stephen miller2

---

see main STEVE

MERRI OK

capt/bak 921 RENAME 1 24

SEE miLLER 3 AM 1ST LEGAL XIAN LEGAL SHOP?

SEE GREAT REPLACEMENT RACISM

villain, 4 horse covid w/ vpence, barr and kush (alyssa farah?)

Laid low after emails exposed? trump rhet eg mt rushmore ramping up rhet/xenophobia (720 foreign students boot leverage to force college open)

pow, at what pt furies villain?

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wonder what his pension plan is, made an org

2025 PJT?

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an 10 22

Former Trump 2016 campaign manager and Senior Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway has remade herself multiple times. A pollster who once had as a client Todd Akin – the GOP lawmaker who made the phrase, “if it’s a legitimate rape” infamous – Conway also did polling for Donald Trump when he was considering a run for New York governor.

Once inside the White House Conway was one of the newsiest officials, often appearing before the Fox News cameras almost daily.

Fox News viewers will once again get to see the former top Trump aide almost daily – this time as a paid Fox News contributor who is using her Christian faith as a sword to attack Democrats.

Conway is the latest Trump White House official to be hired by Fox News, and while she’s not Trump’s spokesperson any longer, she may wrangle the gig into getting her old one back. Puck reports she is being considered to helm Trump’s expected 2024 presidential run.

In fact, the two have something in common.

“I will tell you why he wants to run for president,” Conway told CBS News on Friday. “Donald Trump wants his old job back.”

Conway joins a long list of her former colleagues at what has become a far right wing media outlet catering to promoting anything Trump, while downplaying any negative news about the former president who is currently being investigated by prosecutors in Georgia and the U.S. Dept. of Justice for an array of possible felonies, reportedly including ones under the Espionage Act.

Conway will be right at home working alongside Kayleigh McEnany, Mike Pompeo, Larry Kudlow, and Trump’s daughter-in-law and former Trump campaign official Lara Trump.

In April Vox reported that “while he hasn’t been hired by Fox, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller — known for helping to develop Trump’s nativist immigration policy — has become a fixture as a guest on Sean Hannity’s and Laura Ingraham’s shows.”

“Since the start of President Joe Biden’s term,” Media Matters reported in February, “Fox News has hired at least nine editors who previously worked for former President Donald Trump’s administration, Republican campaign offices, or Republican politicians. Many of those editors now cover politics for FoxNews.com.”

On Tuesday Conway appeared on Fox News and attacked Democrats, saying Hispanic voters “see a Democratic Party that’s openly hostile to religion. They can’t even give their thoughts and prayers when there’s a tragedy. It’s only thoughts now.”

[twt]

the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump calls Conway’s analysis “overly simple and, in part, … explicitly dishonest.”

“Kellyanne Conway claimed that Democrats are hostile religion, something that will surprise the vast majority of Democrats, who are religious,” he adds on Twitter. “There’s a reason that ‘religious’ doesn’t automatically mean ‘Republican.'”

One day earlier, in a segment with a chyron that reads, “The Importance of Religion,” Conway told her former and now current colleague, Larry Kudlow on Fox Business, “People are afraid to make the sign of a cross before a meal in public,they’re afraid to express their — they actually think their religion could get them canceled now, not just their politics, and think about that.”

Conway, perhaps best known for her “alternative facts” flub, offered no proof of her claim.

---

an 4 22

The New York Times is reporting that former Trump aide Stephen Miller was grilled for eight hours by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Capitol riots, and that the interactions with the committee were at times “contentious.”

Miller, the immigration hardliner who actually publicly previewed the tactics Trump and his allies would use to try to stop the certification of the 2020 election in the weeks before the attack, was in particular asked about the speech Trump delivered at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riots.

“Investigators asked Mr. Miller repeatedly about the use of the word ‘we’ throughout Mr. Trump’s speech on the Ellipse, outside the White House, on Jan. 6, 2021, the people said, in an apparent effort to ascertain whether the former president had been directing supporters to join him in taking action to stop Congress from certifying his defeat,” the Times reports. “Mr. Miller argued that the language was no different from any other political speech.”

The portion of the speech in question featured Trump telling the crowd, ““We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about… And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal.”

Miller also reportedly clashed with the committee over whether the 2020 election was stolen, even though Trump and his legal team lost every single court case they brought alleging voter fraud was to blame for his defeat.

---

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's mask mandate for domestic travelers was struck down on Monday by a federal jurist who was appointed by former President Donald Trump. The decision is the latest in a string of blows to President Joe Biden's efforts to curb transmission of the coronavirus.

The CDC last week extended the rule until May 3rd.

Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida wrote in a 59-page ruling that the CDC exceeded its authority in requiring passengers on airlines and any other "conveyance" of public transportation to wear masks to help slow the spread of COVID-19.

Mizelle – whom the American Bar Associated dinged as "not qualified" after she was installed by Trump at the age of 33 – said that passengers who refused to comply and were "forcibly removed from their airplane seats, denied board at the bus steps, and turned away at the train station doors" had their rights against "detention and quarantine" violated.

"The Mask Mandate is best understood not as sanitation, but as an exercise of the CDC's power to conditionally release [from what?] individuals to travel despite concerns that they may spread a communicable disease (and to detain or partially quarantine those who refuse). But the power to conditionally release and detain is ordinarily limited to individuals entering the United States from a foreign country," she proclaimed.

“Wearing a mask cleans nothing,” Mizelle opined, even as cases are once again rising in pockets throughout the country, such as in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which has re-instituted a mask mandate. The virus has also been spreading in the nation's capital, infecting White House officials and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California).

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, blasted Mizelle's order in a Monday afternoon tweet.

"This is both a big deal and a truly preposterous (nationwide) injunction. The CDC’s statutory authority is specifically directed at preventing the spread of communicable diseases across state lines," he wrote. "Where else is such spread more likely to occur than transport hubs like airports?"

---

omg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/mcconnell-judges/

raw

on Wednesday, The Daily Beast examined the "dangerous" record of 33-year-old Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, one of the final judicial nominees to be forced through by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans — and her complete lack of qualifications for the job, beyond her high-powered conservative connections.

"One of five judicial nominees waved through by the lame duck Senate in a final vote before lawmakers left town for Thanksgiving, Mizelle's confirmation is themost galling," wrote Eleanor Clift. "Mizelle is only eight years out of law school (University of Florida), and the ABA's standard for a lifetime seat is 12 years of legal experience. She has had four distinguished clerkships, including one for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, but her only trial experience is as an intern before she graduated from law school. She will take her seat on the Eleventh Circuit for the Middle District of Florida having never tried a case — civil or criminal — as a lead attorney or co-counsel."

Very few judges are ever confirmed to the federal bench in their early 30s, noted Clift. "Mizelle joins that exclusive club because she is a well-connected Washington lawyer with conservative cred who travels in the right circles. At Jones Day, President Trump's favorite law firm, where she has been an associate since last year, Mizelle's profile page highlighted her successfulrepresentation of the Chamber of Commerce in fending off a demand from the AFL-CIO for greater worker protectionsduring the COVID crisis."

"She is married to Chad Mizelle, who faced similar questions about his youth and inexperience last year when his friend and ally at the White House, Stephen Miller, smoothed the way for him to become the acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security,leading DHS' legal office of 2,500 attorneys just six years after graduating from law school," wrote Clift. "Apart from her skimpy experience, concerns about Kathryn Mizelle's ideology are at the core of Democratic opposition, and they originate with her tenure at the Justice Department in 2017 and 2018 supervising litigation handled by the Civil Rights Division. It was a time when many voting rights and LGBT protections were being rolled back."

Moreover, concluded Clift, since 1896, only one judicial nominee was ever advanced during a lame duck session of a defeated president.

"In 1980, a lame duck Senate confirmed Stephen Breyer to the Court of Appeals," wrote Clift. "Nominated by President Jimmy Carter, who had just lost reelection, Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican Strom Thurmond saw Breyer's confirmation as a fitting reward for the work he had done as chief counsel of the Judiciary Committee, which they had led. More than a decade later, President Clinton elevated Breyer to the Supreme Court. Kathryn Mizell, I'm tempted to say, is no Stephen Breyer."

---

note how he brings in anti-immigrant racist BS to sink GND/BBB

mma 10 21

Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, which is largely represented in the Democrat’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, would materially benefit millions of Americans through unprecedented investments in our social safety net and efforts to combat climate change. Polling suggests that the spending bill is popular among the American people. Expectedly, Fox News has characterized the package as a “socialist wish list” and picked off a litany of minor ticket items to rally outrage and opposition on the right.

Former Trump aide Stephen Miller’s description of the bill on the October 16 edition of the Fox News show *Watters’ World* is representative of how the network is using its tried-and-true dog whistles to poison and stoke fear about the bill:

STEPHEN MILLER (GUEST): It's basically the Green New Deal, combined with critical race theory, combined with massive amnesty and open borders, combined with the complete destruction of the American economy.

Among the provisions Fox has characterized as the Green New Deal and mocked or grossly misrepresented are: the Civilian Climate Corps; an initiative referred to as Tree Equity; and a program intended to redress historic inequities and environmental injustices associated with zoning decisions and highway placement, which Fox has referred to as fixing “racists roads.”

Fox’s coverage of these programs has not attempted to describe what they entail or what they would accomplish for hundreds of communities. Rather, they have been used as punchlines or set up for cheap shots that reflect Fox’s racist ethos and climate denial — all under the guise of informing Fox’s audience about the policies contained in the reconciliation package.

Fox has grossly misrepresented the Civilian Climate Corps -- “climate cops” is not a thing KOCH FORK 4]

The reconciliation bill includes $8 billion earmarked for the Civilian Climate Corps -- modeled after the depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps -- which would establish a government jobs program that would put Americans to “work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, and advancing environmental justice.” The current funding for this program represents .4% of the $3.5 trillion spending in the bill.

On October 12, the Republican Study Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) released a memo on policies contained in the reconciliation package, claiming that while the bill is polling favorably, support would tank if the American people understood what was in it. It lists among the “policies to wreck America” the Climate Civilian Corps, which the memo characterizes as “a cabal of federally funded climate police … who will conduct progressive activism on taxpayers’ dime.”

There isn’t even a grain of truth in how the committee characterized the program: “Climate police” is to the reconciliation bill what “cow farts” was to the Green New Deal. But that won’t stop conservative media from running with it.

The Republican Study Committee wasn’t the first to characterize the program this way -- during the early stages of drafting the bill, climate denier Marc Morano suggested on Fox & Friends Firstthat participants could resemble “climate cops” -- but the memo certainly reinvigorated the idea on Fox.

On the October 12 edition of *The Ingraham Angle, Banks said the bill would “create a climate police department. This was a wacky idea that AOC came out with a couple of years ago. We all laughed at it because we thought it would never happen and now it’s on the brink of happening.” The following day, at least four programs described the program this way. On October 14, Banks appeared on both *Kudlow* on the Fox Business Network and Fox News' *Faulkner Focus, claiming that the bill contains billions to create a “climate police department or a militia to go out and enforce Green New Deal policies."

[vid

October 14, 2021, episode of Fox News' Faulkner Focus]

Fox mocked and belittled provisions to address environmental injustices

Notably, during the Faulkner Focus segment Banks also referred to a program to fix “racist roads.” In fact, what he’s referring to is a $4 billion fund intended to address historic inequities and environmental injustices associated with zoning decisions and highway placement, which in some cases have divided once-thriving communities of color. The fund represents about .1% of the spending in the reconciliation bill.

Biden’s original infrastructure plan called for a $20 billion fund to “reconnect” neighborhoods cut off by old transportation projects. This would benefit communities like one in New Orleans whose residents have lived under the Claiborne Expressway for decades and remember how vibrant their community was before “The Monster” was built. After construction began on the highway in the 1960s, the once-thriving Tremé community, a center of Black cultural and commercial life, was divided and diminished. When the program was first introduced as part of the infrastructure plan, Fox’s Tucker Carlson suggested, in a blatantly racist rant, that the program was a form of reparations. This plan was cut in the bipartisan infrastructure bill negotiations, and a drastically reduced version is funded by the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. Also among the litany of “controversial” items in the bill, often cited by Fox News hosts and anchors, is an initiative to plant trees, particularly in urban areas with less canopy cover to reduce the effects of extreme heat.

For example, during the October 13 edition of *The Ingraham Angle*, host Laura Ingraham fearmongered that the bill will “bankrupt the next generation, steal the next generation” before listing the “priorities” embedded in the legislation:

Eight billion bucks for a Civilian Climate Corps. It’s going to act basically as ataxpayer-funded leftist police force.$4 billion for equity — I love that word — in electric vehicle charging and tree planting.$643 million would go toward procuring culturally appropriate foods — I kid you not — for school lunches. Forget chicken tenders and Friday pizza, I guess.Free community college for illegals, of course. They’ll be eligible for child tax credits as well.My personal favorite, though — this is a drop in the bucket for the federal government. $15 million for national resource centers focused on providing services for older individuals who are underserved due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The tree equity initiative Ingraham refers to is a commonsense solution to addressing the heat island effect, which disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities across the US. Communities without sufficient canopy cover can reach temperatures up to 10 degrees higher than those that do, and one proven solution is to plant more trees in those neighborhoods.

On September 27, the day the reconciliation package was revealed, America’s Newsroomincluded the tree equity plan as one of the “doozies” that was buried in the bill while the Faulkner Focus also referred to it as one of the bill’s “hidden goodies” and mocked that there was “$3 billion for tree planting and so-called tree equity. Important that the trees feel equal to one another.”

In fact, there has been no shortage of “equity” jokes -- Greg Gutfeld on the September 29 edition of his late-night show Gutfeld! suggested that the program was meant to address “foilage privilege” (he meant “foliage”). And on the October 2 edition of *Fox & Friends Saturday*, in response to the program, Pete Hegseth quipped, “The oak trees feel like they have been too dominant for too long.” But for all the punchlines, there has been little attempt to understand what the program is or explain the issue it is proven to address.

Predictably, Fox has not scratched the surface of what the reconciliation bill means for climate mitigation

While the climate and environmental justice provisions that Fox has featured in its reconciliation bill coverage represent just a fraction of its spending, they are not an insignificant part of the Biden administration’s larger climate agenda, of which addressing environmental injustices and creating green union jobs are core pillars. They should be reported on. But Fox has framed the reconciliation bill as a radical-socialist wish list of trivial programs -- in fact, it represents, from a climate perspective, possibly the last chance to enact meaningful U.S. policies for the foreseeable future, which could make or break the global response to the climate crisis. But as long as Fox keeps its viewers revved up over “cow farts” and “climate cops” its base will never see the burning forest for the equitable trees.

---

rosemary's baby?!

2017

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/here-are-21-facts-explain-stephen-miller/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/merrick-garland-investigation/

no lnx

former Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller's legal group is demanding the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General launch an investigation into Attorney General Merrick Garland's memo that directs the FBI to discuss threats against school board officials.

The Garland memo is exceptionally weak, stating: "I am directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with each United States Attorney, to to convene meetings with federal state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders" to "facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats."

Nothing more.

After months of coaching and training of "grassroots" activists by right wing groups, including parents across the country, the nation has witnessed countless threats against school board officials and education professionals by parents whose anger is falsely ginned up by Fox news and other right wing media claims over critical race theory, masks, and vaccines.

Miller sees it differently, claiming his group is "demanding an investigation into AG Garland's memo unleashing federal law enforcement against parents fighting racism/CRT.Letter includes shocking info on origins of the memo."

Here is a copy of the letter America First Legal sent the DOJ Inspector General demanding an investigation into AG… https://t.co/T1aqGPokAW

— Stephen Miller (@Stephen Miller) 1634069778.0

Look at that language: "unleashing," "parents fighting racism," "shocking info" – all designed to create outrage.

(Also, parents who oppose CRT are not "fighting racism.")

As NCRM has previously reported, school board members and educators in at least nine states this year have been targeted with threats, death threats, and often racist death threats, including in Virginia, Arizona, Connecticut, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Vermont, according to local news reports.

According to Miller, who was one of the architects of Donald Trump's child separation policy, parents engaging in these threats should not be subjected to legal investigation, but protection.

Miller's Senior Counselor Reed Rubinsteinclaims that "the nationwide protests by parents against public school policies and practices—regardingCritical Race Theory indoctrination; anti-religious and anti-family gender ideology; and/or forced online education and mask mandates—are entitled to the most robust federal constitutional protection."

Rubinstein claims that "the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and others, have combined to oppress, threaten, and intimidate parents to chill and prevent them from exercising the rights or privileges secured by the Constitution," offering no reason why they would do this, especially given they have not done it before.

He also claims, again, offering no proof, that in "early September, Biden Administration stakeholders held discussions regarding avenues for potential federal action against parents with a key Biden Domestic Policy Council official (Jane Doe #1) and White House staff (John Doe #1). Stakeholders also held discussions with senior department officials, including at least one political appointee in the department's Civil Rights Division (Jane Doe #2). Jane Doe #1, John Doe #1, and others in the White House separately expressed concern regarding the potential partisan political impact of parent mobilization and organization around school issues in the upcoming midterm elections."

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an 1021

blanca explains how her family affected by immigr law, ks broke campaign promise to help?]

...The video captures the senator stating, "Actually, I am heading out," and locking herself into a bathroom stall as hecklers pepper her with remarks from the bathroom's entryway.

Following the sound of a flushing toilet, an activist speaks up, arguing they are holding her "accountable."

"We need to hold you accountable to what you told us, what you promised us that you were going to pass when we knocked on doors for you," the activist who identified herself as Blanca says. "It's not right!"

A Sinema spokesperson didn't return a Salon request for comment about the confrontation. In a statement released on Twitter, however, Sinema said the bathroom encounter "was not legitimate protest."

"It is unacceptable for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities such as gaining entry to closed university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom," her statement added.

Right-wing media quickly seized upon the unlikely task of defending a Democratic senator against people who (very likely) voted for her.

Coup-crazed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon suggested that the progressive activists who confronted the senator might have been "Illegal aliens."

"By the way, no illegal aliens vote in Arizona. They are bragging about it," he added Monday morning on his podcast. "Out there, they're stalking Sen. Sinema and bragging about how they organize and vote out in Arizona. Just saying."

"Watch — Leftist Protesters Stalk, Harass Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in a Restroom," the far-right Breitbart site flashed on its homepage early on Monday. The conservative blog RedState asked its readers a rhetorical question: "Did Leftists Who Stalked and Filmed Sinema in the Bathroom Commit a Crime?" (The answer would almost certainly be no.)

Stephen Miller, the former speechwriter and adviser to Donald Trump, who has often expressed an affinity for white nationalist views, also took up Sinema's cause, expanding on Bannon's illogical views.

"An illegal alien is stalking a US Senator to demand passage of Biden's reconciliation bill [because] it includes mass amnesty for illegals," he tweeted, citing the ruckus on the Arizona State campus. "In a functioning democracy, ICE would swiftly deport this person, but under Biden's new edict (as the lawbreaker knows) she's immune from removal."

"Did we #DeportBlanca yet?" former Trump official Steve Cortes asked aloud on Twitter....

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larry elder call in // hannity gets radio airtime b/c kid thus novelty?

santa monica HS pet stephen Miller got attn -- bannon --> trump

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-white-nationalist-tucker-carlson-hosts-white-nationalist-stephen-miller-discuss

systematic rev racism?

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an 521 ME

Former Trump White House senior adviser Stephen Miller developed a reputation for giving white supremacy a mainstream voice. Although his time in the White House has passed, he is still working to advance his white nationalist campaigns by way of Fox News and other right-wing platforms as he perpetuates his dangerous, deluded ideology of anti-white racism.

Now, Miller's non-profit organization "America First Legal" is launching attacks against the Biden administration's steps to establish a more humane immigration structure that would ultimately lead to a more equitable America.

However, The Nation hasdissected Miller's playbook and highlighted ways the Biden administration could actually use it to combat the United States' decades-long white supremacy problem**. "What Biden's team must understand is that the radicalized Republican Party is going to use immigration to attack him regardless of what he does," the publication notes.

Per the publication, there are several steps the Biden administration must deploy to counter Miller's dangerous strategies to promote hatred. In a nutshell, the goal would be to use the mainstream media as a vehicle to counter Miller's attacks.

"Use vivid, visceral anecdotes about immigrants' contributions to the United States in speeches, press releases, news articles, interviews, and more."
"Hold press conferences, roundtables, and other reality-TV-style events that celebrate and inform about the above immigrant contributions to US national security, health, and the economy, while sharing accurate statistics."
"Promote literature, websites, andthink tanksthat center immigrants and refugees and depict them as they really are."
"Call anti-immigrant rhetoric what it is: a tactic of largely white elites to distract from the real problems they created for working people of all colors."
"Forge alliances with other people in positions of power to accomplish the above goals and, crucially, to inspire hope."

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/here-are-21-facts-explain-stephen-miller/

This story first ran in 2017. 2x? holloway

Even among the right-wing ideologues doing the actual presidenting in this administration, Stephen Miller stands out for the copious amounts of Kool-Aid he mainlines. Speaking to the New York Times, a Trump team colleague described Miller as “fiercely loyal” to the president, “a true believer in every sense of the word.” Though he joined the campaign in its early days, penning many of the apocalyptic speeches that won fear-drunk Republican hearts and minds, Miller recently got a lot more visibility after a string of television appearances in defense of the Muslim ban. At each stop, Miller showed a flair for the dramatic: he lied, he dodged, he put on his best tyrant’s voice and proclaimed the executive branch above the law. It seemed contrived and forced, like a politically precocious, weasley teenager’s idea of how to command a crowd. According to those who know Miller’s history, that’s not so far off the mark.

Dating back to junior high school, Miller has been the unwavering right-winger now before us. Though the internet, and some of his family members, were quick to compare him to Joseph Goebbels, this reporter saw a resemblance to Roy Cohn—a—down to the sartorial details. Miller wears retro skinny suits, only recently ditched a chain-smoking habit and has the kind of cockiness that reads as unexamined, unsympathetic self-hatred. His barked orders and put-on baritone are all part of the package, and can strike an observer as funny. At least until you remember this guy is trying to turn the country into an all-white gated community.

---

an 221 3 arts, new bk

costs seem common sensical?

former White House adviser Stephen Miller on Sunday accused Democrats of "madness" over a push to enact comprehensive immigration reform.

Miller made the remarks on Fox News after network host Maria Bartiromo announced that a "new border crisis is afoot" due to a reform bill that has been introduced by Democrats.

For his part, Miller argued that granting citizenship to immigrants would "erase the essence" of the United States.

"The legislation put forward by Biden and congressional Democrats would fundamentally erase the very essence of America's nationhood," Miller claimed, explaining that he was upset by the idea that immigrants could legally regain entry after being deported by a former administration.

"This is madness!" he exclaimed. "This administration has already dismantled border security, canceling President Trump's historic agreements with Mexico and with the northern triangle countries, restoring catch and release and additionally gutting interior enforcement, issuing a memo, preventing ICE from removing the vast majority of criminal illegal immigrants that it encounters!"

"This is a policy choice disguised falsely to the court and to the country as a resource issue!" Miller shouted. "That is a lie and it's a lie that threatens public safety."

"Wow," Bartiromo replied.

Miller contended that the U.S. has enough resources for enforcement but not enough to treat immigrants humanely.

"So ask yourself, who is going to pay for the education?" he said. "What does it mean when classrooms, God willing, reopen? What does it mean for classroom size? What does it mean for health care? Then you add on top of that the families that are being released. Who is paying for the medical bills? Who's paying for the health care costs?"

"That's coming out of your pocket book!" Miller said. "And it's a public safety issue!"

"If you give low-skilled, illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, that will mean a net fiscal transfer of trillions of dollars longterm to pay for social security, to pay for medical care, to pay for Medicaid," he added. "It's an extraordinary expense to give that to 20 million illegal immigrants."

Watch the video below from Fox News.

He was radicalized at a very young age': New book reveals the ... ›

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-election-challenge

...IMI]...That there will be an attempted coup is no longer a matter of speculation. In an appearance on "Fox & Friends" on December 14,Stephen Miller, perhaps the most deranged and malevolent of Trump's senior advisers, openly declared the administration's plan to overturn the election results in the upcoming joint session.

A gambit under the 12th Amendment is a long shot, to be sure, but so was Trump's initial presidential bid back when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his first campaign and stigmatize undocumented Mexican migrants as "rapists" and drug traffickers. It behooves us, then, to take Trump and Miller seriously.

Ratified in 1804 in the aftermath of the hotly disputed election of 1800 (which ultimately seated Thomas Jefferson as the nation's third president), the 12th Amendment modified the procedures that govern the Electoral College. And while the 12th Amendment itself was modified by the 20th Amendment (which moved up the presidential inauguration from March to January), its basic provisions remain intact.

Of particular relevance to Trump's machinations, the 12th Amendment stipulates that after the electors of the various states (there are 538 of them today) cast and certify their votes for president and vice president, their ballots are transmitted to the president of the Senate. Under the Constitution, the president of the Senate is the vice president, currently Pence.

...

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/stephen-miller-2649480025

White House senior advisor Stephen Miller is blaming "the media" for President Donald Trump losing nearly 60 election cases in court, but says right now "alternate" electors are voting to "certify Donald Trump as the winner of the election."

Miller, one of the most prominent white nationalists aside from the president working in the White House, appeared on Fox News Monday in his capacity as a "senior Trump campaign advisor," something experts say at best draws questions of "the appearance of impropriety."

"The only date in the Constitution is January 20, so we have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election and certify Donald Trump as the winner of the election," Miller said on "Fox & Friends."

His claim that election was "fraudulent" is a lie. 86 judges across the country in 59 court cases – including at the U.S. Supreme Court – have refused to indulge the Trump team's lies.

Miller continued to spread falsehoods, while Fox News hosts allowed him to do so unchallenged.

"As we speak," he then said, "an alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote and we are going to send those results to Congress."

Stephen Miller on Fox & Friends says "an alternative" group of electors is also voting today: "As we speak, an al… https://t.co/1ODJJyAQSg

— Travis Akers (@Travis Akers)1607954513.0

The Trump campaign can send to Congress anything they like but without each state's certification by the Secretary of State those documents are meaningless.

Miller also falsely claimed "the media" is to blame for the 59 court case losses.

Fox News' Brian Kilmeade, fresh off his "groveling" interview with President Trump on Sunday, continued to spread Trump's lies about the election as he spoke with Miller.

