Donald Trump trade adviser wrote Democrats want "ethnic cleansing" of whites

Impact

One of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's advisers on trade and the economy, Curtis Ellis, recently wrote an article endorsing a theory prominent among neo-Nazis and white supremacists that the Democratic Party is seeking a full-scale genocide of whites, Mediaite reported on Monday.

In a May piece for right-wing website World Net Daily, Ellis argued the real story of this election was "The Radical Left's Ethnic Cleansing Of America."

In the piece, Ellis argued that beginning in the 1960s the rise of "student activists who were smoking dope, taking over college buildings and sporting Che Guevara shirts" had effectively created a "New Left [which] sneered at white, blue-collar men as racists and the labor unions that represented them as bastions of white privilege that must be destroyed."

According to Ellis, the Democratic Party is "literally" seeking the genocide of "white working people":

The party cadres set out to build their brave new world and eliminate their class enemies – read: white working people. It is in this context that we understand why Clinton and company push so-called "free trade" deals like NAFTA and Obamatrade, corporatist schemes that move America's manufacturing assets – and jobs – to Mexico, China and elsewhere. If you believe, as do the leftists, that America has more than it deserves and Americans are racists, the global redistribution of our wealth and the death (literally) of white working people is a desired outcome, a feature not a bug.

According to Mediaite, Ellis does not appear on the recent campaign lists of advisers. However, he spoke on Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon's show about the article, and made appearances on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News as a Trump adviser earlier this month.

As recently as August 12, one of his columns was being tweeted out by Paul Manafort, Bannon's predecessor as campaign manager.

There's certainly room to debate whether free trade policies have benefited the United States' white working class, and the economy in general. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimated 1993's North American Free Trade Agreement displaced nearly 880,000 U.S. jobs through 2002, as well as contributed to rising inequality and hurt organized labor.

But that's definitely not the thrust of what Ellis was saying. Instead, he was parroting one of the favorite rallying cries of the "alt-right," the loosely organized movement of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other fringe right-wingers: "white genocide."

In these far-right communities, "white genocide" is said to be the culmination of a massive, globalist conspiracy using tools like mass immigration, forced integration, and progressive social policies to push the world's whites into extinction. Though no such project exists, white nationalists have renewed efforts to promote the myth during this campaign season, in one case launching a robocall campaign.

Trump himself has flirted with people who believe the theory. A Fortune piece earlier this year found the candidate "retweeted at least 75 users who follow at least three of the top 50 #WhiteGenocide influencers," while 67.5% of those major white supremacist accounts followed Trump. In January, Trump retweeted an account with the handle, @WhiteGenocideTM.

The Donald Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on this story.