Ex-GOP staffer who racially assaulted black woman and wrote for white supremacist site VDare now writes for WSJ, Forbes

Meet Marcus Epstein, aka Mark Epstein.

Marcus Epstein is a former GOP operative, a former Richard Spencer associate, and once wrote for white nationalist site VDare. He also pled guilty to assaulting a Black woman and calling her the n-word. But as white nationalism goes mainstream, so has Epstein. Lately, he's been rehabbed as an opinion contributor to mainstream publications including Wall Street Journal, the Hill, and Forbes, under the pseudonym Mark Epstein.

As Ryan Mac and Joseph Bernstein at BuzzFeed News write, this is only the latest example of the Trump-aligned racists becoming part of the mainstream conservative movement over the last decade.

The Wall Street Journal just ran an Epstein piece titled Antitrust, Free Speech and Google earlier in June, but wouldn't tell Buzzfeed if Epstein's history was examined before the piece was published.

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.