Media Receives Backlash for Smearing Trump’s Judicial Nominee

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.

"Nation states often have an ethnic, linguistic and cultural basis. But Ms. Maddow said Mr. Menashi is on the ‘fringe of racial thinking.' If Senators take her seriously, they will confirm how far they have drifted to the anti-Israel fringe," the editorial board writes.

But Maddow wasn't alone in distorting Menashi's past writings. CNN published an article titled, "Trump court pick denounced feminists, gay-rights groups and diversity efforts in 1990s, 2000s editorials."

The Wall Street Journal editorial board continued on how CNN took Menashi's college writings out of context.

Next came the spelunkers at CNN, which is outraged by Mr. Menashi's writings as a college student. He was editor of the Dartmouth Review and wrote for the paper regularly. A centerpiece of the hit is that Mr. Menashi in 2001 "accus[ed] a major LGBTQ group of exploiting the brutal murder of a gay student for political ends."

CNN doesn't mention that Mr. Menashi was building on the argument of Andrew Sullivan, the gay-marriage advocate, who had recently argued in the New Republic that the Human Rights Campaign was emphasizing the Matthew Shepard murder in its campaign for a federal hate-crimes law while ignoring a comparable slaying by two gay men in 1999. Mr. Menashi said identity politics leads to a tendency to place a differential value on human lives that should be resisted. He was right.

CNN further assails Mr. Menashi for having "defended a fraternity that threw a ‘ghetto party,' widely seen as racist" in 1998. Mr. Menashi is not accused of participating in the party, but rather for arguing that campus liberal monoculture pressures students to exaggerate harm from offensive speech.

Fox News also hit CNN for insinuating that Menashi defended sexual assault when he denounced the "Take Back the Night" marches.

Menashi's college article that discussed the women's "Take Back the Night" march did not defend sexual assault; rather, it cited the march as an example of instances on the Dartmouth campus that he said employ negative generalizations of men. In discussing how a magazine included Dartmouth among the "ten most antimale schools," Menashi claimed that the marches "charge the majority of male students with complicity in rape and sexual violence."

Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, denounced the misleading attacks on Menashi in a series of tweets.

"First the Democrats and their media allies smeared Steve Menashi with an anti-Semitic mischaracterization of his past scholarship, and now they are purposely distorting his college newspaper articles…the common theme of which is an intellectual and forceful indictment of political correctness and identity politics as divisive and destructive forces that are pulling the country apart," Severino tweeted. "These are the same types of smears Democrats have thrown at many highly qualified people nominated by the President to serve as federal judges including Amy Barrett, Neomi Rao, Brian Buescher, Ken Lee and, of course, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh – all of whom were confirmed."

Menashi is currently special assistant and associate counsel to President Trump. He previously worked in the Department of Education and taught law at George Mason University. His paternal grandparents were Iraqi Jews who lived in Baghdad and Tehran before moving to Israel.

The unanimous 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision basically shut down the idea of politicians suing for libel.
In 1964, “the media” was at the height of its propaganda power, with the maturation of TV (and the beginning of color TV). The conceit that “journalists are objective” sold best in the mid-to-late seventies. Ronald Reagan had to run into the teeth of it.
But, as became clear to me during the Carter Administration, “the media” was not objective then - and it is not objective now. The question is, “Why was that such an easy sell in the first place???” My answer is that it was the culmination of a massive self-serving propaganda campaign by all major journalism, acting as a cabal.
Anyone who reads " People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” - and who understands that all major journalism continuously “meets together,” virtually, via the wire services - has every reason to be extremely skeptical of any self-serving statement by journalists. Clearly, anyone who has been meeting, about business, on that kind of basis just has to have found a way to “conspire against the public” some time between the meeting’s inception before the Civil War, and the 1900s.
The conceit that “journalists are objective”:

cannot be true, because objectivity is not a state of being but an elusive goal which can only be approached via serious self-discipline. Anyone who allows another to assert objectivity for him is participating in a racket.

marks any journalists who claim it as cynical - in that journalists know that journalism is negative. They know perfectly well that they are on the lookout for bad news. And only a cynic could claim that “negativity is objectivity.”

incentivizes journalists to go along and get along, using unanimity as a dodge where actual disciplined search for truth is called for.

Preventing politicians from suing for libel does not affect “liberal" because journalism defines “liberal” as someone who goes along perfectly with them. It only affects conservatives, allowing “liberals” to have not only their own opinions but their own facts. Which is the very definition of PC. One difference between the the 1964 Warren Court and the 1988 Rhenquist Court which got Morrison v. Olson wrong by an 8-1 vote is, of course, that the Rhenquist Court had Antonin Scalia on it. The Warren Court, of course, did not - and it was unanimously rather than merely preponderantly wrong.
Republicans must sue for libel into the teeth of the Sullivan decision, and give the Roberts Court a shot at getting it right.

‘Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy’:
Trump Judicial Nominee Called Out for Law Review Article

by Jerry Lambe August 17th, 2019
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/ethnonationalism-and-liberal-democracy-trump-judicial-nominee-called-out-for-law-review-article/

MSNBC television host Rachel Maddow on Thursday called out one of Donald Trump’s most recent nominees for a lifetime appointment to a federal appeals court bench, accusing him of promoting “racial purity” in a 2010 law review article.

The article, titled “Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy,” was written by Second Circuit nominee Steven Menashi. It argues that “ethnonationalism remains a common and accepted feature of liberal democracy that is consistent with current state practice and international law.”

