Anybody who caught his warm-up act on the campaign trail in 2016 tumbled in less than two minutes to the fact that Stephen Miller was a creature of the primordial political ooze. He was a nasty bit of business, unleavened even by the slightest bit of wit or humor. He looked on the campaign crowds as though they’d come to watch him torture puppies to death with a flamethrower. Not only was this a guy you didn’t want close to any source of political power, this was a guy you didn’t want close to power tools.

On Tuesday, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s newsletter, Hatewatch, published a collection of e-correspondence from Miller that fairly well frames him as an outright white nationalist with more than a little of that Nuremberg torchlight illuminating his thinking. My god, how low have we slipped that this guy commands any part of a democratic self-government?

McHugh told Hatewatch that Breitbart editors introduced her to Miller in 2015 with an understanding he would influence the direction of her reporting. For that reason, and because Miller would have regarded her as a fellow traveler of the anti-immigrant movement, McHugh sometimes starts conversations with Miller in the emails, seeking his opinion on news stories. Other times, Miller directly suggests story ideas to McHugh, or tells her how to shape Breitbart’s coverage. Periodically, Miller asks McHugh if he can speak to her by phone, taking conversations offline.

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

Lovely.

Miller recommended in a Sept. 6, 2015, email that Breitbart write about “The Camp of the Saints,” a racist French novel by Jean Raspail. Notably, “The Camp of the Saints” is popular among white nationalists and neo-Nazis because of the degree to which it fictionalizes the “white genocide” or “great replacement” myth into a violent and sexualized story about refugees.

Miller is out in the open now. Alex Wong Getty Images

The novel’s apocalyptic plot centers on a flotilla of Indian people who invade France, led by a nonwhite Indian-born antagonist referred to as the “turd eater” – a character who literally eats human feces. In one section, a white woman is raped to death by brown-skinned refugees. In another, a nationalist character shoots and kills a pro-refugee leftist over his support of race mixing. The white nationalist Social Contract Press plucked the 1973 book from relative obscurity and distributed it in the United States.

Not that there wasn’t an audience within mainstream conservatism for this swill.

Miller returns to the subject of nonwhite immigration on Sept. 6, 2015. He sends McHugh a link to a tweet from conservative pundit David Frum that reads, “Half of all violent crime in Germany committed by ‘foreign youths.’” (Hatewatch reached out to Frum for more context about his tweet but did not receive any response.) McHugh responds to Miller’s email about Frum’s tweet with a follow-up remark about Europe, and Miller sends 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. Miller then suggests Breitbart take a look at “The Camp of the Saints.”

Oops. "Prominent Never Trumper Linked In Racist Emails." Miller, at least, thought David Frum was sympatico with Jean Respail. However did Trump happen?

White nationalist Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015. Roof’s attack triggered a national conversation about racial hatred in the United States. In response, Amazon.com and other retailers made efforts to pull the Confederate flag from their websites and stores. Miller sought to create a counternarrative to this news through Breitbart, the emails show. He emailed McHugh with the subject line “defies modern comprehension” on June 23, 2015, following the news about the retailers, and highlighted a statistic about the deaths of Confederate soldiers with a link to history.com.

So there’s all of that. Read the e-mails carefully. McHugh, who is the SPLC’s source for these documents, is chatty with Miller. The two of them approvingly share the writings of Ben Shapiro and Heather MacDonald, both of whom are considered to be important conservative voices. The rot is vast and general, and it didn’t start with Donald Trump. But he’s the only president* who’d hire a hoodlum punk like Stephen Miller and hand him a policy portfolio.

Miller considers immigrants to be inferior to him by definition. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

At least Miller had a legitimate track record of actually being what he was being hired to be, namely, a hoodlum punk, which cannot be said for the qualifications of the deputy assistant secretary in the State Department's Bureau of Conflict and Stability Operations. From NBC News:

The gap between Chang's actual qualifications and her claims appears to be the latest example of lax vetting by the Trump administration, which has become known for its many job vacancies and appointments made without thorough screening.

You think?

In a 2017 video posted on her nonprofit's website, Chang can be heard describing her work while a Time magazine cover with her face on it scrolls past. "Here you are on Time magazine, congratulations! Tell me about this cover and how it came to be?" asks the interviewer, who hosts a YouTube show.

"Well, we started using drone technology in disaster response and so that was when the whole talk of how is technology being used to save lives in disaster response scenarios, I suppose I brought some attention to that," Chang said. The interviewer says Chang brought the Time cover to the interview as an example of her work. Time magazine spokesperson Kristin Matzen said the cover is "not authentic.”

Stephen Miller is the authentic one. Chew on that.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io