...For Those Still Foolishly Resisting and Denying the Terrifying Irrefutable EVIDENCE of How The U.S. Has Become A Raging Menace To Itself and the World Via the Election(s) and Cultlike Submission of Millions of Citizens In Servile support of the criminally pathological, utterly vile, and Deeply Oppressive/Exploitative Trump Regime, Inc. I present to you the extraordinary, profound, and courageous work of some of the most important and leading Public Intellectuals, Journalists, Authors, Teachers, Media Organizers, and Social Activists in the nation today, among them such important contemporary figures as Wajahat Ali, Jean Guerrero, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joy Reid, and Sherrilyn Ifill who are featured below among others, as well as a number of specific historical references and cross references that tell us among many other things how we got here over time and why.
The Radicalization of Stephen Miller and His White Nationalist Agenda for America
Wajahat Ali
August 7, 2025
A decaying and diminished Donald Trump's second presidency is now being influenced by a hatemonger who is committed to white supremacy by any violent means necessary. Journalist Jean Guerrero has done the work in Hatemonger, which is the definitive book on the warped, hateful worldview of Miller. In this important conversation, Jean connects the dots and charts how a lonely, awkward teen from LA was radicalized one summer with a zealous ideology of hate that has fueled his political ascent.
https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/th...
Texas Dems Stand on Business Amid Voting Rights 911 | The Joy Reid Show LIVE!
The Joy Reid Show
Streamed live on August 4, 2025
The Joy Reid Show
VIDEO:
https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/th...
Texas Dems Stand on Business Amid Voting Rights 911 | The Joy Reid Show LIVE!
The Joy Reid Show
Streamed live on August 4, 2025
The Joy Reid Show
VIDEO:
On this episode of The Joy Reid Show, Howard University law professor and former LDF Director Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill breaks down what's at stake in the fight over Texas non-census-year redistricting, as Democrats flee the state to try to stop it, and the case winding its way to the Supreme Court that could further gut the Voting Rights Act. Then, Joy speaks with Texas candidate for governor, rancher and former firefighter Bobby Cole, whose candidacy against Greg Abbott is unique, in that it's so ... normal. Read the LDF explanation for Louisiana vs. Calais here: https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/l... Check out Bobby Cole's campaign website here: https://www.coleforgovernor.com/
ABOUT JOY REID:
ABOUT JOY REID:
Joy-Ann Lomena Reid (AKA Joy Reid) is a best-selling American author, political journalist and TV host. She was a national correspondent for MSNBC and is best known for hosting the Emmy-nominated, NAACP Award-winning political commentary and analysis show, The ReidOut, from 2020 to 2025. Her previous anchoring credits include The Reid Report (2014–2015) and AM Joy (2016–2020).
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"What’s Past is Prologue…"
[NOTE: The following commentary and article originally appeared in this space on February 13, 2017]
All,
Stephen Miller is a senior advisor to the President and one of the most seriously unhinged and virulently dangerous far rightwing demagogues in the billionaire sociopath's neofascist administration. He also happens to be along with Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions one of Trump's most trusted and respected lieutenants on both domestic and foreign policy and is a scurrilous attack dog on behalf of the Scumbag-in-Chief and his regime, as well as a shameless apologist for and fierce defender of the President and his deeply authoritarian attitudes and behavior (which is not surprising given his own well documented tyrannical tendencies as both ideologue and activist). A small sampling of Miller's special brand of political madness can be found below in his typically outrageous and frankly treasonous statement in maniacal support of Trump from yesterday afternoon on ABC News...
Kofi
"We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become in many cases a supreme branch of government. Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned."
--Stephen Miller, February 12, 2017. ABC News This Week
https://www.nytimes.com/…/stephen-miller-donald-trump-advis…
Politics
[NOTE: The following commentary and article originally appeared in this space on February 13, 2017]
All,
Stephen Miller is a senior advisor to the President and one of the most seriously unhinged and virulently dangerous far rightwing demagogues in the billionaire sociopath's neofascist administration. He also happens to be along with Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions one of Trump's most trusted and respected lieutenants on both domestic and foreign policy and is a scurrilous attack dog on behalf of the Scumbag-in-Chief and his regime, as well as a shameless apologist for and fierce defender of the President and his deeply authoritarian attitudes and behavior (which is not surprising given his own well documented tyrannical tendencies as both ideologue and activist). A small sampling of Miller's special brand of political madness can be found below in his typically outrageous and frankly treasonous statement in maniacal support of Trump from yesterday afternoon on ABC News...
Kofi
"We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become in many cases a supreme branch of government. Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned."
--Stephen Miller, February 12, 2017. ABC News This Week
https://www.nytimes.com/…/stephen-miller-donald-trump-advis…
Politics
Stephen Miller Is a ‘True Believer’ Behind Core Trump Policies
by GLENN THRUSH and JENNIFER STEINHAUER
February 11, 2017
New York Times
PHOTO: Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser, is said to have “a better understanding of the president’s vision than almost anyone.” Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Staff members on Capitol Hill recall Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old White House adviser behind many of President Trump’s most contentious executive orders, as the guy from Jeff Sessions’s office who made their inboxes cry for mercy.
As a top aide to Mr. Sessions, the conservative Alabama senator, Mr. Miller dispatched dozens and dozens of bombastic emails to congressional staff members and reporters in early 2013 when the Senate was considering a big bipartisan immigration overhaul. Mr. Miller slammed the evils of “foreign labor” and pushed around nasty news articles on proponents of compromise, like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
One exhausted Senate staff member, forwarding a Miller-gram to a reporter at the time, wrote: “His latest. And it’s only 11:45 a.m.”
The ascent of Mr. Miller from far-right gadfly with little policy experience to the president’s senior policy adviser came as a shock to many of the staff members who knew him from his seven years in the Senate. A man whose emails were, until recently, considered spam by many of his Republican peers is now shaping the Trump administration’s core domestic policies with his economic nationalism and hard-line positions on immigration.But his unlikely rise is emblematic of a White House where unconventional résumés rule — where the chief strategist is Stephen K. Bannon, until recently the head of the flame-throwing right-wing website Breitbart News, and the president himself is a former reality television star who before winning the nation’s highest office had never shown much interest in the arcana of governing.
Yet all three men are bound by a belief in an America-first economic policy that has suddenly moved from the fringes of American politics to the Oval Office.
“Stephen was the kind of guy who would make a passionate ideological argument to a roomful of people who were there to make pragmatic decisions,” said Alex Conant, a former aide to Mr. Rubio who remembers squaring off against Mr. Miller at a routine Republican messaging meeting that turned into a full-dress immigration debate.
Mr. Miller has been at the epicenter of some of the administration’s most provocative moves, from pushing hard for the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico to threatening decades-long trade deals at the heart of Republican economic orthodoxy, to rolling out Mr. Trump’s travel ban on seven largely Muslim nations, whose bungled introduction he oversaw.
Working in an administration that “didn’t come here to do small things,” as Mr. Bannon has put it, is a role that Mr. Miller — universally known as a tireless worker — has been preparing for much of his life. From his days at a public high school in Southern California, where he preached against “political correctness” and liberalism and called in to conservative radio shows, to his time at Duke University, where he was known for controversial writings in the student newspaper and a failed attempt at a run for dorm president, he has delighted in challenging prevailing orthodoxies.
PHOTO: President Trump congratulating Mr. Miller, center, after the senior adviser’s swearing-in last month. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times
At a freshman mixer, recalled a college classmate who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Mr. Miller announced, “My name is Stephen Miller, I am from Los Angeles, and I like guns.”
Mr. Miller, known for his skinny ties, so-outdated-they’re-chic pants and his recently abandoned chain-smoking habit, enjoyed a relatively turbulence-free ascent in Mr. Trump’s orbit until the travel ban. His eagerness to keep a tight lid on key details of executive orders to prevent leaks — as well as his inexperience — has at times hampered coordination between the West Wing and agencies that would have to carry them out, several White House officials said.
In part to deal with the confusion that surrounded the travel ban, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, recently created a 10-point protocol that requires all major executive actions to be cleared with the communications department and other senior White House staff members before implementation.
But Mr. Miller’s peacock confidence has served him well with Mr. Trump, who first got to know him in 2015, when Mr. Miller helped bring Mr. Sessions, now the attorney general, into the Trump fold.
After the Republican National Convention in July, Mr. Miller became Mr. Trump’s principal day-to-day speechwriter once the candidate had switched from handwritten notes to a teleprompter in the middle of the campaign.
The message in those speeches was so reflective of Mr. Trump’s views that it earned Mr. Miller a spot as the warm-up act for Mr. Trump’s campaign rallies. His words became Mr. Trump’s — “We’re going to build that wall, and we’re going to build it out of love,” Mr. Miller often said.
“Steve is a true believer in every sense of the word, not just in this message of economic populism but in President Trump as a leader,” said Jason Miller, who worked with him in the Trump campaign and is not related. “Steve’s fiercely loyal and has a better understanding of the president’s vision than almost anyone.”It is sometimes hard to tell Mr. Trump’s voice from that of Mr. Miller, who suppressed his own orotund speech to capture the president’s more visceral, off-the-cuff style. Not that he has had much choice: As one of three or four staff members to fly around with Mr. Trump during the last few months of the campaign, Mr. Miller was summoned to speechwriting tasks by a bark of “Ready!” from Mr. Trump, who insisted on dictating practically every word — and laced into staff members who changed a word or inserted an overly complex policy point.
Mr. Miller’s flexibility as a speechwriter is offset by the consistent stridency of his political philosophy, which has remained much the same since he was the distinct minority at Santa Monica High School, a liberal outpost where he often railed against fellow students and the school administration. Mexican heritage celebrations and Iraq war protests were things of particular offense. He produced a 2003 essay, “How I Changed My Left Wing High School,” that capped a high school career steeped in political activism.
At Duke, Mr. Miller, who is Jewish, cut a similarly confrontational swath, and was briefly friendly with Richard Spencer, who later became a prominent white supremacist, when both were members of the university’s Young Conservatives chapter.
PHOTO: Mr. Miller, right, was a spokesman for Senator Jeff Sessions, center, now attorney general, before joining Mr. Trump. Credit Douglas Graham/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press
From there, it was straight to Capitol Hill, where Mr. Miller worked for Representatives Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and John Shadegg of Arizona before ending up with Mr. Sessions in 2009.
Mr. Sessions and Mr. Miller worked tirelessly against the 2013-14 congressional effort at an immigration overhaul. The bill passed the Senate easily in spite of Mr. Sessions’s vociferous objections, but failed in the House.
“We knew we were taking on the establishment, and Steve was an incredibly hard worker and had no second thoughts about it,” Mr. Sessions said in an interview.
Mr. Miller wrote many of the incendiary speeches that Mr. Sessions gave about the bill, including one in which he suggested that a Cuban-American aide to Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, had been the author of a measure that he believed to be “amnesty” in disguise.
Ultimately, it was Mr. Miller’s dour views on illegal immigration that endeared him to Mr. Bannon and a small team of like-minded economic nationalists that included Julia Hahn, a former Breitbart writer. The group came together during the 2014 campaign of the far-right Republican candidate Dave Brat, whose upset win over the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, in a suburban Richmond, Va., district augured Mr. Trump’s success.
Even then, Mr. Miller had his eye on Mr. Trump, who had flirted with a run for president in 2012. Soon after Mr. Brat’s victory in the Republican primary in July 2014, Mr. Miller sent his friends a Breitbart interview in which Mr. Trump declared, “Everybody is vulnerable because what’s happening in the country is very sad, and the world is watching.” Mr. Miller added a comment: “Trump gets it. I wish he’d run for president.”
Mr. Bannon, Mr. Miller and the lesser-known head of the Domestic Policy Council, Andrew Bremberg, spent the later part of the transition period mapping out a shock-and-awe protocol of executive orders, sending more than 200 to federal agencies for review. The trouble came when they sent some of them to Obama-appointed officials at federal agencies for review, leading to leaks that prompted Mr. Miller to restrict the circulation of the plans.
Mr. Trump, initially pleased by the bold series of executive actions orchestrated by the team, was stung by the fallout from Mr. Miller’s execution of the immigration order, and expressed frustration about not being fully briefed on an order reorganizing the National Security Council to give Mr. Bannon additional power.
Despite the internal finger-pointing, Mr. Miller remains close to the still-powerful Mr. Bannon, who described him in an email as “a loyal and faithful soldier in the Trump movement, a warrior for the working class.”
In recent days, Mr. Miller has been working on what is expected to be another contentious order: an as-yet-uncirculated rewriting of the guest worker program that is likely to impose new restrictions on the cheap foreign labor that Mr. Miller deplored in many of his 2013 emails, according to two officials familiar with their planning.
Mr. Miller, one of the officials said, is working closely with Department of Homeland Security aides to avoid a repeat of the travel ban fiasco.
A version of this article appears in print on February 12, 2017, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Once Seen as Mere Gadfly, ‘True Believer’ Now Shapes Key Trump Policies. Order Reprints| Today's Paper
PHOTO: Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser, is said to have “a better understanding of the president’s vision than almost anyone.” Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miller_(political_advisor)#cite_note-BI-1
Stephen Miller
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Senior Advisor to the President
Incumbent
Assumed office
January 20, 2017
Serving with Jared Kushner
President Donald Trump
Preceded by Brian Deese
Valerie Jarrett
Shailagh Murray
Personal details
Born 1985/1986
Santa Monica, California, U.S.
