Georgetown Protesters Demand Prof’s Ouster, Crying Rooms

CLAY: Buck, when I saw this Georgetown protest… So, a professor at Georgetown — you actually know this guy, Ilya Shapiro.

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: He said that there were better qualified potential candidates than automatically saying what Joe Biden did, which he was gonna put a black woman on the Supreme Court, and from that moment saying, “The race and gender of my nominee is decided,” even before you know who your nominee is, and he said there were people who were gonna be more qualified than whoever that nominee is, which is going to be — unfortunately — because of what Joe Biden did, a common refrain, I believe.

When you say you’re picking somebody based on their race and gender instead of their qualifications. And people at Georgetown, which is one of the elite law schools in the entire country, have lost their minds. They have placed — the university has — Ilya Shapiro on administrative leave. There is now a massive sit-in, I believe, that is going on. And Buck you said there’s demand for crying rooms. This is all over, by the way, one tweet.

Statement on my starting @GeorgetownLaw tomorrow but immediately being placed on paid nonpunitive administrative leave pending investigation of my tweets: pic.twitter.com/u9xdNQY6aO

— Ilya Shapiro (@ishapiro) January 31, 2022

BUCK: Yes, and the tweet that he is in trouble for, I will read it to you. I will quote it to you here so you can understand why they’re now calling for this man to be fired and his career to be destroyed. He was speaking about, in the context of the Supreme Court pick, essentially notions of diversity and inclusion and how this tied into the broader affirmative action discussion over long term, his tweet is as follows.

Quote, “But alas, doesn’t fit into…” I’m sorry. Wait. Let me start at the beginning of it. actually want to give context. “I’m optimistic…” Wait. I only have… I’m sorry. They only have the part of this I can find in the Washington Post story that has gotten him in trouble. There was an earlier part of this. But he said — let me see — that, “Alas, it doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get,” this is his quote, “a lesser black woman,” end quote, and what they’re…

The controversy, of course, is that he’s saying that a woman in this context, an African-American woman is “lesser.” What he was trying to say, and he has said this — that this was poorly worded — was he meant a less qualified, a lesser candidate, not obviously a lesser human being, which is — and I know Ilya and I know… Look. It is poorly worded, but I think the intent is very different from what they’re saying it is, but they don’t care, right? They want him ruined. They want him fired and destroyed.

CLAY: A hundred percent. He named at the beginning of that tweet an Asian minority justice — I don’t believe there’s ever been an Asian justice put on the Supreme Court either — that he believed was more qualified but wasn’t going to be considered because Biden had limited his search to black women. And so an Asian man or woman would not be eligible.

Just as 94% of the overall population, let’s just take the population at large, only 6% of the U.S. population, and even lower number than 6%, by the way, if you consider lawyers. But at the high end, only 6% of the population is actually made up of black women in the United States.