Racist Lawyer Aaron Schlossberg Did This All to Himself
Earlier this week, Aaron Schlossberg delayed his enjoyment of a Fresh Kitchen sandwich for a few moments in order to become the latest previously-unremarkable person to become famous for being a despicable racist. “Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English,” the attorney shouts at a manager who deserves some kind of award for his restraint. "My guess is they're not documented, so my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country." Pointing to individual staffers, he continues. "If they have the balls to come here, and live off of my money—I pay for their welfare, I pay for their ability to be here—the least they can do is speak English."
Schlossberg, it turns out, was a vile person long before he became a semi-permanent fixture of your Facebook feed, and it's unsettling to learn that someone so repulsive accomplished as much as he did in polite society without being cast out of it. In 2016, a man posted footage of Schlossberg calling him a "dirty fucking foreigner" after the two apparently bumped in to one another on the street. In 2017, Schlossberg can be seen at cursing and giving the finger to ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews who were demonstrating in support of a speech given by American Muslim activist Linda Sarsour. (Schlossberg, who says in the video that he is Jewish, tells the counterprotesters that they are not.) Aaron Schlossberg has been a bigot. This time, it went viral.
Today, Schlossberg's life is in ruins. Thousands of one-star reviews materialized on his Manhattan law firm's Yelp page, and whichever poor soul runs the American Bar Association's Twitter account is begging people to stop demanding that it "discipline" him. (The ABA is a voluntary professional organization, and it has no authority to do so.) His landlord is terminating his office lease. Tabloid reporters hounded him on the street, undeterred by the giant umbrella he used in an attempt to shield his face.
In less than 24 hours, Aaron Schlossberg went from middling corporate attorney to someone who might never land a client again. But the free speech rights that every American enjoys do not protect guys like him from the common-sense principle that actions have consequences, some of which may include public opprobrium. This dynamic is an integral part of living in a free-speech society—if not the First Amendment itself, then the social contract built atop its foundation. Schlossberg can be as racist as he wants. (All available evidence indicates that he was!) He has no legitimate complaint when the marketplace of ideas registers its resounding disapproval.
There is also a meaningful distinction to be made between Schlossberg's assertion that employees "should" be speaking English—a racist belief to which he is entitled nonetheless—and his promise to call ICE to have the employees deported, despite possessing no proof that they are "not documented," and relying only on his pernicious stereotypes about people who speak Spanish for his "guess." This is not an unpopular political opinion being subjected to the heckler's veto. It is a direct threat to the safety of men and women who are trying to do their jobs. Just as it is hard to tut-tut at reporters for publicly harassing someone who is famous for harassing in public, it is difficult to bemoan crowdsourced attacks on Schlossberg's livelihood when his notoriety stems from doing the same thing.
At a high level, there are hard, complex questions to ponder about the wisdom of enabling people to form insta-mobs on Twitter that go about their tasks with ruthless efficiency. Reliance on this unregulated system has resulted in some deeply painful failures. Schlossberg, a white-collar white guy with an eponymous law practice in America's most populous city, wasn't hard to identify. But remember when well-meaning Internet detectives briefly solved the Boston Marathon bombings, pointing the finger at Sunil Tripathi, a 19-year-old missing college student? Curious reporters and angry vigilantes hounded his family, and a Facebook group dedicated to finding him was inundated with messages calling him a terrorist. In a matter of hours, his reputation was in tatters.
Sunil Tripathi wasn't behind the bombings, though. A week later, authorities found his body in a river. He had died by suicide a month before the attacks took place. The same tools that were used to expose Schlossberg subjected the family of a missing teenager to an additional, unimaginable level of grief. As social media networks grow more powerful and more ubiquitous, there will be legitimate causes for concern about how easy it is serve a type of street justice that cannot be undone, and for which no individuals can be held responsible.
Schlossberg's case isn't one of them. His conduct is reprehensible, and allowing it to go unchecked emboldens the bigots among us who, if they knew of the scorn and punishment that might await them, would be less likely to act on their racist beliefs in ways that put others in danger. If not for the existence of social media, he would be free today to continue what appears to be a longstanding habit of terrorizing minorities—in public!—without fear of repercussions. The Internet didn't ruin Aaron Schlossberg's life. Aaron Schlossberg did. The Internet just shone a light on who he already was.
