Stephen Miller's Leaked Emails Should Alarm You
Politics

Stephen Miller is a racist. That President Trump’s ghoulish policy advisor—the architect behind the administration’s travel ban, child separation crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, and refugee reduction efforts—aligns with white supremacists is not new information, nor is it particularly difficult to conclude, considering Miller’s long history of antagonism against non-white people. So on its face, there’s a certain element of “no shit” in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s new series by Hatewatch, which exposes Miller’s leaked e-mails with Breitbart News editors prior to the 2016 election, and reveals his full embrace of white nationalism. But a less cynical read shows the full extent of how disturbing his actions have been, the way he has been funneling racist propaganda to news outlets and the president himself, shaping policy with the beliefs of the most draconian racist conspiracies. More alarming still is how much of the press and public has accepted this overt racism with a shrug, just another facet of the unorthodox Trump administration.
At first, it’s easy to compare this to recently leaked audio of white nationalist Richard Spencer shouting a litany of slurs following the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Spencer’s high pitched meltdown about “kikes” and the people his “ancestors fucking enslaved” merely confirmed what we already knew about Spencer, one of the best known racists in the country. But the Miller findings, conveyed by Hatewatch with the headline “Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalism Revealed in Leaked Emails,” are more disturbing than a simple illustration of fact.
Bombastic acts of racism like Spencer’s can be frightening, but there’s a different kind of terror lurking in the paranoid breathlessness with which Miller writes about mass migration and immigration. There’s the troll that gleefully calls you a nigger, and then there’s the troll that methodically goes to the archives to explain why you’re a nigger. The former is shocking but the insult eventually dulls: Its one-notedness overwhelms the sting, often unveiling itself as the work of an uncreative edgelord. The latter is far more chilling, the product of a true believer, the most frightening brand of idiot. These aren’t the types who will spam your Twitter account with a slur and racist memes for a laugh. Instead, they’re eager to share the credo at the heart of their racism. They’ll comb through primary sources supporting race science, cite dubious statistics about IQ and interracial violence. They’re convinced that their hate is based on sound, unwavering logic, not emotion, and disproving them is an exhausting feat: countering misinformation and contextless data points is like fighting with air.
Miller represents the latter.