Larry Kudlow And His Racist Friend
Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding!
Donald Trump's top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, has to be pretty happy about Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen right now. They ate up all the news space yesterday, almost at the very moment the Washington Post published a story about how the publisher of a white supremacist website was a guest at a weekend party hosted by Kudlow. Some guys have all the luck, huh?
Kudlow's publisher pal, Peter Brimelow, is the founder of the rightwing anti-immigrant site VDare.com, which publishes a whole bunch of stuff by white nationalists. It's where John Derbyshire landed after National Review shitcanned him for being too racist for the pages of that august journal -- which then continued to run Kevin Williamson's tales of being an oppressed white guy. Brimelow denies that the label "white nationalist" should apply to him while muttering there's nothing wrong with that anyway, sez the Washington Post's Robert Costa:
[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."
So yes, he's an original thinkerer, too! Brimelow, who's 70, used to be a "respectable" conservative who wrote at National Review too, at least until 1999 when he founded VDare, where he could invite in howling anti-immigration writers who wouldn't be constrained by having to limit their white nationalism to dogwhistling.
Kudlow, Costa makes clear, insists he had no idea that this old friend of his had such despicable views, and that if he had known about them, he never would have invited Brimelow to the birthday party he threw for himself.
Kudlow said Tuesday that Brimelow was a guest at his birthday party at his Connecticut home and is 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."
This led to some discussion in the Wonkette Sekrit Chatcave: What the hell is a "civil rights Republican," anyway? It could be a Republican who likes civil rights, like Nelson Rockefeller in the early '60s. Today, it's probably a Republican who's a fucking liar and insists MLK was denouncing affirmative action when he said that "content of their character" line.
VDare is named after Virginia Dare, the first English babby borned on the North American continent (in the doomed Roanoke colony in 1587). She never really asked to become a heroic figure to White Power Rangers, but as Costa notes, some goons think she's the perfect avatar for ending the immigration of nonwhites:
The British-born Brimelow has written that Dare, who was white, is a reminder of the "very specific cultural origins of America at a time when mass nontraditional immigration is threatening to swamp it."
Because nothing says keep America pure like an anchor baby born to people who just showed up on an already inhabited continent and decided to take it from the natives. Brimelow has been quite overt in fretting about the white ethnic majority, going back as far as his National Review days. In 1995, Brimelow wrote a book with the charming title Alien Nation (no, not the sci-fi cop movie), in which he explained that "certain ethnic cultures are more crime-prone than others," among other deep insights.
Kudlow added Brimelow has been "coming to my dinner parties for years" but told Costa that "none of this other stuff has ever come up." Because why would it? Rich white conservatives don't need to talk about "this other stuff," and Brimelow, knowing Kudlow might disagree, was simply too much the gentleman to share the Fourteen Words with him at any of his parties. Kudlow, Costa notes, is actually a fairly traditional Bush-style neocon on immigration, and in 2014 celebrated the prospect of comprehensive immigration reform.
The party, as it turned out, came the day after the White House finally shitcanned speechwriter Darren Beattie after the press noticed Beattie had given a talk at the 2016 "H.L. Mencken Club conference," a cheerful little white nationalist event that had also featured John Derbyshire and, of course, Peter Brimelow. Previous iterations of the conference had included Richard Spencer -- it's not exactly a gathering of Rotarians. Kudlow had no idea that Beattie had been fired or why.
Beattie is apparently feeling very badly treated just for speaking at a conference held by racists because after all, his own talk, on "The Intelligentsia and the Right," wasn't racist -- he merely delivered it to racists, and isn't guilt by association like McCarthyism? (Not that McCarthy was wrong.)
Brimelow, for his part, was quite outraged on Beattie's behalf, because heavens, he isn't a white nationalist -- he only hires white nationalists to write for him:
"Disgraceful that the Trump White House would fire Darren Beattie just for speaking at the same conference as me, even apart from fact I'm not a 'white nationalist'," Brimelow tweeted Sunday.
Brimelow's Vdare.com then tweeted minutes later that it "will publish anyone critical of immigration disaster, but that certainly does include people who think whites have rights, because they do . . . for now."
For his part, Brimelow turned down the chance to have a phone interview with Costa, but issued a statement saying he and Kudlow had been friends for 40 years and that the two had "agreed to disagree on immigration long ago." Later Tuesday, Brimelow took to Twitter to whine, "Apparently we're not supposed to have personal friends anymore. Who knew."
Guy. They Might Be Giants went over that a good nine years before you even started your little white-panic website. Racism is exactly where the party ends.
Has anyone started a gofundme thingie so this Brimelov can get a haircut? Or at least a perm?
Is that the illegal Iowan's court appointed attorney?