A CNN interview with former Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh leaves no doubt that White House advisor and leading anti-immigrant policy advisor Stephen Miller is an avowed white nationalist – and that ugly worldview animates his influence and drives the range of immigration and refugee policies he’s pushed from the White House (see more from this recent America’s Voice report on the relationship between Miller’s white nationalist worldview and Trump administration policies).
McHugh was the source of the Stephen Miller emails given to Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). In the CNN interview, she describes Miller’s role in radicalizing her. Ultimately, she extricated herself from the white nationalist movement and denounced the worldview. The interview and accompanying article, “Former Breitbart Editor: Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too,” is excerpted below.
The article is excerpted below and can be read in full here
McHugh says on Miller’s way to the White House, where he is now a senior adviser deeply involved in shaping immigration policy in consonance with his hardline views, he was constantly sending her far-right material, encouraging her to use their arguments in her articles.
“He was shaping news coverage of a far-right website that was rapidly growing … and was controlling the narrative behind Donald Trump’s candidacy and the tenor of the electorate, especially the Republican electorate,” McHugh says. Breitbart supported Trump and as he rose while embracing the site’s ideology, so did Breitbart’s popularity with readers.
McHugh was a willing acolyte of Miller who she says further radicalized her.
“I was a white nationalist,” she says. “Whatever you want to call it — white nationalist, white supremacist. But that part [of me] is dead.”
She says Miller privately showed his true colors and pushed white supremacist ideals echoing his hardline views on restricting immigration to her in order to get them on Breitbart’s website.
McHugh has shared several hundred emails with the Southern Policy Law Center and now some with CNN showing Miller’s contacts from 2015 to 2016. She says Miller stopped reaching out once he got a position in the White House.
… Calling someone a white supremacist is a very strong and personal attack, but McHugh does not hesitate to denounce Miller from what she knows of him and how she saw in him a kindred spirit when she was on a racist path.
“I would absolutely call him a white supremacist,” she says. His driving ideology is “white supremacy and anti-immigration especially,” she adds.
McHugh herself once followed the same hate as Miller. When she first moved to Washington, she dated a white nationalist and they and their friends would hang out in a home they dubbed “the house of hate.”
… More than 100 Democrats in the House and 27 senators have called for Miller to go.
But McHugh says, “Not a single Republican has called for Miller’s resignation. That should terrify us as a country.”
