Leaked emails reveal Trump aide Stephen Miller’s fascist politics

By Trévon Austin

15 November 2019

A collection of emails published by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) show Stephen Miller, White House senior adviser in charge of immigration policy, espousing racist views and promoting white supremacist and neo-Nazi publications prior to his joining the Trump administration.

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller [Credit: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin]

The SPLC published a summary of more than 900 emails between Miller and Katie McHugh, a former editor at Breitbart News, between March 4, 2015 and June 27, 2016. The emails show how Miller attempted to guide Breitbart’s news coverage along racist channels, sending links to websites that promote the myth of “white genocide,” i.e., the claim that the world’s white population is being systematically “replaced” by non-white populations.

The theme of the “Great Replacement” pervades the manifestos and rhetoric of fascist terrorists, such as mass murderer Brenton Tarrant, who shot and killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand last March. The neo-Nazis who attacked anti-fascist demonstrators, killing one, and held a torchlight parade in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 chanted “Jews will not replace us!” Trump notoriously said the fascists included “very fine people.”

McHugh was fired by Breitbart in 2017 and subsequently broke from the far-right milieu. According to her, Breitbart officials, then including former Trump campaign chairman and White House aide Stephen Bannon, introduced her to Miller in 2015 with an understanding that he would influence the direction of the publication’s reporting.

According to the SPLC, more than 80 percent of the emails deal with race and immigration. The material in them includes references and links to neo-Nazi websites, xenophobic conspiracy theories, allusions to a racist novel in which Indian men rape white women, and US immigration policies in the early 20th century praised by Adolf Hitler in his Mein Kampf.

Miller has been instrumental in implementing Trump administration attacks on immigrants, such as the executive order banning immigration from five Muslim-majority countries, the policy of separating children from their families at the US-Mexico border and the setting of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants.

“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” McHugh told the SPLC.

McHugh, who was an editor for Breitbart from April 2014 to June 2017, leaked the emails to the SPLC in June. She said she became active in xenophobic circles after starting at Breitbart and frequently interacted with white supremacists. McHugh was fired from Breitbart after posting an anti-Muslim tweet following the June 2017 London Bridge terror attack.

On October 23, 2015, McHugh started an email conversation with Miller by asking if Hurricane Patricia, which devastated parts of Central America, Mexico and Texas, could lead to an influx of immigrants into the United States. Miller responded by highlighting the possibility that refugees from the storm could be granted temporary protected status (TPS), allowing them to live and work in the United States for a limited time:

“This being the worst hurricane ever recorded, what are the chances it wreaks destruction on Mexico and drives a mass migration to the US border,” McHugh asked.

Miller replied, “100 percent. And they will all get TPS. And all the ones here will get TPS too. That needs to be the weekend’s BIG story. TPS is everything.”

Miller also replied with a story from the white supremacist website VDARE, which promotes the “white genocide” and “great replacement” myths. Miller linked a story by Steve Sailer, a proponent of race science, which focused on “anchor babies” and instances when the US offered refugees TPS.

In a September 6 email the same year, Miller recommended that Breitbart cover “The Camp of the Saints,” a racist and xenophobic novel written by Jean Raspail in 1973. The novel is popular among neo-Nazis because of its depiction of the destruction of Western civilization through immigration from impoverished countries.

The novel’s plot centers around Indians “invading” Europe on a flotilla of ships. The racist tract concludes with Western governments being overrun and replaced by pro-migrant regimes that force white people to marry and cohabitate with nonwhites.

In a message, Miller stated that America is “being invaded and talked into tolerating it.” He referred to the acceptance of refugees as a “voluntary policy that can be shut off.”

Miller also sent McHugh a tweet from conservative pundit David Frum that claimed half of violent crime in Germany was committed by “foreign youths.” He also sent a link to a Vox.com article suggesting that SAT scores have dropped in part because of the inclusion of more “poor and nonwhite students” than in previous years.

“[Breitbart editor] Neil [Munro], Julia [Hahn] and I are going to do a series of stories on [nonwhite SAT scores] to break it down,” McHugh wrote. “Neil says it’s easier for people to digest that way and change their minds.”

Miller replied: “On the education angle? Makes sense. Also, you see the Pope saying west must, in effect, get rid of borders. Someone should point out the parallels to Camp of the Saints.”

Miller repeatedly referred to President Calvin Coolidge in his exchanges with McHugh, praising his administration’s anti-immigration policies and signing of the Immigration Act of 1924. The legislation, based on eugenics and social Darwinist theories, banned immigration from Asia and established an essentially racist quota system. Coolidge is often lionized by white supremacists for his condemnation of racial mixing.

Miller brought up Coolidge in the context of Immigrant Heritage Month in the US, writing: “This would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20th century.”

In his exchanges with McHugh, Miller repeatedly raised the issue of crime and focused on offenses perpetrated by immigrants and nonwhites.

The fact that the architect of Trump’s immigration policy is an outright fascist has not garnered any serious attention in the media. At the first public hearing in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry on Wednesday, the same day that press reports emerged on the SPLC exposure of Miller’s fascist agitation, one Democratic House member after another attacked Trump for being “unpatriotic” and undermining Kiev’s war against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Not a single one mentioned the fact that the man in charge of Trump’s war on immigrants is a documented neo-Nazi.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.