But he finally confronted Miller with a few facts.

"Your legal team, in almost every state, 50 times, lost – some with Trump judges. So do you have the worst legal team who just don't seem to be presenting a good case? Or [are] you just too late and this case should have been brought before the election?"

Miller crafted a remarkably dishonest attack on the whole of America's judiciary in response.

"What you have to realize is the pressure from the corrupt corporate media to make everybody cave and bend is overwhelming," he lied. "And so, yes, judges are caving. politicians are caving."

That's false.

He then uttered this dangerous call to action: "We need heroes to step up and do the right thing," before spreading even more falsehoods.

Stephen Miller says Trump electors will be voting and sending results to Congress. (They'll be worthless because… https://t.co/ZPjmzQZ9dT

— Andrew Feinberg (@Andrew Feinberg)url

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1220

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/ice-expelled-group-of-children-under-stephen-miller-policy-just-minutes-after-judge-blocked-it/

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1020 covid pos

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an 1220

Age of Trump and its cruelty were not made possible by shades or ghosts or nameless, anonymous bureaucrats and followers. These were people who made the kinds of choices Hannah Arendt warned us about: "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."

In total, the Age of Trump was made possible and given life by people, real human beings who should be held accountable to the fullest extent possible, by the law as well as the judgments of history and people of conscience.

The Age of Trump and its cruelty were not made possible by shades or ghosts or nameless, anonymous bureaucrats and followers. These were people who made the kinds of choices Hannah Arendt warned us about: "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."

Miller has repeatedly taken Trump's worst instincts and made them worse yet.Examples include the child separation policy, mass detention centers along the border and a general policy of cruelty toward nonwhite migrants and refugees, sabotaging pandemic relief efforts, and an overarching strategy of mainstreaming white supremacy into public policy and attempting to overturn America's multiracial democracy.

In this conversation, Guerrero explains how Miller was radicalized as a teenager into the ideology of white supremacy and other forms of right-wing extremism. Guerrero also details how the right-wing political machine mentored and elevated Miller, first as a rising star in high school and college and then all the way to the Trump White House. She also offers an explanation of Miller's profoundly damaged sense of masculinity, which manifests itself through an obsession with gangster movies and a ghoulish fixation on violence. This is a trait Miller shares with Trump, and one that helped to bond the two closely together in their shared political project.

Ultimately, "Hatemonger" is a reminder that human monsters must be created. They are not born that way.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Why has there been such denial among the mainstream news media about the white supremacists inside the Trump administration? Most notably, of course, I mean Stephen Miller. This has continued throughout Trump's four years as president.

Stephen Miller does a really good job of laundering white supremacist ideas through the language of "heritage" and "economics" and "national security." People who have racist inclinations do not like to perceive themselves as racist. Even those people who are racist and creating those public policies can continue to entertain such a fantasy.

Once you start to familiarize yourself with white nationalism and its literature, those concepts are being repeated almost verbatim by the likes of Stephen Miller and others in the Trump administration, as well as their spokespeople and media. The policies of the Trump administration were drawn specifically from a blueprint created by think tanks supported by John Tanton, the eugenicist who believed in population control for nonwhite people. He also believed in race-based pseudoscience and the genetic superiority of whites.

Part of the denial about that reality is a function of systemic issues, such as a lack of diversity in newsrooms and publishing. There are white managers in those spaces who are really reining in their reporters, telling them to not use terms like "racist" or "xenophobe" when describing people like Donald Trump. There is the narrative that such language should not be used to describe Trump, because we "don't know what is in his heart." I did not write my new book "Hatemonger" to tell the public what is in Stephen Miller's heart. What I can tell you is that Stephen Miller is fluent in the language of hatred. He speaks the language of people who hate. I cannot necessarily tell you if there is hate in his heart. Stephen Miller is a hatemonger. He has been engaging in hate-mongering in a deliberate way. He does this through cruel policies, such as systematically separating children from their parents, basically obliterating the asylum system at the U.S.-Mexico border and slashing refugee admissions to historic lows.

What is Stephen Miller an example of?

He is a case study in indoctrination and radicalization.Stephen Miller is the story of what happens when a person is exposed to an extremist ideology during a vulnerable and difficult time in their life. Such a person then ends up becoming consumed by extremism. And then, in the case of Stephen Miller, said person goes on to become the most powerful adviser in the White House.

Stephen Miller was going through a tough time as a teenager. His father is a real estate investor, like Donald Trump, and he was tangled up in legal disputes and bankruptcies related to his business. Miller's father ended up losing a lot of money and the family had to move to a slightly smaller house in a less affluent, less white neighborhood. My conversations with people who knew Miller at the time, people in his family, revealed that Stephen Miller's life was unraveling in a small way, to the extent that he lost his place in line as a rich white male. He felt entitled to that privilege. He was looking for somebody to blame.

At the time there was extreme anti-immigrant hostility in California. The Republican governor, Pete Wilson, was talking about a migrant "invasion" at the border and blaming it for everything that was going wrong in the state. Stephen Miller is really a product of that political and social moment. Miller internalized a lot of that racist rhetoric andended up meeting some very far-right figures, one of whom was David Horowitz.He introduced Stephen Miller, during this vulnerable time in his life, to the idea that values such as equality and freedom, and other parts of America's civic religion and national mythos, are entirely thanks to white men.

Of course, that is obviously and completely ahistorical. Stephen Miller is a Jewish American. He is the descendant of refugees from Europe. But Miller really saw himself as a white man and began to rally around this idea that America was in danger because of brown and Black people who were coming into the country. David Horowitz introduced a young Stephen Miller to the mission that he needed to save the United States from an existential threat, in the form of the Democratic Party and its alliances with people of color.

How did the right-wing political machine elevate Stephen Miller?

David Horowitz was worried that Stephen Miller was not going to get into an elite universitybecause he was so unpopular in high school and constantly attacked students of color, as well as initiatives to remedy the negative impact of racial inequality.

Horowitz allowed Miller to publish self-promotional articles on his website about all the changes that he had allegedly brought to his high school. Another leading right-wing figure, Larry Elder, allowed Miller to come onto his radio program regularly, when he was a teenager, to complain about his high school.

At Duke University, he continued to use David Horowitz's ideas to get a bigger and bigger platform. For example, Miller was given a column at the Duke newspaper by leveraging the language of "diversity." That tactic is something that Horowitz taught him: Use the language of the civil rights movement against it. He was consistently drawn to racial controversies while at Duke. Miller would get national media exposure from that. But Miller graduated without a job. He was again a fringe figure.

Horowitz comes to Stephen Miller's rescue and gets him his first job, with Rep. Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party congresswoman. And then from there he gets Miller a job with Rep. John Shadegg from Arizona, and finally with Sen. Jeff Sessions from Alabama. Over time Stephen Miller became extremely well connected in the far-right movement, and that helped him get a job working for Donald Trump.

What does Stephen Miller want?

There are two answers to that question.

One of them is very much focused on immigration. He was indoctrinated into the belief that too much immigration from brown and Black countries is detrimental to the United States. What Miller wants is to attack immigration from those countries through whatever means available. That could be through reducing the actual number of people allowed to come to America from those countries or implementing cruel policies in order to deter or frighten nonwhite people from coming at all.

Secondly, and this is why the Stephen Miller story is so important regardless of whether one cares about immigration or not, he is responsible for Donald Trump's most polarizing rhetoric. Miller is also responsible for why Trump was so combative in general. Stephen Miller is truly a master at pitting groups against one another by using wedge issues.

He understands that when you get people fighting with each other, whether it's based on their skin color or their political affiliation or whether they want to wear a mask during the coronavirus crisis, it creates media attention.

Both Miller and Trump believe that any media attention is good media attention, regardless of whether it is negative or positive. Those distractions also allowed Miller and Trump and the administration to push through their agenda. For example, the disastrous response to the coronavirus public health crisis. Instead of focusing on the distribution of masks and medical equipment, Trump and Miller divided the American people by closing the door to legal immigration and denying green cards.

For Stephen Miller, what does it mean to be "white"? Jewish people were not necessarily considered "white" in America until the 1950s or 1960s. Miller has taken that to the most grotesque extreme by becoming a white supremacist.

I believe that Miller would avoid the question. He tries to avoid the topic of race and skin color because he has been taught to launder white supremacist ideas through the language of "heritage," "economics" and "national security," as a way of making hate more palatable.

I believe that an honest answer to that question from Stephen Miller would be that whiteness to him is associated with positive values and ideals. Stephen Miller has been brainwashed to perceive people who are not white as being something evil and beastly. Stephen Miller's reading preferences are very powerful evidence of his beliefs.

Miller has endorsed theexplicitly white supremacist novel "The Camp of the Saints."

In 2015, through his connections at Breitbart, he urged staff there to write articles showing parallels between that book and real life. "Camp of the Saints" is about the destruction of the "white world" by this horde of brown refugees who are described as animals and beasts and monsters. The book explicitly promotes hatred and violence against brown and Black people by white people as a way of ensuring the latter's survival. "The Camp of the Saints" is a book about the "white genocide" conspiracy theory, the same conspiracy theory that white terrorists have used to justify their acts of violence. We saw this in the horrible massacre in El Paso.

From a very young age, Stephen Miller would write things such as, "I'm Jewish, but Jewish people are a minority and so even though Jewish holidays are important to me, American holidays are much more important to me." Stephen Miller was very obsessed with the idea of being perceived as American. And for him to be American was associated with whiteness and the white male heroes he held dear, such as John Wayne. The types of movies and the types of people that Stephen Miller idolized were consistently associated with what he understood whiteness to be. To Miller, whiteness is associated with positive ideals. Miller is also obsessed with mobsters and organized crime and the idea that there is no rule of law apart from "might makes right." It all has to do with power for Stephen Miller.

Stephen Miller's obsession with organized crime figures suggests that he is a fragile and weak man who suffered some type of trauma or other harm to his sense of manhood. He is a remarkably dangerous but cartoon-like figure, an adult man who dresses up like a mafioso from the movies.

I spoke at length to one of his longest and closest friends who told me about how, as a child and then well into his 30s, Stephen Miller was obsessed with mobsters. One of his favorite movies was "Casino" with Robert De Niro.

Stephen Miller would go so far as dress up as De Niro's mobster character. Miller would actually go to Las Vegas dressed that way to celebrate his birthday and on vacations with friends and family. Dressing up like a mobster was not something he just did as a child. Stephen Miller actually incorporates the facial tics and hand gestures of the mafia figures he admires.

When Miller was in high school, he disavowed one of his closest friends because he was Hispanic. That signals to the type of man that he would later become.

Stephen Miller was close friends with Jason Islas. Islas' ancestors are from Mexico and he was exploring his heritage, more as a way of reconnecting with his father, who he had not been spending a lot of time with. Around that time, Stephen Miller decides to no longer be friends with Jason, telling him they can't be friends anymore because of his Latino heritage. Miller also insults Jason by telling him about all these other things he does not like about him, such as that he's too small and too insecure, in general just deliberately attacking the things that he knows are going to hurt Jason Islas.

This happened in eighth grade, going into freshman year of high school. Jason Islas told me, "I don't think that people should be judged for the rest of their lives by the things that they do when they're this age." With Stephen Miller, the way in which he rejected Jason Islas because of his Mexican heritage would later calcify into something even darker and do a great amount of of damage to thousands of people from Latin America.

How has Stephen Miller impacted Donald Trump's approach to the coronavirus pandemic?

Stephen Miller, from the day that he entered the Trump administration, has been focused on narrowing the scope of the Department of Homeland Security. DHS has a mandate of protecting the American people from a broad range of threats such as terrorism, cyber-warfare and pandemics.

Stephen Miller wanted DHS narrowly focused on immigration issues because that was where the country's demographics could be re-engineered. This allowed him to shape policy to attack refugees and asylum-seekers. Miller would eliminate people from their positions if they disagreed with him. Many of the top positions at the Department of Homeland Security are held by people in an acting capacity. They have not been confirmed by Congress. This allows Miller to have greater control over them. The Department of Homeland Security is supposed to be protecting the American people from things like a public health crisis, but is so narrowly focused on Miller's racist obsessions that it has failed to protect the American people from much greater and real threats.

Trump is pathological if not an outright sociopath. The facts are clear there. Miller and Trump both idolize cruelty. They speak openly about hurting people. Moreover, both of them are fixated on violence.

Stephen Miller has a fascination with violence. He shares that trait with Donald Trump. When Stephen Miller was in high school, he wrote an article where he fantasized about watching Osama bin Laden being shot. I believe that his violent ideations are part of why he has been able to last so long in the White House. Stephen Miller understands Donald Trump in a very instinctual way. Miller is the only adviser who consistently pushes Trump in the most cruel and aggressive directions. Trump loves that.

If there is a truth commission or some other organization tasked with revealing the full extent of the Trump regime's crimes and other evils, what would you tell them about Stephen Miller?

I would try to make very clear where Stephen Miller's ideas come from. The Trump administration has consistently talked about how their immigration policies were about "national security" and "law and order," and about keeping out "criminals" and "the cartels." But Stephen Miller's policies have really been about creating a majority white country. Stephen Miller's goal was and is to harm, keep out, exclude and remove as many brown and Black people as he can from this country.

What would America look like if Stephen Miller got his way?

America would be a homogenized gated white community, like the suburbs of Orange County. Unfortunately, America already has mass incarceration of Black people, but there would be more of that if Stephen Miller got his way.

Do you believe that Stephen Miller will have one of those deathbed confessional moments — like Lee Atwater, the architect of the infamous "Southern strategy" — where he recants and apologies at the end of his life for the evil things he has done?

If Stephen Miller believes that it will serve him career-wise, then he might do such a thing eventually. At the end of the day, I would be very surprised if Stephen Miller actually repented.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://theintercept.com/2020/10/03/trump-immigration-antifa-fascism/

ryan d

liSTENING TO Donald Trump describe the U.S. in 2016 was to hear a story of a nation in peril of losing its identity to waves of brown-skinned invaders. Immigration and the border, particularly the urgent need to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, dominated Trump’s campaign rhetoric. Once in office, the president’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, rammed through one punishing initiative after another, banning travelers from Muslim-majority countries, separating immigrant children from their parents to deter others from making the journey north, forcing tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to wait out their cases in the border’s most dangerous cities, and plowing through protected lands to stand up towering new sections of border wall. Today, asylum at the border is effectively dead, and Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is using the coronavirus as a pretext to boot immigrants out of the country — including families, children, and babies — as swiftly as possible.

so it may have come as a surprise to some that immigration hardly came up at all in the first presidential debate of 2020. This is at least partially due to the fact that the Trump administration’s framing of its priorities has evolved over the past several months, as waves of protests challenging the power and brutality of American policing have swept the country. Without question, the anti-immigrant machinery marches on. In July, the Migration Policy Institute catalogued more than 400 executive actions the administration has taken on immigration since Trump’s inauguration. Those policies continue to impact countless individuals and families across the country and around the world every day, and if the claims of a former top DHS official are true, Miller has an immigration campaign of “shock and awe” drawn up and ready to go should Trump remain in office.

But with those efforts simultaneously in motion, the Trump administration has increasingly and prominently centered purported threats posed by leftists, anarchists, and anti-fascists in its bid to hold onto power. This widening of the threat aperture is straight out of the authoritarian playbook, said Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.”

“You begin with something that separates citizens from noncitizens,” Stanley told The Intercept, explaining how fascistic power grabs often take place. “You have your colonial war, your war on terror, your imperialist war that focuses on distinguishing between citizens and noncitizens, and then you direct that force inwards against your political opponents.”

In the case of Trump, the first three years of the administration featured talk of threats from MS-13 gang members, migrant caravans marching north through Mexico, Islamic State killers hidden among refugee populations and more — all were couched in terms of threats to the homeland, an “invasion” that posed a danger to national security and warranted decisive law enforcement and military responses. In some cases, such as the October 2018 migrant caravans that led to military deployments to the border during the midterm elections, the supposedly increased severity of the threat coincided with important electoral moments. From the outset, the White House has argued that certain jurisdictions, so-called sanctuary cities typically run by members of the president’s opposing political party, provide cover for dangerous outsiders. In response, DHS has launched high-profile blitzes into these cities, at timesdeploying militarized Border Patrol tactical unitsto support Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations deep in urban settings and often producing media-ready photo and video packages to illustrate the president’s resolve.

The administration’s framing of its adversaries entered a new phase with the killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed, as the country witnessed a challenge to the legitimacy of policing unlike anything in recent memory. While the vast majority of those protests followed the traditional nonviolent civil rights model, the uprising began with a police precinct being set ablaze, and to this day, a considerable number of protesters remain unapologetic when it comes to the militancy of their demands and actions. Against the backdrop of this upheaval, the Trump administration has embraced what Stanley would describe as the second phase of a fascistic power grab: the turn inward.

[Anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters fight over a Confederate flag with members of far-right militias in a white pride organization rally near Stone Mountain Park in Stone Mountain, Ga., on Aug. 15, 2020.

Photo: Logan Cyrus/AFP/Getty Images

The president has described the leaderless anti-fascist movement known as antifa as a terrorist organization and the conservative media ecosystem has fallen in line behind him. As The Intercept reported in July and as a senior DHS whistleblower attested to last month, the nation’s top Homeland Security officials have downplayed the lethal threat from right-wing extremists and white supremacists amid the unrest, while boosting the president’s talk of threats from the left. A number of the Democrat-led communities that were sanctuary cities at the beginning of the year have now been declared “anarchist jurisdictions,” and Border Patrol tactical teams, among other specialized federal units, have deployed to those cities with a revised mission.

Stanley’s argument is not that the U.S. currently has a fascist government — at least not yet. Instead, he draws attention to the concerning features of Trumpism. “It’s a cult of the leader, all about Trump,” he said. “It’s a fascist social and political movement.” The identification of enemies is central to such movements, he argued, and quite often involves creating linkages between criminalized immigrant populations and the political left. “It’s the KKK ideology,” Stanley said, explaining the roots of Trump’s line of argumentation. “The Ku Klux Klan says Marxist Jews are trying to provoke a race war with Black Americans and they’re trying to bring immigrants and destroy the white race.” Variations on this argument have become known as the “great replacement theory,” and it has made its way into the manifestos and online rants of murderous racist terrorists from El Paso and Pittsburgh to Norway and New Zealand. “The idea is that leftists are bringing immigrants in to destroy the white race,” Stanley said. “Immigration is a communist plot to destroy the racial character of the nation so that the communists can take over.”

In the United States, the DHS, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency by far, would present an attractive tool to any would-be authoritarian looking to stem this takeover. Customs and Border Protection alone, one of the department’s nearly two-dozen component agencies, has an aircraft fleet roughly the size of the Brazilian air force. DHS operates a nationwide network of law enforcement “fusion centers” designed to inform state and local partners about the threats officers might face in the field. As The Intercept reported in July, the DHS intelligence shop distributing much of that information — the same office that top DHS officials are accused of manipulating in Trump’s favor — has repeatedly disseminated reports describing opponents of the president’s border and immigration policies as domestic terrorists.

“We have this massive quasi-military organization devoted to targeting noncitizens and vilifying them as terrorists,” Stanley said. “All you’ve got to do is move that over one little notch to focus on political opponents.”

[burning bldg, mob]Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution about “anarchist violence” in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 4, 2020.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Targeting the Left

In the face of the recent protests, the politicization of DHS operations that defined Trump’s first three and a half years in office, primarily through immigration enforcement, has soared to new heights. Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, the two men leading the department — both illegally occupying their posts, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office — have repeatedly leaned into Trump’s argument that antifa poses a profound danger to national security, despite evidence produced by their own office and other federal law enforcement agencies that groups on the far right present the most persistent and ongoing domestic terror threat in the country. Under their leadership, DHS immigration enforcement personnel, including Border Patrol and ICE agents, were deployed to Portland, Oregon, a site of ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, against the wishes of local elected leaders. The move was repeatedly criticized for exacerbating rather than calming the unrest.

Federal Agents at Protests Renew Calls to Dismantle Homeland Security

The ascent of Wolf and Cuccinelli is part of a broader hollowing out of leadership at DHS, which has effectively left in place only those who are loyal to the lone survivor of Trump’s original 2016 brain trust: Stephen Miller.

“The Democratic Party for a long time historically has been the party of secession — what you’re seeing today is the Democratic Party returning to its roots,” Miller told Fox News talk-show host Tucker Carlsonin July, when asked about the protests in Portland. “The mayors of these cities that have engaged in these kinds of lawless rebellions against federal law, against immigration enforcement, have engaged in unprecedented activity, andthis administration, for the first time in history, has taken action to restore immigration enforcement after five decades of bipartisan betrayal of the American worker.” He added: “This is about the survival of this country and we will not back down.”

Though best known for his war on immigrants, Miller’s political awakening is in fact rooted in bone-deep anti-leftism. “One of Stephen Miller’s main strengths and his original philosophy was about attacking the left,” Jean Guerrero, an investigative journalist and author of “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda,” told The Intercept. “The focus on the left is the logical conclusion of Miller’s ideology.”

In her account of Miller’s upbringing in southern California, Guerrero details how a teenage Miller came up under David Horowitz, a man who renounced his ties to groups like the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s and devoted the rest of his life to a war on the political left. In college, Guerrero explains, Miller’s anti-leftism became bound up ingreat replacement theorizing, which in turn laid the foundation for his views on immigration and border security.“It boils down to the idea that the United States faces an existential threat in the form of the Democratic Party partnering with Muslims and other people of color,” Guerrero said. “He saw the immigration system as a way of realizing this white nationalist agenda.” In 2015, as an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, Miller encouraged reporters at Breitbart’s right-wing news site to write about “The Camp of the Saints,**” a racist French novel rooted in great replacement theory.

In addition to describing immigrants in grotesquely dehumanizing terms, the book argues that the downfall of Western civilization can be traced to the political left, particularly the “anti-racists,” “agitators” and “anarchists,” who stand in solidarity with refugees. For Guerrero, it is these passages that sound increasingly relevant today. “A lot of people talk about how it demonizes people of color, which it does,” she said. “But one of the most striking things to me is the echoes in the rhetoric about anti-racists in the book and what we now see in Trump’s reelection rhetoric, describing anti-racist protesters as agitators and anarchists and trying to paint the entire left as a mob that wants to destroy this country, which is essentially the white genocide theory.”=

The Proud Boys, a far-right pro-Trump group, gather with their allies in a rally called “End Domestic Terrorism Against Antifa” in Portland, Ore., on Sept. 26, 2020. Photo: John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images. blood of commies w/ kyle t shirt?

Stand Back and Stand By

Among the most troubling of the president’s actions is his courting of armed, right-wing paramilitary groups and his confidence that the nation’s security forces are not apolitical institutions, but rather eager and engaged supporters of his “law and order” agenda.

“Stand back and stand by,” Trump told the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist street-fighting gang, during Tuesday night’s debate. The comment was widely seen as an order from the commander-in-chief to an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a hate group, including among the group’s own leaders and members. Trump also weighed in on the killing of Michael Reinoehl, a self-described anti-fascist, by law enforcement in Oregon last month. In an interview published by Vice News shortly before his death, Reinoehl said he shot and killed Aaron J. Danielson, a supporter of far-right group Patriot Prayer, days earlier in an effort to defend a friend. An eyewitness has claimed that Reinoehl was gunned down without warning. Referencing the killing in Tuesday night’s debate, Trump said law enforcement “took care of business.” He previously called the killing an act of “retribution.”

Proud Boys Rally Fizzled but Portland’s Cops Went on the Attack

Trump has similarly defended Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old fan of the president and the police accused of murdering two Black Lives Matter protesters and wounding a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Echoing the president’s line, documents obtained by NBC News this week revealed that DHS personnel were directed to make sympathetic comments about the accused shooter and told that the media was falsely painting Patriot Prayer as a racist organization. Both Danielson and Rittenhouse have achieved martyr status on the far right. Their names were invoked again and again at a Proud Boys rally in Portland last weekend. Though small in numbers, the rally was drenched in the rhetoric of civil conflict and allegiance to the president and the nation’s security forces. “Thin Blue Line” flags were ubiquitous at the event, as were the letters “RWDS,” short for the words “right-wing death squads.”

The blurring of lines between his support in right-wing paramilitary groups and law enforcement agencies has been a consistent feature of Trump’s presidency. In July, Vice President Mike Pence’s visit with Philadelphia’s police union also featured members of the local Proud Boys chapter. Meanwhile, violent “Back the Blue” protests in Arizona have featured participants fantasizing about the murder of their leftist political opponents. In an exchange Tuesday night, Trump pressed Biden to name one law enforcement agency that’s come out in support of his campaign. Biden did not.Trump, meanwhile, has enjoyed extensive support from law enforcement unions across the country, from those representing Border Patrol agents and ICE deportation officers, to the Fraternal Order of Police.

“He’s been wooing the security forces his entire term,” Stanley said. As Tuesday night’s debate wrapped up, Trump explicitly encouraged his supporters to head to election polls and be on the lookout for suspicious activity in what he predicted would be “a fraud like you’ve never seen.” Courting paramilitary groups and loyal security services, calling the integrity of the election into question, and urging his supporters to take it upon themselves to respond are “classic fascist tactics,” Stanley argued.

“He’s been using fascist tactics, unquestionably, and he’s already transformed many of these things into policy, particularly around immigration,” he said. “Now he’s turning to his political opponents, so now we’re really facing the concern about transformation into a fascist regime.”

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920 dn

pre election?

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/24/headlines/trump_administration_restores_public_charge_wealth_test_for_green_card_applicants

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dn also podcast dad lost $ so public sta monica HS

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/he-was-radicalized-at-a-very-young-age-new-book-reveals-the-deeply-sinister-motivations-of-hatemonger-stephen-miller/

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/white-nationalist-aficionado-stephen-miller-claims-democrats-stand-for-a-modern-day-fascism/

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/help-stephen-miller-fox-friends-uses-trumps-delay-election-tweet-lie

fox News continued Friday morning to provide cover for President Donald Trump’s tweet from Thursday, which suggested that America might “Delay the Election” rather than allow it to take place with expanded mail-in voting.

Previously, Fox News personalities ridiculed comments by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who said in April that Trump might attempt to put off the election. At the time, Fox News commentators called such accusations a “bizarre conspiracy theory,” “so dumb,” “an attempt to frighten people,” “a conjuring,” and other terms of derision.

