Trump's Deputy Communications Director is Friends with a White Nationalist

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported on October 21, 2020, that Deputy White House Communications Director Julia Hahn attended a white nationalist writer’s workshop and was friendly with Peter Brimelow, a white nationalist who runs the hate site VDARE.

VDARE has hosted writing from notorious antisemites, like Kevin MacDonald. Hahn is far from Brimelow’s only link to Trump’s Republican Party: Former White House staffer and congressional aide Darren Beattie spoke at an extremist conference alongside Brimelow, and White House Senior Economic Advisor Larry Kudlow and Brimelow are long-time friends. In addition, Gavin Wax, the Chair of the Association of Young Republican Clubs has also granted an interview to VDARE.

Hahn was as protégée Steve Bannon, and came to the White House after working for Breitbart News. While at Breitbart, Hahn wrote positively of Paul Nehlen — a white supremacist and antisemite who ran for Congress as a Republican primary candidate in 2016 and 2018 — in dozens of articles. Hahn is not the only Trump staffer to come from far-right media. Sonny Joy Nelson, who does strategic communications for the Trump 2020 campaign, wrote for Big League Politics, a far-right news outlet that, in January of 2020, defended the Proud Boys.

Like Stephen Miller, another white nationalist White House staffer with whom Hahn is close, Hahn is Jewish. And as was the case with Stephen Miller, the White House uses this fact in an attempt to deflect from the individuals’ — and the administration’s — support for white nationalism. In response to inquiries from SPLC, the White House commented: “Julia Hahn rejects and condemns racism and hatred in all forms, and, as a Jewish American, finds bigotry of any kind to be truly abhorrent.”

Simply being Jewish, it is important to note, does not inoculate someone from being a white nationalist or promoting antisemitism. Miller and Hahn are both proof of that.