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A Senate hearing for an extremist judicial nominee doesn’t go well

The day after Trump nominated Steven Menashi to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Rachel Maddow did an entire segment on an article he wrote in 2010 that raised questions about whether Trump had nominated a white nationalist to a lifetime appointment on the circuit court. Maddow was taken to task by conservative media, but then a week later, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck dug a bit deeper into Menashi’s past.

Steven Menashi, a Stanford-trained lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, wrote dozens of editorials and blog posts in the late 1990s and early 2000s for a number of college and professional publications decrying “leftist multiculturalism” and “PC orthodoxy.” He complained about “gynocentrists,” wrote that the Human Rights Campaign “incessantly exploited the slaying of Matthew Shepard for both financial and political benefit” and argued that a Dartmouth fraternity that held a “ghetto party” wasn’t being racist.

He attacked academic multiculturalism as “thoroughly bankrupt” and, in 2002, defended then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi amid a worldwide controversy over comments asserting the superiority of Western civilization over Islamic culture — for which Berlusconi himself ultimately apologized.

View the complete September 20 article by Nancy LeTourneau from Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website her.

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