President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser hosted a well-known publisher of white nationalist material at his house for own his birthday party over the weekend, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Turns out, they’re old friends, and the publisher was an invited guest.
Peter Brimelow, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told the Post, has been “coming to my dinner parties for years.”
Kudlow told the Post: “None of this other stuff has ever come up.”
Brimelow, perhaps contradicting the White House adviser, told the Post of Kudlow: “We agreed to disagree on immigration long ago.” Kudlow in the past has called himself a “longtime supporter of [immigration] reform,” the Post noted.
“If I had known this, we would never have invited him,” Kudlow told the paper. “I’m disappointed and saddened to hear about it.”
In 1999, Brimelow founded the well-known anti-immigration website Vdare.com. The website was named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas.
Brimelow has acknowledged the website does “certainly publish a few writers I would regard as ‘white nationalist,’” the Post noted.
Last week, a White House speechwriter was fired after CNN revealed he spoke at a conference in late 2016 with Brimelow and other white nationalists.
Kudlow told the Post he’s known Brimelow “forever.”
The White House did not comment on the story, the Post said, instead pointing the paper to its own interview with the White House adviser. Kudlow, asked how he would explain the affiliation to his boss, the President, said: “Just the way I explained it now, hiding nothing.”
Apparently we're not supposed to have personal friends anymore. Who knew https://t.co/0WhD709gNZ
— Peter Brimelow (@peterbrimelow) August 21, 2018
“Adolf and Eva are just charming people. I’ve known them forever. I’m shocked and saddened to hear that they’ve been involved, however tangentially, in some activities with which I don’t necessarily agree.”
Feature. Not a bug.
Of course, the most embarrassing part was when the drapes caught on fire from one of the tiki torches.
Too bad it wasn’t the sheets.
“In fact, here’s a photo of my guests singing Happy Birthday to me around the piano.”