But on Friday’s edition of Fox & Friends, the co-hosts used Trump’s tweet suggesting Election Day should be postponed as a springboard to attack the concept of mail-in voting itself, and insisted that Trump was really just trying to highlight such concerns in the first place.In so doing, they not only helped to spread further lies about the voting process, but they also suggested it would be unreliable because of budget measures that have been put in place by the Trump administration itself.

“Well, a lot of Americans don't trust the U.S. postal system, because they’ve had budget cuts, they’ve had so many problems in the past, you know, decade or whatever, however long it’s been,” said co-host Ainsley Earhardt. “And everyone knows if you go in-person to vote, you know your vote is counted. But if you try to mail something in, there’s a big chance that it's not going to get to the folks who are counting these ballots.”

Not mentioned, of course, is that the Trump administration has opposed measures to shore up the Postal Service’s finances during the pandemic, and it has also put in place new measures to slow down mail delivery. It is these acts that have election officials worried about potential problems with mail-in voting — but which Fox News and other conservative media will use as a reason to oppose the expansion of voting, rather than work to counter those harmful obstacles that have been put in place.

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co-host Brian Kilmeade also invoked a scenario he has pitched before, imagining family dynamics resulting in voter fraud or coercion and urging viewers to “just use logic” about it.

“You sit in your house, there’s five ballots for your family. Three of your kids, 18 to 21, ‘I'm not going to vote, you can vote for me, you could send it in. When I get around to doing it, you click the box,’” Kilmeade said. “Domineering parent tells the kids how they’re going to vote. Or some kids will grab their parents' ballot and send it. Can't we just have this one moment to vote for one candidate every four years, and show up and put a ballot in without licking an envelope or pressing on a stamp? If you can shop for food, if you can buy liquor, you can vote once every four years.”

Later on, the program hosted White House senior adviser Stephen Miller to help spread false claims about mail-in voting.

Co-host Pete Hegseth — who in Fox’s earlier coverage helped to lay the groundwork for a reinterpretation that Trump was really intended to bring attention to the alleged problems with mail-in voting — asked Miller a softball question: “He took to the podium to use that reaction, to explain about the many problems we’ve seen with absentee ballots not being counted on time, fraud with mail-in ballots. Explain what the White House is attempting to do to ensure election integrity on November 3?”

“Here’s a shocking thing for your audience to consider. Nobody who mails in a ballot has their identity confirmed — nobody checks to see if they’re even a U.S. citizen,” Miller responded. “Think about that. Any foreign national — talk about foreign election interference — can mail in a ballot, and nobody even verifies if they're a citizen of the United States of America. Now, this would be happening on a scale of potentially millions of people.”

As pointed out by Bloomberg’s Ryan Beckwith, this claim from Miller is false and media outlets should not be reporting on it without that disclaimer.

“What can be done at the White House to pressure states to actually do validated, in-person voting,” Hegseth asked, “as opposed to allowing secretaries of states to say, ’Hey, we’re going to mail this one in?’”

“Well, one of the things that we need to do, first of all, is raise awareness, so that citizens in every state can put pressure on their local leaders and their governors to fight universal balloting,” Miller proclaimed boldly. “That's a critical issue. Obviously, the Department of Justice has a responsibility to look at all issues relating to voter fraud in this country.”

“But you want to talk about voter suppression, you want to talk about denying people their franchise — that's what universal mail-in ballots are all about,” Miller claimed. “Universal mail-in ballots are an attempt to dilute the vote of your viewers. It's an attempt to dilute the vote of Americans who want to have their identities verified, by allowing for massive, endemic fraud. That is scandalous.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/stephen-miller-gets-added-to-splcs-extremist-files/

ortiz kos

Civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has added Trump administration official and noted white supremacist Stephen Miller to its “Extremists Files” for his role in implementing some of the most inhumane and racist immigration policies in modern U.S. history, putting this taxpayer-paid official alongside notorious racists and bigots like former KKK grand wizard David Duke and dead homophobe Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church.

“Stephen Miller is the architect behind some of the most draconian anti-immigrant policies that we’ve seen from the Trump administration,” SPLC senior investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden said in a statement received by Daily Kos, stating that leaked communications with fellow racists from before he joined the White House “essentially provided a roadmap for the dehumanizing and hateful policies that we’ve seen enacted under this administration.”

“Through the conscious use of fearmongering and xenophobia, Miller implements policies which demonize immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, in an apparent effort to halt all forms of immigration to the United States,” the SPLC said in its new “Extremists” profile on the notorious racist, who was a Senate aide to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III before joining the White House to implement his white supremacist vision.

Emails leaked to SPLC from that time and leading up through impeached president Donald Trump’s campaign revealed Miller promoted the racist propaganda of anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) dozens of times. Someone as vile as Miller might actually be pleased to know that he’s listed alongside CIS’ founder, eugenist John Tanton, in the SPLC files. In other leaked emails, Miller echoed paranoid, white supremacist conspiracy theory around the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which he would later help end after joining impeached president Donald Trump to occupy the White House.

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

“In the trove of emails analyzed by Hatewatch, Miller vocalized a belief in the idea that DACA recipients would advance the reshaping of the U.S.’ demographics by replacing native born citizens,” the report said. “On June 18, 2020, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to end the program in a 5-4 ruling.” Trump and Miller had fully expected a win from the conservative court, so this lawless administration is now just openly defying the courts and refusing to fully reopen the program to new applicants.

Miller has also been one of officials responsible for the impeached president’s latest order stomping on legal immigration, SPLC notes: “Most recently, on April 21, 2020, The New York Times reported on how Miller and Robert Law, chief of the Office of Policy and Strategy for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), drafted President Trump’s executive order blocking the issuance of new green cards.”

“The administration cited the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic as the reason for the newest executive order,” SPLC continued. Lies:Miller had long been itching for a public health crisis as a pretext to implement more of his racist agenda, The New York Times reportedin May. He got what he desperately wished for in COVID-19—and the fact that Black and Latino communities are being disproportionately hit by the pandemic is probably a plus to him. (Side note: his wife, Mike Pence aide Katie Miller, has also tested positive for COVID-19.)

Democrats from both the House and Senate have long called on Trump to fire Miller,but their shared hatred and contempt for immigrants regardless of legal status and people of color is a main reason why he’s one of the few Trump officials to have lasted these three and a half years. Now, we’ve been stuck subsidizing this one man hate parade. Remember, November isn’t just about ousting Trump, it’s also about ousting his destructive aide in order to begin the long road to reversing these destructive policies.

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omfg

https://twitter.com/LouDobbs/status/1283531243548741635

portland secret police

ms 13 barbarian jul 15 dobbs miller interview

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omfg

https://twitter.com/LouDobbs/status/1283531243548741635

portland secret police

ms 13 barbarian jul 15 dobbs miller interviewm finally declared terrorists

https://www.mediamatters.org/lou-dobbs/lou-dobbs-and-stephen-miller-celebrate-their-nativist-extremism

Fox News’ Lou Dobbs and senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller are on the same draconian page when it comes to immigration. So it wasn’t a shock that Dobbs’s interview of Miller yesterday was soft as a feather: These were two proto-fascists comparing notes.

During Miller’s rare July 15 interview, he called arrested gang suspects “barbarians” and denigrated the Black Lives Matter movement as a “Marxist” organization that poses a threat to Americans’ safety. Dobbs did not push back on any of Miller’s statements, nor did he ask about Miller’s history of promoting white nationalism.

miller, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as having a “white nationalist perspective,” has shown an affinity for white supremacists such as Jared Taylor and Jason Richwine. In emails leaked to the SPLC in 2019, Miller frequently cited Taylor and other white supremacists, promoted eugenics, and generally advocated a white nationalist ideology. Members of Congress at the time pushed for Miller to be ousted.

Fox News has an ongoing history of promoting white nationalism and covering for its proponents. Host Tucker Carlson’s top writer recently resigned after CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported on anonymous racist posts the staffer had written online. Carlson himself has a long history of promoting white supremacy on his Fox show. Fox hosts regularly promote prejudicial nativism and white nationalist conspiracy theories. While far-right extremism remains a serious threat in this country, Fox News consistently downplays this concern. Dobbs’ gratuitous interview with Miller is yet another example of how the network provides a platform for white nationalist rhetoric.

And it’s not the first time Miller, who rarely makes media appearances, has gone on Fox for a gratuitous interview. He appeared on Trish Regan’s later-canceled Fox Business show to defend himself after the SPLC’s reporting in 2019 and said the reporting on him was “doing a favor to white supremacists.”

Fox is now continuing to run cover for a white nationalist working in the White House.

Stephen miller lou dobbs

https://video.foxbusiness.com/v/6171909446001/#sp=show-clips

Op Vulcan

sr pol advisor

good strong begin to see good strong pos results on that focus, continue? congrats

congrats on ms 13 op, one of the largest jul 15 largest soulless barbarians hacked to death 2 girls in NY, now facing death penalty, 1st time ever int'l terrorism, a contrast taking out criminal gangs and terrorists w/ rec speed force and focus record focus liberal mayor, crazy mayor lawless mayhem un radical left, unleash violence and mayhem, public safety that's the choice;

Dobbs: it is a stark choice no more emblematic than portland wheeler pristine city being savaged antifa, BLM and other activists and street criminals 6 straight weeks nowhere else cits do not want to ruffle feather and get that major out of town, nowhere else, at least take night off

i suspect strong and growing silent majority in this cty ready to clear house of leftist mayors

silent tortuous violence electoral wave crash over of defund police, abolish law enforcement, force sanctuary cities down the throats, appoint social just prosecutors who won't even enforce the law; choice never more clear, even tho lib mayors refuse request, refuse our generous hands, we will make major announcement next week prez use authority of fed gov't to come to rescue of long-suffering cits ; to rescue,

lou: if citizens do not req, accept violence at the level they are you and i know how it will be painted, fed, crush city despite disavowal

mom and dad and cits of all walks of life manhattan, chicago, atlanta ...they support police, they feds to fullest extent ,want gang members behind bars, killers, murderer, support for robust federal support, keep city, family community safe; right to walk w/o stray bullet, put kids to sleep at night w/o worry homes broken into or windows smashed; social justice prosecutors will make much more diff, but this prez will never waver in his duty to protect the am ppl;

dobbs: isn't role for DOJ NYc mayor De Blasio cognit diss/ [nery unwell" ] , trash city every day, strips police of billion $, throw citizens to wolves; anti-crime unit disbanded by socialist mayor,

SM: I assure you DOJ ...safety, peace and order in our city. Every day thousands ICE ...every day go to work, put dangerous criminals behind bars reduced crime for the 1st time for lowest level decades, did by fed law, [guns offenders, felons carrying weapons behind bars] put X in jail

Sanct cities releasing violent criminals get them off street and we will get them back home = jail

Let’s never forget Obama /Biden for 8 straight years unimpeded, let MS 13 in,unleashed on our communities, never apologized to families..schools, senseless violence , not Pol/part issue, ___normal good ppl], ppl have to live in fear of violence

Dobbs: why not DOJ investigate o BLM not nonprofit 501c4 get $ directly from Dems party gets tax deductible $ ]= tax $, drivers it back to BLM} he dodges question no time to make speech

we will not allow radical marxist orgs deprive Ams bl white, liberal be they POC of rights to be safe

Dobbs: Marxist lives matter , you’d think they’d motto

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wife press aid to vp? covid pos?

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MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff revealed a conversation he had with an aide to Vice President Mike Pence in his new book “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy” that gives a disturbing glimpse of the kinds of people working in the Trump administration.

Soboroff has been one of the most dogged reporters pursuing the story of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, and his new book centers on the administration’s horrific decision to systematically separate thousands of migrant kids from their families as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. This policy caused widespread chaos, trauma, and harm that continues to this day.

At one point in the book, as revealed on “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday night, Soboroff confronted Pence staffer Katie Miller, who had been a spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security during the crisis.

“My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids, I will think about the separations differently,” Katie Miller, who later married Trump’s infamously anti-immigrant staffer Stephen Miller, told Soboroff. “I don’t think so. DHS sent me to the border to see the separations myself to try to make me more compassionate, but it didn’t work.”

“It didn’t work?” Soboroff said, noting he was “exasperated.” “I will never forget what I saw. Seriously. Are you a white nationalist?”

Most people, asked that question, would be horrified and offended. But what was Miller’s reply?

“‘No, but I believe if you come to America, you should assimilate,” she reportedly responded. “Why do we need to have ‘Little Havana?'”

It’s a jarring response. First, the idea that anyone in government would respond to the question “Are you a white nationalist?” by saying, “No, but…” is galling enough on its own. But her further explanation is even more baffling. Whatever you feel about finer points of immigrant assimilation patterns and cultural habits in the United States, it’s hard to see how they could at all be relevant to the cruelty of tearing kids away from their parents and imprisoning them, often in cruel conditions.

The fact that she connects her reaction to this cruelty with her feelings about Little Havana shows exactly who she is. But then, so does the fact that she married Stephen Miller.

Watch the clip below:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/white-house-turmoil-as-senior-staffer-denied-key-promotion-after-right-wing-fury-on-twitter-report/

according to a report from Politico, a senior White House official slated to take a high profile position overseeing domestic policy had his appointment derailed by a furious response on Twitter from extremist conservatives questioning his bonafides.

The report notes that Derek Lyons was on the verge of being announced as President Donald Trump’s next top domestic policy adviser before having the rug pulled out from him and seeing the job suddenly go to Brooke Rollins.

According to Politico’s Anita Kumar and Daniel Lippman, “The abrupt shuffle at the Domestic Policy Council was the result of several typical Trump-era factors: an announcement that got out early, conservative anger and differing internal messages.”

“Nothing’s done until it’s done, and that’s always been true in Trump world and this is yet another of many examples,” explained a person close to the White House.

jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, floatedseveral people for the role, including both Lyons and Rollins. Newly installed chief of staff Mark Meadows floated his own name, Stephen Miller, an influential immigration policy aide.It was expected that the domestic policy chief would play a significant role in the president’s efforts to reopen the country amid the coronavirus pandemic,” the report notes. “After several days of deliberations, it appeared Kushner and Meadows had selected Lyons to serve as acting DPC director for the rest of Trump’s term, while continuing in his current role as White House staff secretary, a key official who manages document flow to the president.”

However, after a Politico report noted the upcoming announcement, it set off a furor among conservative hardliners about Lyons association with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

“Lyons, a lawyer and Harvard Law School grad, started his career as a law clerk to Brett Kavanaugh when the Supreme Court justice was still a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals. He later worked on Capitol Hill,” the report continues. “But it was his time with Jeb Bush’s campaign that made some conservatives suspicious. His affiliation with Kushner also raised some eyebrows, given that Trump’s son-in-law haspushed for some more moderate policies, including business-friendly immigration changes that hardliners say are too lenient.”

That announcement set off anti-immigration gadfly Michelle Malkin who tweeted out, “This is not what #AmericaFirst voters signed up for,” along with the hashtag, “#JaredKushnerIsNotMyPresident..”

Conservative writer and political consultant Ryan Girdusky, piled on, tweeting, “Trump has picked Derek Lyons as the head of the Domestic Policy Council…- he’s a former Jeb! Person.”

The report notes that the outside criticism set off alarms in the White House that eventually led to Lyons being skipped over.

“A White House official said Meadows received praise internally about Lyons but some in the White House worried that criticism from influential conservative pundits, such as Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson of Fox News, would soon follow,” the report states. “There was another problem that arose during deliberations: Meadows and Kushner had yet to have Trump sign off on Lyons’ appointment when the news broke, according to two White House officials. The White House official said Lyons and Rollins were finalists for the job, but the job ultimately went to Rollins in part because she would be able to appear on television as part of ‘the public facing role’ of DPC director.”

“By the end of the week Rollins had been tapped to head the DPC in an acting capacity,” the report notes before adding, “Lyons was elevated to the title of counselor, making him one of the closest advisers to the president alongside Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway, who have similar titles, although Conway is senior counselor. The move was seen internally by some as a face-saving measure and by others as a Kushner attempt to diminish Conway’s status.”

You can read more here.

5/20 an

Trump admin. deported 600 migrant kids under Stephen Miller-led order: report Gabe Ortiz / Dailykos

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cdv stanley

Trump and his news media and representatives are consistently using the language of “war,” and describing Trump as a “war president” during this pandemic. Most mainstream commentators and analysts have failed to understand the true meaning and origins of that language. “War president” is another example of a logic where democracy no longer applies. Carl Schmitt — a political theorist and jurist whose thinking was foundational for the Nazi regime — described thiscondition as one of “exception,” where the leader can ignore the rule of law and other norms. How can we better explain what Donald Trump and his agents really mean when they talk about him as a “war president”?

You are absolutely correct. When an authoritarian or like-minded leaders and regimes want to suspend democracy, they use the language of “war.” Trump calling himself a “war president” enables him to do drastic things such as rushing bills through Congress without proper debate, hearings and public scrutiny. An emergency is a very dangerous time, and the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is a real emergency makes matters much more perilous and complicated.

Trump, the Republicans and many of their supporters have argued that older people and others who are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus should be willing to face death as an act of “loyalty” and “patriotism” to save “the economy.” How does this relate to authoritarianism and fascism?

This coalition of the business elite, right-wing Christian evangelicals, and white nationalists and other white supremacists is very dangerous. Fascism is ultimately a death cult.

Social Darwinism is the heart of fascism as well as the heart of capitalism. With the pandemic, and the way capitalism is a type of religion in America,the Darwinian idea of “survival of the fittest” is made even more central. The notion that “Life is always a struggle, the weak will die” is central to fascism. That idea is also common to certain ways of thinking about capitalism. Remember, Adolf Hitler’s book was called, “My Struggle” — that “struggle” was survival of the fittest. That is exactly what we are seeing in this moment with Trump, the Republican Party and the coronavirus pandemic.

Crisis is an opportunity for Donald Trump. Several weeks ago, Donald Trump announced via Twitter that the United States was ending all legal immigration because of the coronavirus emergency. Of course, that is part of Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s white supremacist agenda.

Notice Trump’s verbiage when he describes the coronavirus: He calls it the “invisible enemy”. That language is an allusion to Jewish people. For centuries anti-Semites and other hate mongers for centuries have used such eliminationist, conspiratorial language. Trump’s announcement “banning” legal immigration — which was likely written by Stephen Miller — was also made on Hitler’s birthday. Miller has repeatedly signaled through his policies, language, emails and use of codes such as “14” and “88” in government documents and announcements a deep affinity with Nazis and other neo-fascists. [irony alert: wife vpence spox infected]

It is obvious that the Trump administration was going to move from stopping “illegal immigration” by nonwhite people and other stigmatized groups to then finding a way to stop legal immigration. Now Trump and Miller are using the coronavirus as an excuse to do just that. That Trump announced such a change on Hitler’s birthday should have been much bigger news. That the news media did not pick up on that date and the announcement, quite frankly, is shocking to me....

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deported to death: US sent 138 Salvadorans home to be killed

The Conversation

by Mneesha Gellman, Emerson College At least 138 people deported from the United States to El Salvador since 2013 have been killed, according to a new report by Human Right

no lnx

Deported to death: US sent 138 Salvadorans home to be killed

President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019, at the InterContinental New York Barclay in New York City. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Written by The Conversation February 7, 2020

by Mneesha Gellman, Emerson College

At least 138 people deported from the United States to El Salvador since 2013 have been killed, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch, which investigates human rights abuses worldwide.

The 117-page report also says researchers identified at least 70 deportees who were sexually assaulted, tortured or kidnapped. Many victims were asylum-seekers attacked or killed by the gangs they originally fled.

The findings show that “the U.S. is repeatedly violating its obligations to protect Salvadorans from return to serious risk of harm,” Human Rights Watch says.

The group used court records, police reports, interviews with victims and their families and news articles to document the fates of deportees. It is the first systematic effort to find out what happened to Salvadorans whose asylum claims were rejected in U.S. immigration courts because they failed to demonstrate “credible fear” of violence in El Salvador.

International asylum laws created after the Holocaust require countries to take in people who are persecuted for their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

El Salvador has one of the world’s highest homicide rates. It is one of the main sources of migration to the U.S.

As part of its immigration crackdown, the Trump administration in September signed an agreement with El Salvador requiring the Central American country to keep asylum seekers there while they await the results of their asylum claims.

But the murders of 138 deportees belie any notion that El Salvador can protect citizens who are under threat.

Roots of impunity

Roughly the size of New Jersey, El Salvador is densely populated and highly connected by cellphone service and social media. The vulnerable groups protected under international asylum law cannot easily go under the radar or relocate if targeted by gangs, corrupt police or domestic abusers.

Hundreds of Salvadorans are killed every month. Murders, disappearances and tortures almost always go unsolved in El Salvador. Criminals, especially those with access to power, are rarely punished for their wrongdoing.

I have documented this culture of impunity across Central America and Mexico, focusing on the indigenous people, women and political dissidents who are so often victims of political violence.

This violence dates back centuries, to Spain’s bloody conquest of the Americas. As in the U.S., colonial-era brutality has lasting impacts on the region’s race, class and gender divisions.

In 1932, the massacre of indigenous Salvadorans and leftists who rebelled against dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez left between 10,000 and 30,000 dead.

Communist Party member Farabundo Martí, who led Salvadoran peasant farmers in their revolt against political corruption and unjust resource allocation, was assassinated after the massacre. But the struggle continued.

By the 1970s, dissident factions again organized against state oppression. United as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, these groups eventually waged war on the ruling ARENA party, which they blamed for oppressing the Salvadoran working class.

The subsequent Salvadoran civil war killed 75,000 people. In 1992, with intensive military support from the United States, ARENA defeated the rebels.

The 1992 El Salvador peace accords, overseen by the United Nations, were meant to bring national reconciliation. A truth commission documented widespread human rights abuses committed by state and paramilitary forces during the war. But days after the report was released, in 1993, El Salvador’s ARENA-controlled congress passed an amnesty law that excused most government and military officials.

As a result, the root causes of El Salvador’s conflict – particularly, unequal access to insufficient resources – still plague society. So does the very weak rule of law that allowed civil war criminals to go unpunished.

Neither the rightist or leftist governments that have held power since have managed to change this.

El Salvador’s defense minister recently assessed that there are more gang members than soldiers in his country. Police in El Salvador are extremely aggressive in pursuing them, and civilians can get caught in the crossfire, Human Rights Watch finds.

The resulting dangerous disarray sent 46,800 residents to seek asylum in the U.S. last year. Risking the unknown violence of migration over guaranteed violence at home is, for many Salvadorans, a logical decision.

Human security

Crime and violence in El Salvador has declined since President Nayib Bukele took office in June 2019, according to the government.

The president credits his tough-on-gangs policing with improving security in the country. But some crime analysts say the apparent drop in homicides is actually a manipulation of crime data. The government recently changed how it counts murders, eliminating deaths that result from confrontation with security forces – police killings – from the homicide category.

In any case, levels of violence in El Salvador are still among the world’s highest.

Police regularly turn a blind eye to violence by gang members, including both MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs, either due to corruption or concern for their own safety. As a result, Salvadoran police frequently fail to meaningfully protect people from gang violence.

In these circumstances, deporting Salvadoran asylum-seekers may violate an international law called “non-refoulement.”

According to the 1954 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, which both the U.S. and El Salvador signed, states cannot expel refugees to a territory “where his life or freedom would be threatened.”

Migrants know El Salvador can’t protect them. That, of course, is why they flee. Now the United States government has to know that, too.

This story has been modified to more accurately characterize the methodology used by Human Rights Watch. It is an updated version of an article originally published Oct. 10, 2019.The Conversation

Mneesha Gellman, Associate Professor of Political Science, Emerson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/supreme-court-allows-trumps-shameful-public-charge-rule-to-take-effect/

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I spent MLK Day reading Stephen Miller’s racist emails — here’s why

Chauncey DeVega / Salon

We need to confront racist evil, especially when it’s right in front of us. Who represents it more clearly?

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/us/politics/stephen-miller-immigration-trump.html

new nativists series with cordelia

no lnx

How Stephen Miller Seized the Moment to Battle Immigration

Behind Mr. Miller’s singular grip on the Trump anti-immigrant agenda are forces far bigger than his own hostility toward the foreign-born.

By Jason DeParle

Aug. 17, 2019

WASHINGTON — When historians try to explain how opponents of immigration captured the Republican Party, they may turn to the spring of 2007, when President George W. Bush threw his waning powers behind a legalization plan and conservative populists buried it in scorn.

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Mr. Bush was so taken aback, he said he worried about America “losing its soul,” and immigration politics have never been the same.

That spring was significant for another reason, too: An intense young man with wary, hooded eyes and fiercely anti-immigrant views graduated from college and began a meteoric rise as a Republican operative. With the timing of a screenplay, the man and the moment converged.

:{:{}:

Stephen Miller was 22 and looking for work in Washington. He lacked government experience but had media appearances on talk radio and Fox News and a history of pushing causes like “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” A first-term congresswoman from Minnesota offered him a job interview and discovered they were reading the same book: a polemic warning that Muslim immigration could mean “the end of the world as we know it.”

:{:{}:

By the end of the interview, Representative Michele Bachmann had a new press secretary.And a dozen years later, Mr. Miller, now a senior adviser to President Trump, is presiding over one of the most fervent attacks on immigration in American history.

The story of Mr. Miller’s rise has been told with a focus on his pugnacity and paradoxes. Known more for his enemies than his friends, he is a conservative firebrand from liberal Santa Monica, Calif., and a descendant of refugees who is seeking to eliminate refugee programs. He is a Duke graduate in bespoke suits who rails against the perfidy of so-called elites. Among those who have questioned his moral fitness are his uncle, his childhood rabbi and 3,400 fellow Duke alumni.

Less attention has been paid to the forces that have abetted his rise and eroded Republican support for immigration — forces Mr. Miller has personified and advanced in a career unusually reflective of its times.

Rising fears of terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks brought new calls to keep immigrants out. Declining need for industrial labor left fewer businesses clamoring to bring them in. A surge of migrants across the South stoked a backlash in the party’s geographic base.

Conservative media, once divided, turned against immigration, and immigration-reduction groups that had operated on the margins grew in numbers and sophistication. Abandoning calls for minority outreach, the Republican Party chose instead to energize its conservative white base — heeding strategists who said the immigrant vote was not just a lost cause but an existential threat.

Arriving in Washington as these forces coalesced, Mr. Miller rode the tailwinds with zeal and skill. Warning of terrorism and disturbed by multicultural change, he became the protégé of a Southern senator especially hostile to immigration, Jeff Sessions of Alabama. And he courted allies in the conservative media and immigration-restriction groups.

