The publisher of a white nationalist, anti-immigration website was a guest in the home of President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow.
Kudlow told The Washington Post he did not know about Peter Brimelow’s racist beliefs when he had him over to his house on Monday for his birthday party.
“If I had known this, we would never have invited him,” Kudlow told the publication. “I’m disappointed and saddened to hear about it.”
Brimelow is the founder of VDARE.com, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a website that “publishes works by white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others on the radical right.”
In 2016, Brimelow said he pushes to “publish a few writers I would regard as ‘white nationalist,’” the Post reported.
Just days earlier, White House speechwriter Darren Beattie was fired when it was revealed he had attended a white nationalist event with Brimelow in 2016. Beattie gave an “academic” talk at the event, he said in a statement.
Other members of Trump’s circle have made their ties to white supremacy known. Former adviser Steve Bannon, for instance, told audience members at a far-right gathering in France in May that they should embrace being called racists. And the president’s current White House senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, ran a “Terrorism Awareness Project” in college that worked to combat “the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country as it attempts to defend itself in a time of terror.”
Trump has expressed his own white nationalist beliefs. After a neo-Nazi allegedly killed one counterprotester and injured dozens more during a white supremacist rally last year in Charlottesville, Virginia, he said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the demonstration.
And in July, the president said he believes immigrants in Europe are causing the continent to lose its culture, directly echoing European white supremacists.