Berkeley law school fails at education, let’s free-speech opponents embrace leftist anti-Semitism
We all know the facts: Berkeley law student Emma C. Warren, now a law professor at the University of California Davis, recently found herself in hot water after sharing a tweet from a conservative commentator that showed her drawing a “Hitler mustache” on her body.
For those who don’t know, a Hitler mustache is just the most extreme incarnation of a popular meme. A Hitler mustache — also referred to as a Hitler “mug” — is a head-and-beak thing, with the shape of the face of a Nazi leader, based on the image that the character Adolf Hitler’s mustache in the infamous book “Mein Kampf.”
In addition to sharing the tweet on Facebook, Warren’s response was short: “What’s next, a Nazi death cap?”
It didn’t take long for a tweetstorm to emerge that was quite literal and figurative: anti-Semites, racists, and other bigoted people came out to make their disapproval of Warren’s “speech” known.
As a leftist, I find it hard not to cringe with delight when conservatives try to make Jews the scapegoat for all that seems to get under their skin about the First Amendment. As a law professor who happens to be Jewish, how do I react when I see a conservative like James Poulos use a meme in such a cavalier fashion?
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The only appropriate reaction is to ignore such attempts at bigotry. In other words, to ignore the whole thing.
I understand their desire to create a platform for their ideas. The freedom of speech is a crucial part of the idea of liberty. And yet, when I see the kind of reaction to a joke about Hitler’s mustache, it makes me smile because it reminds me of just how much our society is being