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Is White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller a white nationalist? It’s a question worth asking after he stood at the White House podium on Wednesday and echoed a white nationalist argument about the Statue of Liberty. As Miller detailed Donald Trump’s plan to limit legal immigration, he was asked about the poem on the Statue of Liberty. You know the one—“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Miller’s response was that the poem was “added later,” so it’s irrelevant to American values. That sounds like a nonsensical answer, until you see all of the straight-up white supremacists who’ve made that exact argument before Miller. Rebekah Entralgo rounds up some of them:
Stormfront.org, a popular website among white supremacists that boasts the tagline, “Every month is White history month,” has a numerous discussion threads on the topic, including one titled, “Give Me Your Huddled Masses — The Jewess who tried to destroy the US!” Contributors to the forum wrote the poem should be “considered graffiti” and stress that [Emma] Lazarus’ sonnet is “not part of the original” statue at all.
The subreddit for Donald Trump supporters, which frequently pushes white nationalist memes, also has a post titled, “Does everyone realize that the poem inscribed beneath the Statue of Liberty is not, in fact, law?”
So basically they want the Statue of Liberty to be their Aryan imaginary girlfriend and not associated with nasty Jews and other non-Aryan immigrants. David Duke has even written a book chapter complaining about Emma Lazarus. And these are the people whose argument a senior White House aide parroted on Wednesday.
Mind you, the fact that the poem was added later shows exactly how important it is. The easy thing to do was leave it off. It took work and money and political will to add it, and that happened because those words added something meaningful to the statue. But if you’re a white supremacist desperately looking to disavow the values embedded in that statue for more than a century now, along with the “Jewess” who wrote them, “it was added later” will do, I guess.