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The New Yorker’s Connie Bruck reports on new evidence that top Trump White House adviser, Steve Bannon, took issue with his daughter’s potential school because, in Bannon’s view, it had too many Jews.
Please add your name to those calling on Bannon to be fired.
We had learned last summer that Bannon’s ex-wife, Mary Louise Piccard, accused him of being an anti-Semite. According to Piccard, Bannon didn’t want his daughters attending the Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles because too many Jews went to the school.
“He said that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews,” Piccard wrote.
Bannon asked his ex-wife if it bothered her that a second school, the Willows Community School, used to be a Temple.
And while checking out yet another school, Bannon asked the director during a sit down why there were “so many Chanukah books in the library.”
Somehow Bannon, who used to run a Web site that, according to Bannon, was the proud home of the “Alt Right,” a hipster white supremacist movement that also dabbles in anti-Semitism.
Now we find that additional documents corroborate Piccard’s story. Bannon’s wife had emailed him about the discussion regarding the percentage of Jews who attended the girls’ potential school.
More from the New Yorker:
Steve Bannon
For middle school and high school, the girls wanted to attend the Archer School, a girls’ school in Brentwood. Their mother, without informing Bannon, had them apply, and they were admitted for the sixth grade, in the fall of 2007. She then told Bannon that the girls had been admitted and urged him to visit the school. As they argued about Archer, Bannon’s ex-wife wrote, he told her that “the biggest problem he had with Archer is the number of Jews that attend. He said he doesn’t like Jews and that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be whiney brats.”
This account of Bannon’s comments about Jews and Archer has been widely reported, and Bannon’s supporters have dismissed them as the fabrications of an angry ex-wife. But the divorce file, which includes e-mails between Bannon and his ex-wife, contains further evidence that he did complain about the number of Jewish students. On March 19, 2007, she told him that Archer had accepted the girls. Twelve days later, she wrote to Bannon, “As for the % of Jewish girls at Archer I have no idea what it is nor do I understand why that is such a concern for you. I certainly have not been raising the girls to be prejudice[d] against Jews or anyone else for that matter.”
A spokesperson for Bannon said that he is not an anti-Semite, and pointed out that the girls went to Archer, and Bannon paid their tuition. But that was only after his ex-wife went to the Los Angeles County Superior Court, later that year, laid out Bannon’s history of having sabotaged her efforts to find a school, and said that she hadn’t notified him about the girls’ applications to Archer because she feared that he would do so again. In Bannon’s court filing, he said that he did not want his children “attending a secular school,” and that, “based on my income, the expense of the proposed school is excessive.”
Now, Piccard’s email is hearsay. It does not prove that Bannon inquired about the number of Jews in the school. It is however, interesting, because it was written before the same accusations came up during the divorce, so it suggests the accusations were not made up expressly to help the divorce.
Knowing this, in concert with Bannon’s claims last summer that the Web site he ran, Breitbart, was “the platform of the Alt Right,” raises serious questions about Bannon’s political philosophy, and specifically his views on race and Jews.
In another other administration, even a Republican administration, someone like Bannon would be gone by now. Especially when the President’s own daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren are Jewish.
Add your name to those calling on Bannon to be fired. No one like this deserves to be in the White House.
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