Political party Republican
Education Duke University (BA)
Stephen Miller (born August 23, 1985)[1] is an American political advisor who served as a senior advisor for policy and White House director of speechwriting to President Donald Trump.[2] His politics have been described as far-right and anti-immigration.[1][3] He was previously the communications director for then-Senator Jeff Sessions. He was also a press secretary for U.S. representatives Michele Bachmann and John Shadegg.
As a speechwriter for Trump, Miller helped write Trump's inaugural address.[4][5][6] He has been a key adviser since the early days of Trump's presidency. An immigration hardliner, Miller was a chief architect of Trump's travel ban,[7][8][9] the administration's reduction of refugees accepted to the United States,[10] and Trump's policy of separating migrant children from their parents.[11] He prevented the publication of internal administration studies that showed that refugees had a net positive effect on government revenues.[12][13] Miller reportedly played a central role in the resignation in April 2019 of Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, who he believed was insufficiently hawkish on immigration.[14][15]
As a White House spokesman, Miller on multiple occasions made false and unsubstantiated claims regarding widespread electoral fraud.[5][16][17] Emails leaked in November 2019 showed that Miller had promoted articles from white nationalist publications VDARE and American Renaissance, and had espoused conspiracy theories.[18][19] Miller is on the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of extremists.[20]
Contents
1 Early life
2 Career
2.1 Trump administration
2.1.1 Leaked emails
3 Media appearances
3.1 Debate with Jim Acosta
4 Personal life
5 References
6 External links
As a speechwriter for Trump, Miller helped write Trump's inaugural address.[4][5][6] He has been a key adviser since the early days of Trump's presidency. An immigration hardliner, Miller was a chief architect of Trump's travel ban,[7][8][9] the administration's reduction of refugees accepted to the United States,[10] and Trump's policy of separating migrant children from their parents.[11] He prevented the publication of internal administration studies that showed that refugees had a net positive effect on government revenues.[12][13] Miller reportedly played a central role in the resignation in April 2019 of Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, who he believed was insufficiently hawkish on immigration.[14][15]
As a White House spokesman, Miller on multiple occasions made false and unsubstantiated claims regarding widespread electoral fraud.[5][16][17] Emails leaked in November 2019 showed that Miller had promoted articles from white nationalist publications VDARE and American Renaissance, and had espoused conspiracy theories.[18][19] Miller is on the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of extremists.[20]
Contents
1 Early life
2 Career
2.1 Trump administration
2.1.1 Leaked emails
3 Media appearances
3.1 Debate with Jim Acosta
4 Personal life
5 References
6 External links
Early life
Miller was born on August 23, 1985, in Santa Monica, California, where he was raised, the second of three children in the Jewish family of Michael D. Miller, a real estate investor, and Miriam (née Glosser).[1] His mother's ancestors—Wolf Lieb Glotzer and his wife, Bessie—emigrated to the United States from the Russian Empire's Antopol, in what is present-day Belarus, arriving in New York on January 7, 1903, on the German ship S.S. Moltke,[21] thus escaping the 1903–06 anti-Jewish pogroms in Belarus and other parts of the Russian Empire.[22][23][24] When his great-grandmother arrived in the U.S. in 1906, she spoke only Yiddish, the historical language of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe.[25]
Miller has said he became a committed conservative after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, a book opposing gun control by Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association.[26][27][28] While attending Santa Monica High School, Miller began appearing on conservative talk radio.[26][23] In 2002, at the age of 16, Miller wrote a letter to the editor of the Santa Monica Outlook criticizing his school's response to the September 11 attacks; he wrote: "Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School."[26][29] While in high school, Miller cited Rush Limbaugh's book The Way Things Ought To Be as his favorite.[30] Miller invited conservative activist David Horowitz to speak, first at the high school and later at Duke University; afterward he denounced the fact that neither institution would authorize the event.[26] Miller was in the habit of "riling up his fellow [high school] classmates with controversial statements";[31] for instance, he told Latino students to speak only English.[27][31][32][33]
At 16, Miller called in to The Larry Elder Show, a conservative radio show, to complain about his high school's alleged lack of patriotism because it did not recite the Pledge of Allegiance.[30] David Horowitz, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant extremist, published an essay by Miller, "How I Changed My Left-Wing High School", on his website.[30] Horowitz has been described as an influential figure in Miller's early life.[30]
In 2007,[34] Miller received his bachelor's degree from Duke University, where he studied political science.[26] He served as president of the Duke chapter of Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom and wrote conservative columns for the school newspaper. Miller gained national attention for his defense of the students who were wrongly accused of rape in the Duke lacrosse case.[26][35] While attending Duke, Miller accused poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou of "racial paranoia" and described student organization Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán (MEChA) as a "radical national Hispanic group that believes in racial superiority."[36]
Miller and the Duke Conservative Union helped co-member Richard Spencer, a Duke graduate student at the time, with fundraising and promotion for an immigration policy debate in March 2007 between Peter Laufer, an open-borders activist and University of Oregon professor, and journalist Peter Brimelow, founder of the anti-immigration website VDARE. Spencer later became an important figure in the white supremacist movement and president of the National Policy Institute; he coined the term "alt-right". In a 2016 interview, Spencer said he had mentored Miller at Duke. Describing their close relationship, Spencer said that he was "kind of glad no one's talked about this", for fear of harming Trump.[2] In a later blog post, he said the relationship had been exaggerated. Miller has said he has "absolutely no relationship with Mr. Spencer" and that he "completely repudiate[s] his views, and his claims are 100 percent false."[37][38][39]
Duke University's former senior vice president, John Burness, told The News & Observer in February 2017 that, while at Duke, Miller "seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking—incredibly intolerant." According to Jane Stancill of The News & Observer, during the Duke lacrosse case, Miller's was the "lonely voice insisting that the players were innocent." History professor KC Johnsondescribed Duke's atmosphere during the case as not "conducive to speaking up" and praised Miller's role in it: "I think it did take a lot of courage, and he has to get credit for that."[38] Miller devoted more of his school paper column, "Miller Time," to the lacrosse scandal than any other topic.[40]
Career
After graduating from college, Miller began to work as a press secretary for Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party Republican, after David Horowitz connected them.[30] Horowitz later helped Miller to get a position with John Shadegg in early 2009.[30][41] In 2009, Miller began working for Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, who was later appointed United States attorney general.[41] He rose to the position of Sessions' communications director.[26] In the 113th Congress, Miller played a role in defeating the bipartisan Gang of Eight's proposed immigration reform bill.[26][41] As communications director, Miller was responsible for writing many of the speeches Sessions gave about the bill.[42] Miller and Sessions developed what Miller describes as "nation-state populism", a response to globalization and immigration that influenced Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. Miller also worked on Dave Brat's successful 2014 House campaign, which unseated Republican majority leader Eric Cantor.[26]
In January 2016, Miller joined the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign as a senior policy adviser.[41] He had previously reached out to the campaign repeatedly.[30] Beginning in March 2016, he regularly spoke on the campaign's behalf, serving as a "warm-up act" for Trump.[26] Miller wrote the speech Trump gave at the 2016 Republican National Convention.[34] In August 2016, Miller was named the head of Trump's economic policy team.[43]
Miller was seen as sharing an "ideological kinship" with former White House chief strategist and Breitbart News co-founder Steve Bannon, and had a "long collaboration" with him.[5][44] However, Miller distanced himself from Bannon in 2017 as Bannon fell out of favor with others in the White House.[5][45]
On April 7, 2021, Miller launched the America First Legal Foundation, a conservative legal organization.[46][47]
On September 8, 2022, Miller and Brian Jack were subpoenaed by a federal grand jury investigating attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election with special focus on the January 6 United States Capitol attack.[48]
Trump administration
In November 2016, Miller was named national policy director of Trump's transition team.[49] On December 13, 2016, the transition team announced that Miller would serve as Senior Advisor to the President for Policy during the Trump administration.[50] He was initially given responsibility for setting all domestic policy, but quickly assumed responsibility for immigration policy only.[51][52] Since becoming one of three Senior Advisors to the President, Miller has been regarded as the adviser who shaped the Trump administration's immigration policies.[53]
In the early days of Trump's presidency, Miller worked with Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump's nominee for Attorney General, and Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, to enact policies through executive orders to restrict immigration and crack down on sanctuary cities.[54] Miller and Bannon preferred executive orders to legislation.[51] Miller's and Sessions's views on immigration were influenced by anti-immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies.[55] Miller and Bannon were involved in the formation of Executive Order 13769, which sought to restrict U.S. travel and immigration by citizens of seven Muslim countries, and suspend the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days, while indefinitely suspending entry of Syrians to the United States.[7][8][9] Miller has been credited as the person behind the Trump administration's decision to reduce the number of refugees accepted into the United States.[10][56]
Miller played an influential role in Trump's decision to fire FBI director James Comey in May 2017.[57] Miller and Trump drafted a letter to Comey that was not sent after an internal review and opposition from White House counsel Don McGahn, but Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was given a copy, after which he prepared his own letter to Comey, which was cited as the reason for firing Comey.[58] In November 2017, Miller was interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller in relation to his role in Comey's dismissal.[59]In September 2017, The New York Times reported that Miller stopped the Trump administration from showing the public an internal study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees had a net positive effect on government revenues.[12][13] Miller insisted that only the costs of refugees be publicized, not the revenues refugees bring in.[12]
In October 2017, Trump provided a list of immigration reform demands to Congress, asking for the construction of more wall along the Mexico–United States border, hiring 10,000 additional U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, tightened asylum policies, and the discontinuance of federal funds to sanctuary cities in exchange for any action on undocumented immigrants who arrived as minors. Those immigrants had been protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy until that policy's rescission a month earlier, in September 2017. The New York Times reported that Miller and Sessions were among the Trump Administration officials who developed the demands.[60]
In May 2018, it was reported Miller had attended a controversial meeting which included George Nader on behalf of two Arab princes, Wikistrat CEO Joel Zamel, Erik Prince, and Donald Trump Jr., on August 3, 2016.[61] The New York Times had also reported in November 2017 that Miller was in regular contact with George Papadopoulos during the campaign about his discussions with Russian government officials.[62]
Miller and Attorney General Sessions were described as the chief champions of the Trump administration's decision to start to separate migrant children from their parents when they crossed the U.S. border.[11][55] Miller argued that such a policy would deter migrants from coming to the United States.[11] After Miller gave an on-the-record interview to the Times, the White House requested that the Times not publish portions of it on its podcast, The Daily; the Times acceded to the request.[63]
In July 2018, senior White House official Jennifer Arangio was fired after she reportedly advocated that the United States remain in the Global Compact for Migration (a United Nations plan intended to "cover all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner."[64]), defended the State Department's refugee bureau when Miller sought to defund it, and corrected misleading information about refugees that Miller was presenting to Trump.[65][66]
"I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family's life in this country."
