The ongoing impeachment inquiry has muffled the public impact of a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center detailing White House aide Steven Miller’s communications with Breitbart News in the 2015-16 time frame. Based on emails leaked to the SPLC, the article describes how Miller passed on all manner of white supremacist ideas and story suggestions to a contact at Breitbart. The communications leave no doubt that Miller is steeped in and inspired by the most hateful and pernicious ideas oozing out of the far right today. From his praise for the Coolidge-era immigration restrictions admired by Adolf Hitler, to his treatment of the “white genocide” theory (in which non-whites are alleged to have formed a conscious and insidious strategy of breeding whiteness into oblivion), to his ready use of the everyday lingo of white supremacists, we now have evidentiary proof that Miller represents the worst of America.
The direct line that we can draw from Miller’s race hatred to his key role in the Trump’s immigration policies means that, for all practical purposes, this administration’s immigration policy may as well have been dictated by the KKK itself. This evidence also clarifies that the Trump administration has drawn an unambiguous line through the American polity: on one side are those who believe non-whites are racially and “culturally” inferior, and on the other are those who believe in a 21st century America where the color of your skin or your country of origin have nothing to do with your Americanness.
The SPLC report crystallized for me a basic fact that’s been hidden in plain view. In the far-right’s hateful and unfounded claims that non-white immigrants, and indeed non-whites in general, are somehow unfit for or incompatible with American culture, they display the very moral and cultural inferiority they ascribe to non-whites. Deranged by phantom fears, rotted by racial panic, they hold themselves up as model citizens even as their irrational hatred offers proof of the opposite: that they are everything that America should denounce and work to transcend. They claim cultural irreconcilability between whites and non-whites, when the actual cultural chasm is between those who believe in our democracy and the common good, regardless of skin color, race, or religious creed, and those who think the Confederate flag represents freedom, racial apartheid equals justice, and being eaten alive by racism and hate is a reasonable way to live your life.
Why has Trump appointed a verified white nationalist as his immigration czar, and why does Stephen Miller still have a job in this administration? The Democrats need to press this question and its obvious answer now and as long as this immoral and intellectually bankrupt man remains in the White House. Beyond this, calling out and repudiating the white supremacist agenda of the president needs to be central to the 2020 election, including against the broader GOP that daily signals through silence or active support its complicity in this deranged vision for America. The racist core of Trumpism is central to its assault on our democracy, as it identifies not only non-white immigrants but non-white Americans as somehow illegitimate members of our society. Defending America and our fellow Americans means delegitimizing and defeating these modern-day manifestations of the Klan and the Confederacy, whether they’re coming from the sewers of Breitbart or the White House.