Alexandra DeSanctis here, filling in for your usual host Jim Geraghty. On the menu today: ABC News suspends Whoopi Goldberg over her unfortunate comments about the Holocaust, self-assured progressive students at Georgetown Law stage a sit-in over Ilya Shapiro, and Americans agree with the GOP that picking a Supreme Court nominee based on race is a silly thing to do.
Bye for Now, Whoopi
Late yesterday evening, ABC announced that The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg would be suspended for two weeks following her assertion during a recent episode of the program that the Holocaust was “not about race” but rather about “man’s inhumanity to man.”
Goldberg apologized for her comments shortly thereafter — what appeared to be a sincere and heartfelt apology, though it, like her remarks, revealed her severe ignorance. “On today’s show, I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man.’ I should have said it is about both,” Goldberg said in a written statement. “As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race.’ I stand corrected.”
But that wasn’t enough for ABC. Last night, ABC News president Kim Godwin said that Goldberg would be suspended for her “wrong and hurtful comments,” adding that “the entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities.”
In a memo to staff, Godwin insisted that, “These decisions are never easy, but [they are] necessary. Just last week I noted that the culture at ABC News is one that is driven, kind, inclusive, respectful, and transparent. Whoopi’s comments do not align with those values.”
Goldberg’s comments were, to be sure, wrong, and indeed quite stupid. They might well have been offensive to many viewers. But none of this amounts to a good enough reason to suspend her. As Charlie Cooke pointed out on The Corner this morning, people say stupid and incorrect things on television almost constantly. And I’d add, they write stupid and incorrect things almost constantly, too. Many people — indeed, most people — are stupid and incorrect from time to time . . . news at eleven.
Saying something foolish or ill-advised or even hurtful isn’t a good enough reason to lose one’s job. These days, though, it’s becoming grounds not only for suspension and possible firing, but also for a person becoming something close to unemployable for some undetermined time period thereafter. We are not living in a culture accustomed to extending grace.
It is the mark of a deeply unhealthy society that a public figure cannot be forgiven after offering a sincere apology for saying something incorrect and even offensive, for making a comment that was almost certainly uttered not out of malice but out of ignorance and lack of reflection. Since when did ignorance and lack of reflection mean a person can’t show their face in public and can’t retain a job? If that silly principle were applied consistently, most hosts of The View — most television hosts, period — would be long gone.
Georgetown Progressives Stage a Sit-In
Speaking of silly overreactions and threats to free speech, over at Georgetown Law School, progressive students continue to extend a controversy over nothing, staging a sit-in on campus to demand not only the firing of incoming administrator Ilya Shapiro but also free meals and a room where they can cry.
Our own Nate Hochman had the story yesterday afternoon. Though he was denied access to campus, Nate managed to catch much of a livestream of the sit-in, conducted by what seemed to be the leadership of Georgetown University Law School’s (GULC) Black Law Student Association. From Nate’s reporting, it’s pretty clear that the students were the ones running the meeting, while the several deans present sounded a bit like they had been taken hostage:
A chastened-looking Treanor [Dean of GULC] spent more than an hour answering questions from what appeared to be the BLSA leadership team in a closed auditorium. The dean, striking an apologetic tone, echoed the language of the activists in the crowd, assuring the assembled students that he was “appalled” by the “painful” nature of Shapiro’s tweets and promising to “listen,” “learn” and ultimately “do better.” But he also seemed to be attempting to appease the students without committing to any definitive disciplinary action for Shapiro. “Since we’re a private institution, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to us,” he said. “It’s not the First Amendment that’s the university’s guideline.” But “on the other hand, the university does have a free speech and expression policy which binds us.”
The crowd was skeptical, directly criticizing Treanor’s messaging as “dishonest” and pushing for more aggressive action against Shapiro. One student floated the idea of defunding the Center for the Constitution “if, worst-case scenario,” Shapiro “were allowed to remain,” suggesting that Shapiro’s tweets can’t “be divorced” from the Center: “If Shapiro is there, then his ideas and his rhetoric will be the Center,” she insisted. Another pressed Treanor on why the Center existed at all, given the originalist views of its director, Randy Barnett. “Why was it created?” she asked. “Because so far it seems like it has done more harm than good.”
“You can do as much diversity training as you want with staff,” she continued. “But I feel like that Center has a certain ideology . . . so I really want you to defend why we really need it, beyond, like, you know, free speech, and beyond diversity of opinion. I really want us to think critically about why we still need it.”