Dr. David S. Glosser, uncle of Stephen Miller[67]
On August 13, 2018, Politico published an essay by Miller's uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, titled "Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I'm His Uncle", in which he detailed the Glosser family's history of coming to the United States from the village of Antopal in present-day Belarus.[68]
In October 2018, the Financial Times reported that Miller sought to make it impossible for Chinese students to study in the United States. Miller argued that a ban was necessary to reduce Chinese espionage, but that another benefit was that it would hurt elite universities with staff and students critical of Trump. Within the Trump administration, Miller's idea faced opposition, in particular from Terry Branstad, the ambassador to China, who argued that such a ban would harm US trade to China and hurt small American universities more than the elite ones.[69]
In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, Miller played an influential role in Trump's messaging, which focused on sowing fears about immigration.[70][71] Trump's party lost 40 seats in the House in those elections, in part because, according to Vox writer Dara Lind, Trump and Miller's "closing argument" focusing on immigrants appealed solely to "white identity politics", which does not have majority support in the United States.[72]
In January 2019, Miller reportedly reduced the number of immigrants who would receive protections as part of a proposed offer by Trump to grant protections for some immigrants in exchange for congressional support for funds to construct a border wall.[73]
Miller reportedly played a central role in Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen's resignation on April 7, 2019, as part of a larger department overhaul[74] aimed at steering the Trump administration towards a "tougher" approach on immigration.[14] Nielsen had opposed a plan Miller supported whereby the Trump administration would carry out mass arrests of undocumented immigrant families in 10 major U.S. cities.[15] Quartz reported that Miller had been purposely leaking information on border apprehensions and asylum seekers to the Washington Examiner so that the paper would publish alarming anti-immigration stories that criticized Nielsen.[75][76] During the same month, Representative Ilhan Omar called Miller a white nationalist as part of her comments on the Department of Homeland Security overhaul, which led to a strong response from several Republicans, including Representative Lee Zeldin and Donald Trump Jr., who accused her of anti-Semitism as Miller is Jewish.[77] Following the exposé by the Southern Poverty Law Center in November 2019, Omar reshared the April tweet in which she had called Miller a white nationalist, adding that "now we have the emails to prove it".[78][79]
In the wake of the United States' assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Miller allegedly suggested "dipping [al-Baghdadi's head] in pig's blood and parading it around to warn other terrorists", according to former defense secretary Mark Esper in his 2022 book A Sacred Oath. Esper called Miller's idea a "war crime"; Miller denied that this took place.[80]
While in the Trump administration, Miller met repeatedly with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, whom Miller described himself as a "huge fan" of. During the meetings, which were held off the White House grounds, Miller and Johnson "swapped speech-writing ideas and tips".[81]
In 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, leaked conversations showed that Miller wanted to extend temporary border restrictions imposed because of the pandemic to restrict immigration in the long term.[82] Emails showed that Miller had tried to use public health powers to implement border restrictions in 2019.[83] Miller also advised Trump not to openly embrace mask-wearing to halt the spread of the coronavirus.[84]
According to The New York Times, in the spring of 2020 Miller requested that the Homeland Security Department develop a plan to use American troops to seal the entire U.S. border with Mexico. Government officials estimated that such a plan would require the deployment of approximately 250,000 troops, or more than half of the active army, constituting the largest use of American military force within the country since the Civil War. Defense Secretary Mark Esper reportedly opposed the plan and it was eventually abandoned.[85]
During the 2020 election, Miller said that if Trump were reelected, the administration would seek to limit asylum, target sanctuary city policies, expand the "travel ban" and cut work visas.[86] He voiced support for the administration's third-country "Asylum Cooperative" agreements with Central American governments, among other policies, and pledged that it would pursue such policies with African and Asian countries if reelected.[87]
After Trump lost the 2020 election and failed to get the result overturned in courts or state legislatures, on December 14 Miller described on television a plan to send "alternate" slates of electors to Congress.[88] That day, as the official electoral college votes were being tallied, groups of self-appointed Republican "alternate electors" met in seven swing states and drafted fraudulent certificates of ascertainment. Since these alternate slates were not signed by the governors or secretaries of state of the states they claim to represent, they had no legal status, but could have been introduced as challenges to the true results when Congress counted the electoral votes on January 6, 2021. The watchdog group American Oversight published the documents in March 2021, but they received little attention until January 2022, when it was reported that the January 6 committee was investigating them. Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel announced in January 2022 that after a months-long investigation she had asked the U.S. Justice Department to open a criminal investigation.[89][90][91][92]
On January 6, Trump held a rally to support his false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen. Miller prepared the remarks that Trump delivered at the rally. During and after the speech, many of the attendees walked to the U.S. Capitol and stormed it.[93][94]
Leaked emails
In November 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center acquired more than 900 emails Miller sent Breitbart News writer Katie McHugh between 2015 and 2016. The emails became the basis for an exposé that showed that Miller had enthusiastically pushed the views of white nationalist publications such as American Renaissance and VDARE, as well as the far-right conspiracy website InfoWars, and promoted The Camp of the Saints, a French novel circulating among neo-Nazis, shaping both White House policy and Breitbart's coverage of racial politics.[18][95][96] In response to the exposé, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham called the SPLC an "utterly discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization."[97] As of November 15, 2019, over 80 Democratic members of Congress have called for Miller's resignation in light of his emails.[98][99][100] On November 13, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) started a petition that had reached more than 20,000 signatures by November 16.[101][102] According to The Daily Beast, seven "senior Trump administration officials with knowledge of Miller's standing with the president and top staffers have all individually told The Daily Beast that the story did not endanger Miller's position, or change Trump's favorable view of him. Two of them literally laughed at the mere suggestion that the Hatewatch exposé could have toppled or hobbled the top Trump adviser."[103]
Media appearances
On February 8, 2016, Miller participated in an interview with InfoWars, during which he praised the site and its owner, Alex Jones, for its coverage of immigration and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.[104]
In a February 2017 appearance on CBS' Face the Nation, Miller criticized the federal courts for blocking Trump's travel ban, accusing the judiciary of having "taken far too much power and become, in many cases, a supreme branch of government ... Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned."[105][106] Miller's assertion was met with criticism from legal experts, such as Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute (who said that the administration's comments could undercut public confidence in the judiciary) and Cornell Law School professor Jens David Ohlin (who said that the statement showed "an absurd lack of appreciation for the separation of powers" set forth in the Constitution).[107] In the same appearance, Miller falsely said there was significant voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election and that "thousands of illegal voters were bused in" to New Hampshire. Miller did not provide any evidence in support of the statements;[16][17] The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler found that Miller has on multiple occasions made false or unsubstantiated claims regarding electoral fraud.[5][16][17]
On January 7, 2018, Miller appeared on Jake Tapper's State of the Union on CNN. In the course of Tapper's interview of him, Miller called Steve Bannon's comments about the Trump Tower meeting in Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury "grotesque". Miller then went on to state, "The president is a political genius... who took down the Bush dynasty, who took down the Clinton dynasty, who took down the entire media complex". Tapper accused Miller of dodging questions, while Miller questioned the legitimacy of CNN as a news broadcaster, and as the interview became more contentious, with both participants talking over each other, Tapper ended the interview and continued to the next news story.[108][109][110] After the interview was over Miller refused to leave the CNN studio and had to be escorted out by security.[111]
In February 2019, as a controversy arose from a declaration of national emergency by Trump in order to fund building a wall along the southern border with Mexico that had been denied by Congress, Miller defended the declaration during a televised interview by Chris Wallace.[112]
Debate with Jim Acosta
On August 2, 2017, Miller had a heated exchange with CNN's Jim Acosta at the White House daily briefing regarding the Trump administration's support for the RAISE Act to sharply limit legal immigration and favor immigrants with high English proficiency.[113][114] Acosta said that the proposal was at odds with American traditions concerning immigration and said that the Statue of Liberty welcomes immigrants to the U.S., invoking verses from Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus". Miller disputed the connection between the Statue of Liberty and immigration, pointing out that "the poem that you're referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty."[114] Miller added that immigration has "ebbed and flowed" throughout American history and asked how many immigrants the U.S. had to accept annually to "meet Jim Acosta's definition of the Statue of Liberty law of the land."[115]
In their coverage, multiple publications (such as The Washington Post, Washington Monthly and U.S. News & World Report) commented that the distinction Miller made between the Statue of Liberty and Lazarus' poem has been a popular talking point among the white supremacist segments of the alt-right.[114][116][117] The Post's Michelle Ye Hee Lee stated that "Neither got it quite right about the Statue of Liberty ... While the poem itself was not a part of the original statue, it actually was commissioned in 1883 to help raise funds for the pedestal" and "gave another layer of meaning to the statue beyond its abolitionist message."[115]
Personal life
Miller married Katie Waldman, a fellow administration official, on February 16, 2020.[118] They have a daughter, born November 19, 2020, and announced the birth of their son in February 2022.[119][120] Miller is Jewish.[121]
He announced on October 6, 2020, that he had tested positive for COVID-19. He was among several White House employees affected by an outbreak.[122]
External links:
Stephen Miller at Wikipedia's sister projects
Media from Commons
Quotations from Wikiquote
Data from Wikidata
Appearances on C-SPAN
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WELCOME TO FASCIST AMERICA...
https://www.nytimes.com/…/stephen-millers-dystopian-america…
Opinion
Stephen Miller’s Dystopian America
Language is a tool for shaping minds, and Miller knows how to weaponize it.
by Jean Guerrero
August 28, 2020
New York Times
PHOTO: Stephen Miller, White House senior adviser. Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Over the past week, the Republican National Convention sought to conjure a “radical left” hellscape.
Speakers conflated anti-racist protesters with deranged criminals out to destroy the country. Donald Trump Jr. called Joe Biden “the Loch Ness monster,” while the conservative activist Charlie Kirk praised Donald Trump as “the bodyguard of Western civilization.” In his speech on Thursday, the president denounced “mob rule.” “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators, and criminals who threaten our citizens,” he said.
The language at the convention comes from the “white genocide” conspiracy theory, which warns, among other things, that brown and Black people will destroy white civilization with the help of their anti-racist allies. It echoed that of the racist-dystopian novel “The Camp of the Saints,” which Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior policy adviser and speechwriter, promoted in 2015 through the right-wing website Breitbart.
The book, by the French author Jean Raspail, characterizes “anti-racists” as an apocalyptic “mob” of “agitators” and “anarchists,” and depicts the destruction of the white world by brown refugees described as “monsters,” “beasts” and “toiling ants teeming for the white man’s comfort.” He wrote of a world where “anti-racists” are “servants of the beast” tainted by the “milk of human kindness.” Empathy and interracial ally-ship are associated with primitive bodily functions.
Language is a tool for shaping minds, and Mr. Miller knows how to weaponize it. It’s why he draws from books like Mr. Raspail’s to shape rhetoric. It’s why, in 2015, he asked writers at Breitbart to produce an article about the parallels between the book and real life that painted the book as prophetic. It’s also why he inserts vivid, gory descriptions of crimes ostensibly committed by migrants into Mr. Trump’s speeches.
In July, Mr. Miller told Tucker Carlson that the federal crackdown on anti-racist protesters in Portland, Ore., was about “the survival of this country.” In an interview with the radio host Larry O’Connor that month, he said the priority of the administration was protecting America from the dangers of “cancel culture,” which he described as “a very grave threat to American freedom.”
Mr. Trump is leaning on Mr. Miller’s dystopian vision to stoke white fear the way Mr. Miller did in 2016, when he helped his boss depict Democrats as elites seeking to “decimate” America through immigration. This time around the targets have expanded beyond Mexicans and Muslims to include Black Lives Matter protesters and their allies. The Trump campaign’s strategy is to cast the president’s opponents as an existential threat to the nation.
The term “cancel culture,” used throughout the Republican convention, lumps together and demonizes critics of white male supremacy, in an attempt to silence them. The use of the term in this context allows the far right to dictate the terms of the conversation, as does the news media’s reluctance to call Mr. Trump and his chief adviser what they are: traffickers in hate, pushing a white nationalist agenda through narratives about national identity, prosperity and security.
Mr. Miller seeks to re-engineer immigration into this country to keep brown and Black people out, because he sees them as threat to America’s prosperity and national security. It explains why his policies disproportionately affect migrant families from Latin America and Africa, and why the federal government is using force against anti-racist protesters in cities run by Democrats.
This obsession with the supposed dangers of people of color, particularly immigrants or left-wing extremists, ignores reality. Right-wing extremists have committed the most terrorist attacks in the United States since the 1990s.
Officials say that a 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire on people during a protest in Kenosha, Wis., on Tuesday, killing two and wounding a third. Mr. Rittenhouse, a supporter of Mr. Trump and the pro-law enforcement “Blue Lives Matter” movement, traveled to Kenosha from his home in Antioch, Ill., in response to online appeals from a right-wing militia group to “protect” businesses, property and lives from “rioters,” investigators say.
Last August, a gunman drove to a Walmart in El Paso, targeting Hispanics in massacre that left 23 people dead. The man charged in the killings, Patrick Crusius, wrote an anti-immigrant manifesto that spoke of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” mirroring Mr. Trump’s characterization of migrants from Central and South America as perpetrating “an invasion of our country.”
False Black and brown crime statistics are a common recruiting tactic in white supremacist circles; the website American Renaissance, which Mr. Miller also promoted through Breitbart, pumps out misleading statistics characterizing people of color as more prone to violence. These words take on a life of their own and serve to further radicalize an already divided citizenry.
Mary Ann Mendoza, an “angel mom” whose son was killed by a driver who was in the United States illegally, was scheduled to speak at the Republican convention. She was dropped from the convention lineup after she retweeted an anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy theory. Mr. Miller has repeatedly given her a platform from which to spew fabricated migrant crime statistics that inaccurately paint migrants as more innately violent than citizens.
As Mr. Trump increasingly adopts the playbook of white supremacists, a new solidarity is emerging among white, Black, brown and other groups as they confront the growing threat of right-wing extremism together. The Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket reflects this new solidarity.
“Trump knows that if we find real solidarity, it’s a wrap,” said Aida Rodriguez, an Afro-Latina activist. “We’re all waking up to it, and you’re going to see it in November.” These alliances are a real-life manifestation of the mob of Mr. Miller’s nightmares. But that “mob” will not destroy America, as he imagines. It will destroy the white supremacist fantasy he and so many others live inside.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jean Guerrero (@jeanguerre), an investigative journalist, is the author of the book “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.”
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A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 29, 2020, Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: The G.O.P.’s Dystopian America. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
PHOTO: Stephen Miller, White House senior adviser. Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times
https://truthout.org/articles/stephen-miller-run-group-airs-anti-trans-white-nationalist-political-ads/
“...Miller is no stranger to pushing unfounded and bigoted ideals. While working in the White House, he encouraged right-wing media to publish stories about the “great replacement” theory, an errant idea among white nationalists that global elites are seeking to saturate countries that have historically had a majority white population with a majority of people of color. Miller was also the architect of many racist Trump administration policies, including the child separation policy for immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries that was introduced early on in Trump’s tenure.
“Through the conscious use of fearmongering and xenophobia, Miller implement[ed] policies which demonize immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, in an apparent effort to halt all forms of immigration to the United States,” the Southern Poverty Law Center says in their profile of Miller."