Menashi, who is currently a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Counsel to the President, previously served as Acting General Counsel at the Department of Education under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. He published the piece in 2010 in the University of Pennsylvania Journal for International Law (Volume 32, Issue 1, Page 57)

. The language in the piece is the sort of weighty verbiage expected in an academic article. “International law and practice confirm that a sovereign democratic government may represent a particular ethnonational community,” Menashi writes, using Israel as an example. “Far from being unique, the experience of Israel exemplifies the character of liberal democracy by highlighting its dependence on particularistic nation-states.”

An incredulous Maddow viewed the piece through the lens of white nationalism in America, even though the term “white” appears nowhere in it and the piece speaks harshly against the Nazis.

“Ethonationalism – ethnic nationalism – we have been talking about a lot in the country in recent weeks for obvious and terrible reasons about ‘white nationalism,’ which is the new branding that domestic terrorists are using in this country for ‘white supremacy,’” Maddow said before reading from the article.

Maddow describes the piece, which Menashi wrote to rebut accusations that Israel’s “particularistic identity—its desire to serve as a homeland for the Jewish people—contradicts principles of universalism and equality upon which liberal democracy supposedly rests,” as an “international tour of ethnonationalism through the ages.”

She then says that the article ends with a “war cry” galvanized by the idea that “definitely democracy cannot work unless the country is defined by a unifying race” (her words, not his).

She then read some of the article’s more polemical passages, said that the work constitutes academic argument that “you can’t really have a country that works if you’ve got all sorts of different people in it,” and concluded that it was a “highbrow argument for racial purity.”

In an email to the Daily Signal on Friday, Menashi disputed Maddow’s classification of his work.

“I take seriously the role of the United States as a nation of immigrants and of Israel as a home for the Jewish people, both of which are important because of suffering that has been caused by ethnic nationalism,” Menashi wrote.

Menashi added that his father was an Iraqi Jew born in Iran and his mother’s parents were Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union.

Writing for the National Review, attorney Ed Whelan argued that Maddow’s segment was rife with false claims and grossly distorted the article’s scope and purpose:

Menashi’s argument about national identity is clearly not about “racial purity” or a “unifying race.” Indeed, the fact that Israelis from Ethiopia are black makes it impossible to take seriously the claim that Menashi is making a case for “racial purity.” Menashi further states that it “is not even clear … that Israel’s national identity can even be described as ‘ethnic’” (in a narrow sense of that concept), as Israeli Jews come from “Argentina, Ethiopia, Germany, Morocco, Russia, and Yemen.”

Here is how the vile British rag, the Independent, falsifies this:

Trump nominates judge who argued countries are stronger if everyone is same ethnic group

Lawyer accused of promoting ‘highbrow argument for racial purity’

Chris Baynes
Saturday 17 August 2019
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-appeals-court-judge-nomination-ethnic-diversity-article-steven-menashi-racism-a9063371.html

A White House lawyer chosen by Donald Trump to serve on the federal appeals court previously argued countries were weakened by ethnic diversity.

Steven Menashi, the president’s nomination for the Court of Appeals Second Circuit, wrote in an academic journal that “ethnic ties provide the groundwork for social trust” and “solidarity underlying democratic polities rests in large part on ethnic identification”.

“Surely, it does not serve the cause of liberal democracy to ignore this reality,” he added in the 2010 article for the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law.

The passages resurfaced on social media following the announcement of Mr Menashi’s nomination on Wednesday and were later discussed on air by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who described them as “a highbrow argument for racial purity in the nation state”.

In the journal article, titled “Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy”, the lawyer says he aims to refute claims that “Israel’s particularistic identity — its desire to serve as a homeland for the Jewish people — contradicts principles of universalism and equality upon which liberal democracy supposedly rests”.

“This article, in contrast, argues that ethnonationalism remains a common and accepted feature of liberal democracy, consistent with current state practice and international law,” he writes.

Later, he adds: “Democratic self-government depends on national fellow-feeling: the capacity of citizens to identify with each other, to respect their competing political claims, and to trust that others will do the same.

“Ethnic ties provide the groundwork for social trust and political solidarity and, universalist aspirations notwithstanding, continue to do so. At the same time, social scientists have found that greater ethnic heterogeneity is associated with lower social trust.

“Ethnically heterogeneous societies exhibit less political and civic engagement, less effective governing institutions, and fewer public goods. The sociologist Robert Putnam has concluded that greater ethnic diversity weakens social solidarity, fosters social isolation, and inhibits social capital.”

Maddow described the article as “blood-curdling”, while the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Mr Trump to withdraw Mr Menashi’s nomination.

Robert McCaw, the council’s director of government affairs, called his appointment “unconscionable” at a time when “our nation confronts the growing threat of white supremacy and white nationalism”. He added: “American democracy is founded on the principle that our rich national diversity is to be celebrated and that we as a people are united by our shared experiences and principles, not by our race or ethnicity.”

Mr Menashi, former general counsel for the US Department of Education and currently a special assistant to the president, rejected claims he was advocating for racial purity and - apparently contradicting his article - acknowledged the dangers of ethnic nationalism.

Right-wing commentators also rallied to the lawyer’s defence and attacked Maddow, who some accused of an “antisemitic attack” without providing details to support the allegation.

“Rachel Maddow grossly distorts Menashi’s argument,” wrote Ed Whelan in National Review. He said Mr Menashi’s argument was is ”clearly not about racial purity” but instead “what makes a population regard itself as a nation, what gives rise to national self-consciousness”.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.