Luke Meyer, a regional field director working for Donald Trump's campaign in Pennsylvania since July, was fired last Friday by the state GOP following reporting by Politico that he hosts a white nationalist podcast under the pseudonym Alberto Barbarossa.
As Barbarossa, Meyer co-hosts "Alexandria" with Richard Spencer, who organized the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. On the podcast, Meyer has espoused the view that whites should reclaim America's demographic makeup.
“Why can’t we make New York, for example, white again? Why can’t we clear out and reclaim Miami?” Meyer asked while guest hosting a different podcast in June, according to Politico. “I’m not saying we need to be 100 percent homogeneous. I’m not saying we need to be North Korea or Japan or anything like that. A return to 80 percent, 90 percent white would probably be, probably the best we could hope for, to some degree.”
Meyer admitted he was Barbarossa when Politico confronted him with their reporting. “I am glad you pieced these little clues together like an antifa Nancy Drew,” he wrote to Politico contributor Amanda Moore, an extremism researcher. “It made me realize how draining it has been having to conceal my true thoughts for as long as I have.”
The Pennsylvania Republican Party told Politico that they had vetted him and did not find any connection with white nationalism at the time. “If we’d had any inkling about his hidden and despicable activity he would never have been hired, and the instant we learned of it he was fired,” a spokesperson said. “We have no place in our Party or nation for people with such shameful, hateful views.”
But even after his firing, Meyer struck a defiant tone.
“Like the hydra, you can cut off my head and hold it up for the world to see, but two more will quietly appear and be working in the shadows,” Meyer wrote to Moore. “Slating Trump to speak at [Madison Square Garden], putting ‘poisoning the blood’ in his speeches … In a few years, one of those groypers [white supremacists] might even quietly bring me back in, with a stern warning for me to ‘be more careful next time.'"
@salonofficial Let’s see how Fox News spins Trump’s recent comments about “German Generals.”
♬ original sound - Salon
Let's see how Fox News spins Trump's recent comments about "German Generals."