Miller was born on August 23, 1985, in Santa Monica, California, where he was raised, the second of three children in the Jewish family of Michael D. Miller, a real estate investor, and Miriam (née Glosser).[1] His mother's ancestors—Wolf Lieb Glotzer and his wife, Bessie—emigrated to the United States from the Russian Empire's Antopol, in what is present-day Belarus, arriving in New York on January 7, 1903, on the German ship S.S. Moltke,[21] thus escaping the 1903–06 anti-Jewish pogroms in Belarus and other parts of the Russian Empire.[22][23][24] When his great-grandmother arrived in the U.S. in 1906, she spoke only Yiddish, the historical language of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe.[25]
Miller has said he became a committed conservative after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, a book opposing gun control by Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association.[26][27][28] While attending Santa Monica High School, Miller began appearing on conservative talk radio.[26][23] In 2002, at the age of 16, Miller wrote a letter to the editor of the Santa Monica Outlook criticizing his school's response to the September 11 attacks; he wrote: "Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School."[26][29] While in high school, Miller cited Rush Limbaugh's book The Way Things Ought To Be as his favorite.[30] Miller invited conservative activist David Horowitz to speak, first at the high school and later at Duke University; afterward he denounced the fact that neither institution would authorize the event.[26] Miller was in the habit of "riling up his fellow [high school] classmates with controversial statements";[31] for instance, he told Latino students to speak only English.[27][31][32][33]
At 16, Miller called in to The Larry Elder Show, a conservative radio show, to complain about his high school's alleged lack of patriotism because it did not recite the Pledge of Allegiance.[30] David Horowitz, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant extremist, published an essay by Miller, "How I Changed My Left-Wing High School", on his website.[30] Horowitz has been described as an influential figure in Miller's early life.[30]
In 2007,[34] Miller received his bachelor's degree from Duke University, where he studied political science.[26] He served as president of the Duke chapter of Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom and wrote conservative columns for the school newspaper. Miller gained national attention for his defense of the students who were wrongly accused of rape in the Duke lacrosse case.[26][35] While attending Duke, Miller accused poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou of "racial paranoia" and described student organization Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán (MEChA) as a "radical national Hispanic group that believes in racial superiority."[36]
Miller and the Duke Conservative Union helped co-member Richard Spencer, a Duke graduate student at the time, with fundraising and promotion for an immigration policy debate in March 2007 between Peter Laufer, an open-borders activist and University of Oregon professor, and journalist Peter Brimelow, founder of the anti-immigration website VDARE. Spencer later became an important figure in the white supremacist movement and president of the National Policy Institute; he coined the term "alt-right". In a 2016 interview, Spencer said he had mentored Miller at Duke. Describing their close relationship, Spencer said that he was "kind of glad no one's talked about this", for fear of harming Trump.[2] In a later blog post, he said the relationship had been exaggerated. Miller has said he has "absolutely no relationship with Mr. Spencer" and that he "completely repudiate[s] his views, and his claims are 100 percent false."[37][38][39]
Duke University's former senior vice president, John Burness, told The News & Observer in February 2017 that, while at Duke, Miller "seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking—incredibly intolerant." According to Jane Stancill of The News & Observer, during the Duke lacrosse case, Miller's was the "lonely voice insisting that the players were innocent." History professor KC Johnsondescribed Duke's atmosphere during the case as not "conducive to speaking up" and praised Miller's role in it: "I think it did take a lot of courage, and he has to get credit for that."[38] Miller devoted more of his school paper column, "Miller Time," to the lacrosse scandal than any other topic.[40]
Career
After graduating from college, Miller began to work as a press secretary for Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party Republican, after David Horowitz connected them.[30] Horowitz later helped Miller to get a position with John Shadegg in early 2009.[30][41] In 2009, Miller began working for Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, who was later appointed United States attorney general.[41] He rose to the position of Sessions' communications director.[26] In the 113th Congress, Miller played a role in defeating the bipartisan Gang of Eight's proposed immigration reform bill.[26][41] As communications director, Miller was responsible for writing many of the speeches Sessions gave about the bill.[42] Miller and Sessions developed what Miller describes as "nation-state populism", a response to globalization and immigration that influenced Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. Miller also worked on Dave Brat's successful 2014 House campaign, which unseated Republican majority leader Eric Cantor.[26]
In January 2016, Miller joined the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign as a senior policy adviser.[41] He had previously reached out to the campaign repeatedly.[30] Beginning in March 2016, he regularly spoke on the campaign's behalf, serving as a "warm-up act" for Trump.[26] Miller wrote the speech Trump gave at the 2016 Republican National Convention.[34] In August 2016, Miller was named the head of Trump's economic policy team.[43]
Miller was seen as sharing an "ideological kinship" with former White House chief strategist and Breitbart News co-founder Steve Bannon, and had a "long collaboration" with him.[5][44] However, Miller distanced himself from Bannon in 2017 as Bannon fell out of favor with others in the White House.[5][45]
On April 7, 2021, Miller launched the America First Legal Foundation, a conservative legal organization.[46][47]
On September 8, 2022, Miller and Brian Jack were subpoenaed by a federal grand jury investigating attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election with special focus on the January 6 United States Capitol attack.[48]
Trump administration
In November 2016, Miller was named national policy director of Trump's transition team.[49] On December 13, 2016, the transition team announced that Miller would serve as Senior Advisor to the President for Policy during the Trump administration.[50] He was initially given responsibility for setting all domestic policy, but quickly assumed responsibility for immigration policy only.[51][52] Since becoming one of three Senior Advisors to the President, Miller has been regarded as the adviser who shaped the Trump administration's immigration policies.[53]
In the early days of Trump's presidency, Miller worked with Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump's nominee for Attorney General, and Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, to enact policies through executive orders to restrict immigration and crack down on sanctuary cities.[54] Miller and Bannon preferred executive orders to legislation.[51] Miller's and Sessions's views on immigration were influenced by anti-immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies.[55] Miller and Bannon were involved in the formation of Executive Order 13769, which sought to restrict U.S. travel and immigration by citizens of seven Muslim countries, and suspend the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days, while indefinitely suspending entry of Syrians to the United States.[7][8][9] Miller has been credited as the person behind the Trump administration's decision to reduce the number of refugees accepted into the United States.[10][56]
Miller played an influential role in Trump's decision to fire FBI director James Comey in May 2017.[57] Miller and Trump drafted a letter to Comey that was not sent after an internal review and opposition from White House counsel Don McGahn, but Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was given a copy, after which he prepared his own letter to Comey, which was cited as the reason for firing Comey.[58] In November 2017, Miller was interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller in relation to his role in Comey's dismissal.[59]In September 2017, The New York Times reported that Miller stopped the Trump administration from showing the public an internal study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees had a net positive effect on government revenues.[12][13] Miller insisted that only the costs of refugees be publicized, not the revenues refugees bring in.[12]
In October 2017, Trump provided a list of immigration reform demands to Congress, asking for the construction of more wall along the Mexico–United States border, hiring 10,000 additional U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, tightened asylum policies, and the discontinuance of federal funds to sanctuary cities in exchange for any action on undocumented immigrants who arrived as minors. Those immigrants had been protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy until that policy's rescission a month earlier, in September 2017. The New York Times reported that Miller and Sessions were among the Trump Administration officials who developed the demands.[60]
In May 2018, it was reported Miller had attended a controversial meeting which included George Nader on behalf of two Arab princes, Wikistrat CEO Joel Zamel, Erik Prince, and Donald Trump Jr., on August 3, 2016.[61] The New York Times had also reported in November 2017 that Miller was in regular contact with George Papadopoulos during the campaign about his discussions with Russian government officials.[62]
Miller and Attorney General Sessions were described as the chief champions of the Trump administration's decision to start to separate migrant children from their parents when they crossed the U.S. border.[11][55] Miller argued that such a policy would deter migrants from coming to the United States.[11] After Miller gave an on-the-record interview to the Times, the White House requested that the Times not publish portions of it on its podcast, The Daily; the Times acceded to the request.[63]
In July 2018, senior White House official Jennifer Arangio was fired after she reportedly advocated that the United States remain in the Global Compact for Migration (a United Nations plan intended to "cover all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner."[64]), defended the State Department's refugee bureau when Miller sought to defund it, and corrected misleading information about refugees that Miller was presenting to Trump.[65][66]
"I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family's life in this country."
Dr. David S. Glosser, uncle of Stephen Miller[67]
On August 13, 2018, Politico published an essay by Miller's uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, titled "Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I'm His Uncle", in which he detailed the Glosser family's history of coming to the United States from the village of Antopal in present-day Belarus.[68]
In October 2018, the Financial Times reported that Miller sought to make it impossible for Chinese students to study in the United States. Miller argued that a ban was necessary to reduce Chinese espionage, but that another benefit was that it would hurt elite universities with staff and students critical of Trump. Within the Trump administration, Miller's idea faced opposition, in particular from Terry Branstad, the ambassador to China, who argued that such a ban would harm US trade to China and hurt small American universities more than the elite ones.[69]
In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, Miller played an influential role in Trump's messaging, which focused on sowing fears about immigration.[70][71] Trump's party lost 40 seats in the House in those elections, in part because, according to Vox writer Dara Lind, Trump and Miller's "closing argument" focusing on immigrants appealed solely to "white identity politics", which does not have majority support in the United States.[72]
In January 2019, Miller reportedly reduced the number of immigrants who would receive protections as part of a proposed offer by Trump to grant protections for some immigrants in exchange for congressional support for funds to construct a border wall.[73]
Miller reportedly played a central role in Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen's resignation on April 7, 2019, as part of a larger department overhaul[74] aimed at steering the Trump administration towards a "tougher" approach on immigration.[14] Nielsen had opposed a plan Miller supported whereby the Trump administration would carry out mass arrests of undocumented immigrant families in 10 major U.S. cities.[15] Quartz reported that Miller had been purposely leaking information on border apprehensions and asylum seekers to the Washington Examiner so that the paper would publish alarming anti-immigration stories that criticized Nielsen.[75][76] During the same month, Representative Ilhan Omar called Miller a white nationalist as part of her comments on the Department of Homeland Security overhaul, which led to a strong response from several Republicans, including Representative Lee Zeldin and Donald Trump Jr., who accused her of anti-Semitism as Miller is Jewish.[77] Following the exposé by the Southern Poverty Law Center in November 2019, Omar reshared the April tweet in which she had called Miller a white nationalist, adding that "now we have the emails to prove it".[78][79]
In the wake of the United States' assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Miller allegedly suggested "dipping [al-Baghdadi's head] in pig's blood and parading it around to warn other terrorists", according to former defense secretary Mark Esper in his 2022 book A Sacred Oath. Esper called Miller's idea a "war crime"; Miller denied that this took place.[80]
While in the Trump administration, Miller met repeatedly with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, whom Miller described himself as a "huge fan" of. During the meetings, which were held off the White House grounds, Miller and Johnson "swapped speech-writing ideas and tips".[81]
In 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, leaked conversations showed that Miller wanted to extend temporary border restrictions imposed because of the pandemic to restrict immigration in the long term.[82] Emails showed that Miller had tried to use public health powers to implement border restrictions in 2019.[83] Miller also advised Trump not to openly embrace mask-wearing to halt the spread of the coronavirus.[84]
According to The New York Times, in the spring of 2020 Miller requested that the Homeland Security Department develop a plan to use American troops to seal the entire U.S. border with Mexico. Government officials estimated that such a plan would require the deployment of approximately 250,000 troops, or more than half of the active army, constituting the largest use of American military force within the country since the Civil War. Defense Secretary Mark Esper reportedly opposed the plan and it was eventually abandoned.[85]
During the 2020 election, Miller said that if Trump were reelected, the administration would seek to limit asylum, target sanctuary city policies, expand the "travel ban" and cut work visas.[86] He voiced support for the administration's third-country "Asylum Cooperative" agreements with Central American governments, among other policies, and pledged that it would pursue such policies with African and Asian countries if reelected.[87]
After Trump lost the 2020 election and failed to get the result overturned in courts or state legislatures, on December 14 Miller described on television a plan to send "alternate" slates of electors to Congress.[88] That day, as the official electoral college votes were being tallied, groups of self-appointed Republican "alternate electors" met in seven swing states and drafted fraudulent certificates of ascertainment. Since these alternate slates were not signed by the governors or secretaries of state of the states they claim to represent, they had no legal status, but could have been introduced as challenges to the true results when Congress counted the electoral votes on January 6, 2021. The watchdog group American Oversight published the documents in March 2021, but they received little attention until January 2022, when it was reported that the January 6 committee was investigating them. Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel announced in January 2022 that after a months-long investigation she had asked the U.S. Justice Department to open a criminal investigation.[89][90][91][92]
On January 6, Trump held a rally to support his false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen. Miller prepared the remarks that Trump delivered at the rally. During and after the speech, many of the attendees walked to the U.S. Capitol and stormed it.[93][94]
Leaked emails
In November 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center acquired more than 900 emails Miller sent Breitbart News writer Katie McHugh between 2015 and 2016. The emails became the basis for an exposé that showed that Miller had enthusiastically pushed the views of white nationalist publications such as American Renaissance and VDARE, as well as the far-right conspiracy website InfoWars, and promoted The Camp of the Saints, a French novel circulating among neo-Nazis, shaping both White House policy and Breitbart's coverage of racial politics.[18][95][96] In response to the exposé, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham called the SPLC an "utterly discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization."[97] As of November 15, 2019, over 80 Democratic members of Congress have called for Miller's resignation in light of his emails.[98][99][100] On November 13, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) started a petition that had reached more than 20,000 signatures by November 16.[101][102] According to The Daily Beast, seven "senior Trump administration officials with knowledge of Miller's standing with the president and top staffers have all individually told The Daily Beast that the story did not endanger Miller's position, or change Trump's favorable view of him. Two of them literally laughed at the mere suggestion that the Hatewatch exposé could have toppled or hobbled the top Trump adviser."[103]
Media appearances
On February 8, 2016, Miller participated in an interview with InfoWars, during which he praised the site and its owner, Alex Jones, for its coverage of immigration and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.[104]
In a February 2017 appearance on CBS' Face the Nation, Miller criticized the federal courts for blocking Trump's travel ban, accusing the judiciary of having "taken far too much power and become, in many cases, a supreme branch of government ... Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned."[105][106] Miller's assertion was met with criticism from legal experts, such as Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute (who said that the administration's comments could undercut public confidence in the judiciary) and Cornell Law School professor Jens David Ohlin (who said that the statement showed "an absurd lack of appreciation for the separation of powers" set forth in the Constitution).[107] In the same appearance, Miller falsely said there was significant voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election and that "thousands of illegal voters were bused in" to New Hampshire. Miller did not provide any evidence in support of the statements;[16][17] The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler found that Miller has on multiple occasions made false or unsubstantiated claims regarding electoral fraud.[5][16][17]
On January 7, 2018, Miller appeared on Jake Tapper's State of the Union on CNN. In the course of Tapper's interview of him, Miller called Steve Bannon's comments about the Trump Tower meeting in Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury "grotesque". Miller then went on to state, "The president is a political genius... who took down the Bush dynasty, who took down the Clinton dynasty, who took down the entire media complex". Tapper accused Miller of dodging questions, while Miller questioned the legitimacy of CNN as a news broadcaster, and as the interview became more contentious, with both participants talking over each other, Tapper ended the interview and continued to the next news story.[108][109][110] After the interview was over Miller refused to leave the CNN studio and had to be escorted out by security.[111]
In February 2019, as a controversy arose from a declaration of national emergency by Trump in order to fund building a wall along the southern border with Mexico that had been denied by Congress, Miller defended the declaration during a televised interview by Chris Wallace.[112]
Debate with Jim Acosta
On August 2, 2017, Miller had a heated exchange with CNN's Jim Acosta at the White House daily briefing regarding the Trump administration's support for the RAISE Act to sharply limit legal immigration and favor immigrants with high English proficiency.[113][114] Acosta said that the proposal was at odds with American traditions concerning immigration and said that the Statue of Liberty welcomes immigrants to the U.S., invoking verses from Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus". Miller disputed the connection between the Statue of Liberty and immigration, pointing out that "the poem that you're referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty."[114] Miller added that immigration has "ebbed and flowed" throughout American history and asked how many immigrants the U.S. had to accept annually to "meet Jim Acosta's definition of the Statue of Liberty law of the land."[115]
In their coverage, multiple publications (such as The Washington Post, Washington Monthly and U.S. News & World Report) commented that the distinction Miller made between the Statue of Liberty and Lazarus' poem has been a popular talking point among the white supremacist segments of the alt-right.[114][116][117] The Post's Michelle Ye Hee Lee stated that "Neither got it quite right about the Statue of Liberty ... While the poem itself was not a part of the original statue, it actually was commissioned in 1883 to help raise funds for the pedestal" and "gave another layer of meaning to the statue beyond its abolitionist message."[115]
Personal life
Miller married Katie Waldman, a fellow administration official, on February 16, 2020.[118] They have a daughter, born November 19, 2020, and announced the birth of their son in February 2022.[119][120] Miller is Jewish.[121]
He announced on October 6, 2020, that he had tested positive for COVID-19. He was among several White House employees affected by an outbreak.[122]
External links:
Stephen Miller at Wikipedia's sister projects
Media from CommonsQuotations from WikiquoteData from WikidataAppearances on C-SPAN
https://www.facebook.com/The-Panopticon-Review-342702882479366/
WELCOME TO FASCIST AMERICA...
