New emails show Trump’s Stephen Miller proposed using trains to deport immigrants in Breitbart pitch
That Stephen Miller — the White House Senior Policy Advisor who has been the biggest cheerleader in the Trump administration for the most draconian and repulsive immigration policies to emerge from that circle of hell — is an odious and despicable presence in the upper echelons of our current government is an opinion to which most decent Americans would readily subscribe.
As the architect of the administration’s child separation policy, Miller is the nexus of white nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment in the cabal of Trump advisors trying to drag this nation back into the 19th century, pre-civil war hierarchy of race relations.
Miller is an unlikely advocate for the harsh immigration stance he advocates. His Jewish ancestry would be considered anathema for most of the racist white supremacists to which his policies are designed to most attract to the Trump camp. When his maternal great-grandparents fled the pogroms in their native Belarus for the United States at the turn of the 20th century, Yiddish was their native tongue.
Yet, after a couple of generations of assimilation, their descendant has become the leading advocate for closing the borders and harshly punishing any non-citizen who enters the United States, whether they have a legitimate claim of asylum or not.
Now, the Southern Poverty Law Center has published a series of emails that Miller wrote pitching story ideas to an editor at the ultra-right-wing Breitbart News beginning when he was an aide for then-Senator Jeff Sessions through his time as a Trump campaign policy adviser.
The emails show Miller as a fervent adherent of one the alt-right’s most hateful fantasies, the “great replacement” theory that posits a conspiracy to replace the white Anglo-Saxon population of the country with immigrants of color, an ironic position for the descendant of Jewish immigrants after the right-wing rioters in Charlottesville, Virginia marched with their tiki-torches chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
Perhaps the most chilling revelation in the emails uncovered by the SPLC was the article Miller shared from the far-right website WorldNetDaily with Phyllis Schlafly suggesting the idea of shipping immigrants out of the U.S. on trains to “scare out the people who want to undo our country,” invoking images of the German detention and shipping of Jewish, Roma, and other non-Aryan residents to death camps during the Holocaust of World War II.
The SPLC article on their website’s Hatewatch section is well worth reading to get an idea of the other hateful content that Miller conjured up in his correspondence with the Breitbart editor.
Be prepared to take a shower after reading it, however. You’ll need to scrub hard to wash off the lingering scent of bigotry and hatred that may remain after exposure to Miller’s odious ideology.
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Original reporting by Michael Edison Hayden at SPLCenter.org.
