Justice Delayed, Cancel Denied: Constitutional Scholar Suspended for Months over Tweet

NCLA’s President and General Counsel Mark Chenoweth chats with Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute.

After 15 years at the Cato Institute, Shapiro was set to start new position as a Senior Lecturer at Georgetown University’s Center for the Constitution. But before he could even start, Shapiro found himself the victim of a vicious cancellation attempt from his enemies on the Left. For his sin, an innocuous if inartful tweet about a pending Supreme Court nomination, Shapiro was suspended by Georgetown and left in limbo for months.

Eventually, the dean of the law school issued a half-hearted, almost apologetic, pronouncement that Shapiro had not committed a fireable offense because he was not, at the time of the tweet, an employee of the university. But the university's statement left no doubt that any future wrongthink would be dealt with harshly. In a move both shocking and, on second thought, completely unsurprising, Shapiro shortly thereafter announced his intention to join the Manhattan Institute, rather than start at Georgetown.