https://www.nytimes.com/…/stephen-millers-dystopian-america…
Opinion
Stephen Miller’s Dystopian America
Language is a tool for shaping minds, and Miller knows how to weaponize it.
by Jean Guerrero
August 28, 2020
New York Times
PHOTO: Stephen Miller, White House senior adviser. Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Over the past week, the Republican National Convention sought to conjure a “radical left” hellscape.
Speakers conflated anti-racist protesters with deranged criminals out to destroy the country. Donald Trump Jr. called Joe Biden “the Loch Ness monster,” while the conservative activist Charlie Kirk praised Donald Trump as “the bodyguard of Western civilization.” In his speech on Thursday, the president denounced “mob rule.” “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators, and criminals who threaten our citizens,” he said.
The language at the convention comes from the “white genocide” conspiracy theory, which warns, among other things, that brown and Black people will destroy white civilization with the help of their anti-racist allies. It echoed that of the racist-dystopian novel “The Camp of the Saints,” which Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior policy adviser and speechwriter, promoted in 2015 through the right-wing website Breitbart.
The book, by the French author Jean Raspail, characterizes “anti-racists” as an apocalyptic “mob” of “agitators” and “anarchists,” and depicts the destruction of the white world by brown refugees described as “monsters,” “beasts” and “toiling ants teeming for the white man’s comfort.” He wrote of a world where “anti-racists” are “servants of the beast” tainted by the “milk of human kindness.” Empathy and interracial ally-ship are associated with primitive bodily functions.
Language is a tool for shaping minds, and Mr. Miller knows how to weaponize it. It’s why he draws from books like Mr. Raspail’s to shape rhetoric. It’s why, in 2015, he asked writers at Breitbart to produce an article about the parallels between the book and real life that painted the book as prophetic. It’s also why he inserts vivid, gory descriptions of crimes ostensibly committed by migrants into Mr. Trump’s speeches.
In July, Mr. Miller told Tucker Carlson that the federal crackdown on anti-racist protesters in Portland, Ore., was about “the survival of this country.” In an interview with the radio host Larry O’Connor that month, he said the priority of the administration was protecting America from the dangers of “cancel culture,” which he described as “a very grave threat to American freedom.”
Mr. Trump is leaning on Mr. Miller’s dystopian vision to stoke white fear the way Mr. Miller did in 2016, when he helped his boss depict Democrats as elites seeking to “decimate” America through immigration. This time around the targets have expanded beyond Mexicans and Muslims to include Black Lives Matter protesters and their allies. The Trump campaign’s strategy is to cast the president’s opponents as an existential threat to the nation.
The term “cancel culture,” used throughout the Republican convention, lumps together and demonizes critics of white male supremacy, in an attempt to silence them. The use of the term in this context allows the far right to dictate the terms of the conversation, as does the news media’s reluctance to call Mr. Trump and his chief adviser what they are: traffickers in hate, pushing a white nationalist agenda through narratives about national identity, prosperity and security.
Mr. Miller seeks to re-engineer immigration into this country to keep brown and Black people out, because he sees them as threat to America’s prosperity and national security. It explains why his policies disproportionately affect migrant families from Latin America and Africa, and why the federal government is using force against anti-racist protesters in cities run by Democrats.
This obsession with the supposed dangers of people of color, particularly immigrants or left-wing extremists, ignores reality. Right-wing extremists have committed the most terrorist attacks in the United States since the 1990s.
Officials say that a 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire on people during a protest in Kenosha, Wis., on Tuesday, killing two and wounding a third. Mr. Rittenhouse, a supporter of Mr. Trump and the pro-law enforcement “Blue Lives Matter” movement, traveled to Kenosha from his home in Antioch, Ill., in response to online appeals from a right-wing militia group to “protect” businesses, property and lives from “rioters,” investigators say.
Last August, a gunman drove to a Walmart in El Paso, targeting Hispanics in massacre that left 23 people dead. The man charged in the killings, Patrick Crusius, wrote an anti-immigrant manifesto that spoke of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” mirroring Mr. Trump’s characterization of migrants from Central and South America as perpetrating “an invasion of our country.”
False Black and brown crime statistics are a common recruiting tactic in white supremacist circles; the website American Renaissance, which Mr. Miller also promoted through Breitbart, pumps out misleading statistics characterizing people of color as more prone to violence. These words take on a life of their own and serve to further radicalize an already divided citizenry.
Mary Ann Mendoza, an “angel mom” whose son was killed by a driver who was in the United States illegally, was scheduled to speak at the Republican convention. She was dropped from the convention lineup after she retweeted an anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy theory. Mr. Miller has repeatedly given her a platform from which to spew fabricated migrant crime statistics that inaccurately paint migrants as more innately violent than citizens.
As Mr. Trump increasingly adopts the playbook of white supremacists, a new solidarity is emerging among white, Black, brown and other groups as they confront the growing threat of right-wing extremism together. The Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket reflects this new solidarity.
“Trump knows that if we find real solidarity, it’s a wrap,” said Aida Rodriguez, an Afro-Latina activist. “We’re all waking up to it, and you’re going to see it in November.” These alliances are a real-life manifestation of the mob of Mr. Miller’s nightmares. But that “mob” will not destroy America, as he imagines. It will destroy the white supremacist fantasy he and so many others live inside.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jean Guerrero (@jeanguerre), an investigative journalist, is the author of the book “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
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A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 29, 2020, Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: The G.O.P.’s Dystopian America. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
PHOTO: Stephen Miller, White House senior adviser. Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times
https://truthout.org/articles/stephen-miller-run-group-airs-anti-trans-white-nationalist-political-ads/
“...Miller is no stranger to pushing unfounded and bigoted ideals. While working in the White House, he encouraged right-wing media to publish stories about the “great replacement” theory, an errant idea among white nationalists that global elites are seeking to saturate countries that have historically had a majority white population with a majority of people of color. Miller was also the architect of many racist Trump administration policies, including the child separation policy for immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries that was introduced early on in Trump’s tenure.
“Through the conscious use of fearmongering and xenophobia, Miller implement[ed] policies which demonize immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, in an apparent effort to halt all forms of immigration to the United States,” the Southern Poverty Law Center says in their profile of Miller."
News
Politics & Elections
Stephen Miller-Run Group Airs Anti-Trans & White Nationalist Political Ads
by Chris Walker
November 1, 2022
Truthout
by Chris Walker
November 1, 2022
Truthout
PHOTO: Former White House Senior Advisor Steven Miller speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held at the Hilton Anatole on July 11, 2021, in Dallas, Texas. Brandon Bell / Getty Images
A series of political ads from two far right groups have aired in battleground states across the country in the final week of the 2022 midterm season, featuring false and incendiary rhetoric about gender-affirming care for trans children and supposed racism against white people.
The radio ads call on listeners with far right extremist views to vote against Democrats in next week’s elections, and include white nationalist and anti-LGBTQ dog whistles.
The two groups are airing ads in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Colorado, Michigan and Nevada, according to The New York Times.
Both groups have ties to former President Donald Trump. America First Legal is a political action committee started by Stephen Miller, a former Trump advisor who helped craft numerous anti-immigrant policies while in the White House. The second group, Citizens for Sanity, includes among its board of directors at least three former Trump administration officials — Gene Hamilton, Ian Prior and John Zadrozny — who also have connections to America First Legal.
In one ad from America First Legal, a narrator accuses the Biden administration of engaging in “anti-white bigotry.” The ad makes false claims about President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris giving preferential treatment to nonwhite businesses and placing people of color ahead of white residents when it comes to coronavirus vaccines and treatments — claims that have been widely debunked by fact-checking websites, according to Politico.
“When did racism against white people become okay?” the narrator asks.
Another series of ads from the organization spreads lies about gender-affirming care for transgender children in order to shock and enrage listeners, accusing Biden and Democrats of wanting to “remove breasts and genitals” of children. The ads also claim that left-leaning politicians are “push[ing] girls to take testosterone so they grow facial hair.”
The ads from Citizens for Sanity pushed similar lies, falsely stating that gender-affirming care for trans kids is irreversible and results in sterilization.
In reality, no one is pushing children into receiving gender-affirming care against their will — and most types of gender-affirming care for trans children simply involve therapy, with some children being allowed to use safe, reversible puberty-blocking medication with their doctor’s approval in order to offset unwanted changes in their bodies. Medical guidelines also state that trans children should not have surgery on their genitals to coincide with gender-affirming care, contrary to what the ads claim.
Miller is no stranger to pushing unfounded and bigoted ideals. While working in the White House, he encouraged right-wing media to publish stories about the “great replacement” theory, an errant idea among white nationalists that global elites are seeking to saturate countries that have historically had a majority white population with a majority of people of color. Miller was also the architect of many racist Trump administration policies, including the child separation policy for immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries that was introduced early on in Trump’s tenure.
“Through the conscious use of fearmongering and xenophobia, Miller implement[ed] policies which demonize immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, in an apparent effort to halt all forms of immigration to the United States,” the Southern Poverty Law Center says in their profile of Miller.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on the American people.
https://www.politico.com/…/stephen-miller-david-horowitz-me…
1600 Penn
The Man Who Made Stephen Miller
Almost 20 years ago, anti-immigration activist David Horowitz cultivated an angry high school student. Now his ideas are coming to life in the Trump administration.
by Jean Guerrero
August 1, 2020
Politico
A series of political ads from two far right groups have aired in battleground states across the country in the final week of the 2022 midterm season, featuring false and incendiary rhetoric about gender-affirming care for trans children and supposed racism against white people.
The radio ads call on listeners with far right extremist views to vote against Democrats in next week’s elections, and include white nationalist and anti-LGBTQ dog whistles.
The two groups are airing ads in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Colorado, Michigan and Nevada, according to The New York Times.
Both groups have ties to former President Donald Trump. America First Legal is a political action committee started by Stephen Miller, a former Trump advisor who helped craft numerous anti-immigrant policies while in the White House. The second group, Citizens for Sanity, includes among its board of directors at least three former Trump administration officials — Gene Hamilton, Ian Prior and John Zadrozny — who also have connections to America First Legal.
In one ad from America First Legal, a narrator accuses the Biden administration of engaging in “anti-white bigotry.” The ad makes false claims about President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris giving preferential treatment to nonwhite businesses and placing people of color ahead of white residents when it comes to coronavirus vaccines and treatments — claims that have been widely debunked by fact-checking websites, according to Politico.
