Today was probably just another normal day for Aaron M. Schlossberg, until it wasn’t. First, a video surfaced online of a white man berating a manager at a midtown Fresh Kitchen because two employees were speaking Spanish. After his racist meltdown went viral, people identified the man as Schlossberg, a lawyer who has been previously videotaped yelling at supporters of Palestinians.
Now, if you go to any of the online pages for Schlossberg’s law firm, you’ll see hundreds–if not thousands–of negative reviews, calling the man racist. That’s not all: People have begun playing with the listings themselves. On Google, if you search Schlossberg’s name on mobile, you’ll see that some have begun listing his firm under the “Mexican Restaurant” category. It seems people want to review his business as such, after he was angered by hearing two restaurant employees speak Spanish (the horror!). Ironically, Schlossberg’s business could actually take Mexican food orders, given that his firm’s website offers to schedule consultations en Español.
The online vigilantes didn’t just change his business’s category. They also swapped the image, changing it from a dapper photo of Schlossberg to a dog being hit in the face by a frisbee.
Similarly on Yelp, his firm is seeing a flurry of bad reviews. One new review proclaims Schlossberg is the “Worst lawyer of all times!” Another simply says “Poor customer service who does not represent well.” His business now has a one-star average.
Yelp now offers a disclaimer, explaining that the business “recently made waves in the news,” and the reviews that “appear to be motivated” by the recent events are bring scrubbed.
His Facebook page, too, is being inundated with angry posts and bad reviews.
All of this makes you think that perhaps hurling racist insults in public just isn’t worth it, although it’s not hard to imagine Schlossberg calling himself the victim now, since the liberal outrage machine has set its crosshairs on him. Still, if he really considered himself to be a pro-business, anti-immigration Republican, this is just the market doing its thing, right?
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