Mr. Miller, who declined to comment for this article, affects the air of a lone wolf — guarded, strident, purposefully provocative. But he has been shaped by the movement whose ideas and lieutenants he helped install across the government as he consolidated a kind of power unusual for a presidential aide and unique in the Trump White House.

“I don’t agree with his policy on reducing legal immigration, but I’m in awe of how he’s been able to impact this one issue,” said Cesar Conda, who battled Mr. Miller on Capitol Hill as an aide to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. “He’s got speech writing, he’s got policy, he’s got his own little congressional-relations operation, he’s got allies whom he’s helped place across the government.”

“Years ago, the restrictionist movement was a ragtag group” with no strong ties to either party, he added. Mr. Miller “embodies their rise into the G.O.P. mainstream.”

Country and Party in Motion

The story that has defined Mr. Miller’s life began two decades before his birth, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a 1965 law ending quotas that chose immigrants based on their national origin and heavily favored white people from Northern Europe. Although Mr. Johnson called the new law a largely symbolic measure that would neither increase immigrants’ numbers nor alter their ethnic mix, it did both on a vast scale — raising the foreign-born share of the population to near-record highs and setting the United States on course for non-Hispanic whites to become a minority of the population.

Opposition initially came from the left, especially from environmentalists worried about population growth.

The first major immigration-control group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, was founded in 1979 by Dr. John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist and Sierra Club member, with funding from Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon banking fortune. Mindful of the bigotry in earlier anti-immigration movements, Dr. Tanton vowed to keep it “centrist/liberal in political orientation.”

[Newly unearthed personal writings by Cordelia Scaife May reveal why she dedicated her fortune to the cause.]

But his arguments about environmental harm and wage competition found little traction in a Democratic Party eager to court minorities. By the mid-1980s, Dr. Tanton was making the racial arguments he had pledged to avoid, decrying the “Latin onslaught” and insisting on the need for “a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”

How Immigrants’ Share of the Population Has Changed

Since the late 1960s, a surge of immigrants from Latin America and Asia has altered America's ethnic mix and has driven the foreign-born share of the population close to a record high.

Foreign-born share of the population by region of origin

In 1921, Congress imposed national-origin

quotas, which it toughened three years later.

13.6% total

foreign-born

in 2017

15%

President Lyndon B.

Johnson ended quotas

based on national

origin in 1965.

10%

7.0% Latin America

4.2% Asia

1.5% Europe

0.9% Other

1880

1910

1940

1970

2000

Sources: U.S. Census; American Community Survey 2012-17By Juliette Love]

At the time, the Republican Party was divided on immigration. While cultural conservatives were wary of rapid demographic change, businesses wanted cheap labor and Cold Warriors embraced anti-Communist refugees, including large waves of Cubans and Vietnamese. Running for president, a conservative as definitional as Ronald Reagan hailed “millions of immigrants from every corner of the earth” as a sign that God had made America a “city on a hill.”

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But by the 1990s, the Cold War had ended, and globalization was sending manufacturing abroad. The business wing of the Republican Party, its main pro-immigrant faction, had less need for foreign workers. “It’s not that the business lobby became anti-immigration; it’s just that they cared a lot less,” said Margaret Peters, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Where Immigrants’ Population Share Has Grown the Most

Green areas had an increase in their share of foreign-born, with darker shading signifying a larger uptick. Purple areas had a decrease.

Percentage change in the foreign-born share of the population by county, 1990-2017

Sources: U.S. Census; American Community Survey 2012-17By Juliette Love]

Not least among the forces shaping the debate was immigration itself: It accelerated and spread to the South, with the number of unauthorized immigrants growing especially fast.

In 1986, President Reagan signed a compromise law that gave legal status to nearly three million people while adding new penalties to curb flows of illegal immigrants. But enforcement proved weak, and the unauthorized population reached a record 12 million. Restrictionists, feeling betrayed, swore never to allow another “amnesty.”

After a Republican backlash in the 1990s led more immigrants to vote for Democrats, Mr. Bush ran in 2000 as a pro-immigrant conservative. He saw Latinos as proto-Republican — religious, entrepreneurial, family-oriented — and was considering a legalization plan when the Sept. 11 attacks consumed his administration.

By the time he returned to the issue in 2007, his party’s skepticism toward legalization had hardened into implacable opposition. Amplified by talk radio, populist critics denounced his plan as “shamnesty”; one called it an effort to make America a “roach motel.” Three-quarters of Republican senators opposed it.

Just a year before, a rising Republican star had urged fellow conservatives not to abandon the party’s Reaganite support for immigration.

“We are either going to prove that we believe in the ideas enshrined on the Statue of Liberty, or the American people will go looking elsewhere,” said a congressman from Indiana, Mike Pence.

But the party’s shift proved decisive. Now, as vice president, Mr. Pence loyally defends the policies set by the president and Mr. Miller.

Early Provocations

The forces that pushed the Republican Party to the right also shaped Mr. Miller.

Born in 1985, he grew up in a post-Cold War world where the acceptance of refugees was no longer seen as part of America’s resistance to a hostile foreign power. Rapid ethnic change was shaping his world.

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The son of an affluent real estate investor, he entered high school in a self-consciously multicultural Santa Monica in 1999, just as California became a majority-minority state. At the start of his junior year, the attacks on Sept. 11 took nearly 3,000 lives.

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The terrorist plot was central to his political awakening. Complaining that school officials were insufficiently patriotic, Mr. Miller won an uphill fight to make them enforce regulations requiring the Pledge of Allegiance. “Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School,” he wrote in 2002 in a local publication.

Tellingly, he took his case to talk radio, as a frequent guest on “The Larry Elder Show.” It was a pattern Mr. Miller would repeat in subsequent years: airing hyperbolic claims of liberal treachery to conservative media allies. “He loved being the provocative conservative behind liberal lines,” said Ari Rosmarin, who was editor of the school newspaper and now works on criminal justice issues at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mr. Miller’s main issue was assimilation, or what he saw as its failures. Writing in a local paper, he complained that “a number of students lacked basic English skills,” and his yearbook page quoted Theodore Roosevelt: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism.” The school paper ran a parody of him railing against ethnic food and demanding white bread and “fine Virginia hams, just as the founding fathers used to enjoy on their bountiful plantations.”

Classmates were often unsure whether his provocative views were sincere or a bid for attention. “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have janitors who are paid to do it for us?” he said in a speech for student government. A video shows him flashing a self-satisfied smile as classmates jeer.

His uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, a vocal critic, dismissed the antics as “just an early adolescent desire to be noticed.”

“This talk of his philosophy seems disingenuous to me,” he said in an interview. “It’s very seductive. All the sudden, you become the darling of media big shots and you get notoriety for it at home.”

Some of Mr. Miller’s Latino classmates say his comments made them feel personally attacked. In an interview, Jason Islas said Mr. Miller told him he was ending their friendship for reasons that included “my Latino heritage.” He added, “I think he is a racist.”

But with prominent allies like David Horowitz, a conservative author and organizer, Mr. Miller headed to Duke in 2003 with the beginnings of a national reputation.

The defining issue of Mr. Miller’s college career was the arrest, when he was a junior, of three white lacrosse players accused of raping a black stripper. Mr. Miller leaped to the players’ defense, charging that administrators and faculty members saw them as emblems of white privilege and simply assumed they were guilty — a case he made on the Fox News show “The O’Reilly Factor,” then the most-watched cable news program. He demanded that the school president be fired and the prosecutor jailed.

The case collapsed. North Carolina’s attorney general declared the players innocent, the prosecutor was disbarred for misconduct and the accuser was later convicted of murdering her boyfriend. For Mr. Miller, it was a two-part vindication — reinforcing his conviction that liberal dogma about racial oppression was wrong and that his scorched-earth tactics were effective.

In his last column for the Duke Chronicle before graduating, he called himself “a deeply committed conservative who considers it his responsibility to do battle with the left.” Then he headed for Washington.

Taking the Fight to Congress

Most of Mr. Miller’s work for Mrs. Bachmann was unrelated to immigration. He wrote news releases about gas prices and fire department grants. But in February 2008, soon after he began the job, anundocumented immigrant in rural Minnesota, Olga Franco, drove through a stop sign and killed four children. Mrs. Bachmann appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor,” where she framed the issue as “anarchy versus therule of law.”

Although Ms. Franco was convicted of vehicular homicide, the National Academy of Sciences, a group founded to convey academic consensus, has written that immigrants are “much less likely than natives to commit crimes,” and recent evidence suggests that the undocumented are no exception.

But immigrant crime would be a running theme in Mr. Miller’s career, and his emphasis on the issue borrowed from the broader restrictionist movement. To erode public support for immigration, FAIR maintains an online archive of “serious crimes by illegal aliens.”

In a 2008 congressional campaign debate, Mrs. Bachmann’s opponent accused her of exploiting the tragedy, but she argued that unauthorized immigrants were “bringing in diseases, bringing in drugs, bringing in violence” — language nearly identical to what Mr. Trump would later employ with Mr. Miller as his aide — and she mustered a slender win.

Soon after that election, Mr. Miller went to work for Representative John Shadegg of Arizona, and then quickly crossed the Capitol to work for Mr. Sessions. Perhaps the leading immigration foe in the Senate, Mr. Sessions was a product of a region where immigration had soared, largely in places unaccustomed to it. In two decades, the number of immigrants had grown fourfold in Alabama, Kentucky and South Carolina; fivefold in Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee; and sixfold in North Carolina.

Mr. Miller had opposed immigration mostly on cultural grounds, warning that newcomers were failing to learn English and endangering public safety. But Mr. Sessions emphasized economic concerns and what he called “the real needs of working Americans,” saying foreigners threatened their jobs and wages.

As a defender of the working class, Mr. Miller had uncertain credentials. If his high school gibe about janitors was a joke, he returned to the issue at Duke. He mocked a campaign to have students thank their dorm-cleaning staff, arguing that employment was thanks enough. “The janitors need a job, which we provide,” he wrote.

Striking a self-consciously elitist pose, he ridiculed calls for improved relations with working-class Durham, N.C. (“one of the last spots in America anyone would visit”) and asked for a student smoking lounge with “plenty of mahogany and leather.”

The impact of immigrants on jobs and wages is much debated — they take jobs but make jobs, too. Most economists see greater downward pressure on wages coming from other forces, including the decline of the minimum wage (adjusted for inflation), weak unions, outsourcing and technological change.

The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2017 that immigration’s overall effect on wages was “very small,” but added that “some studies have found sizable negative short-run impacts for high school dropouts” (who account for about 8 percent of the work force). Even among dropouts, some economists find the effects modest or nonexistent.

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One prominent scholar, the Harvard economist George Borjas, consistently finds negative impacts much larger than his peers do. He is the figure Mr. Miller most often cites.

A Sign of Things to Come

In moving to Mr. Sessions’s Senate suite, Mr. Miller arrived at a crossroads for the restrictionist movement’s people and ideas.

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As head of communications, Mr. Miller acquired a deep knowledge of the movement’s players and policy goals. Others in the office would also go on to influential jobs in the Trump administration, not least Mr. Sessions himself, who as attorney general presided over a policy that separated thousands of young immigrant children from parents illegally crossing the border.

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Mr. Miller’s minor moment of Capitol Hill renown stems from his efforts to defeat the so-called Gang of Eight bill, a bipartisan attempt to pair new enforcement measures with legalization for most of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, and to offer them a long path to citizenship.

He opposed the bill with the same zeal that had inspired high school parodies, haranguing reporters into the night and earning a gadfly reputation.

In retrospect, three elements of Mr. Miller’s approach foreshadowed his future exercise of power. One was his rejection of the view that Republicans needed to court minorities. The Gang of Eight bill was born after the 2012 presidential race, in which the defeated Republican, Mitt Romney, lost the Latino vote by 44 points.

No less a hard-liner than the Fox News host Sean Hannity called for legalizing most of the country’s undocumented immigrants. “Pathway to citizenship — done,” he said on his radio show. The Republican National Committee urged the party “to empower and support ethnic minorities” and “champion comprehensive immigration reform,” meaning legalization.

Mr. Miller took the opposite view, which the party ultimately followed: Mobilize the white working-class base, among whom turnout had fallen.

While Mr. Bush had seen Latinos as natural Republicans, most restrictionists saw them as an electoral threat. “If four out of five Latinos are registering with the Democrats, perhaps less immigration would be in the interest of the Republican Party, no?” wrote Jon Feere of the Center for Immigration Studies, a spinoff of FAIR. (Mr. Feere later joined the Trump administration as an immigration adviser. )

A second feature of Mr. Miller’s efforts was his symbiotic relationship with conservative media, especially online publications like Breitbart News.

Lacking gatekeepers, the internet was a medium tailor-made for anti-establishment causes. Right-wing populism had long flourished on talk radio, but Breitbart, with few restrictions on space, could cover the issue in greater depth, bringing intense scrutiny to hot-button issues. And social media made articles easy to share.

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Breitbart ran three stories making the false charge, circulated by Mr. Sessions’s staff, that the bill offered undocumented immigrants free cellphones.

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Mr. Miller and Breitbart worked together closely.

“Sessions: Special Interest, Extremist Groups Wrote Immigration Bill,” claimed one Breitbart headline.

“Sessions: ‘Tide is Beginning to Turn’ Against Immigration Bill,” announced another.

A third element of Mr. Miller’s work involved his alliance with outside groups, especially three that Dr. Tanton helped create and that received millions of dollars from Mrs. May’s foundation. (Over a recent 12-year period alone, the foundation gave the Center for Immigration Studies $17.6 million, FAIR $56.7 million and NumbersUSA $58.2 million.)

Once a lonely cause, restrictionism had grown into a mature movement — an intellectual ecosystem of sorts — with groups specializing in areas as diverse as litigation and voter mobilization.

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When Mr. Sessions claimed on a conference call that the Gang of Eight bill threatened jobs, an analyst from the Center for Immigration Studies was on the line to vouch for the data, and Breitbart covered it as news. When the center presented its journalism award, Mr. Miller was the speaker, and his first-name references to the Center’s staff — “all the great work that Mark and Jessica and Steve are doing”— made it clear that he felt among friends.

Despite Mr. Sessions’s opposition, the bill passed in the Democratic Senate in 2013. As it headed to the Republican House, Mr. Miller drafted a 30-page memo that Mr. Sessions shared with the House Republican caucus, urging members to oppose the bill on behalf of “millions of struggling American workers.”

House leaders were mulling how to proceed when, in June 2014, an obscure Virginia professor toppled the majority leader, Eric Cantor, in a Republican primary. Though vastly outspent, the newcomer, Dave Brat, prevailed in large part by attacking Mr. Cantor for being “in cahoots” with Democrats on immigration.

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“The world just changed,” Mr. Miller exulted the next day.

Indeed, it had. Among those commenting in Breitbart was the “conservative provocateur” Donald J. Trump, who said the upset showed that the Republican establishment was at risk. “Everybody is now vulnerable,” he said.

Circulating the article, Mr. Miller told friends that he wished Mr. Trump would run for president. When Mr. Trump did — demanding a wall and a ban on Muslims entering the country — Mr. Miller soon signed on.

The Right Kind of Candidate

Mr. Miller rose quickly on the small staff. A prolific writer and combative surrogate, he was the person most knowledgeable about the campaign’s central issue, and he lavished Mr. Trump with praise. (The Trump candidacy, Mr. Miller said, had altered “Western civilization.”) He also served as an ideological chaperone to a candidate given to sudden reversals of signature policies, a role Mr. Miller continues to play in the White House.

Mr. Trump scored a coup by winning the support of some tech workers who, after being laid off by the Walt Disney Company, were forced to train foreign replacements admitted on temporary H-1B visas.

The workers embodied Mr. Trump’s larger argument that immigration hurt American employment. Yet days after appearing with them at a rally, Mr. Trump said in a televised debate that he would drop his plan to restrict the H-1B program.

“I’m changing, I’m changing,” he told the stunned interviewer. “I’m softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country.”

Within hours, Mr. Trump reversed himself again, issuing a statement to assure his followers that he planned to “end forever the use of H-1B as a cheap labor program.”

Despite the president’s public image as an unrelenting immigration foe, some restrictionist leaders view him as soft — a businessman whose desire for labor will lead him to support more immigration. That unreliability, they say, makes Mr. Miller’s presence especially important.

“If he weren’t there, I’m pretty sure it’d be worse,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

To Remake America’s Self-Image

Mr. Miller now occupies a large West Wing office and has influence on virtually every element of immigration policy, from the words the president uses to the regulations he promulgates. Mr. Miller is a speechwriter, policy architect, personnel director, legislative aide, spokesman and strategist. At every step, he has pushed for the hardest line.

When Mr. Trump wavered on his pledge to abolish protections for 800,000 so-called Dreamers — people brought illegally to the United States as children — Mr. Miller urged conservative states to threaten lawsuits. Mr. Trump then canceled the protections.

When the president later mulled a deal to restore them, Mr. Miller stacked the negotiations with people who opposed the move, leading Mr. Trump to abandon compromise and rail against immigrants from “shithole countries.”

“As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we are going nowhere,” complained Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who supported a deal.

The Trump effort to curb immigration has played out amid so much chaos — judicial setbacks, congressional defeats, personnel purges, Twitter wars — that it can be hard to keep a running tally of its impact.

The attempt to revoke Dreamer protections has been blocked in court. An effort to bar travelers from certain predominantly Muslim countries was struck down twice. The promised border wall has not been built. A campaign to deter illegal immigration by separating thousands of children from their mothers was abandoned amid blistering criticism, including some from the right.

Still, Mr. Miller has left a big mark, in ways both obvious and obscure. After two highly publicized failures, he helped craft a travel ban that passed court muster. A fervent critic of refugee programs, he has helped cut annual admissions by about three-quarters since the end of the Obama administration.

Writing in Politico, his uncle, Dr. Glosser, expressed an “increasing horror” at his nephew’s hostility to refugees and noted that their ancestor, Wolf-Leib Glosser, arrived at Ellis Island after fleeing Russian pogroms. Had Mr. Miller’s policies prevailed then, he wrote, the Glossers probably “would have been murdered by the Nazis,” as most in their village were.

With less fanfare, Mr. Miller has guided a series of policy changes that critics liken to building an “invisible wall.” The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, counted more than 100 of them, noting that “most have moved forward untouched.”

The Trump administration quadrupled the number of work site investigations. It slowed the processing of temporary H-1B visas. It imposed new performance measures on immigration judges, to encourage faster deportations.

Though Mr. Miller was often the driving force, many of these changes were longstanding goals of the restrictionist movement. “He comes from a community of people who’ve been working on this, some of them, since the ’90s,” said Roy Beck, the president of NumbersUSA.

Beyond the commas and clauses of government rules, Mr. Miller and Mr. Trump are trying to change something deeper: America’s self-conception as a land of immigrants. Mr. Trump is the son of an immigrant. Two of the three women he married are immigrants. Four of his five children have an immigrant parent. Yet his immigration agency rewrote its mission statement to remove the phrase “nation of immigrants.”

Mr. Miller even took to the White House briefing room to offer a revisionist view of the Statue of Liberty.Like many in his movement, he argued it should not be seen as welcoming immigrants because it was originally built for a different purpose (to celebrate political freedom) and that the Emma Lazarus poem hailing the “huddled masses” carries little meaning because it was added later.

The border wars intensified this spring as large numbers of Central American families sought asylum and Mr. Trump, with Mr. Miller urging him on, purged top officials from the Homeland Security Department, including the secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen; he argued they weren’t doing enough to keep them out.

But a quieter bureaucratic story may have revealed as much about Mr. Miller’s priorities and bureaucratic skill.

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After long deliberation, the administration last week released a 217-page rule making it easier to deny admission or permanent residency to low-income immigrants deemed likely to receive public benefits. Unlike the border disputes, this so-called public charge rule affects only legal immigrants, since the unauthorized are already barred from most safety-net programs.

Critics say the rule is already causing needy immigrants to forgo health care and nutritional aid. They call it a backdoor way of circumventing Congress and creating a new immigration system that admits fewer people, excludes the “huddled masses,” and favors Europeans over poorer Mexican and Central Americans.

Mr. Miller was so eager to see the rule enacted, he helped push out a one-time ally, L. Francis Cissna, the head of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, for not moving fast enough.

Mr. Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies argued that the rule would have only modest effects on immigrant numbers but praised Mr. Miller for asserting a principle. “The point of immigration policy is to benefit Americans,” he said, not “strain the social safety net.”

While the restrictionist movement had long taken that principle to heart, he said “Stephen understood how to operationalize it.”

no lnx

Inside the bizarre crafting of Trump’s ‘ridiculous’ letter to Pelosi — which left White House lawyers in the dark

Written by Shira Tarlo / Salon December 18, 2019

White House lawyers were reportedly left out of the drafting of President Donald Trump’s scorching, six-page letter delivered Tuesday to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

The rambling letter, which accused Pelosi and House Democrats of engaging in a three-year crusade to undermine the results of the 2016 election, was allegedly drafted last week by some of the president’s closest advisers.

Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, director of the Office of Legislative Affairs Eric Ueland and Michael Williamson from the chief of staff’s office produced a draft of the letter, without the input of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, even though he is expected to play a large role in a likely Senate trial. Trump was also revealed to have been very involved in the process.

A couple of days after it was first generated, the White House Counsel’s office was reportedly given a copy of the document last week and recommended edits and changes. It is unclear if the president incorporated any of the inputs from Cipollone.

Senior White House officials told The Washington Post that White House lawyers “were not pleased” that the letter was released a day before the House of Representatives is expected to vote on whether to impeach the president.

Josh Dawsey

@jdawsey1

Sr. White House official confirms this and says lawyers were not pleased to be left out for much of the drafting of a letter released the day before an impeachment vote. https://twitter.com/KFaulders/status/1207086075535077377 …

Katherine Faulders

@KFaulders

WH lawyers were cut out of the process of drafting Trump’s 6-page letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the House impeachment vote, @jonkarl reports. At POTUS direction, the letter was drafted by Leg Affairs Director Eric Ueland, Stephen Miller & counselor to CoS Michael Williams.

House Democrats have unveiled two articles of impeachment against Trump for abuse of power and obstructing Congress.

At the heart of the charges are the president’s purported efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his domestic political rivals, including former Vice President Joe Biden, and his decision to temporarily withhold nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.

In the letter, Trump accused Pelosi of having “cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment” and claimed that she was “declaring an open war on American Democracy” by pursuing his impeachment.

“You dare to invoke the Founding Fathers in pursuit of this election-nullification scheme — yet your spiteful actions display unfettered contempt for America’s founding and your egregious conduct threatens to destroy that which our Founders pledged their very lives to build,” Trump wrote. “It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!”

The president declared that he had been “deprived of basic Constitutional Due Process” from “the beginning of this impeachment scam.” He alleged that “more due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”

Moments after releasing the letter publicly, Trump told reporters inside the Oval Office that he did not take any responsibility for conduct which has led to the House’s planned vote Wednesday on his impeachment. The president denied any wrongdoing and insisted that Democrats’ actions would leave a “mark on this country.”

“The whole impeachment thing is a hoax. We look forward to getting on to the Senate. We are not entitled to lawyers. We are not entitled to witnesses. We are not entitled to anything in the House, it’s a total sham,” Trump told reporters. “This has been a total sham from the beginning — everybody knows it.”

Pelosi, meanwhile, told reporters Tuesday night that she had not “fully read” the letter, but that it was “ridiculous” and “really sick.”

“I don’t have a reaction. It’s ridiculous,” she said. “I mean, I haven’t fully read it. We’ve been working. I’ve seen the essence of it. It’s really sick.”

Manu Raju

@mkraju

Pelosi's first reaction to Trump's letter. "I don't have a reaction. It's ridiculous," she told me. I asked her why no reaction: "I mean, I haven't full read it. We've been working. I've seen the essence of it. It's really sick."

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Kamala Harris leads 27 Senate Dems in call for Trump to fire Stephen Miller

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/stephen-miller-proves-the-trump-regime-is-a-white-supremacist-enterprise-will-americans-choose-to-save-our-multiracial-democracy/

no lnx

Stephen Miller proves the Trump regime is a white supremacist enterprise. Will Americans choose to save our multiracial democracy?

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon November 25, 2019

Like the president he serves, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. Miller believes that white people should be the most powerful group in the United States and around the world. He has worked diligently and enthusiastically to advance that goal through public policy.

Miller is not a “white nationalist.” To use such language is to legitimate the ways white supremacists have tried since the 1970s to repackage themselves so as to appear more “mainstream” and “reasonable” in order to win over more white Americans.

As though more evidence is necessary after three years of Stephen Miller’s influence on Donald Trump’s regime and its unrepentant and enthusiastic cruelty against nonwhites, 900 emails recently obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center offer further proof of Miller’s white supremacist ideology.

In his communications with a former editor of the right-wing website Breitbart, Miller — then an aide to Sen. Jeff Sessions, who went on to become Trump’s first attorney general — advanced talking points from white supremacist websites that advocate eugenics against nonwhites and a general belief in the inferiority of black people and others.

Miller praised the notorious white supremacist novel “The Camp of the Saints” (also a favorite of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon) which depicts nonwhite immigrants and migrants in Europe as subhuman, murderous invaders.

In these emails Miller also channeled white supremacist talking points about nonwhite immigrants being “invaders” in “white countries” and the premise that white people are somehow being “replaced.”

Writing at the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie observes that “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.

As a practical matter, Miller views nonwhite people as his enemies. In other words, a senior adviser to the president of the United States is crafting public policy that both directly and indirectly hurts tens of millions of nonwhite Americans. This is a treacherous betrayal of America’s multiracial democracy and a direct threat to its future, and provides more evidence that Donald Trump and his regime are illegitimate.

In response to Miller’s emails, more than 100 Democratic members of Congress have called for him to resign. No senior Republican elected officials, to my knowledge, have done the same.

These “revelations” about Stephen Miller’s white supremacist emails are not secondary to the current impeachment inquiry, or somehow coincidental to a rogue regime’s assault on the rule of law and the Constitution.

Indeed, Miller’s emails are better understood as huge flashing road signs that illustrate how racism and the ideology of white supremacy made Trump’s presidency possible and continue to fuel the Republican Party’s fascist and authoritarian crusade against American democracy.

There are many examples. Social scientists and others have shown that white racism in combination with nativism and hostile sexism (and assisted Russian interference) that gave Donald Trump the White House in 2016.

