But if you want evidence that unjust delegimitization is happening as well, consider that in the very same period that the email exposé appeared, a succession of mainstream media outlets served up bogus accusations of racism against prominent and not-so-prominent conservatives.
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First Rachel Maddow’s show ran a segment accusing a judicial nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Steven Menashi (an old friend, full disclosure), of highbrow white supremacy for a 2010 law review essay arguing that Israel’s status as a Jewish homeland is normal rather than dangerously illiberal, because liberal democracies the world over often have similar ethnic identities and foundations. (The Maddow segment neither mentioned that Menashi is Jewish nor that Israel was his primary subject.)
Then The Washington Post published an op-ed attacking J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” (also my friend, full disclosure), as a racist for a speech in which he worried about America’s plunging birthrate. In that case The Post had to run a correction, not least because one of the Vance speeches cited in the essay specifically attacked Republicans for being insufficiently sympathetic to … African-American single mothers.
Then a couple of days later The Post published a peculiar essay by Eve Fairbanks, a usually judicious liberal writer, accusing a group of mostly anti-Trump conservatives and centrists (including, full disclosure, my colleague Bari Weiss) of somehow adopting the rhetoric of Confederates and slaveholders when they argue that left-wing orthodoxies in the intelligentsia are oppressively stifling debate.
And then, just Tuesday morning, Bloomberg Law published a hit piece on an obscure Labor Department appointee, Leif Olson (fullest disclosure: I had never heard of him before), which alleged that he had posted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Facebook. Olson was forced to resign before it became apparent that the post in question was mocking white supremacists and anti-Semites, the reporter having apparently failed to recognize crushingly obvious sarcasm in his haste to shame a bigot.
I’m not interested in using this sequence of smears to invite pity for the plight of conservatives in the age of Trump. Olson deserves an apology and reinstatement because of the brazen absurdity of the Bloomberg Law piece, but generally prominent authors and journalists and judicial nominees have to live with a certain rough-and-tumble, and avoid claiming persecution unless there’s a literal fatwa on their heads.