The protestors went on to demand a “reparations” package for black students, specifically including a place on campus set aside for students to go if they need to cry: “Is there an office they can go to? I don’t know what it would look like, but if they want to cry, if they need to break down, where can they go? Because we’re at a point where students are coming out of class to go to the bathroom to cry.”
One of the deans took this absurd request seriously: “It is really, really hard to walk out of class or a meeting in tears, and you should always have a place on campus where you can go. And if you’re finding that you’re not getting the person that you want to talk to or not getting the space that you need, reach out to me any time — any time — and we will find you space.”
Later, a student suggested that another part of the “reparations” for black students might be some free food: “Coming back to this reparations thing. . . . I don’t know if it’s a couple dinners or lunches or what, but that would help us.”
“We have food on the way,” a dean responded swiftly.
Yet another student insisted that, in its ongoing statements, the university must be sure to remind critics of the Black Law Student Association that white students are present on campus thanks to slavery, or something:
They are only here because our ancestors were sold for them to be here. And I think it’s a very important fact that is not talked about explicitly enough, because we are still being attacked. So I just would appreciate in whatever message that’s going out, that our classmates are explicitly reminded: Do not attack the people who were sold for you to have this opportunity. . . . That needs to be something that these people are reminded of, because they continue to attack us as if it is not on our backs that they are even here.
One Georgetown Law student, a Democrat, later told Nate:
I’ve talked to many left-leaning friends here in private who admit freely that the BLSA demands go over the top or concede they only want Ilya fired because of his conservative political views. One person told me they didn’t like his views on masks. Another told me they thought he was racist because he advocates for conservative policies [that] are racist. But people worry about losing journal spots, jobs, or letter grades if they aren’t woke enough and so aren’t willing to say anything about it.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet your incoming class of the nation’s top lawyers and your future slate of U.S. judges. Aren’t you excited?
Americans and the GOP Agree: No Affirmative Action for SCOTUS
A new poll from ABC News/Ipsos finds that Americans overwhelmingly oppose President Biden’s pledge to consider only black women when filling the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Stephen Breyer.
More than three-quarters of respondents said that the president should “consider all possible nominees” as opposed to considering “only nominees who are Black women, as he has pledged to do.” Republicans were almost unanimous (95 percent) in saying that Biden should consider all nominees — not a surprising outcome. But a majority of Democrats (54 percent) said the same thing, a warning sign for Biden, who appears prepared to persist in his plan to apply affirmative action to the nation’s highest court.
Over in the Senate, Republicans are sorting out their strategy for how to handle Biden’s eventual nominee. According to Politico, GOP leadership encouraged Republican senators at a lunch yesterday to focus on “the pocketbook problems plaguing Democrats” when discussing the upcoming confirmation battle, rather than the president’s promise to select a black woman:
Minority Whip John Thune (R., S.D.) said that waging a high-profile battle against a SCOTUS nominee they don’t have the votes to block could be counterproductive to their messaging and also set unreasonable expectations for the base. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell . . . argued that the GOP has already had a lot of success with the courts. He suggested one liberal jurist replacing another wasn’t a big deal since it wouldn’t change the balance of the court.
But some Republicans aren’t having it: Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.), who sits on the Judiciary Committee, didn’t exactly tamp down his rhetoric. “No. 1, I want a nominee who knows a law book from a J. Crew catalog,” he said upon exiting the lunch. “No. 2, I want a nominee who’s not going to try to rewrite the Constitution every other Thursday to try to advance a ‘woke agenda.’”
Asked about how he squared that language with GOP leaders’ advice, Kennedy said: “I think some members of leadership think they can control what people want to talk about. I don’t agree with that proposition. I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about, and if they don’t like that, they can call somebody who cares.”
It might not be the right time for the GOP to go scorched earth in an effort block whomever Biden ends up nominating, but Senate Republicans should be confident that most Americans — indeed, most Democrats — are on their side when it comes to the foolishness of choosing a Supreme Court justice via affirmative action.
ADDENDUM: For readers who may have missed the announcement a couple weeks back, my friend Ryan Anderson and I are writing a book! In Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing, we’ll offer a comprehensive argument against abortion, arguing that, in addition to ending the lives of more than 65 million unborn children since 1973, abortion has harmed every element of our society: women, families, medicine, the rule of law, our politics, and our culture. It’s available for pre-order now and will be published on June 28.