Vladimir Putin’s spies and other agents launched a sophisticated psy-ops campaign, via social media and other means, to exacerbate racial tensions. The goal was to mobilize Trump’s voters and demobilizing those more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Research shows that Trump’s racially intolerant white voters reject the very idea of democracy if it means that white people will no longer be the dominant and most powerful group in America. A large proportion of Trump’s voters are racial authoritarians.

From the post-civil rights era onward, the Republican Party and movement conservatives have embraced racism and white supremacy as a dominant strategy for winning elections and then keeping and expanding power.

Republicans are more likely to be racist and generally more hostile towards nonwhites than are Democrats. Racism and white racial resentment are central to conservatism as a system of motivated social cognition.

In his recent book “Post-Racial or Most-Racial?” political scientist Michael Tesler shows in exhaustive detail how white racial resentment and racial backlash against Barack Obama now structures the partisanship and other political values of Republicans and right-leaning independent voters.

Political polarization is not “race neutral.” In reality, the increasing extremism of the Republican Party, as manifested through asymmetrical political polarization — from the end of the civil rights movement to the backlash against Obama and then the election of Donald Trump — is a function of white racism and white racial resentment. Negative partisanship and political tribalism, where politics is viewed not just as a reasonable difference of opinion between fellow citizens who share common values but rather as a referendum on their human worth and personhood, has also been fueled by white racism and an increasing hostility by Republicans and other conservatives toward the increasingly multiracial and diverse Democratic Party.

Today’s Republican Party is opposed to multiracial democracy and the full and equal citizenship rights of nonwhite people, especially black Americans. Through gerrymandering, voter suppression — both legal and otherwise — and other tactics, the Republican Party has made itself increasingly immune from political accountability for its embrace of white supremacy and racial authoritarianism. In essence, the post-civil rights era Republican Party is the United States’ largest white racist organization.

Furthermore, this racialization of white group interests in the Age of Trump is increasingly central to white identity and political decision making.

Political scientist Ashley Jardina explained this to Salon in a July 2017 interview:

The idea behind “white identity politics” is that there is a subset of white voters and/or white Americans in general who feel a sense of attachment to their group. They feel a sense of solidarity. They think that their race and their racial identity is important to who they are. Their “white identity” influences how they see and view the political world. Tied up in that sense of identity is a belief that whites are losing out in the United States, their status and power is somehow under threat.

Subsequently those white people who manifest white identity politics are responding to that perception in a political way by supporting policies and candidates who they view as protecting their racial group and preserving its status…. Donald Trump is very much the candidate of white identity — but white identity mattered before Trump came on the scene….

Yes, white identity is still part of the system of racism because it’s about wanting to maintain their power at the top. By implication, this means that people of color necessarily cannot be equal with white people. This type of white identity is about maintaining a system of inequality.

In total, the Trump regime’s corruption and lawlessness is made legitimate in the eyes of the Republican Party’s leaders, the right-wing propaganda news media and Republican voters because they believe themselves to be “defending” America from the Democratic Party and its nonwhite supporters.

To this point, Adam Serwer of the Atlantic observes: “The Republican Party has responded to the increasing diversity of the electorate with an accelerating intolerance for ethnic and religious minorities, and with elaborate schemes to disenfranchise rival constituencies and rig election rules to its advantage. Crucial to this effort is its conviction that the Republican electorate is the only one that can confer legitimacy on elected officials, and that the party’s political opponents are no longer wrong but fundamentally illegitimate, faithless usurpers with no right to determine the direction of the country. This has manifested in the quasi-religious dogma that Trump represents the will of Real America, and therefore defiance of his will is itself a form of treason.”

Leading Republicans know that democracy is their enemy precisely because the policies they want to force on the American people are so unpopular. Perhaps even more important, because the Republican Party is organized around white racial tribalism, Republican leaders, their news media and their voters view multiracial democracy, embodied (at least in their eyes) through the Democratic Party, as an existential threat.

Writing in the Guardian, civil rights law professor Carol Anderson summarizes the Republican Party and movement conservatism’s commitment to racial authoritarianism and what has been called “Herrenvolk democracy”:

The party of Lincoln’s electoral cul de sac was mapped out by the Republicans’ contempt for democracy and, especially, fear of the broader American public’s access to the ballot box. Despite numerous warnings about the consequences of doubling down on racism, homophobia and misogyny in an increasingly diverse and liberalizing nation, the Republican party ignored those broadsides and chose, instead, to hollow out, shrink and tilt the electorate as far to the right as possible.

“I don’t want everybody to vote,” bellowed Paul Weyrich, the co-founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation. Those marching orders were dutifully supported by a series of supreme court decisions that gutted the Voting Rights Act, sanctioned voter roll purges in defiance of federal law and ignored the racism embedded in extreme partisan gerrymandered districts.

As a result, a range of Republican-sponsored voter suppression policies now scars the American landscape in a concerted effort to politically silence the majority of the people. Those sheer numbers and the Republican party’s hardcore refusal to jettison white supremacy as its operating code has led to policy choices that exacerbate the range of crises facing the nation.

Anderson notes that as of July 2018, even with all the Republican efforts at voter purges, “there were 12 million more Democrats than Republicans in the United States. Democrats are 40% of registered voters compared with just 29% listed as Republicans. In fact, the percentage of Americans who identified as members of the Republican party dropped by 5% in four short years. And independents lean overwhelmingly toward Democrats.”

The Trump regime’s embrace of white supremacy and racism is not limited to the United States. It is also international. In 2018, this administration withdrew the U.S. from the UN Human Rights Council. It has pushed for language condemning racism and nationalism to be removed from official UN documents — language that has been present for decades.

In what would in more normal times be a stunning admission, the director of America’s National Counterterrorism Center recently admitted that under the Trump regime the United States is now viewed by the world as an exporter of white supremacist terrorism. This report is from Yahoo News:

After an upsurge in racially motivated attacks around the world, other countries are beginning to regard the United States as an exporter of white supremacism, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said Friday.

“For almost two decades, the United States has pointed abroad at countries who are exporters of extreme Islamist ideology,” Russell Travers, acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told an audience in Washington, D.C. “We are now being seen as the exporter of white supremacist ideology. That’s a reality with which we are going to have to deal.”

Travers said there is now a global movement of what he termed “racially motivated violent extremism,” or RMVE (pronounced “rem-vee”), fueled by a wide variety of motivations and facilitated by social media and other online communications.

“A large percentage of RMVE attackers in recent years have either displayed outreach to like-minded individuals or groups or referenced early attackers as sources of inspiration,” he said.

While the Trump regime has brought America low and sacrificed the country’s prestige and honor abroad — in apparent supplication to Vladimir Putin and Russia — it can claim one “success.” Under Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s “stewardship,” America is now viewed as the world leader in exporting white supremacist terrorism and violence.

Such an outcome is foundational, not coincidental. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is viewed by many white supremacists and other members of the New Right as a beacon for maintaining global white power and as a champion against a more cosmopolitan and diverse present and future. To the degree that the Trump regime aligns America’s interests with those of Russia, it is doing the work of global white supremacy.

Stephen Miller should of course be forced to resign. There should also be public hearings in Congress about Miller’s role in the Trump regime and the policies he inflicted on the country. Miller also represents a much larger problem, beyond systemic and institutional racism in the United States.

The Trump regime has nurtured a permissive environment that welcomes and empowers white supremacists such as Miller, Bannon, Michael Anton and others, at both senior levels and as middle or lower-level bureaucrats. This problem extends to the courts, police and other law enforcement and the military. Congressional hearings could use Stephen Miller as an entry point to a larger discussion of white supremacist infiltration at all levels of the United States government.

In the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, should Democrats include the full panoply of his crimes and other unpresidential behavior — encouraging white supremacy and other political violence; crimes against humanity, as demonstrated by his regime’s treatment of nonwhite migrants; betrayal of the presidential oath of office; violations of the emoluments clause and abundant corruption — or should they instead go small and just focus on abuse of power, obstruction of justice and the Ukraine scandal?

Ultimately, those questions will reflect on how the Democratic Party’s leaders balance political expediency with principle.

At the Inquirer, Will Bunch summarizes this dilemma:

The evidence is piling up that Trump’s political extortion ploy on Ukraine was bribery, an extreme abuse of power, and a violation of his sacred oath to protect the best interests of the United States. That alone merits his impeachment (which will happen), his removal (which probably won’t) and a harsh judgment from 2020 voters (when it doesn’t). But given the sweep of this president’s assault on both the Constitution and on human decency, it almost feels — and I’m hardly the first to write this — like busting the murderous Al Capone for income tax evasion.

Capone wasn’t charged with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and Trump won’t be impeached for ripping toddlers away from their refugee mothers and fathers, or for locking tens of thousands of kids at the border in cages or squalid detention centers. Even worse, confirmation of something awful yet long suspected — that the man shaping U.S. immigration policy is a fairly unabashed white supremacist — barely caused a ripple.

Yet this unconscionable assault against the tired, the hungry, the poor, and their defenseless children on the southern border is the very worst crime of Donald Trump’s presidency, an offense against humanity. It’s good to see our elected officials finally holding this president accountable for violating his oath when he put his hand on that Bible on January 20, 2017.

Holding Trump and Stephen Miller accountable for violating the words inside that Bible — to love thy neighbor — will have to wait on a higher authority than Congress.

Trump’s impeachment and the 2020 presidential election offer a referendum on what type of country America is — and what kind it will be in the future. The Democrats will impeach Donald Trump. Republicans in the Senate, in all likelihood, will not convict him. Trump and his cult will claim victimhood and be further empowered in their assault on democracy, the rule of law and human decency.

This leaves the American people to decide on Election Day 2020 whether they are prepared to save the country’s multiracial democracy or abandon it to fascists, racial authoritarians and their dream of a 21st-century American apartheid where making America “great again” is an updated version of “Whites Only.”

new

Over 100 Lawmakers Call on President Trump to Fire Stephen Miller

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NEW

mofo stephen miller war on brown ppl getting benefits

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/reps-ocasio-cortez-and-omar-call-on-stephen-miller-to-resign-after-top-trump-aide-exposed-as-bonafide-white-nationalist/

...

"we’re not going to let him do any more damage,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez.

The SPLC report on Miller’s emails details how the Trump advisor worked to shape coverage by white nationalist outlet Breitbart on immigration. In multiple emails from 2015 and 2016 to former reporter Katie McHugh when Miller was an aide to former Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and then the Trump presidential campaign, Miller pushed for reporting focusing primarily on nonwhite immigration and crime.

According to the SPLC:

Miller’s perspective on race and immigration across the emails is repetitious. When discussing crime, which he does scores of times, Miller focuses on offenses committed by nonwhites. On immigration, he touches solely on the perspective of severely limiting or ending nonwhite immigration to the United States. Hatewatch was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.

Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro also took to social media to criticize Miller’s rhetoric.

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/13/headlines/splc_stephen_miller_sought_to_promote_white_nationalism_ahead_of_2016_election

Southern Poverty Law Center says White House senior adviser Stephen Miller sought to promote white nationalism, far-right extremist ideas and racist immigration stories through the right-wing website Breitbart in the lead-up to the 2016 election. That’s according to a cache of leaked emails that Miller sent to a Breitbart writer in 2015 and 2016. On Tuesday, New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Miller to resign.

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see ukraine 2 stephen miller etc deep state

Similarly, The Federalist has published more than 50 articles about Ukraine since September 23. Among its arguments for Trump’s innocence are that it was actually the Democrats who colluded with a foreign government during the 2016 election, that this entire scandal exposes only that the Biden family is corrupt, that the whistleblower can’t be trusted because he contacted a House aide before filing his complaint, that members of the “deep state” made suspicious changes to a whistleblower complaint form, that anti-Trump members of the press are just lying because they’re not happy with the outcome of the 2016 election, and finally, that sure, Trump did it, but it’s not like it’s a crime or anything. (Of course, The Federalist is far from alone in pushing most of these arguments.)

There’s a lot of baseless speculation and downright false information in those articles, and it’s certainly possible that the people writing them know this. The goal, as in any Gish Gallop, is to make debunking bad information a Sisyphean task while overloading the public with useless information in order to confuse them.

whistleblower

mma 919 deep state talking pts

Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson, a serial plagiarist, claimed the complaint has “no evidence,” is “unverified” and “uncorroborated,” and is being “used to launch a fraudulent investigation.”

Conservative radio host and QAnon supporter Bill Mitchell claimed that “this whole thing is hearsay” and addedthat “we are witnessing the end of the Democrat Party as we know it.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/the-trump-administrations-insidious-plan-to-cut-social-security-benefits/

Trump administration, continuing its assaults on the most vulnerable Americans, is now going after disabled people with limited English proficiency. Dependent children of people who become disabled are among those likely to be hurt by the new rule.

The rule, not yet in effect, would deny Social Security disability benefits to people whose language difficulty makes them unemployable in the market, but who Team Trump thinks should be able to find jobs where an inability to speak or understand instructions is only a minor problem, citing among other examples cook and gardener.

The justification makes no mention of whether people have the stamina, agility and muscle power to do such work, especially if they are disabled. Most recipients of Social Security Disability Insurance payments receive between $800 and $1,800 per month (the average for 2019 is $1,234).

The proposed rule contradicts another Trump rule change. Both rules are squarely aimed at immigrants.

The proposed Social Security rule change is the latest example showing that to Team Trump no one is too poor, too powerless or too far down the economic ladder to escape their malicious attention.

People with difficulty speaking in any language could be denied benefits, opponents argue.

"We’re very concerned at how this administration is chipping away” at benefits for people, said Jenna McDavid of the Diverse Elders Coalition.

Hidden Intention

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/a-new-trump-administration-rule-could-force-tens-of-thousands-of-kids-into-homelessness-report/

Trump Administration has proposed a rule designed to purge undocumented immigrants from public housing. But according to analysis from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the rule could have the effect of displacing more than 55,000 children who are all legal citizens or residents of the United States.

HUD Secretary Ben Carson has described the proposed rule, which is beingaggressively pushed by White House Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller,as a way to “make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it.” However, HUD’s analysis indicates that about half of the people in households that are facing possible eviction or homelessness are children who are legally qualified for help.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/a-new-trump-administration-rule-could-force-tens-of-thousands-of-kids-into-homelessness-report/

In the U.S., current rules forbid undocumented immigrants from directly receiving federal housing assistance. But families that have mixed immigration status are eligible.

An undocumented single man or single woman is not eligible for housing assistance under current rules, but a family is eligible if at least one person in that household is eligible. For example, a man who is undocumented would not be eligible by himself, but his family could apply if his wife is a U.S. citizen or if he has a child who was born in the U.S. (that U.S.-born child enjoys birthright citizenship). And the benefits the family is entitled to receive are prorated accordingly.

But the new rule would require everyone in that household to have “eligible immigration status,” the Washington Post reports. According to HUD, roughly 25,000 households in the U.S. representing about 108,000 people presently living in subsidized housing have at least one ineligible member—and about 70% of these households with mixed immigration status (around 76,000 people) legally qualify for benefits. About 55,000 are children.

According to its analysis, “HUD expects that fear of the family being separated would lead to prompt evacuation by most mixed households. Temporary homelessness could arise for a household if they are unable to find alternative housing."

Diane Yentel, president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, is highly critical of the proposed rule, and the Washington Post quotes her as saying, “Tens of thousands of deeply poor kids, mostly U.S. citizens, could be evicted and made homeless because of this rule. And by HUD’s own admission, there would be no benefit to families on the waiting list.”

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stevemiller419

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promoted primary 12/17 evil pending

probably neglected, as jeff laura etc get headlines

horowitz mentor

4/19 bak

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/here-are-21-facts-explain-stephen-miller/

mick m in on dhs purges?

no lnx twit pix

Here are 21 facts that explain who Trump ‘puppet master’ Stephen Miller really is

written by Kali Holloway / AlterNet April 9, 2019

The anti-immigrant Trump mouthpiece has been like this for a long time.

This story first ran in 2017.

Dating back to junior high school, Miller has been the unwavering right-winger now before us. Though the internet, and some of his family members, were quick to compare him to Joseph Goebbels, this reporter saw a resemblance to Roy Cohn—a Trump mentor—down to the sartorial details.Miller wears retro skinny suits, only recently ditched a chain-smoking habit and has the kind of cockiness that reads as unexamined, unsympathetic self-hatred. His barked orders and put-on baritone are all part of the package, and can strike an observer as funny. At least until you remember this guy is trying to turn the country into an all-white gated community.

The Trump administration is the natural place for Miller to end up. He’s been writing racist, anti-immigrant rants for half his life and he’s only 31. He’s worked for some of the most deplorable U.S. politicians out there, only to become the voice for the worst of all. By all accounts, he is as terrible—and dangerous—as he seems, which is why he’s no laughing matter. And in that way, he is exactly like his boss. As one of his high school classmates told the Daily Beast, “People laughed at [Miller] because he was a buffoon, he was a performer, he thrived on spectacle. I’m very conscious now, looking back, that he was treated the same way that Trump was—he wasn’t taken seriously.”

Here are 21 facts that explain who Stephen Miller is.

The National Rifle Association was his first right-wing love.

Miller grew up in Santa Monica, a coastal city long regarded as a progressive bastion in L.A. County. A Los Angeles Times profile states Miller, along with two siblings, was raised in a “Jewish family of longtime Franklin Roosevelt Democrats.” Somewhere around eighth grade, Miller’s politics took a hard right after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, penned by National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre.

He dumped a childhood friend because he was Latino.

According to Jason Islas, in the summer between middle and junior high, Miller told him, “I can’t be your friend anymore because you are Latino.” According to Islas, the two never spoke again, though he hasn’t lost much sleep over the demise of their friendship. “[It] didn’t bother me, because the fact that Miller rejected me because I am Latino showed me he was pretty much worthless,” he told Univision.

He was the ‘ best-known and least-liked conservative activist’ in his liberal high school.

Miller was in the racial and political minority at Santa Monica High, where 30 percent of students were Latino, 12 percent black and 5 percent Asian. Oscar de la Torre, a counselor at the school who remains active in the community, describes Miller as being “on a crusade against liberalism and liberals.”

Student body president Justin Brownstone says Miller “enjoyed saying things that were perceived as racist. The more he offended, the happier he was.”

“He had a lot of grudges,” de la Torre told Fusion. “He didn’t go out of his way to go to dances or to have girlfriends. I don’t remember ever seeing him smile.”

He started as a right-wing mouthpiece in high school.

Julia Ioffe writes that Miller reached out to conservative talk radio host Larry Elder while at Santa Monica High, mostly to complain about pervasive liberalism in his school. He also started writing articles for the Santa Monica Lookout. Miller leveraged his role as local conservative media maven to win unilateral wars against what he imagined were lefty enemies in his school.

In a column written just after graduation, Miller noted that just “since his Junior year in High School, he [had] been a guest on local and national radio over thirty times.”

He spent months fighting to reinstate the Pledge of Allegiance in his high school.

In a letter to local media outlet the Lookout decrying “political correctness out of control,” 16-year-old Miller complained that “our school refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms for years,” proof that “they only adhere to the liberal guidelines.” For months, Miller pestered school administrators to “bring back the pledge” even dragging the superintendent into the fight. The pledge was ultimately reinstated, though Miller moaned in his letter that “it is still only said twice a week, while policy dictates it should be said every day.”

Some things Miller’s classmates have said about his attitudes on race.

Charles Gould, whom the Daily News describes as Miller’s schoolmate from first to 12th grade, wrote, “[Miller] was an unabashed racist. No, I’m not being over sensitive and no, I’m not using the ‘r’ word where it doesn’t apply. In private conversations he was constantly making disparaging remarks about the African-American, Latino and Asian students at our school.”

Classmate Natalie Flores, who wrote a Huffington Post piece about growing up with Miller, told Univision that Miller seemed to have “an intense hatred toward people of color, especially toward Latinos.” She added, “I think his big problem was the Latinos. He thought they lived off welfare.”

“[It] was not just that he targeted minority students, and played a victim on a regular basis, but was an asshole,” Ari Rosmarin, the editor of the student newspaper who now works at the ACLU, told the Daily Beast. “Most people knew him because he made it his business to have everyone hear his vile rhetoric on a regular basis.”

His high school writings demonstrate his budding right-wing views.

In that same letter, Miller writes, “When I entered Santa Monica High School…I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills. There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school. Even so, pursuant to district policy, all announcements are written in both Spanish and English. By providing a crutch now, we are preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own…”

He goes on to gripe about condoms in his school (“Legally speaking, sex between minors is statutory rape”), the presence of a student LGBT group (“[W]e have a club on campus that will gladly help foster their homosexuality”), reverence for Native Americans (“excusing their scalping of frontiersmen as part of their culture”) and the lack of praise for the U.S. military (“Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”)

In another article he wrote, “We have all heard about how peaceful and benign the Islamic religion is. But, no matter how many times you say that, it cannot change the fact that millions of radical Muslims would celebrate your death for the simple reason that you are Christian, Jewish or American.”

Here’s what he used for his senior yearbook quote, citing Teddy Roosevelt: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”

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Stephen Miller is nationalist from way back! Check out his yearbook quote! WHEW!

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He actively tried to undermine student groups focused on Latino and black issues.

Oscar de la Torre, his former high school counselor, says Miller frequently claimed that because he—a white male—didn’t experience racism or sexism, students of color were making it up. “He didn’t believe the oppression existed,” de la Torre told the Times. “This guy is 17 years old, and it’s like listening to someone who’s 70 years old—in the 1930s.”

During a summit to address African American and Latino issues, Miller showed up with the message that the room was delusional and he knew better. “He wanted to sabotage us,” de la Torre told the Times. “He confronted everyone, denying that racism existed. He said that was a thing of the past.” (In a column about the meeting, Miller would later indicate the real problem wasn’t racism but “leftist victim mentality.”)

He was once booed off the stage for making a racist joke about the school janitors.

While running for student council, Miller made a speech complaining about having to pick up his garbage when there were janitors for that. The incident, which survives in the video below, was funny because the janitors were black and brown people who got paid almost nothing to pick up garbage. Get it? Haha, right?

“It was a racist remark because we all knew that our janitors were people of color,” Flores told Fusion.

“He was booed unanimously by the student body off the stage. People were disgusted,” Rosmarin, of the ACLU, told the Daily Beast. “That kind of incident with the janitorial staff—everyone, no matter what your background is, understands why that is an awful thing to say.”

(A bit of aughts trivia: the winner of that election was Mark Hunter, the guy behind the Cobrasnake party photo empire.)

He attended Duke University, where people remember him, though not fondly.

Here is how Miller was recently described by John Burness, the former senior vice president of public affairs and government relations at Duke: “He’s the most sanctimonious student I think I ever encountered. He seemed to be absolutely sure of his own views and the correctness of them, and seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking. Incredibly intolerant.”

A college classmate told the New York Times that at a freshman orientation event, he introduced himself by announcing, “My name is Stephen Miller, I am from Los Angeles, and I like guns.”

In college, he greatly expanded his portfolio of right-wing hate pieces .

In a column lamenting “multiculturalism” at Duke and other colleges, Miller listed all the cool things that make America great:

“We are the nation of cinema and radio, crooning and jazz, convertibles and diners, the Old West and New York City. Our culture includes Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jackie Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Douglas Macarthur, Milton Friedman, Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Edison and again, for emphasis, Elvis Presley.”

Neat-o! He only forgot to include Pat Boone and racism.

In another article, Miller accused Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and said her “legendary wisdom” amounted to “tired, multicultural clichÃ©s.” Another piece finds Miller finally breaking the right wing’s longstanding silence on the liberal media, asking why there aren’t any movies “about the evils of the Islamic holy war, the merits of capitalism…[o]r, dare I say it, a movie with a positive take on the Bush administration?”

For good measure, Miller also gives voice to the Angry Adult Virgin Lobby, noting that “shows like Queer As Folk, The ‘L’ Word, Will & Grace and Sex and the City, all do their part to promote alternative lifestyles and erode traditional values.”

He helped found and lead a campus group called the Terrorism Awareness Project.

CNN reports Miller served as “national campus coordinator, president, and co-founder” of the group, launched by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. (Horowitz is a vocally anti-black, anti-Muslim xenophobe and Zionist.) The project claimed its mission was to end “the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country as it attempts to defend itself in a time of terror.” Miller promoted events like “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”—which didn’t catch on, for some reason—and videos with gross titles like The Islamic Mein Kampf. He also tried to get other college newspapers to run ads, like this one, which was reportedly designed by Richard Spencer. When colleges turned them down, Miller took his case to the only show that would have him, “Fox & Friends.” You can watch that appearance; note that Miller was still using his real voice, not his now-famous King of the D&D Virgins voice.

He palled around with white supremacist and recently punched neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

When Miller was an undergrad and Spencer was working on a Ph.D. he was too racist to finish (no really, he dropped out to found a racist “think tank”), the two became buddies as members of the Duke Conservative Union. Together, they worked on an event featuring Peter Brimelow, founder of the virulently xenophobic VDARE and a notable hate-scene fixture with his very own SPLC page. Spencer told the Daily Beast he was a “mentor” to Miller, saying he “spent a lot of time with him at Duke…I hope I expanded his thinking.”

Spencer, who has lauded Miller as “very bold and strong,” said ahead of the election, “It’s funny no one’s picked up on the Stephen Miller connection. I knew him very well when I was at Duke. But I am kind of glad no one’s talked about this because I don’t want to harm Trump.”

For the record, Miller has said the two were merely members of the same club and that they fell out of touch after graduation.

Another white nationalist is also a big fan, as is David Duke.

In a piece titled “Stephen Miller is David Duke’s Favorite Jew,” Forward picks up recent tweets from the former Klansman applauding Miller. “I can’t help it, I like this guy,” Duke states in one message.

Jared Taylor, whose anti-black output was a favorite of racist murderer Dylann Roof, reportedly also namechecked Miller. The Washington Post points to a post by Taylor which notes that Trump’s lack of white racial consciousness is helped by “men close to him — Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller — who may have a clearer understanding of race, and their influence could grow.”

He worked for noted racist Jeff Sessions.

After a stint working for Michelle Bachmann, Miller took a communications job with Senator Jeff Sessions in 2009. Sessions’ office—where Miller could help the racist, xenophobic sausage get made—helped elevate his visibility among conservatives, though initially, he was known mostly for his emails (see #16).

