President Donald Trump’s judicial nominee for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has been subject to a media smear campaign which has distorted his past writings and labeled him a white nationalist, provoking backlash from experts.
Earlier this month, MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow attacked Steven Menashi, Trump’s nominee for the open seat on the circuit court, for a 2010 law review article he wrote. Maddow characterized the article, titled “Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy,” as a “high-brow argument for racial purity” arguing that democratic nations couldn’t function unless they were unified by race.
“Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about? Oh yes you are,” Maddow said. She added that the article “ends with this sort of war cry about how a country can’t work, how definitely democracy can’t work unless the country is defined by a unifying race.”
Ed Whelan in National Review explains that Menashi’s argument was about national identity and not about “racial purity.” Menashi argued, quoting John Stuart Mill, that national identity requires a people “united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others, which make them cooperate with each other more willingly than with other people, [and] desire to be under the same government.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board slammed Maddow for her smears of Menashi. – READ MORE