An Extremist in Moderate Clothing
Pseudo intellectualism has long been a hallmark of white supremacy — one generation’s phrenology is another generation’s eugenics is another generation’s Bell Curve. Thanks to social media sites and video sharing platforms, modern-day racists can, with amazing alacrity, view, produce, and disseminate specious statistics about crime rates in Chicago and fantastical conspiracies about the Great Replacement. In this way, information has become small-d democratized to the point where even the most credulous fool can claim to be an expert on almost any subject, particularly with respect to race and racial relations.
Which brings us to one Stephen Miller. Miller, of course, is a senior adviser and speechwriter for the administration of White House Occupant #45: highly a high-profile role in previous administrations, but Miller has distinguished himself from the anonymous pack with his noxious public persona and a predilection for virulently racist and xenophobic policy ideas.
That predilection became even more pronounced today when the Southern Law Poverty Center released an article that extensively cataloged Miller’s affinity for white nationalism. The SLPC article features a series of emails Miller sent to Breitbart News in the years prior to working for the current administration. These emails highlight Miller’s extremist xenophobic ideology and how that ideology informed not only articles written by Breitbart, but policies and positions taken by the White House over the past three-plus years.
Of course, there’s little in the SLPC piece that will come as a surprise to close observers of Miller’s. At most, it offers confirmation bias that the policies that appeared on their face to be racist and anti-immigrant were undergirded by a bigoted, prejudicial worldview expressed in unambiguous terms in his private correspondences with fellow travelers. It was in such a context that Miller could be free to fully express himself — at least, up to a point. According to the SLPC (via The Washington Post), Miller “rarely puts anything in writing, eschewing email in favor of phone calls.” Presumably, part of that can be chalked up to the intense paranoia and secrecy that marks Miller and other administration apparatchiks. But I suspect that this tendency also stems from an innate understanding that his views are rightly reviled by the public at large and, therefore, need to be concealed under the cover of officious edicts and disingenuous denials.
A noteworthy aspect of Miller’s Breitbart correspondences is his consistent evocation of junk political science to buttress his racist views. For instance, at one point Miller encourages Breitbart editor Katie McHugh (who has since renounced her far-right past) to aggregate immigrant crime statistics from a notorious white nationalist website. In another exchange, he recommends a novel called The Camp of the Saints, a work that has been embraced by white nationalists and neo-Nazis for its dehumanizing depictions of Indian immigrants. This corpus of racist literature gives comfort and ideological support to people like Miller: “see, I’m not wrong, here’s an author who agrees with me!”
This appeal to authority (or “authority,” as the case may be) is far from new, and moreover has become increasingly prevalent in an age where any one of us can instantaneously summon a link that supports our side in a social media argument. As it turns out, Miller is as apt to share fake news with his interlocutors as a cognitively addled, eternally credulous grandparent. Of course, the Constitution protects Miller’s right to his views, noxious as they are. But when that person plays a fundamental role in shaping U.S. policy — and perhaps more to the point, is frustratingly opaque about those views, at least in public — then you have a recipe for disaster. Or, as I would say with no small measure of chagrin, our current state of affairs.