Politico notes the up-and-comer played a pivotal role in crushing the Gang of Eight’s 2013 bipartisan immigration bill. The outlet points out that “when the bill passed the Senate…Miller literally wrote the 23-page handbook that House members were given on how to fight the deal.” As you may already know, after being deemed too racist for the federal bench in the 1980s, Sessions was judged perfectly racist for the Trump administration and confirmed attorney general.

As you might imagine, he is a super annoying emailer.

A recent New York Times article describes Miller as “a man whose emails were, until recently, considered spam by many of his Republican peers.” The Times goes on to say:

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.”

On the campaign trail, he warmed up the crowds for Trump.

Miller’s job was to toss small bits of red meat for the audience to gnaw on while they waited for Trump to hit the stage and throw them the rest of the bloody carcass. In the video below, shot at a rally in Wisconsin, he rails against “foreign workers,” telling the audience they’re “competing against you, and your children, and your grandchildren, and your brothers, and sisters and neighbors for jobs. Low-wage foreign workers being brought in to take your place at less pay.”

He talks about “uncontrolled migration from the Middle East,” and “illegal immigrants being arrested…for the most heinous crimes imaginable,” and hails Trump as the candidate “who will protect our cities, who will protect our communities, who will save our families.”

He wrote Trump’s RNC and ‘America First’ inauguration speeches.

Miller is reportedly responsible for penning Trump’s ominous RNC speech, in which he declared, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

While there was the option of going lighter for the inauguration—some presidents do not use the minutes after being sworn in to share a vision of the country as a dystopian hellscape—Miller stuck with fearmongering:

“Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

He’s considered the brain behind the travel ban.

Though he denies it, Miller is believed to have written a significant portion of the travel ban, with some help from Steve Bannon and congressional aides sworn to contractual secrecy. Multiple sources have reported that the Steves have refused to consult with other agencies that might have necessary insights or legal expertise, leading to disastrous rollouts. In order to counter the negative press around the Muslim ban (we’re calling it what Trump calls it, because that’s what it is), Miller was sent on a Sunday morning press tour last weekend.

Infamous quotes from Miller’s tour of the Sunday morning shows last weekend.

“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.”

“The president’s powers…represent the apex of executive authority.”

“We will have unquestioned military strength beyond anything anybody can imagine.”

“That’s the story we should be talking about and I’m prepared to go on any show anywhere anytime and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct 100 percent.”

His family is mostly not proud of him.

Buzzfeed News rounded up posts from Miller’s extended family, who seem not particularly keen on his new role. His mother’s brother, David Glosser, posted on the wall of a local media outlet, “With all familial affection I wish Stephen career success and personal happiness; however I cannot endorse his political preferences. I am not a Trump supporter.”

Glosser’s letter, which is fairly long, goes on from there:

Mr. Trump is trying to sell you something…He sells fear of immigrants, contempt of our daughters, sisters, and wives, and sows discord and anger. He knows the dictator’s disgraceful sales tricks of challenging the integrity of democratic elections, he finds an unpopular outside group to blame our troubles on, cooks up false electoral fraud theories if he doesn’t get his way, threatens and bullies his opponents, and tells us that he is the only one that can lead the nation ahead. He’s trying to sell you something, and it’s not a good product. For the first time in my memory a major American political party’s presidential candidate has proposed that laws and regulations be established solely on the basis of a person’s religion and ethnic background. The legitimization of this as a basis of serious political discussion is a terrible step into darkness. Remember, what goes around comes around. If today it’s “them,” then tomorrow it may be you.

Finally, my nephew and I must both reflect long and hard on one awful truth. If in the early 20th century the USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant immigrants of a different religion, like the Glossers, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other six million kinsmen whom we can never know.”

Another family member, commenting on the post, wrote, “At least he [Miller] doesn’t share our last name.”

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basically fired when she told trump he was asking he to do crimes

Kirstjen Nielsen Steps Down as DHS Secretary

miller calling deputies to scream for not being tough enough

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omg origin of evil: duke lacrosse

From their point of view … It reveals a culture where white men are acceptable targets of hate who deserve no sympathy and no due process, and where the left-wing mob wields tremendous power through its command of the public sphere.

That view connects to a broader assumption shared by many conservatives: that white Christian men are a persecuted minority in modern America.

To non-conservatives, this sounds absurd. White men are the country’s most powerful and privileged citizens. The party they dominate currently controls two and a half branches of government, and they sit in a disproportionate number of powerful seats in the private sector. But in this argument, conservatives follow a maxim generally attributed to the late provocateur Andrew Breitbart: “Politics is downstream from culture.” By this, Breitbart meant that the balance of power in day-to-day politics is determined, in the long run, by the cultural ideas that shape the way people approach politics.

With liberal elites largely in charge of the country’s entertainment and higher education, in the Breitbart-conservative view, that means they control the commanding heights in our society.

The concept of white men being the persecuted in America largely comes down to being told they’re wrong, or freaking out over nothing when they’re told it’s something by the right-wing outrage machine. And within the “commanding heights,” whether it be scientists, Hollywood, the media, or Democrats, calling stupid ideas stupid has somehow become “elitist” and evidence of bias. It’s one of the most bitter ironies that the people who bitch and moan about political correctness and wear shirts saying “fuck your feelings” are the ones whining about respect whenever a TV show or movie has a story which steps on their toes, or a science article actually advocates … you know, science which goes against one of their beliefs.

It’s as if we are trying to placate children who want people to hold their hands and play along while they wish really hard for unicorns to be real.

From Reeeves Wiedeman at New York Magazine:

After work one day in January 2007, Scott McConnell left his office at the magazine The American Conservative in Arlington, Virginia, and walked to a nearby Thai restaurant that was hosting a panel discussion about the Duke lacrosse scandal… McConnell and his magazine had largely ignored the scandal; identity politics weren’t top of mind for conservative media then, and most outlets weren’t especially interested in defending a group of rich jocks who had hired a stripper. But by January, the case was imploding. The accuser had changed her story more than half a dozen times, one of the players had a well-documented alibi, and DNA tests found no match with any member of the team, a fact the prosecutors initially hid from the defense. McConnell was reminded of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s novel about 1980s New York in which an overzealous prosecutor, the media, and the city’s liberal elite rushed to condemn an innocent white man accused of killing a black man. “There was this palpable yearning among the liberal establishment for guilty white people they could put on trial,” McConnell said, of the lacrosse case.

McConnell and one of his editors, Michael Dougherty, went to the Thai restaurant panel hoping to find someone to write about the case. They knew most of the speakers — an economics professor, an editor at the WashingtonTimes, a men’s-rights blogger — but their talks were so boilerplate that neither McConnell nor Dougherty could recall much about them. The fourth speaker, however, was a Ph.D. candidate in Duke’s history department who delivered a blistering critique of the Duke faculty’s rush to prejudgment. “Scott and I both thought, Here’s a young guy, he presents himself well, and his talk was the most interesting of the night,” Dougherty said recently. “God, I hate to think that we were part of creating this.”

Richard Spencer, the fourth speaker, is now America’s most famous self-identified white nationalist. “In this funny chain of events, the Duke lacrosse case changed the course of my career,” Spencer told me recently. “My life would not have taken the direction it did absent the Duke lacrosse case.” The speech at the Thai restaurant — “Ironic, isn’t it?” he said — pushed him from an academic track toward a more activist one. McConnell commissioned Spencer to write a piece for The American Conservative about the case, and, by the end of the semester, Spencer had dropped out of school to work at the magazine full-time. A year later, he coined the term “alt-right.” … It not only launched Spencer’s career, but that of White House adviser Stephen Miller, too. On the morning of Spencer’s talk at the Thai restaurant, Miller — who was then a senior at Duke — published a column in the student newspaper titled “A Portrait of Radicalism,” just a few days after he appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show to chastise Duke’s faculty. Donald Trump didn’t have much to say about the scandal at the time; he hadn’t yet joined Twitter and was devoting his cable-news appearances to his simmering feud with Rosie O’Donnell. But Miller seemed interested in little else. He had become known to some at Duke as the “Miller Outrage Machine” for his willingness to take controversial stands in his biweekly “Miller Time” column, which he wrote for the campus newspaper as a way, he says, to “defend the idea of America.”

This sort of behavior is also present in conservative women. Recent research and ponderings attempting to identify why white women support Republicans and conservative policies more than their non-white sisterhood have largely explained the difference through gender roles and subservience to their partners. For example, during the recent hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Republican women (who are for the most part white) were the only demographic among which support for Kavanaugh increased as the process went along.

Why is that?

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lapierre nra:

cf trms email says trip to give conduit to djt

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/leaked-documents-incriminate-gop-russia-ties-with-nra-as-a-common-denominator/

Leaked emails obtained by several news outlets contradict the NRA’s denials that it had nothing to do with its members traveling to Moscow to meet top Russian officials on a 2015 trip organized by admitted Russian agent Maria Butina.

Butina, who recently pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges after she was accused of working as a Russian agent to infiltrate conservative circles, organized a 2015 trip to Moscow for top NRA officials. While there, they met with Russia’s then-foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and other prominent figures as part of an apparent Russian campaign to gain influence with American conservatives.

Several NRA officials told the New York Times on Monday that NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre “was opposed to the trip” and ordered members not to go. “Given Mr. LaPierre’s power within the organization, it is unclear how such a trip would have proceeded at all despite his opposition to it,” the Times noted.

ABC News reported that internal NRA documents and emails, as well as photos on social media, appear to show that the NRA “was significantly involved in planning” the trip.

Among those who went on the trip was former NRA president David Keene.

An email obtained by the Daily Beast written by Paul Erickson, Butina’s boyfriend and longtime Republican operative, said that Russian Central Bank official and Butina’s handler Alexandr Torshin offered Keene, who was also a columnist for the Washington Times, an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“[I]mpressing the NRA’s Russian hosts is also the quickest way to secure a private interview with President Putin on behalf of David Keene and the Washington Times — a plum that was dangled in front of Keene by Torshin himself during a recent Torshin visit to Washington, DC,” Erickson, wrote according to the Daily Beast. “High stakes all around.”

Erickson’s email also said that the trip could ease tensions between the U.S. and Russia and pave the way for relations with a future Republican president.

“As we discussed over lunch in Iowa, Russia believes that high level contacts with the NRA might be the BEST means of neutral introduction to either the next American President OR to a meaningful re-set in relations with the Congress under a (God forbid) President Clinton,” he wrote. “This simple good will trip would have enormous diplomatic consequences for a future U.S. / Russia bilateral relationship to the world.”

The emails show that Keene played a large part in organizing the trip with Butina, and was angry when another NRA official dropped out of the trip, putting Keene’s plans in jeopardy. Despite LaPierre’s claims, the NRA paid for Keene’s travel expenses, at least, and also bought official NRA “gifts” for the Russian delegation, according to the Times.

Among the members who accompanied Keene were Joseph Gregory, co-chair of the NRA’s Golden Ring of Freedom, a group for donors of $1 million or more; and Pete Brownell, the group’s vice president, who later became its president. Brownell also paid for former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, an NRA member, to go on the trip.Brownell later abruptly resigned from the NRA.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who is leading at least four investigations into the NRA’s ties to Russia, told ABC News that “it’s not credible for the NRA to claim that they played no official role in the 2015 Moscow trip.”

“Americans would rightly be outraged if they learned that officers of a powerful, taxpayer-subsidized organization were offered personal incentives by the Kremlin in exchange for access to elite Republican circles,” Wyden later told The Daily Beast. “That question is right at the heart of my inquiry.”

After the meeting, Butina wrote to Torshin about the successful trip she organized.

“We should let them express their gratitude now, we will put pressure on them quietly later,” she wrote.

Around the same time, Erickson wrote, in an email obtained by the FBI, that he was “involved in securing a VERY private line of communication between the Kremlin and key [unnamed political party] leaders through, of all conduits, the [unnamed gun-rights organization].”

When FBI agents raided Erickson’s South Dakota home, they found a note in which Erickson mused, “How to respond to FSB offer of employment?” The FSB is the Russian state intelligence agency, successor to the infamous Soviet-era KGB.

During this same period, the NRA, relying on an arm of the organization that is not required to disclose its donors, spent a record $30 million helping to elect President Trump, which was nearly three times the $12.5 million it spent to help Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. The NRA and the Trump campaign went as far as coordinating their ad buys for maximum impact, The Trace reported.

All this has caught the eye of special counsel Robert Mueller, whose team has been “raising questions about the relationship between the campaign and the gun group,” according to CNN.

Despite mounting suspicions and eyebrow-raising emails, William Hurd, a lawyer for Erickson, dismissed the reports even as his client faces his own possible charges.

Hurd told the New York Times, “Anyone who thinks that a freedom-loving group like the NRA is going to get all cozy with Vladimir Putin is living in Fantasyland.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/nra-desperately-backpedaling-from-russia-as-investigators-look-closer/

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https://www.alternet.org/2018/12/all-he-has-is-failures-new-report-reveals-why-trumps-most-hated-aide-is-suddenly-in-the-spotlight/

He’s one of the few White House figures who can inspire even more revulsion than his boss, but in recent days, he’s been put out on the front lines.

So why is Stephen Miller suddenly taking center stage?

Miller, a virulently anti-immigrant adviser who found his way under President Donald Trump’s wing through his work with Jeff Sessions, has been behind some of the White House’s cruelest and most inept policies. The infamous Muslim travel ban, which had to go through not one but two complete revisions before it barely passed constitutional muster, was reportedly designed by Miller. He also played a pivotal role, reportedly, in pushing for the immigrant family separation policy, which needlessly traumatized thousands of children in an attempt to deter asylum seekers and led to a massive backlash against the administration. And during the first government shutdown fight over immigration policy at the beginning of 2018, Miller’s efforts to push Trump toward a hardline view were cited as a key reason the negotiations kept falling through.

In the latest round of fights, Miller been one of the White House’s most public spokespeople. He pointlessly yelled at CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in a ridiculously and unnecessarily combative interview. And in an appearance on Face the Nation, he drew attention not only for his petulance and his scowl but also for his patently absurd attempt to hide his baldness. (Being bald is nothing to be ashamed of.)

According to Yahoo News, the reason Miller has been chosen to represent the administration’s position on the shutdown and immigration debate is that no one else wants to do it. Despite his obvious flaws as a communicator, and his absolute inability to either show or elicit sympathy, when it comes to defending Trump’s outlandish immigration policy stances, Miller is all they’ve got.

“Miller is so awful on TV, it’s counterproductive to put him on,” one former official told Yahoo News.

But part of why he’s so awful is because his views are so awful. This shouldn’t be too surprising, given that they appear to be influenced by his early desire to bully Latino kids and other minorities growing up.

“Nobody wants to defend Stephen’s positions, so they stick his ass out there,” a former member of Trump’s transition team told Yahoo News. “Stephen’s in the background telling everyone, ‘max pressure, max pressure,’ and saying those things are feasible. Everyone who’s actually worked in policy is like, that can’t work, go defend it yourself.”

Trump should realize by now that Miller’s views are both vile and a political loser. In the 2018 midterms, the president doubled down on the demonization of immigrants and stoking fear about the border — only to be dealt a devasting electoral defeat. But the only political move Trump knows is showing his callousness and pandering to the worst parts of his base.

“[Miller is] certainly not judged on his policy successes; all he has is failures,” the former transition team member said. “He shows deference and he makes these outrageous policy suggestions.”

went to pittsburg synangog shooting PR trip?!

https://www.alternet.org/meanwhile-donald-trumps-white-nationalist-white-house-still-humming-along

Trump loves to call nonwhite immigrants and refugees as "vermin" or "invaders" and to suggest they are the "worst people." Yet he has no such strong words for the white nationalists and other racists prevalent throughout his administration.

As CNN reported on Sunday, a policy aide and speechwriter named Darren Beattie "has left the White House" after it was revealed he had spoken at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club Conference. Mencken represents an unfortunate chapter in American journalism: He was a prominent satirist, columnist and critic of the early 20th century, whose book "The American Language" marked the first serious attempt to study English as spoken in the United States. Mencken's posthumously published diaries, however, made clear that he was an ardent racist and anti-Semite, which has made him something of a hero to the far right.

The Mencken Club's annual conference, launched in 2008, has attracted a range of "well-known white nationalists," the CNN report continues, including the briefly famous Richard Spencer. "The schedule for the 2016 conference listed panels and speeches by white nationalist Peter Brimelow and two writers, John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg, who were both fired in 2012 from the conservative magazine National Review for espousing racist views."

After CNN inquired about Beattie's involvement with the 2016 Mencken Club conference, the White House apparently asked the network "to hold off on the story for several days last week." It's not clear why CNN complied with that request. Beattie's email address at the White House was still working on Friday evening, the network reported, but "was no longer active by Saturday."

"Mr. Beattie no longer works at the White House," White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told CNN on Friday. "We don't comment on personnel matters."

As for the semi-disgraced Darren Beattie, he told CNN he had indeed spoken at the 2016 Mencken gathering and had nothing to be ashamed of.

"In 2016 I attended the Mencken conference in question and delivered a stand-alone, academic talk titled 'The Intelligentsia and the Right.' I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely," he told CNN's KFile in an email on Saturday. "It was the honor of my life to serve in the Trump Administration. I love President Trump, who is a fearless American hero, and continue to support him one hundred percent. I have no further comment."

Beattie is not alone. There are many known or obvious white nationalists (which is just a more polite or palatable term for white supremacists) in or around Donald Trump's White House.

Stephen Miller, Donald Trump's senior adviser, has been closely associated with the aforementioned Richard Spencer, perhaps America's best-known white supremacists. Miller himself has a long and public pattern of racism and bigotry towards nonwhites. His beliefs and behavior are so repugnant that his own uncle rebuked him in a scathing public letter published by Politico last week.

Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, the self-described "platform of the alt-right," previously served as Trump's senior White House strategist and remains highly influential in Republican politics. He recently met with far-right groups in Europe and encouraged them to treat accusations of racism as "a badge of honor."

Michael Anton, one of Trump's senior national security advisers, is the author of the infamous "Flight 93 Election" manifesto, which explicitly argued that immigration from nonwhite countries and "multiculturalism" are a threat to the West and American values and culture. Anton channels his white nationalist ideology -- as do Miller and Bannon -- under the cover of such Trumpian labels as "populism" and "economic nationalism."

In addition to the heretofore little-known Darren Beattie, there are other people in around the Trump White House, including Carl Higbie, Jamie Johnson and William Bradford, who appear to hold white nationalist and overtly racist views.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has actively rolled back civil rights protections for African-Americans and other nonwhites, and has advanced a strategy of voter suppression. He actively encourages police thuggery and brutality by refusing to hold law enforcement officers accountable for their behavior, and is using the Department of Justice and the courts to argue that white people -- not black and brown people -- are the actual victims of racism in America.

And of course Donald Trump has repeatedly displayed his white supremacist views in both his public and private life. He uses violent, eliminationist rhetoric to describe nonwhite immigrants, migrants and refugees; says that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville included "very fine people"; has called calls black women "dogs" and suggested that black athletes who protest racism should be deported. Let's not forget that he launched his political career as a prominent advocate of the racist "birther" conspiracy theory that sought to undermine the legitimacy of Barack Obama, the United States' first black president.

Contrary to what Donald Trump's enablers in the news media might argue, Darren Beattie's presence in the Trump administration was not a failure of "vetting" by a disorganized or inexperienced White House. It was a statement of purpose and principles more than anything else: As America's first "white" president, Trump naturally attracts white nationalists and other racists into his orbit.

Indeed, racism almost seems to be a qualification for working in Trump's administration. It is empowering a much broader effort to severely limit the civil rights and human rights of nonwhites in America. The ultimate goal of the Trump administration's "white strategy" is to "make America great again" through racial authoritarianism; in other words, to protect and elevate white power with the ultimate goal of breaking and then destroying the country's post-civil rights era multiracial democracy.

To that end, Trump and his allies and enablers are doing much more than nurturing what W.E.B. Du Bois famously described as "the psychological wages of whiteness." They are installing a white power regime that new research shows is supported by at least 11 million Americans, and likely many more.

When Trump took control of the White House he chose (with Bannon's encouragement) to replace a portrait of the Statue of Liberty with one of Andrew Jackson. To casual or generous observers this was a reference Trump's alleged populist" appeal to the "white working class" voters who purportedly gave him the presidency. But as is so often true, the deeper truths behind Trump and Bannon's choice are more revealing.

Andrew Jackson led an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Seminoles as well as the former black slaves in Florida. He was also a literal "slave driver"who bought and sold black people as human property. "The American Slave Coast," an award-winning book by Ned and Constance Sublette, explains this history:

Failing to sell the slaves himself, Jackson drove the unsold slaves back to Nashville, taking the unheard-of step of driving a coffle [or a chained train] of slaves from the destination back to the point of origin, through Choctaw and Chickasaw territory. . . . Given the documentation of this episode that exists, it appears safe to say that Andrew Jackson is the only U.S. president that we know of who personally drove a slave coffle. But then, Jackson was also the first president to have been a merchant.

Adding to his ignominious legacy, Jackson also ordered the "Indian Removal Act," one of the most infamous actions in American history. People of the Cherokee Nation were forced from their lands east of the Mississippi and forcibly marched on the "Trail of Tears" hundreds of miles away to reservations in Oklahoma. At least 4,000 indigenous people died as a result of this forced march.

So it is altogether too perfect that President Andrew Jackson's portrait now looks down at Donald Trump in the Oval Office. He is a perfect spirit guide for the 45th president of the United States.

trend? bith trump melania and miller family are immigrants

https://www.alternet.org/trump-aide-stephen-millers-uncle-compares-his-nephew-nazis-scathing-essay

https://www.alternet.org/laura-ingrahams-demographic-changes-rant-not-matter-law-and-order-its-rallying-cry-trumps-base

digby

The big earthquake of the 2018 primary season so far has been the unseating of powerful Democratic House leader Joe Crowley by 28-year-old democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez in New York. This isn't a common occurrence, needless to say, but it does happen from time to time, most recently four years ago when an obscure economics professor named David Brat unseated GOP House leader and "young gun" Eric Cantor in Virginia. At that time, much of the chattering class chalked the defeat up to "all politics is local," saying that Cantor had neglected his district. That analysis was wrong. Brat won because of one very hot issue that was boiling over in the right-wing media: immigration.

The right-wing star most responsible for pushing that issue into the GOP mainstream was talk radio host Laura Ingraham.

Before her promotion to Fox News primetime host, Ingraham used her talk radio show to stump for Brat and rail against Cantor. She even went to the district to campaign for Brat, solely on the basis of his hardcore stance against the unaccompanied minors from Central America who were in the news at the time gathering at the border seeking asylum. Ingraham was on a tear during that crisis, ranting daily about the ungrateful little wretches coming to our sacred borders asking for an undeserved handout. When she heard that some of these refugees weren't taking to the food in their detention centers she described them as spoiled whiners and mocked them by playing an old TV commercial with the slogan "yo qiero Taco Bell?". She made this declaration to the kids themselves:

Oh no you won't. This is our country... Our borders matter to us. Our way of life and our culture matter to us. Our jobs and our wages matter to us. No you won't.

During this period Donald Trump was seriously considering jumping into the presidential election and he had his friend Roger Stone's hired hand, Sam Nunberg, listen to thousands of hours of talk radio and report back to him about what they were talking about. He didn't have any strong feelings about immigration at the time but when he got a strong response at the conservative CPAC gathering that year for saying “we either have borders or we don’t,” he was all in. He rode that anti-immigration wave all the way to the White House.

Meanwhile, the Republican establishment had been trying to tamp down this growing xenophobia because their 2012 presidential campaign "autopsy" made it very clear that the GOP was in grave danger of becoming an all-white party in a country that was becoming less and less white. The lesson that the activists like Ingraham took from that was to try to reverse the trend and rid the country of as many people of color as possible. And they were joined by a faction in the US Congress led by the man who would become one of Trump's earliest supporters, Senator Jeff Sessions.

In 2015, he and his aide, now Senior White House adviser, Stephen Miller, drafted a document that laid out a plan to end not only illegal immigration but put a stop to all legal immigration as well, arguing that the country could not "absorb" any more people from other cultures. It pointed to the 1924 Immigration Act, which curbed immigration of most non-whites, Catholics, Jews, Arabs, southern Italians for several decades, as its model. From the moment Sessions signed on with Trump (and subsequently submitted to Trump's ongoing ritual humiliation of him for recusing himself from the Russia investigation), it has been clear that he did so because he saw the best opportunity he's ever had to advance this nativist and racist agenda.

The Attorney General has no greater supporter in that effort than Laura Ingraham who caused some big ripples again this week with a xenophobic rant on her Fox News show in which she attacked both legal and illegal immigration as "The left's effort to remake America":

She went on to describe lurid details of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in much the same language President Trump commonly uses to paint them as deviant and subhuman. And then she asked the president to give an address to the nation from the Oval Office:

The president can be so persuasive, so give us the whole truth, Mr. President, the good, the bad, and yes, the uncomfortable. This is a national emergency and he must demand that Congress act now. There is something slipping away in this country and it's not about race or ethnicity. It's what was once a common understanding by both parties that American citizenship is a privilege, and one that at a minimum requires respect for the rule of law and loyalty to our constitution.

After another round of widespread backlash in reaction to her rant, Ingraham returned to Fox News on Thursday to insist that "despite what some may be contending – I made explicitly clear that my commentary had nothing to do with race or ethnicity, but rather a shared goal of keeping America safe, and her citizens safe and prosperous.”

First, it is not a national emergency. Border crossings are far below what they were a decade ago. And this president is the last person on earth to make a case for the rule of law and loyalty to the constitution since he demonstrates on a daily basis that he has no respect for the first or even a rudimentary understanding of the second.

Nonetheless, this policy is being implemented. The Muslim ban, ICE deportations and the horrifying separation of families at the border are just the beginning. NBC News reported this week that Trump's unctuous factotum Stephen Miller has written a proposal to "make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they have ever used a range of popular public welfare programs, including Obamacare." The purpose is to reduce the number of immigrants who obtain citizenship and, therefore, the right to vote. That's what's known as a "win-win" in the Trump administration.

