A Former Republican Operative With Ties To White Nationalists Has Been Publishing Opinion Pieces In
Source: BuzzFeed News
A Former Republican Operative With Ties To White Nationalists Has Been Publishing Opinion Pieces In The Wall Street Journal
Marcus Epstein, a former associate of Richard Spencer and a former contributor to white nationalist site VDare, has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Hill, and Forbes under a thinly veiled pen name.
Ryan Mac
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Joseph Bernstein
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on June 18, 2019, at 6:36 p.m. ET
A former Republican operative notorious for his connections to white nationalists has established himself as an opinion contributor for several national publications, including the Wall Street Journal, while writing under a thinly veiled pen name, BuzzFeed News has learned.
Marcus Epstein, who worked for former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo and founded a nativist political club with white nationalist Richard Spencer, has written more than a dozen opinion pieces for the Journal, the Hill, Forbes, US News and World Report, and the National Review over the past two years. His pieces, which mainly focus on the regulation of the technology industry, were published under the byline “Mark Epstein.”
In six different pieces for the Journal, Epstein is identified as an “antitrust attorney and freelance writer” and addresses topics including the supposed threat to conservative speech posed by Google and Facebook, and the ways regulation and antitrust might be used to ensure “viewpoint neutrality” and consumer protection, respectively. They make no mention of his past, which includes contributions to the white nationalist site VDare and charges that he assaulted a black woman, after racially abusing her, in 2007. (In 2008 in District of Columbia Superior Court, Epstein entered an Alford plea — a plea in which the defendant accepts the consequences of a guilty verdict without admitting guilt — after which the charges were dropped.)
The publication of Epstein’s pieces is the latest instance of the far-right, hyper-nationalist fringe becoming part of the mainstream conservative movement over the last decade. The Journal, which ran a piece from Epstein titled “Antitrust, Free Speech and Google” earlier this month, declined to say if it looked into his history before publishing his work.
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Read more: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/marcus-mark-epstein-white-nationalist-vdare-wall-street
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