William Jacobson heads up the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School. But his real passion is running his blog, Legal Insurrection, which provides a what can best be called “legalish” spins on the standard conspiracy theories and white persecution complex tropes of the modern conservative movement. The front page of the site right now features talk about “race-hustlers” and a Tucker Carlson quote about “bloodguilt” to give you a sense of the sandbox they’re playing lawyers in.
But Jacobson’s latest post expresses his deep concern that there’s a “movement” underway at Cornell to get him fired.
To support his theory, he cites a number of emails that have come in from alumni complaining about seeing the Cornell name attached to articles the Jacobson wrote last week pitching “accurately detail[ing] the history of how the Black Lives Matters Movement started,” by which he means “peddling conspiracy theories about a widespread anti-capitalist movement using ‘fraudulent narratives’ about police killings to generate support.” Does it also tag George Soros as the secretly bankrolling this “movement”? Oh, you bet it does!
Earlier this week, other members of the Cornell Clinical Law Faculty drafted an op-ed generally criticizing Ivy League professors using that cachet to perpetuate racist tropes. Specifically, the letter calls out the use of the racially loaded term “wilding,” a byproduct of the Central Park Five case — where, we all remember, five minority kids were wrongly convicted of a crime — which directly addresses Jacobson, who used the term in a recent headline.
None of the 21 signatories, some of whom I’d worked closely with for over a decade and who I considered friends, had the common decency to approach me with any concerns. Instead they ran to the Cornell Sun while virtue signaling to students behind the scenes that this was a denunciation of me. Such is the political environment we live in now at CLS.
Yeah… it might be the “political environment we live in now at CLS,” or it might just be that you unabashedly manage a website replete with racist rhetoric and these professors are genuinely sick of your crap and how it impacts the school? Sometimes it’s not a George Soros masterminded Bolshevik conspiracy — sometimes it’s just you.
Jacobson notes that he’s never been accused of discrimination and that may well be true, but also completely misses the point. In the pursuit of equality, that’s a floor not a ceiling. There are numerous ways to intimidate and ostracize black people and other minorities that don’t require active discrimination. Indeed, the picture attached to the article is a selfie of him performatively going down to a kneeling rally in order to mockingly stand and that’s the kind of garbage — a professor showing off how little he cares about a man’s death because he thinks it’s all part of some widespread plot against “America” as he imagines it — that gets faculty and students alike fed up. This isn’t academic freedom, it’s just disrespectful trolling.
So it’s no surprise that he demands the troll’s satisfaction: a “debate.” Which is to say less a debate than an exercise in empty sophistry. Ben Shapiro is all about these little forays into controversy theater where the whole point is to show a phony “both sides” equivalency by packing the room with enough supporters to make it all seem like an earnest discussion or to set up schoolyard “chicken” taunts if the other side wises up to the rouse. No one should ever take this bait.
BLSA and other groups are working on their own effort against me. Based on documents I’ve seen, there was consideration of demanding my firing, but it appears to have moved away from that not because they don’t want me fired, but “because calling for his firing would only draw more attention to his blog and bolster his platform, and we do not want to give him that satisfaction.” The plan is to call for “the law school to unequivocally denounce his rhetoric, acknowledge the harm caused by subjecting students to his racist pedagogy, and critically examine the views of the people they employ as professors of the law.” They plan to circulate the petition to the law school community and to “inform incoming students” of the situation.
They aren’t calling for Jacobson to be fired? Dude, that’s a win for you.
I have little doubt that many students will sign because there is no choice in this environment. BLSA has announced on its Facebook page that “Silence Is Violence.” Who would refuse to sign when failure to sign would be deemed an act of violence?
A theme is becoming rapidly apparent. At every turn the critics aren’t “real.” The professors signing the op-ed are just “virtue signaling.” The people signing the petitions are just bowing to peer pressure. The criticism is never genuine, but the product of the disingenuousness of others. It’s a common theme in conservative jeremiads borne of their refusal to accept that the free market of ideas is burying their ideology, giving rise to the foundational conviction that most of their critics can’t really disagree with them and must be cynical actors playing a part. If it weren’t happening to adherents of such a toxic philosophy, it would be a condition worthy of profound pity.
But no, Occam’s Razor still holds sway — they’re just sick of your crap.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.