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The list of of Donald Trump appointments with closer-than-usual relationships to white supremacists, anti-Semites, and the other dregs of the far right just keeps getting bigger.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump appointed Teresa Manning, a leading anti-abortion activist, to be a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services. The pick was controversial because Manning, formerly a legislative analyst at the conservative Family Research Council and a lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee, would be in charge of family planning policy, even though she has questioned the efficacy of contraception in preventing pregnancy and has said government should not play a role in family planning. But there was one item in her résumé that did not receive attention: She had once praised a defender of Holocaust deniers.
It's saying something when being a member of a SPLC-identified hate group isn't enough to immediately disqualify a person, but nope, she manages to ratchet it up another notch.
Her links to the Holocaust-denying right are direct. In her anti-abortion role she edited a 2003 book of essays by fellow anti-abortion activists. One of those essays was by Joe Sobran, who joined her onstage for a promotional event for the book. That Joe Sobran was at the time well known throughout conservatism for his anti-Semitic writings and promotion of Holocaust deniers was, apparently, not a deal breaker for Manning and her "pro-life" audience.
In her flattering introduction of Sobran, Manning neglected to mention that a few months earlier, in June 2002, he was a speaker at the 14th annual convention of the Institute for Historical Review. This is how the Southern Poverty Law Center has described the group: “Founded in 1978 by Willis Carto, a longtime anti-Semite, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) is a pseudo-academic organization that claims to seek ‘truth and accuracy in history,’ but whose real purpose is to promote Holocaust denial and defend Nazism.”
That there are still, in this millennium, people in America obsessed with defending the Nazis is remarkable. It’s also remarkable how Trump's team just happens to keep appointing figures from the far-right with so many of the same marks on their resumes. Go figure, and so on.
