One has to feel sorry for Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, who is being criticized on Twitter and beyond for what was clearly just a big ol’ misunderstanding. There he was on Twitter, minding his own business, when he came across some tweets he disliked from Georgetown’s Ilya Shapiro, screenshotted and shared them, condemned their author as a racist troll in tweets that tagged his employer, insisted dramatically that he was “ashamed” of his “alma mater,” solicited and shared a reproaching comment from that alma mater’s dean, and . . . well, for some inexplicable reason, the people watching this saga concluded that Stern was trying to get Shapiro fired.
Those people have clearly and willfully miscast what Stern was trying to do. As Stern himself has noted, he’s the last guy who would want Shapiro to be fired, because if Shapiro is fired, then people might notice that Stern got Shapiro fired, and if people notice that Stern got Shapiro fired, then they might think that cancel culture actually exists. Which, as Stern has routinely insisted, it most emphatically does not.
What was Stern doing? He was just chatting with the Internet, with Georgetown Law tagged in for the ride. Sure, in his work at Slate, and on Twitter in general, Stern often comes across as an unhinged hysteric of exactly the type who thrives in the open sewer that is contemporary social media. But, in this case, his motives were evidently benign. When Stern said that Shapiro was a “troll” and a “racist” whose “overt and nauseating” bigotry made him “ashamed” of Georgetown, he was simply confirming that overtly racist nauseating trolls are precisely the sort of people whom Georgetown should keep on staff — and maybe even give a promotion and a raise.
As a result of his thoughtful unwillingness to embarrass Shapiro, Stern noted that, despite the profound shame that Shapiro’s continued employment makes him feel, Georgetown Law should not bow to the mob and “make any hasty decisions about his future.” Once enough time has passed, though, Shapiro is clearly set to be rewarded for his efforts — exactly as Mark Joseph Stern always intended.
