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White House adviser Stephen Miller has been an obvious white supremacist obsessed with pushing anti-immigrant policy for as long as he’s been in the public eye. But emails he sent in 2015 and early 2016 go deeper, showing how committed to white nationalist ideas and thinkers he is. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch reviewed more than 900 emails between Miller and editors at Breitbart News, which were leaked by former Breitbarter Katie McHugh. The upshot: Stephen Miller is who we thought—who we knew—he was.
In the emails, Miller shared stories from the far-right conspiracy theory site Infowars and the white nationalist website VDARE and the white nationalist website American Renaissance, and McHugh notes that Miller referred to the latter by the familiar, even affectionate nickname AmRen. The subjects of some of the stories will be familiar to people who’ve followed Donald Trump’s Miller-influenced immigration policy. One story from VDARE was about the evils of Temporary Protected Status, which allows people fleeing unsafe conditions in their home countries to live and work in the U.S. for a limited time. Trump has tried to end TPS for people from several countries, and denied TPS for people fleeing the hurricane-battered Bahamas.
Miller successfully pressed Breitbart to use a white nationalist novel to attack Pope Francis’ statements in support of refugees. Miller is now an immigration adviser to a president who has slashed the number of refugees the U.S. accepts.
In the emails, which were sent before the Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, Miller seems particularly upset about the removal of Confederate monuments, pressing McHugh to write attacking stores that had stopped selling Confederate flags but were still selling “commie flags” and “Che shirts.” The next day, Miller asked “what do the [Confederate monument] 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?” (Gee, Stephen, I don’t know, maybe that military service to the Confederacy was service in an army fighting against the United States?)
”In his emails, Miller uses slang and rhetoric about immigration that would be familiar to people who read white nationalists discussing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory,” Hatewatch reports. “He refers to demographic changes brought about by immigration as “new America” multiple times in the emails. It’s a phrase VDARE sometimes uses.”
This is not just a guy who happens to hate immigrants. It’s someone who’s deeply enmeshed in white nationalist media and language, who’s been pushing that ideology behind the scenes for years and who is now helping to set policy from the White House.
