On Wednesday, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was caught on camera at a Fresh Kitchen deli insulting workers for speaking Spanish to customers and threatening to call ICE on them. He also told a bystander to stop eating sandwiches. Filled with white pride and the hubris of a customer who believes he’s always right, this doofus had the nerve—in the middle of Manhattan—to call the U.S. “his country” and demand fealty from immigrants.

The New York Post wrote about the fallout from the incident. Schlossberg’s Madison Avenue workspace kicked him out, and he might get reprimanded by the New York court system. The piece is full of quotes from New Yorkers being very New York about the whole thing, and it’s very good.

Reporters from the Post and NBC have been trying to get the racist asshole to stand by the cowardice of his convictions on their cameras, but he keeps running away from them. It is funny to watch him run:

Here he is, like a bigoted turtle trying to retreat into his shell:

When NBC tried catching up with him, they found him wearing that stupid beanie. He sprints for about half a block and then looks back to see if the camera is still watching him. He then begins running backwards, extremely awkwardly, for reasons known only to him:

I’ve been watching these videos and laughing over the last few hours to brighten however briefly the darkness that surrounds us always, but then some real ~free thinkers~ on Twitter started trying to make me feel bad about it! Here’s Julia Ioffe implying that people who ridicule Schlossberg and who celebrate the consequences to his actions are really just hypocritical crypto-authoritarians:

As you might expect, a vicious Twitter mob has already assembled to roll its eyes and remind Ioffe that reframing racist threats of deportation and harassment as a mere “disagreement” amounts to a pretty egregious act of minimization.

Yes, paparazzi can be vile. But they do go away if you answer their questions. And if you have the courage to yell hateful shit at workers while they’re making your sandwich, then you should have the courage to look into the camera and yell the same racist shit. Exercise some of that free speech baby! Moreover, nobody has a right to a fancy workspace on Madison Ave. If a club doesn’t want to associate with you, they can kick you out. Will Schlossberg lose his license to practice law? A professor of legal ethics at NYU says he won’t.

We don’t need to be chastened for welcoming some relatively small consequences to some pretty outrageous behavior. This fucking narc isn’t getting unfairly maligned for telling a bad joke or slipping up and saying something racist. He threatened to invoke the power of the state to deport people—to completely disrupt their lives, to separate them from their family and friends—because he overheard them speaking another language at their jobs. The only person who can stoop that level of cruelty and get away scott free is the President of the United States of America.

Rich Smith is The Stranger's former News Editor. He writes about politics, books, and performance. You can read his poems at www.richsmithpoetry.com