President Trump’s top economic adviser Larry Kudlow invited the publisher of a website that features white nationalist writers to his birthday celebration last week, a new report says.
Peter Brimelow, who founded anti-immigration website Vdare.com in 1999, has provided a platform for white nationalists on his site. Although he has denied that he himself is a “white nationalist,” he told the Harvard Crimson in 2016 that Vdare.com does “certainly publish a few writers I would regard as ‘white nationalist’ in that they stand up for whites just as Zionists, black nationalists do for Jews, blacks, etc.”
Kudlow said that he has known Brimelow for “forever,” but said he wouldn’t have extended an invite to Brimelow for his birthday celebration had he known Brimelow’s history of publishing white nationalists.
“If I had known this, we would never have invited him,” Kudlow said, according to the Washington Post. “I’m disappointed and saddened to hear about it.”
Kudlow noted that Brimelow has attended his “dinner parties for years,” although “none of this other stuff has ever come up.”
He also said that Brimelow’s perspective on immigration and race is “a side of Peter that I don’t know and I totally, utterly disagree with that point of view and have my whole life. I’m a civil rights Republican.”
A White House spokesperson was not available to comment to the Post, and Brimelow refused to be interviewed over the phone. He also did not immediately respond to emailed questions.
The report comes after the one-year anniversary of the Aug. 12, 2017, Unite the Right rally, which was organized to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and sparked a national conversation about what to do with Confederate monuments around the country.
The protest resulted in the death of counterprotester Heather Heyer, who died after a self-identified neo-Nazi drove a vehicle into a crowd. Virginia State Police Troopers Lt. H. Jay Cullen III and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates were also killed in a helicopter crash while policing the event. A second rally, held in Washington, D.C., this year, drew only a few dozen protesters.
