Your cheat sheet for Stephen Miller, senior Trump policy advisor and white supremacist

Stephen Miller was born in August 1985. This photo was taken in 2017.

If you’re only becoming familiar with Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s senior policy advisor, through the recent leak of about 900 emails with a Breitbart News editor in the time leading to the 2016 election, you’ll find this cheat sheet handy. It’ll provide you with lots of background information on Miller, Breitbart, Katie McHugh (the former Breitbart editor with whom Miller exchanged emails), and more.

Who is Stephen Miller?

Stephen Miller has been at war with minorities since at least his teen years. He once broke off a friendship by saying “I can’t be your friend anymore, because you are Latino.” If you want a a quick portrait of Miller, this video explainer does a pretty good job of charting his path from small-time nuisance racist provocateur to big-time racist policy-maker:

“Child is father to the man,” the saying goes, and as this video shows, high school asshole is father to the adult asshole:

The “Immigration Enforcement” episode of Patriot Act shows the harmful and damaging effects of his policies:

The Southern Poverty Law Center points out that Miller’s policies include…

…reportedly setting arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants, an executive order effectively banning immigration from five Muslim-majority countries and a policy of family separation at refugee resettlement facilities that the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General said is causing “intense trauma” in children.

Have you ever been denounced by a family member on national media? Miller has:

Who is Katie McHugh?

Katie McHugh was once an editor at the alt-right Breitbart News, and during her tenure, she was in regular email communication with Stephen Miller. She kept those emails and recently leaked them to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

She also used to tweet stuff like this:

She has since parted ways with the alt-right, which you can read about in this Buzzfeed piece, A former alt-right member’s message: “Get out while you can”. Ignore the doe-eyed glamor shots (why do media outlets keep giving terrible people like Richard Spencer and James Damore fashion shoots?) and remember that at one point, she wrote that “Slaves built the country as much as cows built McDonald’s.”

Also worth reading:

Heavy.com: Former Breitbart Editor Katie McHugh: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
The Daily Beast: I Knew Katie McHugh Was a Racist. Did I Enable Her?

What is Breitbart News?

Breitbart is, as RationalWiki so succinctly puts it, “Nazi Buzzfeed”.

Here’s Media Matters for America’s slightly longer summary:

Breitbart News was all-in for Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential bid, and then-Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon joined the Trump campaign after he won the Republican nomination and served for a short time in the Trump administration as the president’s chief strategist before returning to helm Breitbart for several months. Breitbart also worked closely with white supremacists and neo-Nazis to push racist content.

What’s in those emails?

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the organization that Katie McHugh leaked the emails to:

Miller does not converse along a wide range of topics in the emails. His focus is strikingly narrow – more than 80 percent of the emails Hatewatch reviewed relate to or appear on threads relating to the subjects of race or immigration. Hatewatch made multiple attempts to reach the White House for a comment from Miller about the content of his emails but did not receive any reply.

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.

Here’s a link to the the article, and below are links to key parts of it:

What is VDARE?

I’ll leave it to Media Matters for America to summarize:

VDare is a racist, anti-immigration website associated with several prominent white supremacists and alt-right leaders. The Southern Poverty Law Center has described VDare’s list of contributors as “a Rolodex of the most prominent pseudo-intellectual racists and anti-Semites.” The site was founded by Peter Brimelow, who has admitted that it publishes pieces written by white nationalists.

Miller sent McHugh a number of links to articles from VDARE, which is where a lot of alt-righters get their first exposure to The Camp of the Saints, which Miller recommended that people at Breitbart read.

What is The Camp of the Saints?

Think of it as the French version of The Turner Diaries, the preferred bedside reading of the America far right. Written by Jean Raspail and published in 1973 as Le Camp de Saints, it was translated to English in 1975.

A quick summary of the book’s plot: The story starts with a flotilla of a million Indians seeking a new place to live sets sail for France. Their initial plan was to go via the Suez Canal, but this later changes to them rounding the Cape in South Africa. Both Egypt’s and South Africa’s militaries adopt the stance of sinking the ships rather than letting the migrants land. France takes the more liberal guilt-based approach and lets the migrants in, turning the country into a lawless nightmare that is no longer France as we know it. The flotilla’s success encourages other third worlders to take over other western nations. In the end, the mayor of New York is forced to share the mayoral residence with three African-American families, the Queen of England’s son is forced to marry a Pakistani woman, and Chinese peasants take over Siberia.

Notable fans of this book include:

Steve Bannon, loves referring to this book, usually in reference to that most overused of white supremacist tropes: the Great Replacement.
Radix, a website founded and published by everyone’s favorite punchable neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, has praised this book as “highly original”, declaring that its “narrative, howsoever exaggerated for effect, was a distillation and condensation of observable reality.”

Also worth reading: