Bolton wasn’t just a part of Gatestone. He was the head of it for five years. Five years that brought such reasonable material as claiming that Somali refugees had turned Sweden into the rape capital of Europe. The truth is that the listed rate of rape in Sweden has been far higher than other countries since it began publishing statistics in 1996 for three reasons: Sweden reports all forms of sexual assault together, it reports on incidents rather than convictions, and it reports on the count of incidents, not victims. The introduction of Somali refugees had nothing to do with it. Which is definitely not the impression generated by the Gatestone report, which dismisses the “feminist myth” that rape often comes from a pattern of domestic abuse, and instead loops back to 1975 to claim that rates for a “pure” Swedish population were much lower.

Gatestone isn’t just providing the Russia media with racist, anti-immigrant talking points. It’s also bringing Russia’s talking points to the west.

Alina Polyakova, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies far-right populism and disinformation campaigns in the European Union, said Gatestone is “putting out content that was clearly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and was echoing some of the Russian disinformation propaganda” being spread by internet trolls and on social media.

The information put forward by Gatestone was often played up by Russian bots and trolls. Meanwhile, Gatestone repeated Russian memes to provide the alt-Right with “research” that confirmed their racist fears and gave them “proof” that immigrants, particularly Muslims, were violent. All of it was designed to feed the demand for anti-immigrant “news” to feed both the anti-immigrant positions of Donald Trump and the Russian government.

And it wasn’t just Trump feeding off the hate being generated by Bolton.

Some of the group’s work was widely distributed, including a claim about Muslim-controlled “no-go zones” in France that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz cited in an op-ed during the 2016 Republican presidential primary campaign.

John Bolton’s new position at the White House is less of an acknowledgement of his international knowledge, and more of a thank you for the big dollops of critical hate he provided for the Trump campaign.