Yesterday it was announced that Melania Trump's parents got in just under the wire. Sponsored by their daughter and her husband under the much-maligned "family migration" system they became US citizens. It's unknown just what "merit" the president believes they have that qualifies them under his new proposals but one can't help but notice that they are Caucasian. So Laura Ingraham no doubt has little concern that they will be polluting our precious American culture like those little children at the border.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/stephen-miller-duke-donald-trump

HOW STEPHEN MILLER RODE WHITE RAGE FROM DUKE’S CAMPUS TO TRUMP’S WEST WING

At the young age of 31, Stephen Miller has his own office in the West Wing and the President’s ear. He also has held a shocking worldview since he was a teenager. From his writings on the 2006 Duke lacrosse-team rape scandal, which gave the then–college junior national media exposure, to an alleged association with a white-nationalist advocate, William D. Cohan dives deep into Miller’s tumultuous past.

BY WILLIAM D. COHAN

SUMMER 2017

Around midnight on the evening of March 13, 2006, something untoward happened in the nondescript rental house at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard, right off Duke’s East Campus, where three of the university’s lacrosse team’s senior co-captains lived. It was spring break, and Duke’s bucolic campus, in the heart of North Carolina’s Piedmont region, was quiet, maybe too quiet. The lacrosse team had practiced that morning and afterward had met with coach Mike Pressler. Since Duke’s cafeterias were closed for the week, Pressler doled out around $10,000 in cash to the 46 players to pay for their meals and other sundries. Afterward, most of them retired to the North Buchanan Boulevard house for an afternoon and evening of drinking and drinking games, such as beer pong and washers.

Also on the agenda, at 11 P.M. to be exact, were performances by two “exotic dancers.” That afternoon, co-captain Dan Flannery called the Allure Agency, in Durham, and hired the women for two hours. He specified that he wanted white women. They would be paid $400 each—money that the co-captains collected from some of their teammates, who put in $20 each.

Kim Roberts, then 31, who is half black and half Korean, arrived at the appointed hour. Crystal Gail Mangum, then 27, who is black, showed up about 30 minutes later. A friend had driven her there in his car and then left. There were some signs that she had been drinking and was already unsteady on her feet. Both women were single mothers and both had had previous run-ins with the law—Roberts for embezzling from an employer, Mangum for a variety of incidents, including a bizarre drunk-driving episode after stealing a taxi. (There was a warrant still out for Roberts’s arrest; after the taxi incident, Mangum had pleaded guilty to four misdemeanors, served a short time in jail, and was placed on two years’ probation.) The two women had never met before. For some reason, Roberts referred to Mangum as “Precious.”

After Roberts and Mangum arrived at the house, the players debated whether to proceed, because the dancers were not white, as Flannery had requested. But they decided to go ahead anyway. Just before midnight, it was showtime. “There were about 20 to 25 young guys there who were all sitting down,” Roberts recalled. “[Mangum] and I began our show, which, in my opinion, seemed to be going well.” Observed Flannery, “Guys were cheering and yelling.”

Things quickly got out of hand. David Evans, another of the senior co-captains who lived at the house, noted that Mangum “couldn’t talk or stand up straight, she was so high.” The girls were sloppily dancing and began to kiss. Evans said Mangum “went down” on Roberts, although later neither Roberts nor Mangum recalled having had oral sex. Roberts was increasingly nervous. “Things were said that made me concerned for my safety,” she recalled.

After the women got up off the floor, according to Flannery, Roberts asked the guys “who was going to step up and take their pants off. No one would.” Peter Lamade, then 21, from Chevy Chase, Maryland, asked Roberts “if she put objects up her vagina.” Her response, according to Flannery, was “something along the lines of ‘I would put your dick in me, but you’re not big enough.’ ”

Lamade then grabbed a broomstick, showed it to Roberts, and said, “Would this do?” (In another version of this incident, according to Matt Zash, the third co-captain who lived at the house, Roberts allegedly said, “What’s wrong, white boy, is your dick too small?” Lamade then grabbed a broomstick and told Roberts, “I’m going to shove this up you.”)

“That statement made me uncomfortable, and I felt like I wanted to leave,” Roberts later explained. “I raised my voice to the boys and said the show was over.” To decide what to do next, Roberts then grabbed Mangum, and together they headed into David Evans’s room, and then back into his bathroom. Some of the lacrosse players felt shortchanged. “Guys on the team were upset and wanted their money back,” Flannery recalled.

Meanwhile, Roberts went to her car and changed clothes. She wanted to drive away but didn’t want to leave Mangum by herself in the house. Flannery told Roberts he thought Mangum was still in Evans’s bathroom. “However, she was passed out on the back stoop of the house, half naked,” Flannery said. (How she ended up there is not known.) “At this time I went to the back of the house with Kevin Coleman”—another teammate—“who photographed her passed out there and picked her up. I put her arms around my shoulder and walked her to the other girl’s car.”

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES

As the women were getting ready to leave in Roberts’s blue Honda, and then as they were driving off, racial epithets started flying. A next-door neighbor later said he heard one of the players yell, “Hey, bitch, thank your grandpa for your nice cotton shirt!” Roberts said the verbal assaults were even more offensive: “They just hollered it out, ‘Nigger,’ ‘Nigger,’ ‘Nigger.’ They were hollering it for all to hear. They didn’t care who heard it.” Flannery remembered that some of his teammates were on top of the stone wall surrounding East Campus, yelling at the Honda as it pulled away. He saw that Roberts had stopped the car, gotten out, and yelled something back, along the lines of “You limp-dick white boys, you’re not real men. You had to pay for us.” At that point, Flannery said, the guys on the wall screamed, “Go home and feed your kids.”

For his part, co-captain Zash remembered overhearing one of his teammates say, “Well, we asked for whites, not niggers,” to which Roberts replied, “That’s a hate crime—I’m calling the police.” As she drove away, Roberts kept thinking, “It was almost unbelievable. All I kept going back to was ‘I can’t believe these are Duke students.’ ”

And then things got much worse. Within hours, Mangum claimed she had been kidnapped, and raped and sexually assaulted in Evans’s bathroom by an ever changing number of white Duke lacrosse players at the party. She told that story in the early hours of March 14 to a counselor at Durham Access, a social-services center, and then again to a nurse at the Duke University Hospital. The nurse examined her and concluded she had been sexually assaulted. Mangum also told several Durham police detectives that three white Duke lacrosse players had raped her in the bathroom at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard. They believed her, setting in motion a series of extraordinary events that would shock the nation as law-enforcement officials in North Carolina tried to figure out what, if anything, the lacrosse players had done to Mangum in David Evans’s bathroom after the dancing had stopped so abruptly.

On March 23, at the detectives’ request, a local judge issued a non-testimonial order, or NTO, requiring the white lacrosse players to submit DNA samples to the Durham police. (The players’ attorneys had previously blocked the police’s request to provide the DNA voluntarily.)

That’s when Michael Nifong, the acting Durham district attorney, caught a glimpse of the NTO, a copy of which had been left on a copier machine outside his office, and first learned about what had allegedly occurred at the rental house 10 days earlier. After Nifong read the NTO, in all its gory detail, he knew all hell would break loose at Duke and in Durham. He figured, correctly, that the accusation of rape and sexual assault by a poor black stripper against three white, presumably well-to-do Duke lacrosse players would attract national media attention. Based on Mangum’s allegations and her subsequent absolute identification of her alleged assailants after reviewing their photographs on a computer, a Durham County grand jury indicted the three—David Evans, one of the senior co-captains, and two sophomores, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty—on criminal charges of first-degree rape, sexual assault, and kidnapping. The scandal would engulf Duke’s campus for the next 13 months.

stephen miller

Miller and President Trump meet with county sheriffs at the White House, in February.

Into this conflagration of economic, racial, and sexual politics came Stephen Miller, a 20-year-old Duke junior from Santa Monica, California, who wouldn’t have known a lacrosse stick if he were hit over the head with one. A columnist for The Chronicle, the Duke student newspaper, Miller defended the lacrosse players in print, despite nearly universal condemnation of them by others on campus and in the media. His outspoken support for the players—even before the indictments were handed up—got him plenty of national media attention, which he enthusiastically embraced. As he expounded nightly on CNN and on The O’Reilly Factor, among other television shows, it became apparent that the sordid allegations surrounding the case gave Miller the perfect opportunity to hone the right-wing political views he had espoused since adolescence.

His passion for American exceptionalism and racial superiority eventually led him to jobs in Washington, D.C., first as a spokesperson for two right-wing members of Congress, Michele Bachmann and John Shadegg, and then as a policy adviser and communications director for conservative Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general. Sessions, with Miller at his side, almost single-handedly killed the 2013 bipartisan immigration-reform bill that would have created a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Now, at 31, the still-single Miller is President Trump’s youngest senior policy adviser, with his own office in the West Wing and a seat at the table during crucial decisions. His most visible act in that job so far was helping his friend Steve Bannon, for the moment Trump’s chief strategist, to craft and roll out the Trump administration’s first try at instituting a travel ban on the citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries. In the wake of a federal judge’s decision to strike down the ban, Miller was ubiquitous on television news shows. In one astonishing interview, dressed in his trademark dark suit and skinny tie, Miller told CBS’s John Dickerson, without irony, “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.”

It was a jaw-dropping statement, even by Trumpian standards. “Horrendous” and “embarrassing” was how Joe Scarborough, the co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, described Miller’s claims, adding for good measure, “[The president’s decisions] will be questioned, my young, little Miller. They will be questioned by the court. It’s called judicial review. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote about it in the Federalist Papers. It was enshrined in Madison’s Constitution.”

Since then, despite winning Trump’s approval for his bravura performance—“Great job!” the president tweeted—Miller has been kept under wraps, more seen than heard, although he was in the Mar-a-Lago photo of Trump and his advisers authorizing the April missile strike on an air base in Syria.

VIDEO: A Primer on Stephen Miller, Senior Policy Adviser to Donald Trump

REBEL YELL

People who know Miller personally are not surprised by his unflinching support for Trump or his recent exclusionary antics. Growing up in a wealthy, liberal Southern California enclave, he delighted in challenging political convention and social niceties, even as a high-school student. “I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would do,” he admitted in a 2002 speech to his Santa Monica High School classmates. In the same speech, to a chorus of boos, he said, “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?” Miller now claims his speech was “satire” and a “Colbert-style routine,” according to what his high-school friend Chris Moritz told The Washington Post. (Moritz did not respond to requests to be interviewed, and the White House declined to make Miller available to speak with V.F.)

Despite Miller’s penchant for outrageous provocation, his family was very much like others in Santa Monica. His mother, Miriam, from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, came from a well-known Jewish family that had made a fortune in retailing. His father, Michael, a Stanford graduate, was a lawyer and real-estate mini-mogul. These days, the Millers together own Cordary Inc., a real-estate investment company, of which Michael is the president and Miriam is executive vice president. (Miller himself was a vice president of the family business for a few years, according to disclosure forms.) The company owns and manages three multi-family residential “communities” in the Los Angeles area comprised of 471 rental units.

Ironically, the family would not have made it to the United States had someone like Stephen Miller been in the White House a century ago. Facing religious persecution, Miriam’s family—the Glossers—fled Belarus, arriving in New York in 1903. “Imagine living in a place where armed Cossacks ride through the streets, looking to cripple or kill you,” wrote Robert Jeschonek, in Long Live Glosser’s, a 2014 book about the family.

“DO NOT TAKE THESE STORIES ABOUT STEPHEN LIGHTLY. THEY SOUND LIKE EXAGGERATIONS . . . . THEY ARE NOT. HE HAS BEEN RADICALIZED.”

In America the Glossers turned a small tailoring business into a beloved Johnstown department store and a chain of 75 Gee Bee discount stores. In 1985, the family and Bear Stearns took the company private in a $45 million leveraged buyout; four years later, it filed for bankruptcy and was eventually liquidated, its stores sold off in pieces or shuttered.

As a youngster, Stephen was obsessed with Star Trek. He watched the show for hours. And he and his younger brother, Jacob, used to dress up in Captain Kirk uniforms. “He really liked this kind of macho alpha-male thing that was going on with Kirk,” remembers Jason Islas, a friend of Miller’s in middle school. “I think he was really attracted to that as a model for his own behavior.” Miller also was fixated on Las Vegas-style gangsters, “like the Bugsy Siegel types,” explains Islas. In one yearbook picture, Miller is dressed as a mobster, with a wad of cash in his hand.

Miller attended a variety of different synagogues in and around Santa Monica. A friend at Beth Shir Shalom, a progressive reform synagogue, remembered that Miller was “a budding provocateur” and “was not very concerned with being well liked,” according to an article about him in The Jewish Journal. Another Beth Shir friend, Sophie Goldstein, told the Journal about an incident in which a small group of students were deciding how to divide up a last piece of pizza in a fair way. “We’re all talking and talking about it,” she said. “In the middle of this discussion, Stephen slaps his open hand down on the middle of the slice of pizza. And of course nobody would touch this pizza slice after he put his greasy 13-year-old paw on it.”

When Miller celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at Beth Shir Shalom, Islas was a close enough friend to be invited. But Miller abruptly ended their friendship that summer, before they both went off to Santa Monica’s huge, 3,400-student public high school. According to Islas, one day Miller telephoned him and told him he didn’t want to be friends anymore. Not content to just let their interactions fade as they moved from one school to another, Miller wanted to make a point. “He gave me a whole list of reasons why we couldn’t be friends and almost all of them were personal, but the one that stuck out was because of my Latino heritage,” Islas recalls. “It was the one that wasn’t directly personal. It was very strange.”

Soon enough, though, Miller was embracing a white-nationalist agenda. His high-school yearbook quotation came from Teddy Roosevelt: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are American and nothing else.”

Miller’s evolving political views could not have been more at odds with those of progressive, inclusive Santa Monica, a fact in which he delighted. When he was 16, he wrote an op-ed in a local newspaper about the “rampant political correctness” that had “consumed” the high school and the school district. From ninth grade on, he wrote, a number of his classmates “lacked basic English skills” and there were “very few, if any,” Latino students in his honors classes, “despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school.” He decried the school’s policy of making announcements in both English and Spanish. Miller seemed particularly peeved by liberal regrets over the killing of Native Americans. “We could have lived with the Indians, learning how to finger paint and make tepees, excusing their scalping of frontiersmen as part of their culture. Forget about being the nation that stopped Hitler, brought communism to its knees, and feeds more hungry people around the world than any other country—forget all of that, and let us just agree that we’re a horrible nation.”

He thought that the school’s policy of providing condoms to students promoted sexual promiscuity. And if his classmates happened to have figured out “at their tender age” that they were gay? “We have a club on campus that will gladly help foster their homosexuality,” Miller complained. “Do they notify parents if their teenagers have chosen an alternate lifestyle? Of course not.” His classmates have no recollection of Miller dating. “I would be shocked if he’s ever had a relationship,” says Nick Silverman, a former high-school classmate.

Miller played tennis in high school. One of the team’s matches against a rival school coincided with a track-and-field competition. During a girls’ track event, Miller decided to jump into the race toward the end, Rosie Ruiz-style, and then boasted, back at school, about how he had beaten the girls and “wasn’t even warmed up or anything,” recalls Silverman, now a writer in Los Angeles. “Everyone was pissed at him.”

By many accounts, Miller’s proudest achievement in high school was forcing the school to comply with the California Education Code’s requirement that a “patriotic exercise” be conducted daily, which Santa Monica High School had failed to do. Miller brought the violation to the attention of Mark Kelly, who was then a co-principal at the high school. Kelly says he did not find it particularly odd that Miller would call the school out for not following the state code. “Students at the time would come up with all kinds of stuff,” he says, “and actually I liked that. A lot of fun in my job was to interact with students when they had issues or things that they felt strongly about and wanted to interact with us about.”

Miller wrote a letter about the school’s code violation to Larry Elder, then, as now, a California-based conservative radio talk-show host. Elder invited Miller to come on his radio show, and Miller quickly took a shine to the media spotlight. “He was incredibly bright, incredibly articulate, incredibly focused, and that started a friendship that continues to this day,” Elder says. He had Miller on his show more than 70 times. “The reason I know this is because he counted them,” Elder adds.

stephen miller

Stephen, right, and his brother, Jacob, in Star Trek costumes.

Miller came to the attention of Ari Rosmarin, the editor of the high-school newspaper, after Miller complained that a teacher had given him a low grade because of his conservative political views. “He was all about this victimhood idea, that he was this lonely soldier crusading,” says Rosmarin, who is a civil-rights attorney.

Elder says Miller’s confrontational approach shocked the community. “It is extremely left-wing,” he says about Santa Monica, “and for somebody like Stephen Miller to talk about how racism is no longer a major issue in America [or throwing] water on this issue of the glass ceiling [or] things like minimum wage, he was very, very unpopular.”

The September 11 attacks exacerbated Miller’s penchant for nationalistic thinking. In a December 2001 column for the high-school newspaper, he wrote, “Blaming America for the problems of countries whose citizens would rather spend time sewing blankets to cover women’s faces than improving the quality of life is utterly ludicrous. And not to kill terrorists poses a serious threat to the security of the nation.”

Miller wrote about how he decided to “challenge the campus indoctrination machine” of liberal thinking and cited as a catalyst an incident that, if true, is particularly disturbing. “One teacher even dragged the American flag across the floor—as we were sending off brave young men to risk their lives for it,” he wrote. Miller’s assertion, written in 2003, remains controversial, if only because no one I spoke to about it seems to recall its happening. Kelly, the co-principal, doesn’t remember the incident. “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen necessarily,” he says. “You’ve got to remember this for me is almost 20 years ago and thousands and thousands of students later.” Another high-school classmate, Kesha Ram, who recently ran an unsuccessful campaign to be lieutenant governor of Vermont, is skeptical. “I have a hard time believing it,” she says. “Rumors spread really fast on a high-school campus, and I don’t even remember hearing that as a rumor.” Islas has no recollection of the incident either and thinks it may be “overblown.”

Silverman also has no recollection of the flag incident. But he does remember one time when Miller lost his temper. They had gone together to Sacramento for a week-long stay at Boys State, an immersive program designed to educate high-school students in the ways of state and local government (and to counter the socialism-inspired Young Pioneer camps). Miller was determined to win an election to a mock city council “any way he could,” even using dirty tricks, Silverman recalls. Boys State was on the conservative side of the political spectrum. “I imagine Stephen felt he would be right at home,” Silverman wrote on a recent Facebook post. “But even here, among his seemingly ideological allies, he was ostracized. After being voted out of the mock city council, Miller threw a tantrum, flipping over a table and shouting ‘You can’t do this to me!!!’ ” Silverman says it was the only time he saw Miller upset. According to Silverman, he was usually “eerily calm,” the persona he effects to this day.

But Silverman says there was no mistaking Miller’s agenda, even then. “He believes multiculturalism is a weakness, that when we celebrate our differences we are ignoring our ‘American culture,’ ” Silverman wrote on Facebook. “He didn’t like someone from El Salvador celebrating their homeland, or someone from Vietnam bringing in food from their country of origin. He wanted everyone to celebrate one culture. One country. At 16, Stephen was an extreme nationalist.”

In their government class, Silverman recalled on Facebook, Miller bullied “the opposition with unverifiable statistics and figures, baseless claims launched with his articulate bravado. He would just bludgeon you with evidence he pulled from thin air, gun-death numbers or immigration statistics that were usually false or gross exaggerations. And in 2002 no one had a smartphone to quickly verify it. It was mostly met with eye-rolls or an unwillingness to continue to debate someone who had a casual relationship with truth . . . . I know this may come off as melodramatic, but Stephen’s views are very DANGEROUS. Do not take these anecdotes or stories about him lightly. They sound like exaggerations and embellishments. They are not. He is an extremist. He has been radicalized.”

OLD-SCHOOL TIE

One former Duke student remembers Miller’s behavior in class more than she does his political views. In a freshman history course about the American Revolution, she recalls, “Just right away, he’d just walk in, put his head down, and go to sleep.” After giving Miller a few good-natured warnings, the professor kicked him out. “He’s got that sleepy-eyed, sloe-eyed look, but he’s just saying ‘Fuck you’ to the world,” she says.

On campus Miller joined the Duke Conservative Union and became head of the Duke chapter of Students for Academic Freedom. As he had done at Santa Monica High School, Miller invited David Horowitz, the 1960s radical turned conservative ideologue, to speak. Horowitz had just written a book identifying 101 “dangerous” professors on college campuses—two of whom were at Duke—that “made me Public Enemy Number One in the universities,” Horowitz recalls. The campus erupted in protest against Horowitz.

But it was the lacrosse-team scandal—which occurred two months after Miller started writing his biweekly Chronicle column—that gave him the perfect opportunity to launch himself onto the national stage. The 24-hour cable networks pined to interview a conservative Duke student about the scandal, and Miller happily obliged. After all, how many Duke students were eager to defend the lacrosse team’s behavior within a month of the off-campus party, especially after the coach had been fired and the lacrosse season canceled?

With the campus in an uproar over the rape allegations, Miller happily took the contrarian view. “Protesters and community leaders have claimed the alleged rape speaks to the larger ingrained prejudice of Duke students and the University’s administration,” he wrote in one early column. “But in reality, the only widespread prejudice we have seen is the prejudice that has allowed a single unproven allegation to condemn and defame an entire community.”

By fall 2006, far more information was known about what had happened on the night of March 13—although not everything—and the case against the three indicted players collapsed for a variety of reasons, including that Mangum kept changing her story, and that DNA samples taken from her that night, with one exception, did not match that of any of the lacrosse players. Miller published his final Chronicle column on the subject in April 2007, two weeks after Roy Cooper, the North Carolina state attorney general (and now its new governor), had, after a secret four-month investigation, declared the three lacrosse players not guilty of the criminal charges that a grand jury had brought against them a year earlier. Miller took a victory lap: “For many at Duke, the last year offered a horrifying tutorial in the moral bankruptcy of the left’s politically correct orthodoxy and the corruption of our culture at its hands,” he wrote. “Three of our peers faced a devastating year-long persecution because they were white and their accuser black.”

Miller then tried to imagine what would have happened had the scenario been flipped—if the three athletes had been black and their accuser white. He wondered what might have happened if the school president had fired the black coach. “You think that scenario would have lasted for a year?” he asked. “Try a week.”

As the author of The Price of Silence, a 2014 book about the Duke lacrosse scandal, I have wondered about that scenario, too. My conclusion was exactly the opposite of Miller’s: in my estimation, there is no way, had the indicted boys been black and their accuser white, that they ever would have been exonerated without a trial. There is no way a secret investigation by the state attorney general would have declared them innocent and no way that Duke would have paid them $20 million each—which is what the three accused white players received—as part of a legal settlement with the university.

Robert Steel, the chairman of the Duke board of trustees during the ordeal and a former partner at Goldman Sachs, agreed to speak with me for The Price of Silence, against the wishes of the Duke administration and his fellow trustees. (He is now C.E.O. of Perella Weinberg, the investment-banking boutique.) He remains unsure of exactly what happened in that bathroom that night. But he’s confident it was something of which none of us would be proud. He told me, “There was zero chance that there was a group activity, that thirty guys saw something that was incredibly unattractive or whatever . . . . Someone would’ve told their parents that ‘I saw this’ or whatever . . . . [But] we have no idea what happened in a bathroom with one person or two persons. I have no clue, no idea . . . . Today, what do I think? I just don’t know . . . . You can imagine seven clicks [of the dial], some of which you can go, ‘That’s not so great,’ or other clicks you can imagine, ‘That’s pretty unattractive.’ ”

stephen miller

Steve Bannon and Miller talk about American trade policy in New Hampshire, in February 2016.

At Duke, Miller was also the first national coordinator of the Terrorism Awareness Project, created in 2007, designed to make “students aware of the Islamic jihad and the terrorist threat, and to mobilize support for the defense of America and the civilization of the West,” according to the project’s Web site. The project, which originated with David Horowitz, sponsored “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on college campuses, including at Duke, and ran ads in college newspapers, including The Chronicle, with the headline WHAT AMERICANS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT JIHAD. The author of the jihad advertisement was Richard Spencer, then a Ph.D. candidate in Duke’s history department, who had arrived at the university in spring 2005. After graduating from the University of Virginia, Spencer had received a master’s in the humanities from the University of Chicago. He left Duke before completing his Ph.D. to become the founder of the National Policy Institute, a white-nationalist think tank and one of the intellectual leaders of the so-called alt-right movement, which gained potency during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Spencer says he “first became aware” of Miller at Duke after the start of the lacrosse scandal. “He certainly understood the media and how to get his message out there,” Spencer says. “I could only be impressed.” The two met at the Duke Conservative Union in 2006. Being a few years older and in graduate school, Spencer says, he mentored Miller. “But I do think that Stephen probably would’ve ended up exactly more or less where he is today whether he had met me or not,” he adds. “He is his own man . . . . He is a strong American nationalist, you could say. Certainly not a white nationalist, but he is an American nationalist and a civic nationalist or a public nationalist . . . . He was going on Fox News even as an undergraduate—really remarkable.”

Spencer praises Miller for having had the guts to support the lacrosse players when it was unpopular to do so. “It was racial politics at its heart,” he says. “And so whenever you touch on that case you’re playing with fire; you are willing to go someplace that most people aren’t. It was a racialized morality play from the first second that it hit campus. Stephen is not me. He is not coming from my identitarian perspective, but he is willing to go there. He’s willing to take on those issues, which shows a lot of bravery . . . . I think Stephen’s ballsy.”

Spencer’s public utterances about race and white nationalism are far less diplomatic than was our measured conversation. As he puts it, “The ideal I advocate is the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent.” To accomplish that he supports “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”

At a 2016 alt-right conference, he elaborated on his dream:

To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward. And we recognize a central lie of American race relations. We don’t exploit other groups—we don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around . . . . America was, until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.

Spencer’s audience often responds to him with the Nazi salute, and, on a number of occasions, he has refused to denounce Hitler. For instance, on April 23, he tweeted, “Whatever your opinion on Nazis, they were extremely interested in . . . space travel, rockets, public health.”

When, during the presidential campaign, the relationship between Spencer and Miller from their days together at Duke became public, Miller quickly disavowed knowing Spencer. “I have absolutely no relationship with Mr. Spencer,” Miller e-mailed Mother Jones last October. “I completely repudiate his views, and his claims are 100 percent false.”

