The publisher of a website that serves as a platform for white nationalism was a guest last weekend at the home of President Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow.
Peter Brimelow attended the gathering, a birthday bash for Kudlow, one day after a White House speechwriter was
dismissed in the wake of revelations that he had spoken alongside Brimelow on a 2016 panel.
Brimelow, 70, was once a well-connected figure in mainstream conservative circles, writing for Dow Jones and National Review. But over the past two decades, he has become a zealous promoter of white-identity politics on Vdare.com, the anti-immigration website that he founded in 1999.
While Brimelow has long personally rejected the label of “white nationalist,” he
acknowledged to the Harvard Crimson in 2016 that his website 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 Tuesday that Brimelow was an invited guest to his birthday party at his Connecticut home and has been someone he has known “forever,” going back to their work in financial journalism. Kudlow expressed regret when he was described details of Brimelow’s promotion of white nationalists on Vdare.com.
“If I had known this, we would never have invited him,” Kudlow said. “I’m disappointed and saddened to hear about it.”
Kudlow said that Brimelow’s views on immigration and race are “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.”