Liberty and forgiveness the antidote to wokeness
The tide is turning. America’s culture war between the “Progressive left” and everyone else continues at full tilt, but the weary un-woke can take heart. Recent days bring glad tidings of modest hope.
From “The View” to Spotify, to the formerly hallowed halls of Georgetown University, the motley crews standing up for freedom of conscience and speech are seeing glimmers of possible progress.
After all, if even Whoopi Goldberg — entertainment legend, outspoken leftie, Black woman — can be rebuked for ill-informed comments on race, then no one is immune from accountability.
If Joe Rogan can withstand an attempted de-platforming by rock ’n’ roll star Neil Young, then the rogue podcaster and his legions of fans can takea few deep breaths.
And if a libertarian legal scholar can survive (so far) the young pitchfork-wielders and gassy old hypocrites at Georgetown, then maybe there’s hope for our republic.
Taken together, these are a proverbial “embarrassment of riches,” but it might not feel like that to law professor Ilya Shapiro, the least-known of our subjects and therefore the most atrisk.
Also at risk? The historic Jesuit enclave of Georgetown University, where intellectual honesty and spiritual life used to matter.
Mr. Shapiro, a constitutional scholar slated to join GU’s law school faculty on Feb. 1, tweeted 10 days ago that the “best pick for Biden” to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer would be Sri Srinivasan, chief judge of theD.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The president had made a campaign pledge to nominate a Black woman. Srinivasan, born in India, is a racial minority here, but as a male he does not conform to the “latest intersectionality hierarchy,” Mr. Shapiro wrote, “so we’ll get [a] lesser black woman.”
The outrage of some GU law students was not slaked by Mr. Shapiro’s thorough apology nor by law school dean William Treanor’s decision to put hisnew hire on administrative leave.
The dean’s first email addressing the controversy grossly mischaracterized Mr. Shapiro’s tweets as suggesting “the best Supreme Court nominee could not be a Black woman.” The dean thereby demonstrates that it isn’t only new law school students who have skulls full of mush. [Dear One-Ls, this is a reference to TV’s first great legal drama, “The Paper Chase.” Plusça change…]
Pundits and platforms from Bari Weiss to National Review to the Washington Post have pointed out the hypocrisy in Georgetown’s retention of law prof Christine Fair, who tweeted in 2018 that Brett Kavanaugh’s defenders “deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh … [then] castratetheir corpses and feed them to swine.”
Georgetown took no action against Ms. Fair, but Mr. Shapiro is punished — probably because he isn’t “intersectional” enough.
At ABC, despite multiple lengthy apologies, Whoopi Goldberg got a twoweek suspension for asserting on air last Monday that the Holocaust was “not about race.” She’s woefully misinformed, but she is reportedly angry enough at ABC management to quit —to “cancel” herself.
Over at Spotify, rocker Neil Young got angry enough over COVID material disseminated by $100-million podcaster Joe Rogan to say, basically, “It’shim or me.”
Spotify chose Mr. Rogan and began removing Mr. Young’s music, but the company did announce new advisories on podcasts with worrisome content.
Can Spotify put those warnings on theCDC?
Biden spokesperson Jen Psaki expressed approval of Spotify’s warnings and urged big tech to do more to suppress “misinformation.” Nobody got it 100% right; after all, it was the CDC which has promoted destructive lockdowns and ineffective cloth masks.
In our vibrant public square, free speech will often include misinformation or outright lies. Some of this will come from authority figures. As we struggleto determine the facts, uphold truth and have a voice in the shaping of our culture, the remedy for these inevitable conflicts is not less speech, butmore.
And when, in all our talking, we inevitably state things badly, make mistakes or utter falsehoods, sincere apologies have to matter. There must be forgiveness — or we won’t have a cultureworth saving.