Spencer says he was surprised by Miller’s renunciation of him. He could have spoken publicly about knowing Miller at Duke, he says, but chose not to because he did not want to “harm Stephen.” But, he adds, “the fact is I did know him, now 10 years previously, so I could’ve talked about this in 2015, I could’ve talked about this all through 2016, but I didn’t . . . . Stephen looked a little strange, kind of doing this outright denial. What he should’ve said is ‘Oh, yeah. I knew Richard Spencer 10 years ago. Who cares?’ ”

This past February, soon after Miller’s television appearances, nearly 3,500 Duke alumni signed an open letter to him, decrying his political views. “We . . . see nothing in your actions that furthers the values of intellectual honesty, tolerance, diversity, and respect that we seek to promote in the world,” the letter stated. Corey Sobel, a classmate of Miller’s at Duke and one of the co-authors of the letter, says, “You wouldn’t really believe the number of stories where he would offend—very suspiciously always a young woman—with whatever broad tirade against liberalism and free thought he had, and then, a couple of weeks later, ask that same woman who he had offended, usually publicly, out on a date.” The consensus seemed to be that Miller’s behavior was “really icky” and “very creepy.”

In his position of power within the Trump White House, Miller has done nothing to diminish the controversy that swirls around him. His fans, such as Elder and Horowitz, view him as a charming crusader. He now seems to be in the process of skillfully pivoting his allegiance from the increasingly tarnished Bannon to the administration’s rising stars, Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. “He doesn’t stick a stick in people’s eye just for the hell of it,” says Elder. “He’s trying to make the country work better, and trying to improve the lives of people and make them more productive.”

But Miller’s numerous detractors see other motives. “He was obviously a very driven, hardworking guy, so I knew that he would probably find a place somewhere,” says Silverman, Miller’s high-school classmate. “I had no idea that it would be this, at the right hand of the president at 31 years old.” He says he recognizes Miller’s voice coming loud and clear out of Trump’s mouth. “I can hear that kind of nationalistic, America-First American culture,” he continues. “That’s that same Stephen from junior year. He hasn’t gone anywhere. That’s still him.”

Does Silverman have any advice for people who are just learning about Stephen Miller for the first time? “Take him seriously and know that he is a dangerous person,” he says. “He has a dangerous mind and a dangerous way of thinking. He wants to shift what America is about . . . . You’ve got to stay vigilant. He’s not taking days off. If there’s one thing Miller is, and he’s a lot of things, he’s absolutely motivated. This is his entire life. This is everything for him. He’s not going to rest. He won’t rest. He won’t stop . . . . He’s not a Trump shill. He was this way before Trump, before Bannon. He was radicalized way before that.”

https://www.alternet.org/here-are-21-facts-explain-who-trump-aide-stephen-miller

baby jails

2x? update?

ven among the right-wing ideologues doing the actual presidenting in this administration, Stephen Miller stands out for the copious amounts of Kool-Aid he mainlines. Speaking to the New York Times, a Trump team colleague described Miller as “fiercely loyal” to the president, “a true believer in every sense of the word.” Though he joined the campaign in its early days, penning many of the apocalyptic speeches that won fear-drunk Republican hearts and minds, Miller recently got a lot more visibility after a string of television appearances in defense of the Muslim ban. At each stop, Miller showed a flair for the dramatic: he lied, he dodged, he put on his best tyrant’s voice and proclaimed the executive branch above the law. It seemed contrived and forced, like a politically precocious, weasley teenager’s idea of how to command a crowd. According to those who know Miller’s history, that’s not so far off the mark.

Dating back to junior high school, Miller has been the unwavering right-winger now before us. Though the internet, and some of his family members, were quick to compare him to Joseph Goebbels, this reporter saw a resemblance to Roy Cohn—a Trump mentor—down to the sartorial details. Miller wears retro skinny suits, only recently ditched a chain-smoking habit and has the kind of cockiness that reads as unexamined, unsympathetic self-hatred. His barked orders and put-on baritone are all part of the package, and can strike an observer as funny. At least until you remember this guy is trying to turn the country into an all-white gated community.

The National Rifle Association was his first right-wing love.

He dumped a childhood friend because he was Latino.

According to Jason Islas, in the summer between middle and junior high, Miller told him, “I can't be your friend anymore because you are Latino.” According to Islas, the two never spoke again, though he hasn’t lost much sleep over the demise of their friendship. “[It] didn't bother me, because the fact that Miller rejected me because I am Latino showed me he was pretty much worthless,” he told Univision.

Student body president Justin Brownstone says Miller “enjoyed saying things that were perceived as racist. The more he offended, the happier he was.”

“He had a lot of grudges,” de la Torre told Fusion. “He didn't go out of his way to go to dances or to have girlfriends. I don't remember ever seeing him smile.”

He started as a right-wing mouthpiece in high school.

“Thus began a cycle that would repeat itself over and over in high school and college,” Ioffe writes, “Miller would clash with school administrators over a perceived leftist conspiracy...then escalate the conflict by taking it to a conservative talk show, infuriating the administrators but yielding a compromise in Miller’s favor.”Julia Ioffe writes that Miller reached out to conservative talk radio host Larry Elder while at Santa Monica High, mostly to complain about pervasive liberalism in his school. He also started writing articles for the Santa Monica Lookout. Miller leveraged his role as local conservative media maven to win unilateral wars against what he imagined were lefty enemies in his school.

In a column written just after graduation, Miller noted that just “since his Junior year in High School, he [had] been a guest on local and national radio over thirty times.”

He spent months fighting to reinstate the Pledge of Allegiance in his high school.

Some things Miller’s classmates have said about his attitudes on race.

Charles Gould, whom the Daily News describes as Miller’s schoolmate from first to 12th grade, wrote, “[Miller] was an unabashed racist. No, I’m not being over sensitive and no, I’m not using the 'r' word where it doesn’t apply. In private conversations he was constantly making disparaging remarks about the African-American, Latino and Asian students at our school.”

His high school writings demonstrate his budding right-wing views.

In that same letter, Miller writes, “When I entered Santa Monica High School...I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills. There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school. Even so, pursuant to district policy, all announcements are written in both Spanish and English. By providing a crutch now, we are preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own...”

Stephen Miller is nationalist from way back! Check out his yearbook quote! WHEW! pic.twitter.com/hEdTtAkcoy

— SenateTracker (@DaveNYviii) February 13, 2017

He actively tried to undermine student groups focused on Latino and black issues.

He was once booed off the stage for making a racist joke about the school janitors.

“It was a racist remark because we all knew that our janitors were people of color,” Flores told Fusion.

(A bit of aughts trivia: the winner of that election was Mark Hunter, the guy behind the Cobrasnake party photo empire.)

He attended Duke University, where people remember him, though not fondly.

A college classmate told the New York Times that at a freshman orientation event, he introduced himself by announcing, “My name is Stephen Miller, I am from Los Angeles, and I like guns.”

In college, he greatly expanded his portfolio of right-wing hate pieces.

In a column lamenting “multiculturalism” at Duke and other colleges, Miller listed all the cool things that make America great:

Neat-o! He only forgot to include Pat Boone and racism.

In another article, Miller accused Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and said her “legendary wisdom” amounted to “tired, multicultural clichés.” Another piece finds Miller finally breaking the right wing’s longstanding silence on the liberal media, asking why there aren’t any movies “about the evils of the Islamic holy war, the merits of capitalism…[o]r, dare I say it, a movie with a positive take on the Bush administration?”

He helped found and lead a campus group called the Terrorism Awareness Project.

CNN reports Miller served as “national campus coordinator, president, and co-founder” of the group, launched by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. (Horowitz is a vocally anti-black, anti-Muslim xenophobe and Zionist.) The project claimed its mission was to end “the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country as it attempts to defend itself in a time of terror." Miller promoted events like "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”—which didn’t catch on, for some reason—and videos with gross titles like The Islamic Mein Kampf. He also tried to get other college newspapers to run ads, like this one, which was reportedly designed by Richard Spencer. When colleges turned them down, Miller took his case to the only show that would have him, “Fox & Friends.” You can watch that appearance; note that Miller was still using his real voice, not his now-famous King of the D&D Virgins voice.

He palled around with white supremacist and recently punched neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

Spencer, who has lauded Miller as “very bold and strong,” said ahead of the election, “It's funny no one's picked up on the Stephen Miller connection. I knew him very well when I was at Duke. But I am kind of glad no one's talked about this because I don't want to harm Trump."

For the record, Miller has said the two were merely members of the same club and that they fell out of touch after graduation.

Another white nationalist is also a big fan, as is David Duke.

He worked for noted racist Jeff Sessions.

After a stint working for Michelle Bachmann, Miller took a communications job with Senator Jeff Sessions in 2009. Sessions' office—where Miller could help the racist, xenophobic sausage get made—helped elevate his visibility among conservatives, though initially, he was known mostly for his emails (see #16).

Politico notes the up-and-comer played a pivotal role in crushing the Gang of Eight’s 2013 bipartisan immigration bill. The outlet points out that “when the bill passed the Senate...Miller literally wrote the 23-page handbook that House members were given on how to fight the deal.” As you may already know, after being deemed too racist for the federal bench in the 1980s, Sessions was judged perfectly racist for the Trump administration and confirmed attorney general.

As you might imagine, he is a super annoying emailer.

A recent New York Times article describes Miller as “a man whose emails were, until recently, considered spam by many of his Republican peers.” The Times goes on to say:

On the campaign trail, he warmed up the crowds for Trump.

He talks about “uncontrolled migration from the Middle East,” and “illegal immigrants being arrested...for the most heinous crimes imaginable,” and hails Trump as the candidate “who will protect our cities, who will protect our communities, who will save our families.”

He wrote Trump’s RNC and 'America First' inauguration speeches.

Miller is reportedly responsible for penning Trump’s ominous RNC speech, in which he declared, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

"Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

He’s considered the brain behind the travel ban.

Infamous quotes from Miller’s tour of the Sunday morning shows last weekend.

“The president’s powers...represent the apex of executive authority.”

“We will have unquestioned military strength beyond anything anybody can imagine.”

“That’s the story we should be talking about and I’m prepared to go on any show anywhere anytime and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct 100 percent.”

His family is mostly not proud of him.

Glosser's letter, which is fairly long, goes on from there:

Mr. Trump is trying to sell you something...He sells fear of immigrants, contempt of our daughters, sisters, and wives, and sows discord and anger. He knows the dictator’s disgraceful sales tricks of challenging the integrity of democratic elections, he finds an unpopular outside group to blame our troubles on, cooks up false electoral fraud theories if he doesn’t get his way, threatens and bullies his opponents, and tells us that he is the only one that can lead the nation ahead. He’s trying to sell you something, and it’s not a good product. For the first time in my memory a major American political party’s presidential candidate has proposed that laws and regulations be established solely on the basis of a person’s religion and ethnic background. The legitimization of this as a basis of serious political discussion is a terrible step into darkness. Remember, what goes around comes around. If today it’s “them,” then tomorrow it may be you.

Another family member, commenting on the post, wrote, “At least he [Miller] doesn’t share our last name.”

518

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/stephen-miller-tried-publicize-lie-so-obvious-anti-immigrant-dhs-secretary-had

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http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/stephen-miller-captain-odious-last-major-alt-right-figure-trumps-white-house

After torch-bearing white nationalists marched in Charlottesville last month and a peaceful counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was murdered by a neo-Nazi, the leaders of the black, Hispanic, Asian and progressive caucuses in Congress sent a letter to President Trump. They asked that he fire White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.

They wrote:

Americans deserve to know that white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis are not in a position to influence U.S. policy.

It's hard to believe it somehow became necessary to write such a thing to the president of the United States about his high-level White House advisers, but it did. All three of those men have affiliations with or connections to white supremacists, "alt-right" groups and neofascist organizations. In the wake of those horrifying events in Charlottesville, and the president's insistence that the neo-Nazi marchers included "very fine people" and that anti-fascist protesters had created many of the problems, it seemed important to go on the record with this request.

As it happens, Bannon was exiled from the White House shortly afterward and Gorka followed a couple of weeks later. The press reported that they were both let go as part of a staff reorganization by John Kelly, the retired general who had come in to replace the hapless Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff and put an end to the chaos that had characterized the Trump administration from the beginning. For their part, Bannon and Gorka insisted that they had made the decision to leave because they believed they could better serve Trump from the outside. Let's just say that didn't sound convincing.

Most political observers, even many conservatives, were relieved. Gorka was an embarrassment, a man who literally wore medals associated with Nazi collaborators to the inauguration. The Daily Beast reported this week that he had landed a new job working for a pro-Trump super PAC called the MAGA Coalition, which is best known for its promotion of conspiracy theories, notably "Pizzagate," the imaginary child-rape ring allegedly run by Hillary Clinton out of a Washington pizza parlor. Gorka told Laura Ingraham on her radio show on Tuesday that the group plans to run primaries against "fake conservatives."

We know where Steve Bannon went. He's back at Breitbart making Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell miserable and plotting the apocalypse. Most observers saw Bannon as the most sinister presence in the White House, a white nationalist Rasputin with special access to Donald Trump's id. It was assumed that getting rid of Bannon meant that Kelly had removed the main influence that stoked Trump's darker impulses.

It turns out that Stephen Miller, the remaining member of the "alt-right" trio those House members demanded be fired, was the savviest political player among them. Rather than jockey for power with the president's powerful son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as Bannon did, Miller was smart enough to see that family would be the last people Trump would abandon. So he moved into Kushner's orbit.

After all the palace intrigue of the first eight months of Trump's administration, Miller is the one left standing. Judging from the president's "global carnage" speech this week to the United Nations -- an obvious sequel to the "American carnage" inaugural address -- Miller remains a highly influential adviser and a pernicious influence on our government.

Miller is a true white nationalist, going all the way back to his teenage years at Santa Monica High School, where he was known for his anti-Latino views. In college at Duke University he befriended Richard Spencer, future co-founder of the "alt-right" and the man who led a meeting of fellow fascists in a "Heil Trump" chant shortly after the election. Miller worked for the most anti-immigrant senator of the modern era, current Attorney General Jeff Sessions, before joining the Trump campaign and the administration, where his first assignment was to put together the new president's first botched Muslim ban.

Miller hasn't had his face on the cover of Time and nobody is parodying him (yet) on "Saturday Night Live," so Trump hasn't had reason to be jealous. His rare public performances have been the kind that the boss appreciates: combative, rude and extremely loyal to the president. Back in February he was dispatched to defend the president's assertion that fraudulent voters had stolen the popular vote, and he delivered an epic performance on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos:

George, it is a fact, and you will not deny it, that there are massive numbers of non-citizens in this country who are registered to vote. That is a scandal, we should stop the presses and as a country we should be aghast about the fact that you have people that have no right to vote in this country registered to vote canceling out the franchise of lawful citizens of this country. That’s the story we should be talking about and I am prepared to go on any show, anywhere, anytime and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct 100 percent.

Trump tweeted later that day:

Congratulations Stephen Miller- on representing me this morning on the various Sunday morning shows. Great job!

More recently, Miller took over the podium in the White House briefing room to defend the president's immigration policy. Most people thought his performance was creepy, but it likely made the president happy because Miller got into a spat with CNN's Jim Acosta, the reporter Trump just calls "fake news"

iller's even caught up in the Russia investigation now, having been revealed to have helped Trump draft a scorching version of his letter firing FBI Director James Comey, which was rejected by White House counsel Don McGahn as inappropriate. Considering Miller's temperament, combined with Trump's, one can only imagine what it must have said.

Miller isn't just giving Trump the words to express his dystopian vision, he is exerting a toxic influence on policy. The New York Times reported that the White House rejected a study prepared by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in revenue than they cost the government over the past decade. According to the Times, Miller “personally intervened in the discussions on the refugee cap to ensure that only the costs — not any fiscal benefit — of the program were considered.” Evidently, taxes paid by refugees don't count.

Stephen Miller is proving much more adept at seeing into Trump's psyche and stroking his racist id than Steve Bannon ever was. He's a smarter political player, he takes on the press, he's more focused on the details. He's getting the job done.

Heather Digby Parton,

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http://www.alternet.org/trumps-maniacal-un-address-has-set-america-course-cataclysm

miller, new axis of evil 5 incl venezula; Bebe

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http://www.alternet.org/trumps-maniacal-un-address-has-set-america-course-cataclysm

miller, new axis of evil 5 incl venezula; Bebe

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bannon feeds history to djt eg a jackson, pal of Miller who plugged trump into hard right eg immigration, fawning, so not bounced like bannon and gorka

https://kpfa.org/episode/rising-up-with-sonali-august-29-2017/

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/3/headlines/trump_aide_stephen_miller_spars_with_cnn_journalist_over_immigration

statue of liberty altered later?!

bs mirror racist ju jitsu

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see steven miller

When TV news viewers saw Trump adviser Stephen Miller accuse Jim Acosta of harboring a “cosmopolitan bias” during Wednesday’s news conference, they might have wondered whether he was accusing the CNN White House reporter of an excessive fondness for the cocktail made famous on “Sex and the City.” It’s a term that’s seldom been heard in American political discourse. But to supporters of the Miller-Bannon worldview, it was a cause for celebration. Breitbart, where Steve Bannon reigned before becoming Trump’s chief political strategist, trumpeted Miller’s “evisceration” of Acosta and put the term in its headline. So did white nationalist Richard Spencer, who hailed Miller’s dust-up with Acosta as “a triumph.”

Why does it matter? Because it reflects a central premise of one key element of President Donald Trump’s constituency—a premise with a dark past and an unsettling present.

So what is a “cosmopolitan”? It’s a cousin to “elitist,” but with a more sinister undertone. It’s a way of branding people or movements that are unmoored to the traditions and beliefs of a nation, and identify more with like-minded people regardless of their nationality. (In this sense, the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine might have been an early American cosmopolitan, when he declared: “The world is my country; all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”). In the eyes of their foes, “cosmopolitans” tend to cluster in the universities, the arts and in urban centers, where familiarity with diversity makes for a high comfort level with “untraditional” ideas and lives.

For a nationalist, these are fighting words. Your country is your country; your fellow citizens are your brethren; and your country’s traditions—religious and otherwise— should be yours. A nation whose people—especially influential people—develop other ties undermine national strength, and must be repudiated.

One reason why “cosmopolitan” is an unnerving term is that it was the key to an attempt by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to purge the culture of dissident voices. In a 1946 speech, he deplored works in which “the positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitanism that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded.” It was part of a yearslong campaigned aimed at writers, theater critics, scientists and others who were connected with “bourgeois Western influences.” Not so incidentally, many of these “cosmopolitans” were Jewish, and official Soviet propaganda for a time devoted significant energy into “unmasking” the Jewish identities of writers who published under pseudonyms.

What makes this history relevant is that, all across Europe, nationalist political figures are still making the same kinds of arguments—usually but not always stripped of blatant anti-Semitism—to constrict the flow of ideas and the boundaries of free political expression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, has more and more embraced this idea that unpatriotic forces threaten the nation. As Foreign Policy put it in 2014:

“The new theme of Russian politics [is] the conflation of loyalty to the Kremlin with patriotism. It says much that dissidents at home, from journalists failing to toe the official line to protesters on the streets, are castigated either as outright ‘foreign agents’ (every movement, charity, or organization accepting foreign money must register itself as such) or else as unknowing victims and vectors of external contamination — contamination, that is, from the West, whose cosmopolitanism and immorality Putin has come to see as an increasing threat to Russia’s identity.”

That same notion has characterized the politics of the former Soviet bloc. In Hungary, the president of its Parliament has repeatedly denounced his political opponents as “people without a country,” loyal only to values like freedom, contemptuous of tradition and religion. Its prime minister, Viktor Orban, has openly advocated for “illiberal democracy” and launched a campaign against the Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros. In Poland, the reigning Law and Justice Party sees the nation besieged by dangerous influences. An article last year in World Press succinctly summarized the situation:

“In the party’s propaganda the country is in ruins, its economy robbed blind by international capital, while the foreign ownership of some newspapers and other types of mass media outlets made Poland into a colony, infecting Poles’ minds with rootless cosmopolitanism. … What is at stake is Polish Christian national values that must be protected at all cost, namely the linguistic and religious homogeneity of the country. Only Poles should reside in Poland, and a proper Pole must be a Polish-speaking Catholic.”

In one form or another, such sentiments have been at play in the politics of the Netherlands, Germany, France, and (in less blatant form) in the Brexit vote in Great Britain last year.

And they undergirded much of Trump’s campaign. One of its central premises was that “globalists,” regardless of ideology or party, were undermining American interests—by bringing low-skilled workers to our shores, by building factories in other lands, by letting international financial institutions grow rich while hollowing out American cities and towns.

“We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be—always—America First.”

To be clear: Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller would angrily wave away any suggestion that they are echoing the sentiments of anti-democratic political movements, much less anti-Semitic dog whistles. But there is no evading the unhappy reality that to label someone a “cosmopolitan” carries with it a clear implication that there is something less patriotic, less loyal … someone who is not a “real American.”

So maybe the next time Miller wants to duel with an obstreperous reporter, he might consider going back to “elitist”—that’s a real homegrown insult.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/03/the-ugly-history-of-stephen-millers-cosmopolitan-epithet-215454

girls face slash?

The president vowed to destroy the "vile" cartel MS-13, which he called "particularly violent." He said that these gang members don't like shooting people because "it's too quick and too fast."

"I was reading, one of these animals was caught, and explaining, they like to knife 'em and cut 'em and let them die slowly because that way it's more painful. And they enjoy watching that much more," the president said. "These are animals." And he also pointed out that the gang was responsible for 17 murders in Suffolk County since January.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/31/politics/stephen-miller-immigration-trump-administration/index.html

no link

Miller, President Donald Trump's speechwriter, confidante and the author of his controversial immigration ban, has operated on the fringes of his own political party since he was a teenager.

But after what appears to have been a momentous White House policy coming out week, featuring Miller at its center, that's no longer the case. The California native has brought his views on immigration, multiculturalism and political correctness to the President's desk.

He's also helped Trump in his mission to disrupt Washington, ruffling feathers with the secretive way in which he helped lead the White House release of its temporary immigration ban from seven Muslim-majority countries late on Friday with little to no input from the government agencies tasked with implementing the vision.

But rather than a slap-dash effort, which is how the executive action seemed to unfold, Miller actually spent months crafting the order, a White House official said.

Would people in Ferguson embrace Trump's speech? 01:00

The real estate mogul's architect: Bannon's influence swells

The 31-year-old White House policy director has worked as the key voice in Trump's ear on immigration, along with Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart CEO who is another top adviser. The pair at one point overruled the Department of Homeland Security's more narrow reading of Trump's executive order by directing federal officials to also bar green card holders from one of those seven countries from entering the US. Those legal US permanent residents will now need to apply for a waiver to leave and return to the US, for at least the next 90 days.

The decision to work on the order largely in secret, however, left many Capitol Hill Republicans "pretty pissed about how this went down," one aide who blamed Miller told CNN Sunday.

The secrecy also led to mass confusion over the weekend, as Department of Homeland Security and other officials struggled to parse how to carry out the order.

Defending the policy Monday, Miller told CBS the move would "make sure that people entering our country truly love and support the United States of America."

Protesters swarm airports nationwide 01:33

But thousands of Americans hold a different view about the temporary immigration ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, evidenced by widespread protests.

The order, however, is perfectly in line with what Miller has been writing, pushing and talking about since he was 16 years old.

Trump fires acting AG after she declines to defend travel ban

Unlike some in the President's orbit who arrived later to the campaign, Miller has been with Trump since January 2016 and served as his hype man for much of the primary and general election.

The sharply dressed aide would often take the stage before Trump, firing up thousands of people with a consistent message: Those in power want to keep you down, but Donald Trump is here to raise you up.

"Everybody who stands against Donald Trump are the people who've been running this country into the ground," Miller said at one campaign rally in Texas. "Everything that is wrong with this country today, the people opposing Donald J. Trump are responsible for."

That rhetoric was familiar for Miller.

According to people who went to Santa Monica High School with Miller, the Trump aide made a name for himself touting his conservative views with the predominantly left-leaning student body.

"Stephen's whole view of immigration stems from high school," said Adrian Karima, a 31-year-old lawyer who sat two desks away from Miller in AP Government. "His negative views of immigration started in high school and just grew over time."

Karima, an Iranian immigrant who voted for Hillary Clinton, said Miller was outspoken in the government class, regularly challenging the teacher and arguing that the entire school -- which he said had sizeable African-American and Hispanic populations -- was trying to indoctrinate students.

"He saw it as being outnumbered in Santa Monica," Karima said, and viewed his role as "trying to preserve any idea of Americanism that he felt, particularly by pushing English-speaking first."

Trump Adviser Stephen Miller Clashes with ex-RNC Official 08:42

In March 2002, Miller -- age 16 -- wrote a lengthy opinion editorial for the Santa Monica Lookout that argued "very few, if any, Hispanic students" make it to honors classes because the school provides a "crutch" to those who don't speak English by ensuring "all announcements are written in both Spanish and English."

He also wrote that his high school wasn't patriotic enough.

"Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School," Miller wrote, knocking the school newspaper for condemning the military response to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, and faulting school administration for being "quick to preach non-violence."

Miller and other White House officials declined to be interviewed for this piece.

After high school, Miller attended Duke University, where he again became an outspoken conservative voice.

Writing for the Duke Chronicle, Miller, who is Jewish, wrote about the war on Christmas ("Christmas is being banned"), on immigration ("We oppose common-sense security measures. We give driver's licenses to illegal aliens") and on multiculturalism ("As we obsess over, adulate and extol the non-American cultures we ignore the culture we all hold in common").

After college, Miller moved north to Washington, where he began to put the political views he espoused for years into practice. His first job was with then-Rep. Michele Bachmann, the outsider Minnesota congresswoman who told CNN she took a "gamble" on Miller, who had no experience before he was hired to be her press secretary.

"I decided I would take a chance on him because he struck me as a very serious individual," Bachmann said, calling Miller "intelligent, hard working and highly competent."

Trump adviser, pundit spar over wife tweet 02:43

One thing Miller wasn't, Bachmann said, was a free-lancer. The former congresswoman said Miller was "very circumspect not to overstep any boundaries" even though the Bachmann felt he had "insight beyond his years."

Miller would later work as Rep. John Shadegg's communications director and then tied his success to Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama immigration hard-liner who is now Trump's pick to lead the Justice Department. Miller first worked with Sessions at the Senate Judiciary Committee and later moved to his personal office to serve as his communications director.

It was with Sessions where Miller came to be known as a skilled operator and true believer in conservative immigration policy. Miller helped his boss become the most outspoken critic of the 2013 bipartisan Gang of Eight immigration reform bill, penning a handbook filled with talking points on the issue and helping him lead the charge behind the scene to kill the measure.

Mnuchin arrives for his confirmation hearing in January. Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker, faced policy questions about taxes, the debt ceiling and banking regulation.