CNN analyst David Gregory believes that the view that America’s culture is unique is at its core, racist.

On Anderson Cooper 360 on Thursday, Gregory responded to chief White House strategist Steve Bannon’s remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Bannon touched on American culture as something unique among nations and Gregory pulled from that what he wanted:

“The language of the uniqueness of American culture is this kind of white nationalist language, to me, that harkens back to the kind of language we've heard before.”

Gregory prefaced his comments saying he doesn’t know what’s in Bannon’s heart, but he seemed pretty confident there’s some racism in there somewhere. Gregory continued:

“There’s a worldview there that I think will trouble a lot of Trump opponents about the uniqueness of America somehow being separated from our -- the history of being such a multicultural society. A welcoming society and a society that assimilates outsiders really well. Assimilates immigrants really, really well there is a comparison to the vulnerability of Europe that somehow we are the same. And I think immigrants assimilate into America both economically, socially, and culturally much better than other countries as part of the greatness of this country. That seems to be what he’s challenging.”

Another panelist, Symone Sanders, former press secretary for the Bernie Sanders campaign, accused Bannon of racism in much stronger terms, confident that a white supremacist is in the White House. Amazingly, Anderson Cooper pushed back in a rare moment of journalism, as Newsbusters pointed out:

“When you say that, is that based solely on the one line that Steve Bannon said in an interview about Breitbart being the platform for the alt-right? Because, I mean, in terms of his actual language, is there anything you can actually point to that says he is white supremacist?”

There wasn’t, of course, only Sanders’ conjecture that “Alt-right is nothing but white supremacy dressed up in khakis in my opinion.”