Influential members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign promoted a defense of Trump from “alt-right” blogger Mike Cernovich, a sexual assault apologist who denies the existence of rape culture, as the GOP reeled from the revelation that Trump once bragged about committing sexual assault.

On October 7, The Washington Post published 2005 audio and video of Trump saying on a hot mic: “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful -- I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” Trump later added, “And when you’re a star they let you do it,’ Trump says. ‘You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” The comments have been widely condemned as an admission by the Republican presidential nominee of sexual assault.

Late in the evening of October 8, Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn tweeted a link to Cernovich’s defense of Trump’s confessed abuse while promoting the blogger’s supposedly “terrific book” about masculinity. Hours later, BuzzFeed political reporter Rosie Gray noted that Donald Trump Jr. had retweeted the link. In the video linked to by Flynn, Cernovich and libertarian blogger Stefan Molyneux disparage concerns over Trump’s “locker room talk from 11 years ago,” which they portray as nothing more than “alpha male” exaggerations as they complain about a “selective outrage hysteria that seems to be the hallmark of the left”:

As Media Matters has documented, Cernovich is a sexual assault apologist and noted conspiracy theorist prominent on the “alt-right” fringe of conservative media. Cernovich operates a website called Danger & Play where he peddles misogyny, Islamophobia, and other baseless conspiracy theories to the lowest common denominator. His social media accounts, particularly on Twitter, frequently dismiss the existence of date rape, which he claims is a natural male activity -- “the hotter the sex, the more closely it resembles rape.”