“When did racism against white people become okay?” the narrator asks.
Another series of ads from the organization spreads lies about gender-affirming care for transgender children in order to shock and enrage listeners, accusing Biden and Democrats of wanting to “remove breasts and genitals” of children. The ads also claim that left-leaning politicians are “push[ing] girls to take testosterone so they grow facial hair.”
The ads from Citizens for Sanity pushed similar lies, falsely stating that gender-affirming care for trans kids is irreversible and results in sterilization.
In reality, no one is pushing children into receiving gender-affirming care against their will — and most types of gender-affirming care for trans children simply involve therapy, with some children being allowed to use safe, reversible puberty-blocking medication with their doctor’s approval in order to offset unwanted changes in their bodies. Medical guidelines also state that trans children should not have surgery on their genitals to coincide with gender-affirming care, contrary to what the ads claim.
Miller is no stranger to pushing unfounded and bigoted ideals. While working in the White House, he encouraged right-wing media to publish stories about the “great replacement” theory, an errant idea among white nationalists that global elites are seeking to saturate countries that have historically had a majority white population with a majority of people of color. Miller was also the architect of many racist Trump administration policies, including the child separation policy for immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries that was introduced early on in Trump’s tenure.
“Through the conscious use of fearmongering and xenophobia, Miller implement[ed] policies which demonize immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, in an apparent effort to halt all forms of immigration to the United States,” the Southern Poverty Law Center says in their profile of Miller.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on the American people.
https://www.politico.com/…/stephen-miller-david-horowitz-me…
1600 Penn
The Man Who Made Stephen Miller
Almost 20 years ago, anti-immigration activist David Horowitz cultivated an angry high school student. Now his ideas are coming to life in the Trump administration.
by Jean Guerrero
August 1, 2020
Politico
PHOTO: White House senior adviser Stephen Miller pauses while speaking during a television interview at the White House, Friday, July 31, 2020, in Washington. AP Photo/Alex Brandon
[NOTE: Jean Guerrero is an investigative journalist and author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda, forthcoming from William Morrow (HarperCollins) on August 11, from which this article is adapted. Her first book, Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, won the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize.]
In December 2012, with the Republican Party reeling from a brutal election that left Democrats in control of the White House and the Senate, the conservative activist David Horowitz emailed a strategy paper to the office of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.
Horowitz, now 81, was a longtime opponent of immigration and the founder of a think tank and a campus freedom-of-speech advocacy group. He saw in Sessions a kindred spirit—a senator who could reawaken a more nationalist fire in the Republican Party. The person he emailed it to was a Sessions aide: Stephen Miller. Horowitz, who recalled the episode in an interview and shared the emails with me, had known Miller since the aide was in high school.
Horowitz encouraged Miller to not only give the paper to Sessions but to circulate it in the Senate. Miller expressed eagerness to share it and asked for instructions. “Leave the Confidential note on it. It gives it an aura that will make people pay more attention to it,” Horowitz wrote. The paper, “Playing to the Head Instead of the Heart: Why Republicans Lost and How They Can Win,” included a section on the political utility of hostile feelings. Horowitz wrote that Democrats know how to “hate their opponents,” how to “incite envy and resentment, distrust and fear, and to direct those volatile emotions.” He urged Republicans to “return their fire.”
“Behind the failures of Republican campaigns lies an attitude that is administrative rather than combative. It focuses on policies rather than politics. It is more comfortable with budgets and pie charts than with the flesh and blood victims of their opponents’ policies,” Horowitz wrote, adding that Democrats have the moral high ground. “They are secular missionaries who want to ‘change society.’ Their goal is a new order of society—‘social justice.’” He argued that the only way to beat them is with “an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language, identifying them as the bad guys.”
Horowitz wrote that hope and fear are the two strongest weapons in politics. Barack Obama had used hope to become president. “Fear is a much stronger and more compelling emotion,” Horowitz argued, adding that Republicans should appeal to voters’ base instincts.
It is perhaps the most compact crystallization of the relationship that propelled Miller, now a senior policy adviser and speechwriter in the Donald Trump administration, to the White House and of the importance that relationship has had in the administration. The friendship between Miller and Horowitz began when Miller—who did not respond to interview requests for the book from which this article was adapted—was in high school and continued throughout his career. Tracing it reveals a source of Miller’s laser focus on immigration restriction, which has over the past few years resulted in a ban on travel from mostly Muslim countries and a policy that separated families crossing the border into the United States to seek asylum. If you want to understand the language Trump uses to talk about immigrants and his opponents, or the immigration policies he has put into place, often via Miller, you have to also understand Horowitz, and the formative role he played in Miller’s career and life.
Miller met Horowitz shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when Miller was a teenager growing up on the Southern California coast. He was going through a period of family turmoil. A few years before, they had moved out of a million-dollar home in a wealthy white neighborhood to a slightly smaller house in a more diverse neighborhood. Miller’s father, Michael, was having financial troubles and fighting several legal battles related to his real estate company, including a fight with his brother whom he permanently separated from the family with a no-contact order in a settlement agreement. Rather than attending a private school the way Michael’s youngest son later did, his oldest son, Stephen, found himself at a diverse public school, which celebrated Día de los Muertos and Cinco de Mayo.
When his father was tangled up in lawsuits, Miller found comfort in a number of conservative California-based talk radio show hosts, including Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh complained about multiculturalism and the poor, whom he called “the biggest piglets at the mother pig and her nipples” in his book The Way Things Ought To Be. Miller read the book and later cited it as a favorite.
Geographically, the 16-year-old was nearly as far from the 9/11 attacks as he could be in the United States, but he was transformed by the tragedy. He wondered why his high school didn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He called into a local right-wing talk radio show, the Larry Elder Show, to complain about his school’s alleged lack of patriotism.
When Miller heard about Horowitz through a classmate, he reached out to him and invited him to speak at Santa Monica High School. Horowitz had heard Miller on the radio, as had other right-wing provocateurs who would go on to shape Trumpism: Steve Bannon, Andrew Breitbart and Alex Marlow. Like them, Horowitz was riveted by the teenager’s furious rants against multiculturalism. He thought he was “gutsy,” a kindred spirit. He agreed to speak at his school.
Horowitz ran, and continues to run, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which was later renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center: A School for Political Warfare. The foundation says it “sees its role as that of a battle tank, geared to fight a war that many still don’t recognize.” The enemy? In the foundation’s words, it’s the “political left,” which “has declared war on America and its constitutional system, and is willing to collaborate with America’s enemies abroad and criminals at home to bring America down.” Horowitz says the political left poses an “existential threat.” Horowitz has been labeled an anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate watch group.
Horowitz’s parents were members of the Communist Party, and he supported the New Left in the '60s and '70s, and worked with the Black Panther Party. But he became disillusioned after a white friend he had recommended to work for them as a bookkeeper, Betty Van Patter, was murdered.
The murder was never solved, but Horowitz blamed the Black activists. He came to believe liberals had waged a wrongheaded “war against ‘whiteness.’” White European males, primarily English and Protestant Christian, created “America’s unique political culture … [which] led the world in abolishing slavery and establishing the principles of ethnic and racial inclusion,” he wrote in his book Hating Whitey. “We are a nation besieged by peoples ‘of color’ trying to immigrate to our shores to take advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and rights our society offers them.”
Horowitz, who is Jewish like Miller, argues that Protestant Christian doctrines are fundamental to America and are under direct assault by Muslims, progressives and anyone who argues with his ideology. Having leaped from left-wing radicalism to right-wing radicalism, he uses the language of the civil rights movement to attack it, painting conservative white men as victims of discrimination and defending hate speech with appeals to “intellectual diversity.” “Academic freedom is most likely to thrive in an environment of intellectual diversity that protects and fosters independence of thought and speech,” reads the “Academic Bill of Rights” he created for his youth group, “Students for Academic Freedom.” Meanwhile, his acolytes learn to invert and deflect criticism. Liberals and people of color are “bigots,” “racists,” and “oppressors,” Horowitz has said multiple times. “The racists here are blacks who have been brainwashed into thinking all cops are white and oppressing them,” Horowitz has tweeted.
When Miller invited Horowitz to speak at his high school, the goateed older man had recently been defending young conservatives in several cases against allegations of racism, sexism and homophobia. For example, a university fraternity had been suspended for posting racist flyers at Cal State Northridge. Horowitz says he thought the protests were “overwrought.” He helped connect the fraternity with an experienced San Diego attorney. In the spring of 1993, the fraternity was reinstated amid threats of a lawsuit by its attorney, alleging free speech violations.
Days before Horowitz’s scheduled visit to Miller’s high school, administrators canceled, giving vague excuses about why. Miller complained as a guest on The Larry Elder Show. The administrators relented, and Horowitz was allowed to speak. Horowitz told students, “There is no exodus of people fleeing America because it is oppressive or racist. That tells you that people who argue that it is [oppressive or racist] are selling you a bill of goods.”
Horowitz spoke to me in a raspy voice that dripped a kind of fatherly exhaustion. He recalled worrying that the teenager would not get admitted into a top-tier university; perhaps he wouldn’t get recommendation letters from teachers.
Horowitz let Miller publish a self-promotional article on his website: “How I Changed My Left-Wing High School.” Miller recapped his successes at influencing school administrators, such as with the Pledge of Allegiance. He wrote, “In the 1970s, students started a political revolution on campus. Now is the time for a counter-revolution—one characterized by a devotion to this nation and its ideals. David Horowitz will soon launch ‘Students for Academic Freedom,’ an organization dedicated to just these principals [sic]. Acting together, we can succeed.”
Miller got into Duke University. Horowitz was relieved. His young protégé would go on rising. And he would take Horowitz’s ideas with him; he started with a launch of a Duke University chapter of Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom.
At Duke, Miller battled multiculturalism and campus liberalism by appealing to desires for diversity—in his case, diversity of opinion—as Horowitz had taught him to do.
In 2004, as a sophomore, Miller became outraged that Duke was hosting a Palestine Solidarity Movement conference. A few days before the conference, an inflammatory email impersonating PSM organizers went out to thousands at Duke. “The message included statements in support of terrorism and a slogan used by the extremist group Hamas,” wrote John F. Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations, in a letter to students and faculty. “The students did NOT send this message, which appears to be a deliberate act of disinformation and provocation on the part of people who do not want the conference to take place.” Computer security staff investigated. They concluded only that the message originated in California.
Miller handed out flyers linking the PSM to terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He met with Burness to complain about alleged PSM terrorist-recruiting. Burness was struck by the vehemence of the young man’s statements and his self-assuredness. Burness says the encounter was one of many he would have with Miller.
Burness knew him as a Horowitz acolyte, and always had the sense Miller had just been consulting with him. “The language he would use occasionally sounded exactly like Horowitz,” he says. (Horowitz has long denied that Palestinians have a right to a national identity, tweeting in 2018: “There is no Palestine. There are no Palestinians.”) Burness defended the decision to host the conference, saying the organizers had followed the proper channels. He thought it was ironic that Miller, relying on academic freedom arguments, took issue with them applied to the opposite side. “He conveyed a sense that he had all the answers and that mine were made up,” Burness says.
Miller wrote a piece for a conservative online forum, encouraging people to call or email Duke’s president and stop supporting Duke. He wrote that Duke’s president had “prostituted the campus to terror.” He said he was shocked at the Jewish students supporting the PSM, describing them as “disenfranchised college kids looking for a sense of belonging, of personal power.”
Miller visited Horowitz back home a few times in college and attended his annual Restoration Weekends and West Coast Retreats run through the David Horowitz Freedom Center. At luxury resorts in California and elsewhere, the events united conservative lawmakers and media personalities. (Registration for the 2019 West Coast retreat was between $1,400 per person, with sponsorship options of up to $20,000.) Miller was on a student panel in 2006 discussing the alleged bullying of conservatives in schools. He mingled with prominent right-wingers, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the National Rife Association's Wayne LaPierre and Andrew Breitbart.
In his junior year, he secured a column in the campus newspaper, The Chronicle. According to a classmate who worked at the paper, he was given the position because some staffers saw him as adding to the university’s intellectual diversity. Miller attacked multiculturalism, singled out minority students and denied the idea of systemic racism, citing “racial paranoia.” He wrote: “For many members of the political left, the belief in a racist society is an article of faith-beyond all reason, question or rational discussion.”
He invited Horowitz to speak at Duke in 2006, and Horowitz recruited Miller to lead a national Terrorism Awareness Project 2007. Its website contained such statements as “The goal of the Arabs is the destruction of the Jews” and “There were no Arabs in Palestine until the Muslim invasions.” A button labeled “Ammunition” led to a page advertising anti-Islam books, including some by self-described Islamophobe Robert Spencer, who wrote an article entitled “The Case for Islamophobia,” published on Horowitz’s website. The Terrorism Awareness Project website claimed the goal of Muslim “jihad” is “world domination.” Most Muslims interpret “jihad” as the struggle to be a good Muslim. Only extremists see it as a call to holy war.
Miller was invited onto Fox & Friends in 2007 to discuss his thwarted efforts to run advertisements in campus newspapers with Horowitz’s interpretation of jihad.
Despite the attention, Miller was seen by his classmates as a fringe figure. He graduated without a job. He drifted awhile, going to Israel on a birthright trip and traveling in Europe. In the fall, Horowitz asked him to help coordinate an Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week on college campuses, featuring speakers, film screenings and other events to “educate” people about the threat of “Islamo-Fascism.” Critics called it an “Islamophobia tour.” “We’re not going to back down an inch,” Miller said.
