doocy, the question was fairly anodyne…” Tapper replied. “It would be like you calling me a ‘dumb son of a b*tch’ right now, caught on microphone. I mean, he was standing right in front of a microphone.”
Kimmel asked Tapper about “defending” Doocy, despite Fox News saying Tapper is on “Team Biden” and a “mouthpiece for the Democrats.”
Jimmy Kimmel: "Fox…says…you're on Team Biden…yet, here you are, defending Peter Doocy, who…is indeed a dumb son of a bitch."
Jake Tapper: "So, I do not agree…I recognize that Peter's channel probably would never come to my defense like that, but it is what it is." pic.twitter.com/GAdURGzeaR
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) January 25, 2022
“And yet, here you are defending Peter Doocy, who as far as I’ve been able to tell is a dumb son of a bitch,” Kimmel said.
“So, I do not agree with that, and I will say, standards for decency don’t have to do with whether or not you like the people that are being treated poorly, it just has to do with the standard,” Tapper responded. “And yes, I recognize that Peter’s channel probably would never come to my defense like that, but it is what it is.
Notably, Fox News did come to CNN’s defense when President Donald Trump revoked the aforementioned Acosta’s press credentials in 2018.
“Fox News supports CNN in its legal effort to regain its White House reporter’s press credential. We intend to file an amicus brief with the U.S. District Court. Secret Service passes for working White House journalists should never be weaponized,” wrote Fox News president Jay Wallace in a statement at the time.
–The View’s Whoopi Goldberg insisted on Monday morning that “the Holocaust isn’t about race. No. It’s not about race,” over the protests of some of her co-hosts. “It’s about man’s inhumanity to man,” she asserted. Goldberg surely didn’t mean to minimize the role of anti-Semitism during the segment, but it’s not hard to imagine what the reaction of the rest of the press would have looked like had a guest on Joe Rogan’s show uttered the same sentiment.
Sparks fly as The View panel confronts Whoopi after she says "the Holocaust isn't about race. No. It's not about race."
"Well, the considered Jews a different race," Joy Behar says."But it's about white supremacy. It's about going after Jews and Gypsies," Ana Navarro adds. pic.twitter.com/GZwZSi2qXi
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) January 31, 2022