First, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow took a turn smearing Trump judicial pick Steven Menashi as some kind of white nationalist. Now CNN's Andrew "KFILE" Kaczynski and Em Steck are digging into Menashi's college-newspaper articles at the Dartmouth Review to denounce him as -- gasp! -- a conservative:
A White House aide nominated by President Donald Trump for a federal appeals court seat has a history of denouncing women's marches against sexual assault, dismissing education about multicultural awareness and accusing a major LGBTQ group of exploiting the brutal murder of a gay student for political ends.
A KFILE tweet boiled it down: "Trump Court pick denounced feminists, gay-rights groups and diversity efforts in 1990s, 2000s editorials." Apparently, Team CNN considers it distressing and disqualifying for anyone to question feminists, "diversity efforts" and "gay-rights groups."
Kaczynski and Steck didn't "fact check" the Menashi writings they quoted. They merely implied they were somehow beyond the pale. Take, for example, the charge that the Human Rights Campaign exploited the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming for political ends. This would only seem unfair because everyone on the left exploited Shepard's murder for political ends, especially the liberal media.
Menashi noted that the HRC said nothing about the murder of 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising in Arkansas in the same time frame, a boy who was bound, gagged, and sodomized with objects by two gay men until he died of "positional asphyxiation." Once again, much of the "mainstream" media aerobically tried to ignore the Dirkhising story. The divergence in media coverage and "exploitation" was an eye-opening demonstration of the media's propaganda operations. Brent Bozell's column lays out the whole sorry scene.
As for "denouncing women's marches against sexual assault," Menashi wrote in 2000 about how Men's Health magazine at that time designated Dartmouth as one of the ten most "antimale" campuses in America. Menashi was actually criticizing broad accusations of sexual assault without evidence. Isn't CNN opposed to rape accusations without evidence? Or is that how they handled the Brett Kavanaugh nomination?
"'Take Back the Night' marches charge the majority of male students with complicity in rape and sexual violence (every man's a potential rapist, they say; it's part of the patriarchal culture)—not to mention the 'Frats Rape' accusation that's chalked on the sidewalks from time to time," Menashi wrote. "And while campus gynocentrists can throw around these accusations, there's no similar leeway for men."
And "dismissing education against multicultural awareness"? In one article CNN cited from 1998, Menashi discussed how Brown engaged in left-wing indoctrination during the student orientation process:
"Every fall at Brown University, newly-admitted minority students arrive on campus four days before their peers. They spend that time in Brown's 'Third World Training Program,' an intense seminar focusing on issues of race, class, gender, assimilation, and identity. When the rest of the student body arrives on campus, they are forced to watch a film depicting a conversation between a black man and a white man. At the conclusion of the film, the white man breaks down crying from guilt," wrote Menashi. "Next, the insidious part: the entire freshman class is divided into small groups and assigned a 'facilitator' to discuss race, class, and the rest. Naturally, those who participated in the Third World Training program are the most outspoken; they have just completed four days of instruction in PC orthodoxy."
If Menashi were a liberal, engaging articles like these would be called "journalism." But they're rigorous critiques of the Left, so they're disqualifying. Carrie Severino offered a powerful fact check on the CNN article at National Review.
