Actress Alyssa Milano tweeted to her more than 3 million followers describing her horror at seeing a Christmas elf arrangement at a department store including a Nazi salute. But she was derided for attempting to tie the disconcerting event to President Trump's aide Steve Bannon.
"Just walked into a Christmas store in NY and someone arranged all the elf arms in nazi salutes," she said on her account Sunday.
"I'm sick to my stomach," she said, with a symbol of a broken heart and the "Fire Bannon" hashtag.
The hashtag has gained prominence especially among liberal users of social media after the horrific attack on counter-protesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Some have identified Steve Bannon with the "alt-right" movement that he once said was being given a platform on the pro-Trump website, Breitbart News. Bannon was an executive at the right-wing news outlet before joining the Trump administration.
Milano said that her husband rearranged the elf figures so that they were not making the Nazi salute.
"Well, I took the kids outside and my husband fixed them," she responded on Twitter.
Some on social media found the connection Milano was trying to make between the Nazi elves and Steve Bannon to be tenuous at best.
TheBlaze founder Glenn Beck, once called Bannon “the most dangerous guy in American politics,” and rejected what he described as a white supremacist worldview.
“If people really want to — in the press — would like to call Donald Trump a racist, you might want to stop on that one and just spend a little time on Bannon. Because Bannon has a clear tie to white nationalists," Beck said during his radio show. "Clear tie."
Bannon himself denies being a white nationalist, and instead prefers the term "economic nationalist."