Horowitz wanted to help Miller find employment. He remembered Michele Bachmann, a first-term Tea Party Minnesota congresswoman he’d met at one of his restoration events; she was one of the few Republicans with a perspective about jihad that aligned with his own.
Horowitz connected the two; Bachmann hired Miller as her press secretary. Soon, Miller tired of working for Bachmann, according to Horowitz. (Horowitz developed a negative opinion of Bachmann as a “flake” and says he suspects Miller did, too.) Horowitz helped him land a job with ultraconservative Arizona Congressman John Shadegg in early 2009. But after just a few months, Horowitz learned his old friend, Sessions, was looking for a press secretary. Horowitz recommended Miller to him.
Sessions had been denied a federal judgeship as a U.S. attorney in the '80s amid allegations that he had improperly prosecuted Black voting rights activists and used racially insensitive language. (Sessions defends the prosecution as warranted.) “As you can imagine, I couldn’t have given [Miller] a higher recommendation, both because of his intelligence and his courage under fire, and because of how responsible he was,” Horowitz says.
As Sessions’ press secretary, Miller began to communicate regularly with bloggers at Breitbart. Breitbart editors had given Miller free rein to pitch articles, and Miller began sending links from around the internet, according to former Breitbart writer Katie McHugh. Miller sent them to a white nationalist website created by Peter Brimelow, whom Miller had invited to speak at Duke in collaboration with Duke Conservative Union colleague Richard Spencer, now a well-known white nationalist. Brimelow’s website promotes the white genocide conspiracy theory, which says white people are being systematically replaced by people of color—often cited by white terrorists to justify violence against people of color.
Miller encouraged Breitbart bloggers such as McHugh to pull from the white supremacist website American Renaissance, which he referred to familiarly as “AmRen” and which highlights the crimes of Black and brown people. It has a “Blacks versus Hispanics” archive. Horowitz told me he thinks Miller was probably “influenced” in 2002 by the fact that Horowitz posted an American Renaissance piece on his homepage. Horowitz says he sees the website founder Jared Taylor’s interracial crime articles as informative and thinks of the white supremacist as a smart man. But he claims he rejects Taylor’s “perverse” idea that whites need to organize under white identity. He calls that perspective “racial,” rather than “racist,” adding: “You can call it racist but it is no more racist than the general attitude in the Democratic Party.”
“I haven’t discussed this with Stephen,” Horowitz wrote me in an email, “but I’m certain his intention was to use the reporting of American Renaissance on interracial crimes to emphasize that cultural differences are important and that unvetted illegal immigration is problematic. If you look at the statistics of crimes committed by illegal immigrants across the southern border, you will see this is a reasonable concern, and has nothing to do with racism.”(In fact, crime statistics show that noncitizens are no more likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens).
Sessions participated in one of Horowitz’s West Coast retreats with conservative lawmakers in February 2013. At the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, Calif., Sessions gave a keynote speech praising Horowitz for his “profound contribution.” He described a revelatory experience in bed while reading one of his books, Radicals, which portrays Obama as a totalitarian extremist trying to destroy America. He praised the papers Horowitz had written. He declared that the man was making “a difference in the way we approach things.” He said, “I’m learning, David.”
One of Sessions’ signature achievements while Miller worked for him was helping torpedo an immigration reform bill backed by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers known the Gang of Eight. It’s easy to see echoes of Horowitz’ advice about stoking fear and demonizing Democrats, offered just a year earlier, in their campaign to sink the bill. Together, they painted its supporters as elites, part of a “donor class” seeking cheap labor. Miller wrote a handbook that Sessions’ office distributed to Republican members of Congress, suggesting talking points to use against Democratic supporters such as: “My Democrat colleagues think the first goal of immigration policy should be bringing in more low-wage workers to replace them.” The handbook also repeatedly uses the phrase “criminal aliens,” as in: “Overall, there are about 167,000 convicted criminal aliens who were ordered removed that are now at large in the United States, and almost as many at large who were released before being ordered removed.”
Miller started reaching out to the Trump campaign soon after it launched. He bombarded campaign manager Corey Lewandowski with emails at strange hours, such as two o’clock in the morning. “We have to talk immigration, we have to talk immigration,” Miller said, according to Lewandowski. “Let me come to the campaign.”
In January 2016, he was officially brought on to shape Trump’s speeches and immigration policy; it’s easy to hear similarities to Horowitz’s arguments, as well as his advice on style, in Trump’s speeches today.
That might be because almost from the beginning of Miller’s new role, he went to his old mentor for speech ideas and policy advice, according to correspondence Horowitz shared with me. On May 9, 2016, Miller emailed him. “What are some ways the government and the oligarchs who rely on the government have ‘rigged’ the system against poor young blacks and hispanics?” In his strategy paper about appealing to fear, Horowitz had urged Republicans in their war on Democrats to “put their victims—women, minorities, the poor and working Americans—in front of every argument.” Accordingly, he responded to Miller with what he called a “soundbite”: “Everything that is wrong with the inner city, everything that stifles the aspirations of minorities and the poor and blocks their advancement, that policy can effect, Democrats are 100% responsible for.” He shot back a list of items, such as “dead-end welfare” and “hand-cuffed police,” adding: “The inner cities are war zones … BLM [Black Lives Matter] makes criminals into martyrs, and incites violence against the police.”
PHOTO: Book cover from HATEMONGER.
This article is adapted from HATEMONGER by Jean Guerrero. William Morrow, 2020
Soon after, Trump ramped up mentions of the inner cities and compared them to “war zones.” “You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it is safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats,” he said in Akron, Ohio, on August 22.
On August 14, 2016, Miller again wrote Horowitz. “The boss is doing a speech on Radical Islam. What would you say about Sharia Law?” Miller asked. “Islamic law is incompatible with the religious and individual freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution,” Horowitz wrote. “I would give specific examples … Gays hung from cranes, jail for holding hands in public if you’re not married … Although Islam itself is definitely the problem, I would be extremely careful about focusing the attack on Sharia — the idea of Islamic law — and not Islam as such,” he wrote. “Referring to it as ‘Radical Islam’ — though inaccurate — is a good and necessary idea. Necessary because Trump is under such unprincipled attack from left and right.” (Horowitz explained to me that in his view, all of Islam is “problematic” because of a passage in the Quran calling for violence. The Christian Bible also has passages calling for violence.)
The next day in Ohio, on August 15, Trump gave a speech about the threat of “radical Islamic terrorism.” He painted a gruesome image: “Children slaughtered, girls sold into slavery, men and women burned alive. … We will defeat radical Islamic terrorism, just as we have defeated every threat we have faced in every age before. But we will not defeat it with closed eyes, or silenced voices. Anyone who cannot name our enemy, is not fit to lead this country.”
Horowitz emailed Miller the next day, thrilled that his mentorship had paid off.
“Great fucking ground-breaking speech,” Horowitz wrote. “I spent the last twenty years waiting for this. Good work.”
This summer, as the economy strained under the weight of Covid-19 and tens of thousands of Americans died from the virus, Trump has increased the fear and vilification factors in his tweets and speeches. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” he warned in his July 4 speech at Mount Rushmore. The speech, which mentioned “far left fascism,” was written by his team of writers in the West Wing, led by Miller.
In mid-June, Trump promoted Horowitz’s book on Twitter: “Hot book, great author!”
Adapted with permission from HATEMONGER: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda by Jean Guerrero. Copyright © 2020 by Jean Guerrero. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Filed Under: Immigration, Donald Trump, Donald Trump 2020, 1600 Penn,
PHOTO: White House senior adviser Stephen Miller pauses while speaking during a television interview at the White House, Friday, July 31, 2020, in Washington. AP Photo/Alex Brandon
[NOTE: Jean Guerrero is an investigative journalist and author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda, forthcoming from William Morrow (HarperCollins) on August 11, from which this article is adapted. Her first book, Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, won the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize.]
In December 2012, with the Republican Party reeling from a brutal election that left Democrats in control of the White House and the Senate, the conservative activist David Horowitz emailed a strategy paper to the office of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.
Horowitz, now 81, was a longtime opponent of immigration and the founder of a think tank and a campus freedom-of-speech advocacy group. He saw in Sessions a kindred spirit—a senator who could reawaken a more nationalist fire in the Republican Party. The person he emailed it to was a Sessions aide: Stephen Miller. Horowitz, who recalled the episode in an interview and shared the emails with me, had known Miller since the aide was in high school.
Horowitz encouraged Miller to not only give the paper to Sessions but to circulate it in the Senate. Miller expressed eagerness to share it and asked for instructions. “Leave the Confidential note on it. It gives it an aura that will make people pay more attention to it,” Horowitz wrote. The paper, “Playing to the Head Instead of the Heart: Why Republicans Lost and How They Can Win,” included a section on the political utility of hostile feelings. Horowitz wrote that Democrats know how to “hate their opponents,” how to “incite envy and resentment, distrust and fear, and to direct those volatile emotions.” He urged Republicans to “return their fire.”
“Behind the failures of Republican campaigns lies an attitude that is administrative rather than combative. It focuses on policies rather than politics. It is more comfortable with budgets and pie charts than with the flesh and blood victims of their opponents’ policies,” Horowitz wrote, adding that Democrats have the moral high ground. “They are secular missionaries who want to ‘change society.’ Their goal is a new order of society—‘social justice.’” He argued that the only way to beat them is with “an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language, identifying them as the bad guys.”
Horowitz wrote that hope and fear are the two strongest weapons in politics. Barack Obama had used hope to become president. “Fear is a much stronger and more compelling emotion,” Horowitz argued, adding that Republicans should appeal to voters’ base instincts.
It is perhaps the most compact crystallization of the relationship that propelled Miller, now a senior policy adviser and speechwriter in the Donald Trump administration, to the White House and of the importance that relationship has had in the administration. The friendship between Miller and Horowitz began when Miller—who did not respond to interview requests for the book from which this article was adapted—was in high school and continued throughout his career. Tracing it reveals a source of Miller’s laser focus on immigration restriction, which has over the past few years resulted in a ban on travel from mostly Muslim countries and a policy that separated families crossing the border into the United States to seek asylum. If you want to understand the language Trump uses to talk about immigrants and his opponents, or the immigration policies he has put into place, often via Miller, you have to also understand Horowitz, and the formative role he played in Miller’s career and life.
Miller met Horowitz shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when Miller was a teenager growing up on the Southern California coast. He was going through a period of family turmoil. A few years before, they had moved out of a million-dollar home in a wealthy white neighborhood to a slightly smaller house in a more diverse neighborhood. Miller’s father, Michael, was having financial troubles and fighting several legal battles related to his real estate company, including a fight with his brother whom he permanently separated from the family with a no-contact order in a settlement agreement. Rather than attending a private school the way Michael’s youngest son later did, his oldest son, Stephen, found himself at a diverse public school, which celebrated Día de los Muertos and Cinco de Mayo.
When his father was tangled up in lawsuits, Miller found comfort in a number of conservative California-based talk radio show hosts, including Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh complained about multiculturalism and the poor, whom he called “the biggest piglets at the mother pig and her nipples” in his book The Way Things Ought To Be. Miller read the book and later cited it as a favorite.
Geographically, the 16-year-old was nearly as far from the 9/11 attacks as he could be in the United States, but he was transformed by the tragedy. He wondered why his high school didn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He called into a local right-wing talk radio show, the Larry Elder Show, to complain about his school’s alleged lack of patriotism.
When Miller heard about Horowitz through a classmate, he reached out to him and invited him to speak at Santa Monica High School. Horowitz had heard Miller on the radio, as had other right-wing provocateurs who would go on to shape Trumpism: Steve Bannon, Andrew Breitbart and Alex Marlow. Like them, Horowitz was riveted by the teenager’s furious rants against multiculturalism. He thought he was “gutsy,” a kindred spirit. He agreed to speak at his school.
Horowitz ran, and continues to run, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which was later renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center: A School for Political Warfare. The foundation says it “sees its role as that of a battle tank, geared to fight a war that many still don’t recognize.” The enemy? In the foundation’s words, it’s the “political left,” which “has declared war on America and its constitutional system, and is willing to collaborate with America’s enemies abroad and criminals at home to bring America down.” Horowitz says the political left poses an “existential threat.” Horowitz has been labeled an anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate watch group.
Horowitz’s parents were members of the Communist Party, and he supported the New Left in the '60s and '70s, and worked with the Black Panther Party. But he became disillusioned after a white friend he had recommended to work for them as a bookkeeper, Betty Van Patter, was murdered.
The murder was never solved, but Horowitz blamed the Black activists. He came to believe liberals had waged a wrongheaded “war against ‘whiteness.’” White European males, primarily English and Protestant Christian, created “America’s unique political culture … [which] led the world in abolishing slavery and establishing the principles of ethnic and racial inclusion,” he wrote in his book Hating Whitey. “We are a nation besieged by peoples ‘of color’ trying to immigrate to our shores to take advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and rights our society offers them.”
Horowitz, who is Jewish like Miller, argues that Protestant Christian doctrines are fundamental to America and are under direct assault by Muslims, progressives and anyone who argues with his ideology. Having leaped from left-wing radicalism to right-wing radicalism, he uses the language of the civil rights movement to attack it, painting conservative white men as victims of discrimination and defending hate speech with appeals to “intellectual diversity.” “Academic freedom is most likely to thrive in an environment of intellectual diversity that protects and fosters independence of thought and speech,” reads the “Academic Bill of Rights” he created for his youth group, “Students for Academic Freedom.” Meanwhile, his acolytes learn to invert and deflect criticism. Liberals and people of color are “bigots,” “racists,” and “oppressors,” Horowitz has said multiple times. “The racists here are blacks who have been brainwashed into thinking all cops are white and oppressing them,” Horowitz has tweeted.
