White House viciously smears the activist group that exposed Stephen Miller’s white nationalist emails
Earlier today a bombshell new report from the Hatewatch arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed emails from President Trump’s Senior Advisor Stephen Miller which express a chilling fondness for white nationalism.
Between 2015 and 2016 Miller communicated with the far-right propaganda website Breitbart News. As the SPLC explains, some of the Miller emails included writings from the white nationalist website VDARE and the crackpot fringe site Infowars, a recommendation for “The Camp of the Saints” a book popular among white nationalists which pushes the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and a crowing approval for an article on Hispanic crime statistics which was written by a white nationalist.
In the wake of the mass shooting carried out by white supremacist Dylann Roof on a Black church, Miller voiced concerns over the decision by Amazon to pull Confederate flags from their website as well as concerns over the campaign to remove Confederate statues. On top of all that, Miller expressed a keen interest in pointing out that Chris Harper-Mercer, a mass shooter with white supremacist beliefs, was in fact “mixed race.” Hatewatch adds that many of the emails are littered with slang and jargon lifted straight from white nationalist literature.
Now, Axios reports that White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham has addressed the disturbing Miller story in what can only be characterized as exceptionally cowardly fashion.
“We have not seen the report,” said Grisham. “The SPLC, however, is an utterly-discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization that has recently been forced — to its great humiliation — to issue a major retraction for other wholly-fabricated accusations. They libel, slander, and defame conservatives for a living. They are beneath public discussion,” she went on, employing the same kind of shameful, dishonest smear strategy we’ve come to expect from her boss. This defense will only play well with MAGA diehards, as most Americans recognize the SPLC for the reputable organization it is.
According to Axios‘s Zach Basu, an unnamed White House official tried to blame the Hatewatch story on anti-semitism because Miller is Jewish, an utterly ridiculous accusation since none of the allegations against Miller have anything to do with his being Jewish. Claiming as much is a transparent attempt to undermine Hatwatch‘s credible reporting and engage in obvious bad faith distraction techniques.
A White House official also provided us with this response on background: "This is clearly a form of anti-Semitism to levy these attacks against a Jewish staffer." https://t.co/SUg9e1nOZz
— Zach Basu (@zacharybasu) November 12, 2019
The emails were leaked to Hatewatch by Katie McHugh, a former editor at Breitbart who was eventually fired for shockingly Islamaphobic tweets but who now claims to have had a change of heart and disavowed her place in the far right. She emailed back and forth with Miller on numerous occasions, sometimes starting the conversations and other times responding to his suggestions for stories to cover.
“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” McHugh said to Hatewatch.
Hatewatch reportedly trawled through over 900 emails sent by Miller to Breitbart. Most of the emails were sent before Miller attached himself like a putrid barnacle to the hull of the Trump campaign, back when he was still working for then-Senator Jeff Sessions. Hatewatch’s investigators discovered that roughly 80% of those emails were centered around race or immigration, revealing the obsessive manner in which Miller approaches these topics. Explains Michael Edison Hayden for Hatewatch:
“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.”
As stomach-churning as these revelations are, they’re in perfect keeping with what we know about Miller and the course we’ve seen this administration chart since Inauguration Day. This is a White House that delights in perpetrating pointless acts of cruelty on nonwhite people. It’s a destructive, authoritarian behemoth with a pulsing white nationalist heart. There is no reasoning with warped, perverted souls like Stephen Miller. The only recourse for decent Americans is to vote Donald Trump out and send all of his cretinous little minions scuttling back to their parents’ basements.
Original reporting by Michael Edison Hayden.
