A Donald Trump staffer who worked as a regional field director for the western Pennsylvania Republican party was fired on Friday after it was revealed that he was a white supremacist.
Politico reported it had identified Luke Meyer, 24, a Pennsylvania-based field staffer who worked for five months for the former president, as the online white nationalist who used the pseudonym Alberto Barbarossa.
Meyer reportedly co-hosts the Alexandria podcast with Richard Spencer, the organiser of the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and regularly shared racist views.
“Why can’t we make New York, for example, white again? Why can’t we clear out and reclaim Miami?” Barbarossa asked during a podcast recording in June.
“I’m not saying we need to be 100% homogeneous. I’m not saying we need to be North Korea or Japan or anything like that. A return to 80%, 90% white would probably be, probably the best we could hope for, to some degree.”
After being presented with evidence by Politico linking him to the Barbarossa alias, Meyer admitted the connection and confessed that he had been concealing his online identity from fellow members of Trump Force 47, the arm of the Trump campaign overseeing volunteer mobilisation efforts.
“I am glad you pieced these little clues together like an antifa Nancy Drew,” Meyer wrote in an email to Politico. “It made me realise how draining it has been having to conceal my true thoughts for as long as I have.”
Meyer was hired in June by the Pennsylvania Republican party, which fired him on Friday, in a move confirmed in a text message by the GOP to the Washington Post.
In an email to Politico, Meyer said: “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. Slating Trump to speak at [Madison Square Garden], putting ‘poisoning the blood’ in his speeches, setting up Odal runes at CPAC, etc. In a few years, one of those groypers [slang for white supremacists] might even quietly bring me back in, with a stern warning for me to ‘be more careful next time’.”
Neo-Nazi groups and the online far right are latching on to the anti-immigration rhetoric used by Trump’s campaign for the White House in an effort to recruit new supporters and spread their extremism to broader audiences.
