McHugh says Miller also directed her to stories from the website American Renaissance, another white nationalist publication, this one focused on eugenics and anti-black racism. Its founder, Jared Taylor, has argued that “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.” In 2013, he argued for a white ethno-state. “We want a homeland where we are a majority,” he said.

There’s more. In June 2015, after Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., Miller emailed McHugh with an outraged message about retailers pulling Confederate flags from their stores, pointing her toward statistics on Confederate deaths in the Civil War. He then wrote to her about efforts to remove Confederate memorials:

What do the vandals say to the people fighting and dying overseas in uniform right now who are carrying on a seventh or eighth generation of military service in their families, stretching back to our founding?

In a September 2015 email, Miller encouraged McHugh to show “the parallels” between Pope Francis’s pro-refugee statements and “The Camp of the Saints,” a 1973 novel by the French author Jean Raspail. In the book, an influx of Indian refugees — described as subhuman and led by a feces-eating demagogue — storm France, killing, stealing and rampaging until they’ve completely occupied the country. Other migrants follow and eventually overrun western Europe, turning white Europeans into a subject class. The book is popular with white nationalists and is mentioned frequently on VDARE and the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. It is also a favorite of Steve Bannon’s, the other of Trump’s “two Steves.”

The White House has pushed back against the report. “This is clearly a form of anti-Semitism to levy these attacks against a Jewish staffer,” an unnamed official told Axios. But there’s no way to spin these emails into something innocuous. The evidence is overwhelming: Miller was immersed in white power ideology. He was fluent in the language of white nationalism, attuned to its ideas. He was an obvious sympathizer who brought that sympathy to the federal government, where he has a direct hand in making immigration policy and choosing personnel.

For three years, Miller has used his perch to inflict fear and anxiety on refugees, asylum-seekers and unauthorized immigrants. Maybe, if you were charitable to Miller and sympathetic to restricting immigration, you could frame this as a misguided but good faith attempt to pull back from a more liberal status quo. No longer. These emails show that Miller’s views flow from his commitment to racist exclusion and the protection of a white demographic majority.

Breitbart fired Katie McHugh in 2017 for anti-Muslim remarks on Twitter. Since then, she says, she has left the “alt-right” and renounced her white nationalist views.

Miller, on the other hand, is still writing speeches and making policy. And while Democrats have called for his removal in the wake of this report (“Stephen Miller must resign. Now,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter), Republicans have been silent. Perhaps they’re occupied with impeachment, struggling to defend the president’s behavior against clear evidence of his guilt. Perhaps they don’t want to confront the fact that white nationalist ideas have a privileged place in this administration. Or perhaps they just don’t care enough to be alarmed.

If that sounds unfair, consider this: Republicans stuck with President Trump in 2017 when he defended the “Unite the Right” protesters in Charlottesville, Va., and they stuck with him in 2018 when he denounced “shithole” countries. They stuck with him through family separation, and they’re sticking with him as he keeps thousands of children in detention. Now we have proof that one of the president’s key advisers is awash in white nationalism. But to a Republican Party that has stuck with that president, what difference would this actually make?