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NY Times Op-Ed, Nov. 15, 2019
Stephen Miller’s Sinister Syllabus
By Jamelle Bouie
Somewhat lost in the frenzy over impeachment this week was a report from
the Southern Poverty Law Center on Stephen Miller, a White House
speechwriter and close adviser to the president.
An analysis of more than 900 emails from Miller to editors at Breitbart
News, the report shows Miller’s single-minded focus on nonwhite
immigration and his immersion in an online ecosystem of virulent,
unapologetic racism. The Miller of these emails isn’t just an
immigration restrictionist, he’s an ideological white nationalist.
It’s tempting to dismiss this as old news. Miller is, after all, the
architect behind the Trump administration’s most draconian border and
immigration policies, as well as some of its harshest anti-immigrant
rhetoric.
The first travel ban, rolled out within days of President Trump’s
inauguration? That was Miller. Family separation at the border? That was
Miller too. The relentless effort to limit asylum, deport protected
migrants and block refugees from entering the country? Also Miller. The
president’s January address from the Oval Office, in which he spun
gruesome tales of immigrant crime and violence (“In California, an Air
Force veteran was raped, murdered and beaten to death with a hammer by
an illegal alien with a long criminal history”)? Stephen Miller.
But suspecting Miller’s ideological allegiances is quite different than
knowing them. In the absence of proof, there was room for plausible
deniability. That’s how a conservative magazine editor could praise
Miller as a “wunderkind” for his command of the “details” of immigration
policy while dismissing evidence that Miller was once close to Richard
Spencer, a prominent neo-Nazi.
With the emails — supplied by Katie McHugh, a former editor at Breitbart
— we now know what Miller was reading and thinking about in the year
before he joined the Trump campaign. And there’s no denying the nature
of the material.
In October 2015, while still an aide to Senator Jeff Sessions of
Alabama, Miller sent McHugh a story from VDARE, a white nationalist
website named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North
America. VDARE is preoccupied with “white genocide” — the myth that
nonwhites are working to destroy white people through immigration and
intermarriage — and Miller cited the website in response to McHugh’s
concern that the government would grant temporary protected status to
Mexican survivors of Hurricane Patricia.
“This being the worst hurricane ever recorded, what are the chances it
wreaks destruction on Mexico and drives a mass migration to the U.S.
border?” wrote McHugh, who identified as a white nationalist at the
time. Miller replied: “100 percent. And they will all get TPS. And all
the ones here will get TPS too. That needs to be the weekend’s BIG
story. TPS is everything.” He then sent her a link from VDARE that
focused on the prospect of protected status for victims of the hurricane.
McHugh says Miller also directed her to stories from the website
American Renaissance, another white nationalist publication, this one
focused on eugenics and anti-black racism. Its founder, Jared Taylor,
has argued that “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices,
Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.” In 2013,
he argued for a white ethno-state. “We want a homeland where we are a
majority,” he said.
There’s more. In June 2015, after Dylann Roof murdered nine black
churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., Miller emailed McHugh with an outraged
message about retailers pulling Confederate flags from their stores,
pointing her toward statistics on Confederate deaths in the Civil War.
He then wrote to her about efforts to remove Confederate memorials:
What do the vandals say to the people fighting and dying overseas in
uniform right now who are carrying on a seventh or eighth generation of
military service in their families, stretching back to our founding?
In a September 2015 email, Miller encouraged McHugh to show “the
parallels” between Pope Francis’s pro-refugee statements and “The Camp
of the Saints,” a 1973 novel by the French author Jean Raspail. In the
book, an influx of Indian refugees — described as subhuman and led by a
feces-eating demagogue — storm France, killing, stealing and rampaging
until they’ve completely occupied the country. Other migrants follow and
eventually overrun western Europe, turning white Europeans into a
subject class. The book is popular with white nationalists and is
mentioned frequently on VDARE and the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website.
It is also a favorite of Steve Bannon’s, the other of Trump’s “two Steves.”
The White House has pushed back against the report. “This is clearly a
form of anti-Semitism to levy these attacks against a Jewish staffer,”
an unnamed official told Axios. But there’s no way to spin these emails
into something innocuous. The evidence is overwhelming: Miller was
immersed in white power ideology. He was fluent in the language of white
nationalism, attuned to its ideas. He was an obvious sympathizer who
brought that sympathy to the federal government, where he has a direct
hand in making immigration policy and choosing personnel.
For three years, Miller has used his perch to inflict fear and anxiety
on refugees, asylum-seekers and unauthorized immigrants. Maybe, if you
were charitable to Miller and sympathetic to restricting immigration,
you could frame this as a misguided but good faith attempt to pull back
from a more liberal status quo. No longer. These emails show that
Miller’s views flow from his commitment to racist exclusion and the
protection of a white demographic majority.
Breitbart fired Katie McHugh in 2017 for anti-Muslim remarks on Twitter.
Since then, she says, she has left the “alt-right” and renounced her
white nationalist views.
Miller, on the other hand, is still writing speeches and making policy.
And while Democrats have called for his removal in the wake of this
report (“Stephen Miller must resign. Now,” Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter), Republicans have been silent. Perhaps
they’re occupied with impeachment, struggling to defend the president’s
behavior against clear evidence of his guilt. Perhaps they don’t want to
confront the fact that white nationalist ideas have a privileged place
in this administration. Or perhaps they just don’t care enough to be
alarmed.
If that sounds unfair, consider this: Republicans stuck with President
Trump in 2017 when he defended the “Unite the Right” protesters in
Charlottesville, Va., and they stuck with him in 2018 when he denounced
“shithole” countries. They stuck with him through family separation, and
they’re sticking with him as he keeps thousands of children in
detention. Now we have proof that one of the president’s key advisers is
awash in white nationalism. But to a Republican Party that has stuck
with that president, what difference would this actually make?
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