“The Miller of these emails isn’t just an immigration restrictionist, he’s an ideological white nationalist.”
In a new must-read piece, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie brings our attention back to “ideological white nationalist” Stephen Miller, the architect of every last “draconian border and immigration” Trump and Republican policy and the author of recently revealed xenophobic emails to Breitbart, and directly calls out the Republicans, who have been utterly silent allowing Trump and his racist crooks to sit up on the highest perch and take a wrecking ball to the Statue of Liberty.
Bouie’s detailed accounts of the correspondence with Breitbart and other alt-right publications — brought to light by a series of Southern Poverty Law Center reports — details Miller’s extraneous efforts to control the narrative on immigration and directly create real institutional and policy changes that continue to prove Miller’s rightfully earned title as a white nationalist and architect of Trump’s cruelty towards immigrants.
Below is Bouie’s column entitled, “Stephen Miller’s Sinister Syllabus”:
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.
…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?
