Leaked emails show Stephen Miller promoting white nationalist propaganda

Senior White House adviser Stephen Miller promoted white supremacist literature, racist immigration stories, and lamented the loss of pro-slavery Confederate symbols in a series of leaked emails obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project.

The emails, sent between Miller and editors of the conservative Breitbart News between March 2015 and June 2016, “showcase the extremist, anti-immigrant ideology that undergirds the policies [Miller] has helped create as an architect of Donald Trump’s presidency,” Hatewatch reported Tuesday.

Miller sent the emails in question while working as an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), from his government email address, according to Hatewatch. He also sent emails from a personal Hotmail address, both “before and after he started working for Trump.”

At the time, Breitbart was busy promoting Donald Trump’s candidacy.

Hatewatch noted that “more than 80 percent of the emails” it reviewed from Miller centered on the topic of race or immigration, Miller’s central area of focus in the Trump administration.

Miller’s emails included scores of references to stories about nonwhite individuals committing crimes. He also argued repeatedly in favor of “severely limiting or ending nonwhite immigration to the United States,” Hatewatch noted.

“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,” it wrote.

Among the emails Miller sent were stories from the white nationalist site VDare. The Anti-Defamation League has described VDare as a website that “posts, promotes, and archives the work of racists, anti-immigrant figures, and anti-Semites.”

One particular VDare story Miller shared was an entry from anti-immigrant activist Steve Sailer, promoting a theory that a hurricane could then-President Barack Obama to invite “a lot of Mexicans” into the United States.

In his emails, Miller also cited the racist novel “The Camp of the Saints,” which has been used white nationalists to fearmonger about “white genocide,” a baseless claim that nonwhite immigrants hope to destroy the white race.

“You see the Pope saying west must, in effect, get rid of borders. Someone should point out the parallels to Camp of the Saints,” Miller wrote.

Cécile Alduy, a professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the French far right, which has often cited the book, told HuffPost in 2017 that the book “reframes everything as the fight to death between races.”

Steve Bannon, who led Breitbart and was later Trump’s campaign chairman and a senior political adviser in the White House, has also repeatedly promoted the book and its xenophobic themes.

Miller also recommended stories to Breitbart from the white supremacist site American Renaissance, which was founded by white supremacist Jared Taylor.

One such story was an article dated July 1, 2015, called “New DOJ Statistics on Race and Violent Crime.” According to former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh, who leaked Miller’s emails to Hatewatch, the article “focused on a favorite topic of Miller’s in the emails — interracial crime.”

As McHugh recalled to Hatewatch, Miller phoned her on a workday, around that time, to discuss the story.

“Miller asked me if I had seen the recent ‘AmRen’ article about crime statistics and race,” she said. “I responded in the affirmative because I had read it. Many of us [on the far right] had read it. I remember being struck by the way he called it ‘AmRen,’ the nickname.

McHugh was fired from Breitbart in 2017 over several anti-Muslim tweets, though as Hatewatch noted, she has since “renounced” the far-right.

Miller himself appears on American Renaissance as the author of an article that was republished on the site in 2005 from the right-wing site FrontPage Magazine, Hatewatch reported. That article blamed the “left” for “excusing black and Hispanic misbehavior [in schools] by holding those students to a lower standard.”

After a racist mass shooter killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, Amazon and other retailers chose to remove products with the pro-slavery Confederate flag. The shooter had posed with the flag in pictures before his massacre.

In emails to Breitbart around that time, Miller said the move “defies modern comprehension” and urged an editor at the site to attack Amazon.

“Have you thought about going to Amazon and finding the commie flags and then doing a story on that?” he wrote. “I think that would be a very big story.”

While working in the White House, Miller has publicly embraced and promoted many of the racist ideas he shared with Breitbart.

Miller authored the Trump administration’s travel ban, which sought to block travelers from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States.

Trump also reportedly told Miller that he was “in charge” of the administration’s immigration policies and has empowered him to come up with policy ideas and regulatory changes that would restrict immigration to the United States.

Miller was a key architect of the 2018 “zero-tolerance” family separation policy, which led thousands of children to be forcibly removed from their parents. Some of those children were held in facilities with histories of alleged abuse and neglect, and experts have said the forced separations may have done irreparable damage to the children’s mental health.

Miller notably came under the spotlight in August 2017 after he attacked the poem “The New Colossus” at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, while pushing an anti-immigrant legislative proposal from Senate Republicans. The poem advocates immigration, inviting into the country those “huddled masses yearning to be free.”

Miller dismissed the poem as “not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty,” because it was not a part of the “original” statue and “was added later.”

As many media outlets later reported, Miller’s comments mirrored those of white supremacists like former KKK grand wizard David Duke and Richard Spencer, who have criticized the poem in the past.

Breitbart later defended and praised Miller’s remarks.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.