When Miller invited Horowitz to speak at his high school, the goateed older man had recently been defending young conservatives in several cases against allegations of racism, sexism and homophobia. For example, a university fraternity had been suspended for posting racist flyers at Cal State Northridge. Horowitz says he thought the protests were “overwrought.” He helped connect the fraternity with an experienced San Diego attorney. In the spring of 1993, the fraternity was reinstated amid threats of a lawsuit by its attorney, alleging free speech violations.
Days before Horowitz’s scheduled visit to Miller’s high school, administrators canceled, giving vague excuses about why. Miller complained as a guest on The Larry Elder Show. The administrators relented, and Horowitz was allowed to speak. Horowitz told students, “There is no exodus of people fleeing America because it is oppressive or racist. That tells you that people who argue that it is [oppressive or racist] are selling you a bill of goods.”
Horowitz spoke to me in a raspy voice that dripped a kind of fatherly exhaustion. He recalled worrying that the teenager would not get admitted into a top-tier university; perhaps he wouldn’t get recommendation letters from teachers.
Horowitz let Miller publish a self-promotional article on his website: “How I Changed My Left-Wing High School.” Miller recapped his successes at influencing school administrators, such as with the Pledge of Allegiance. He wrote, “In the 1970s, students started a political revolution on campus. Now is the time for a counter-revolution—one characterized by a devotion to this nation and its ideals. David Horowitz will soon launch ‘Students for Academic Freedom,’ an organization dedicated to just these principals [sic]. Acting together, we can succeed.”
Miller got into Duke University. Horowitz was relieved. His young protégé would go on rising. And he would take Horowitz’s ideas with him; he started with a launch of a Duke University chapter of Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom.
At Duke, Miller battled multiculturalism and campus liberalism by appealing to desires for diversity—in his case, diversity of opinion—as Horowitz had taught him to do.
In 2004, as a sophomore, Miller became outraged that Duke was hosting a Palestine Solidarity Movement conference. A few days before the conference, an inflammatory email impersonating PSM organizers went out to thousands at Duke. “The message included statements in support of terrorism and a slogan used by the extremist group Hamas,” wrote John F. Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations, in a letter to students and faculty. “The students did NOT send this message, which appears to be a deliberate act of disinformation and provocation on the part of people who do not want the conference to take place.” Computer security staff investigated. They concluded only that the message originated in California.
Miller handed out flyers linking the PSM to terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He met with Burness to complain about alleged PSM terrorist-recruiting. Burness was struck by the vehemence of the young man’s statements and his self-assuredness. Burness says the encounter was one of many he would have with Miller.
Burness knew him as a Horowitz acolyte, and always had the sense Miller had just been consulting with him. “The language he would use occasionally sounded exactly like Horowitz,” he says. (Horowitz has long denied that Palestinians have a right to a national identity, tweeting in 2018: “There is no Palestine. There are no Palestinians.”) Burness defended the decision to host the conference, saying the organizers had followed the proper channels. He thought it was ironic that Miller, relying on academic freedom arguments, took issue with them applied to the opposite side. “He conveyed a sense that he had all the answers and that mine were made up,” Burness says.
Miller wrote a piece for a conservative online forum, encouraging people to call or email Duke’s president and stop supporting Duke. He wrote that Duke’s president had “prostituted the campus to terror.” He said he was shocked at the Jewish students supporting the PSM, describing them as “disenfranchised college kids looking for a sense of belonging, of personal power.”
Miller visited Horowitz back home a few times in college and attended his annual Restoration Weekends and West Coast Retreats run through the David Horowitz Freedom Center. At luxury resorts in California and elsewhere, the events united conservative lawmakers and media personalities. (Registration for the 2019 West Coast retreat was between $1,400 per person, with sponsorship options of up to $20,000.) Miller was on a student panel in 2006 discussing the alleged bullying of conservatives in schools. He mingled with prominent right-wingers, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the National Rife Association's Wayne LaPierre and Andrew Breitbart.
In his junior year, he secured a column in the campus newspaper, The Chronicle. According to a classmate who worked at the paper, he was given the position because some staffers saw him as adding to the university’s intellectual diversity. Miller attacked multiculturalism, singled out minority students and denied the idea of systemic racism, citing “racial paranoia.” He wrote: “For many members of the political left, the belief in a racist society is an article of faith-beyond all reason, question or rational discussion.”
He invited Horowitz to speak at Duke in 2006, and Horowitz recruited Miller to lead a national Terrorism Awareness Project 2007. Its website contained such statements as “The goal of the Arabs is the destruction of the Jews” and “There were no Arabs in Palestine until the Muslim invasions.” A button labeled “Ammunition” led to a page advertising anti-Islam books, including some by self-described Islamophobe Robert Spencer, who wrote an article entitled “The Case for Islamophobia,” published on Horowitz’s website. The Terrorism Awareness Project website claimed the goal of Muslim “jihad” is “world domination.” Most Muslims interpret “jihad” as the struggle to be a good Muslim. Only extremists see it as a call to holy war.
Miller was invited onto Fox & Friends in 2007 to discuss his thwarted efforts to run advertisements in campus newspapers with Horowitz’s interpretation of jihad.
Despite the attention, Miller was seen by his classmates as a fringe figure. He graduated without a job. He drifted awhile, going to Israel on a birthright trip and traveling in Europe. In the fall, Horowitz asked him to help coordinate an Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week on college campuses, featuring speakers, film screenings and other events to “educate” people about the threat of “Islamo-Fascism.” Critics called it an “Islamophobia tour.” “We’re not going to back down an inch,” Miller said.
Horowitz wanted to help Miller find employment. He remembered Michele Bachmann, a first-term Tea Party Minnesota congresswoman he’d met at one of his restoration events; she was one of the few Republicans with a perspective about jihad that aligned with his own.
Horowitz connected the two; Bachmann hired Miller as her press secretary. Soon, Miller tired of working for Bachmann, according to Horowitz. (Horowitz developed a negative opinion of Bachmann as a “flake” and says he suspects Miller did, too.) Horowitz helped him land a job with ultraconservative Arizona Congressman John Shadegg in early 2009. But after just a few months, Horowitz learned his old friend, Sessions, was looking for a press secretary. Horowitz recommended Miller to him.
Sessions had been denied a federal judgeship as a U.S. attorney in the '80s amid allegations that he had improperly prosecuted Black voting rights activists and used racially insensitive language. (Sessions defends the prosecution as warranted.) “As you can imagine, I couldn’t have given [Miller] a higher recommendation, both because of his intelligence and his courage under fire, and because of how responsible he was,” Horowitz says.
As Sessions’ press secretary, Miller began to communicate regularly with bloggers at Breitbart. Breitbart editors had given Miller free rein to pitch articles, and Miller began sending links from around the internet, according to former Breitbart writer Katie McHugh. Miller sent them to a white nationalist website created by Peter Brimelow, whom Miller had invited to speak at Duke in collaboration with Duke Conservative Union colleague Richard Spencer, now a well-known white nationalist. Brimelow’s website promotes the white genocide conspiracy theory, which says white people are being systematically replaced by people of color—often cited by white terrorists to justify violence against people of color.
Miller encouraged Breitbart bloggers such as McHugh to pull from the white supremacist website American Renaissance, which he referred to familiarly as “AmRen” and which highlights the crimes of Black and brown people. It has a “Blacks versus Hispanics” archive. Horowitz told me he thinks Miller was probably “influenced” in 2002 by the fact that Horowitz posted an American Renaissance piece on his homepage. Horowitz says he sees the website founder Jared Taylor’s interracial crime articles as informative and thinks of the white supremacist as a smart man. But he claims he rejects Taylor’s “perverse” idea that whites need to organize under white identity. He calls that perspective “racial,” rather than “racist,” adding: “You can call it racist but it is no more racist than the general attitude in the Democratic Party.”
“I haven’t discussed this with Stephen,” Horowitz wrote me in an email, “but I’m certain his intention was to use the reporting of American Renaissance on interracial crimes to emphasize that cultural differences are important and that unvetted illegal immigration is problematic. If you look at the statistics of crimes committed by illegal immigrants across the southern border, you will see this is a reasonable concern, and has nothing to do with racism.”(In fact, crime statistics show that noncitizens are no more likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens).
Sessions participated in one of Horowitz’s West Coast retreats with conservative lawmakers in February 2013. At the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, Calif., Sessions gave a keynote speech praising Horowitz for his “profound contribution.” He described a revelatory experience in bed while reading one of his books, Radicals, which portrays Obama as a totalitarian extremist trying to destroy America. He praised the papers Horowitz had written. He declared that the man was making “a difference in the way we approach things.” He said, “I’m learning, David.”
One of Sessions’ signature achievements while Miller worked for him was helping torpedo an immigration reform bill backed by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers known the Gang of Eight. It’s easy to see echoes of Horowitz’ advice about stoking fear and demonizing Democrats, offered just a year earlier, in their campaign to sink the bill. Together, they painted its supporters as elites, part of a “donor class” seeking cheap labor. Miller wrote a handbook that Sessions’ office distributed to Republican members of Congress, suggesting talking points to use against Democratic supporters such as: “My Democrat colleagues think the first goal of immigration policy should be bringing in more low-wage workers to replace them.” The handbook also repeatedly uses the phrase “criminal aliens,” as in: “Overall, there are about 167,000 convicted criminal aliens who were ordered removed that are now at large in the United States, and almost as many at large who were released before being ordered removed.”
Miller started reaching out to the Trump campaign soon after it launched. He bombarded campaign manager Corey Lewandowski with emails at strange hours, such as two o’clock in the morning. “We have to talk immigration, we have to talk immigration,” Miller said, according to Lewandowski. “Let me come to the campaign.”
In January 2016, he was officially brought on to shape Trump’s speeches and immigration policy; it’s easy to hear similarities to Horowitz’s arguments, as well as his advice on style, in Trump’s speeches today.
That might be because almost from the beginning of Miller’s new role, he went to his old mentor for speech ideas and policy advice, according to correspondence Horowitz shared with me. On May 9, 2016, Miller emailed him. “What are some ways the government and the oligarchs who rely on the government have ‘rigged’ the system against poor young blacks and hispanics?” In his strategy paper about appealing to fear, Horowitz had urged Republicans in their war on Democrats to “put their victims—women, minorities, the poor and working Americans—in front of every argument.” Accordingly, he responded to Miller with what he called a “soundbite”: “Everything that is wrong with the inner city, everything that stifles the aspirations of minorities and the poor and blocks their advancement, that policy can effect, Democrats are 100% responsible for.” He shot back a list of items, such as “dead-end welfare” and “hand-cuffed police,” adding: “The inner cities are war zones … BLM [Black Lives Matter] makes criminals into martyrs, and incites violence against the police.”
PHOTO: Book cover from HATEMONGER.
This article is adapted from HATEMONGER by Jean Guerrero. William Morrow, 2020
Soon after, Trump ramped up mentions of the inner cities and compared them to “war zones.” “You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it is safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats,” he said in Akron, Ohio, on August 22.
On August 14, 2016, Miller again wrote Horowitz. “The boss is doing a speech on Radical Islam. What would you say about Sharia Law?” Miller asked. “Islamic law is incompatible with the religious and individual freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution,” Horowitz wrote. “I would give specific examples … Gays hung from cranes, jail for holding hands in public if you’re not married … Although Islam itself is definitely the problem, I would be extremely careful about focusing the attack on Sharia — the idea of Islamic law — and not Islam as such,” he wrote. “Referring to it as ‘Radical Islam’ — though inaccurate — is a good and necessary idea. Necessary because Trump is under such unprincipled attack from left and right.” (Horowitz explained to me that in his view, all of Islam is “problematic” because of a passage in the Quran calling for violence. The Christian Bible also has passages calling for violence.)
The next day in Ohio, on August 15, Trump gave a speech about the threat of “radical Islamic terrorism.” He painted a gruesome image: “Children slaughtered, girls sold into slavery, men and women burned alive. … We will defeat radical Islamic terrorism, just as we have defeated every threat we have faced in every age before. But we will not defeat it with closed eyes, or silenced voices. Anyone who cannot name our enemy, is not fit to lead this country.”
Horowitz emailed Miller the next day, thrilled that his mentorship had paid off.
“Great fucking ground-breaking speech,” Horowitz wrote. “I spent the last twenty years waiting for this. Good work.”
This summer, as the economy strained under the weight of Covid-19 and tens of thousands of Americans died from the virus, Trump has increased the fear and vilification factors in his tweets and speeches. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” he warned in his July 4 speech at Mount Rushmore. The speech, which mentioned “far left fascism,” was written by his team of writers in the West Wing, led by Miller.
In mid-June, Trump promoted Horowitz’s book on Twitter: “Hot book, great author!”
Adapted with permission from HATEMONGER: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda by Jean Guerrero. Copyright © 2020 by Jean Guerrero. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Filed Under: Immigration, Donald Trump, Donald Trump 2020, 1600 Penn,
PHOTO: White House senior adviser Stephen Miller pauses while speaking during a television interview at the White House, Friday, July 31, 2020, in Washington. AP Photo/Alex Brandon
