President Joe Biden’s nominee to fill a vacancy on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals is a longtime diversity trainer who has argued for curtailing the First Amendment and conducted training sessions that say "microaggressions" can "kill you."
Now an associate justice on the Connecticut State Supreme Court, Maria Araujo Kahn suggested in a 2020 opinion that courts should criminalize speech that offends "oppressed groups." Since 2013, she has also delivered at least a dozen diversity trainings and presentations to lawyers across the country, with titles like "Cultural Competence, Implicit Association and Racial Anxiety," according to her Senate Judiciary Questionnaire.
To prepare for one of those trainings, offered to graduates of Fordham Law School, participants were instructed to watch an animated video, "How Microaggressions Are Like Mosquito Bites," that depicts a man-sized mosquito telling a dark-hued college student to "try a less challenging major" and then sucking him dry.
