Given his lofty position in the White House, it’s bizarre that Larry Kudlow doesn’t seem to know an old friend of his is one of America’s top white nationalist publishers. Photo: Alex Edelman/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On Monday, it became known that White House speechwriter Darren Beattie was recently fired for appearing on a panel with white nationalist publisher Peter Brimelow.

Then on Tuesday, the Washington Post’s Robert Costa reported that the self-same notorious white nationalist publisher attended the birthday party last weekend of the president’s top economic advisor, Larry Kudlow.

Brimelow is best known as the founder and publisher of vdare.com, a poisonous anti-immigrant website that frequently indulges in explicit white racial appeals and hosts pariahs like John Derbyshire (fired by National Review in 2012 for a “nasty and indefensible” piece about African-Americans). VDare is infamous, as evidenced by this news from last year:

The Hilton Tucson El Conquistador golf resort said it will no longer host a March 2018 “immigration conference” for VDare, a publication that routinely publishes stories bylined by white nationalists, becoming the third venue this year to back out of holding the site’s planned conference.

Though Brimelow denies that his publication espouses white nationalist ideas, the author of “Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster” shares white nationalists’ concerns about non-whites taking over the country; routinely attends white nationalist events; and hosts articles with headlines like “One Problem With These Hispanic Immigrants Is Their Disgusting Behavior” on VDare.

The site was even described as “racist” by a Breitbart News editor in an explosive BuzzFeed exposé on Breitbart’s successful efforts to smooth out white nationalist ideas for publication on its own site.

So Brimelow’s politics are hardly a secret. Yet Kudlow pled innocence to Costa:

Kudlow said Tuesday that Brimelow was an invited guest to his birthday party at his Connecticut home and has been someone he has known “forever,” going back to their work in financial journalism. Kudlow expressed regret when he was described details of Brimelow’s promotion of white nationalists on Vdare.com.

“If I had known this, we would never have invited him,” Kudlow said. “I’m disappointed and saddened to hear about it.”

And he’s probably even more disappointed and saddened to get busted over it, particularly so soon after a far less important White House staffer got run out on a rail for hanging out with Kudlow’s old buddy.

Kudlow’s circle of old friends who happen to be scoundrels of one sort or another includes Roger Stone, who was also present at the birthday party. But it’s particularly astonishing, given the regular allegations of white nationalist sympathy the White House is constantly trying to combat, that someone at Kudlow’s lofty level wouldn’t have been warned about people like Brimelow. In terms of his impact on administration policies, it’s unclear what’s more alarming: that he knew about the man and still thought him an appropriate guest, or was as ignorant as he professes.