The Washington Post editorial board published an opinion piece Thursday shaming the Trump administration for withdrawing a $400,000 last-minute Obama DHS grant to Christian Picciolini’s “Life After Hate.”
“In light of the violence in Charlottesville,” the Post tell us, “this decision appears tragically shortsighted. It also underlines the indifference of President Trump and his administration toward the problem of far-right violence.”
In reality, the grant, made just one week before President Barack Obama left office, would have handed $400,000 to Mr. Picciolini, a former self-proclaimed neo-Nazi skinhead with a long history of viciously attacking the president and raising his profile by tying Trump to racist extremism using his “Nazi” bone fides.
A salacious and glowing 2016 profile of Picciolini in Chicagoist described his past, not without an air of the braggadocios, as the teenage leader of an outfit called Chicago Area Skinheads (CASH). By this account, his group “was responsible for a wave of racist attacks during its heyday, including firebombings, vicious assaults, and numerous acts of vandalism against synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses.”
Now, two decades after his abrupt exit from his reputed but poorly documented role as a leader in the “white power” scene, Picciolini makes a living running Life After Hate, a group dedicated to “working with individuals who wish to leave a life of hate” and “to counter the seeds of hate we once planted.” Life After Hate’s own website conflicts on whether the group was founded in 2009 or 2011, and it is unclear where funding came from before they hit the big time with the DHS grant of taxpayer money.
The runaway success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the mainstream media’s hunger to link Trump to racism and hatred gave Picciolini a spot in the sun. He quickly filled a niche position giving interviews and statements confirming the Trump-racism narrative from his position of authority as a real, live neo-Nazi.
For example, Picciolini managed not see “any violent protesters” at the March, 2016, Trump rally he attended in Chicago. The rally had to be shut down after leftist fanatics attacked Trump supporters and Chicago police. He did, however, manage to find racism. “I heard some of the most vile things come out of people’s mouths, more vile than I heard at any Klan rally or the dozens neo-Nazi skinhead rallies that I’ve been to,” he told Chicagoist.
As the Trump train picked up steam and delivered the greatest upset in modern American presidential history, Picciolini took to Twitter with all the fury of his supposed Nazi skinhead days, claiming that “people like him” will have “targets” on their backs:
*Explicit Language Warning*
Things did not calm down as Trump Derangement Syndrome set in. In the most vulgar terms, he compared Trump supporters to his gangs of Swastika waving criminals and called for Trump to be removed from office:
It was around this time, January 13, 2017, to be exact, that the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security made the decision to hand Picciolini’s organization, Life After Hate, the grant that the Washington Post is so upset about him losing.
After Trump took office, and perhaps thinking his $400,000 taxpayer check was as good as cashed, Picciolini then called his fellow American voters, most of whom presumably have not been in violent neo-Nazi street gangs, “Nazis,” and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon, who certainly never claimed to be a dangerous leader in the white power scene, a “white nationalist” and a “danger:”
Since losing his grant, Picciolini has slipped into the Louise Mensch-esque Russophobic conspiracy theory:
None of the above is mentioned in the Post’s op-ed. Instead, no possible reason is given for the Trump DHS’s decision to revoke the last administration’s grant to Life After Hate other than “the indifference of President Trump and his administration toward the problem of far-right violence,” which, in turn, is evidence of “the absence of moral leadership from the president.”
Nowhere in the Washington Post op-ed is there any mention of left-wing political violence. Nowhere is there any mention Antifa’s leading role in the violence at the Charlottesville rally. Nowhere is there any discussion of the need for a hypothetical “Life After Communism,” “Life After Anarchism,” or “Life After Extremist Black Nationalism” non-profit. Nowhere is the lack of $400,000 in funding for such an organization presented as “tragically shortsighted.”
Perhaps most importantly, nowhere is it implied that a Democratic president would ever be under some moral obligation to provide $400,000 of taxpayer money to a man who makes a living leveraging his dubious history of ties to violent political extremism and who repeatedly called that president and his advisors “Nazis” who need to have their “nonsense” put an end to once and for all merely because his Republican predecessor told him to.
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