If you accept, as Joshua Green argues in his splendid , and as events subsequent to the election have more than borne out, without Steve Bannon, it is unlikely that we would have a President* Trump to be embarrassed by in front of the entire 21st Century. And what is also clear is that, without Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the reactionary New York gozillionnaires, Bannon would be back on Giedi Prime with the rest of the Harkonnens.

At the moment, Robert Mercer is being sued by his former partner in Renaissance Technologies, a guy named David Magerman, who is not quite as enthusiastic about the Trump presidency* as the Mercers are. Documents are becoming public and, as Vanity Fair reports, some of those documents are well off the boy-howdy scale of revelatory.

In court papers filed on Friday, Magerman argues that following a pair of phone conversations in which Mercer expressed arguably racist opinions, Magerman felt obliged to inform the press about his boss’s viewpoints—and that he received verbal assurance by Renaissance C.O.O. Mark Silber that the statements he intended to make were “permissible under company policy.” Those racist opinions, according to Magerman, included comments such as: a) The United States began to go in the wrong direction after the passage of the Civl Rights Act in the 1960s; b) African Americans were doing fine in the late-1950s and early-1960s before the Civil Rights Act; c) The Civil Rights Act “infantilized” African Americas by making them dependent on government and removing any incentive to work;d) The only racist people remaining in the United States are black; and e) White people have no racial animus toward African Americans anymore, and if there is any, is it not something that the government should be concerned with.

The best part of the filing, at least to us, was that when Magerman “point[ed] out that society was segregated before the Civil Rights Act and African Americans were required to use separate and inferior schools, water fountains, and other everyday services and items,” Mercer allegedly responded that “those issues were not important.” In a subsequent phone conversation (the “white supremacist” one), Magerman claimed Mercer initially “disputed that he had said such things, although he did not actually deny saying them” and “in the course of rehashing the conversation . . . repeated many of these same views, and even cited research that allegedly supported his opinion that the Civil Rights Act harmed African Americans economically.” (A spokesman for Renaissance declined to comment.)

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American politics long has been afflicted with wingnut plutocrats; after all, back in 1958, when he invited 11 men of considerable net worth to Indiana to help him found the John Birch Society, Robert Welch didn't hire out of the Yellow Pages. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David, was one of them. So was Robert Stoddard, the president of the Wyman Gordon Company and owner of my two hometown newspapers. Certainly, the Kochs have held true to the family politics. And the Mercers represent the next generation of that same peculiar conservative fauna. The JBS believed much the same things about civil rights legislation that, according to Magerman, Robert Mercer does.

How you can believe that in 2017 is another question entirely. We should keep an eye on this case, if only as a bulwark against any claims that the election of the 45th president* was not energized primarily by the racist manifestation of an ancient national Id.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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