For those who have continued to give Donald trump more chances, refusing to accept the fact that he fully supports and willingly fuels Nazism; the violence that broke out committed by Nazi sympathizers Charlottesville on August 12 should have been the breaking point. Naturally, every revelation about Trump's continued support for those ideals after Charlottesville, is even more damning, such as the recent report that his deputy assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Teresa Manning, has shamelessly supported those with anti-Semitic views and Holocaust denialism that is fueled by Nazi propaganda.
Teresa Manning's involvement with Nazi sympathizer
Mother Jones published an article titled: "Trump Official Once Praised a Defender of Holocaust Deniers" which points out that Manning was already a controversial pick as she would be in charge of family planning policy given her anti-abortion views. The article referred to Manning's involvement in editing a book of essays by anti-abortion activists in 2003 and said that one of those activists was Joseph Sobran who was also part of a promotional event for the book that year that Manning -- then named Wagner -- hosted. The event was co-sponsored by the Republican National Coalition and in her introduction for Sobran, she said that he was a senior editor for the conservative media outlet the National Review.
Joe Sobran's background
But in her introduction, Teresa failed to mention that only months before the event, that Sobran had been a speaker at the 14th annual convention of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center says "promote Holocaust denial and defend Nazism.” When the group started in 1979, it had guest speakers such as former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and another well-known Holocaust denier, David Irving.
The SPLC says that the IHR's events were opportunities for neo-Nazis and anti-Semites from around the world to network. Sobran went as far as to defend the IHR against criticism by Jewish groups denying that the organization was anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi in a 2001 column he wrote for the IHR.
In the column (which will go unnamed) he supported the "revisionist" view that Jews died from disease rather than at the hands of Nazis during World War II and that many witnesses to the Holocaust had already been discredited.
His article leans heavily on the restrictions to free speech which is a similar defense white supremacist and "alt-right" hate groups that support Trump use today. Sobran was fired from the National Review in 1993 by William F. Buckley and later had his column killed by Scott McConnell of the American Conservative over the fact that he would be a speaker for an IHR event around that time. As the Mother Jones article points out, Manning praised all of those who were included in her edited book of essays which by 2003, were already well-known in conservative circles such as Sobran. So, it's curious how she could in any way ignore Sobran's reputation and not know his views.