As plausible deniability around White House senior adviser Stephen Miller’s racism breaks down, his supporters still mount a desperate defense. Liam Glen writes on the conservative movement’s disturbing fascination with white supremacy.
Contemporary American political culture is good for racists. So long as they dress well and avoid saying slurs in public, they can easily pass as respectable political commentators.
Of course, not everyone is cut out for it. When audio emerged of an unhinged rant by notable neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, it must have been a severe shock to whoever still fell for his veneer as a respectable white nationalist.
Now an even higher-profile figure is under scrutiny, Senior Adviser to the President Stephen Miller. Of course, Miller’s questionable views have been an open secret for some time now.
According to Spencer, the two of them were close acquaintances during their overlapping time as members of the Duke Conservative Union. Since then, Miller has devoted his career to stopping non-whites from entering the country. His lack of empathy is such that it worries even other administration officials.
Any doubt about Miller’s sympathies disappeared after former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh leaked a trove of emails from Miller to the Southern Poverty Law Center. This revelation should prompt conservatives to question how they let someone like Miller into the highest rungs of power.
In the Mind of Miller
The full list of disturbing incidents is too large to briefly go over, but just a few are necessary to get a sense of Miller’s worldview.
First is his habit of sharing articles from websites like VDARE and American Renaissance.
For those unfamiliar, VDARE is an anti-immigration website founded by Peter Brimelow, who is very open about his mission of maintaining the current “American ethnic mix.” The site’s various authors have written extensively on racial pseudoscience and on topics such as the inherently subversive nature of Hispanics and Jews.
To its credit, VDARE does keep a thin charade of respectability. The same cannot be said for American Renaissance – or, as Miller affectionately calls it, “AmRen.” Founded by Jared Taylor, the journal has a self-proclaimed focus on “white identity” and strong opposition to racial integration.
Miller was also a heavy promoter of The Camps of the Saints by Jean Raspail, an astoundingly racist novel about the invasion of France by a caravan of Indians led by a man known as “the turd eater.”
Indiscriminate violence is presented as the only way of stopping them, but thanks to the interference of unpatriotic leftists, it proves too late to prevent the entire white world from being overrun by what Rapsail depicts as inferior races. Steven Bannon, among others, is also quite a big fan of the book.
Unsurprising, then, is Miller’s nostalgia for the days when American was governed by the Immigration Act of 1924, which sought to make it severely difficult for anyone other than Northern Europeans to enter the country.
In all of this, it is easy to infer Miller’s fixation on the ideal of white America. Foreigners are subhumans whose lives are disposal. Even individual Americans do not seem to matter much. Rather than are simple cogs in the machine that forms the country’s national identity, which must be preserved at any cost.
Don’t Fraternize with the Fringe
Miller has become indefensible, but that has not stopped some conservatives from trying. For the most part, his apologists offer only cheap acts of obfuscation, but their main argument seems to be that there is no way of knowing if Miller is truly racist. He could still be a perfectly fine man who just happens extensively read and take influence from racist publications.
When the line between mainstream conservative and racist becomes so thin, perhaps it is time for right-wingers to start reexamining their movement. If one does not want to be branded a racist, avoiding white supremacist books and websites would be a rather obvious place to start.
Yet, the line continues to fade away. As one reader informed columnist Jamelle Bouie, “every young conservative I know regularly reads VDare.”
Many White House staffers are reportedly fans of an far-right manifesto written by a man known as “Bronze Age Pervert.”
Such attraction to the fringe is not surprising when the president himself infamously offered praise to conspiracy theorist and grifter Alex Jones.
Even before the age of Trump, the highly respected National Review published academic Mackubin Thomas Owen’s commentary on The Camp of the Saints proclaiming that the book “eerily prefigures our current immigration mess” and only admitting as a minor side note that the author’s “emphasis on the white race can indeed be off-putting.”
This is usually the point where someone brings up concerns about free speech and the marketplace of ideas. But that hardly applies in this situation. There are a near-infinite number of ideas about politics floating around in the world, and per Sturgeon’s Law, 90 percent of them are utter nonsense which deserve no attention.
There are people who insist that Stalin did nothing wrong, there are some who still believe in the divine of kings, there are even those who maintain that the agricultural revolution was a mistake and only a return to hunting and gathering can salvage humanity. We do not grant them any legitimacy, nor should we.
Whenever someone on the left associates with the racist and anti-Semitic cult leader Louis Farrakhan, for instance, the right has no problem piling criticism upon them.
As Stephen Miller continues to run the nation’s immigration policy, it is the duty of every conservative who is disgusted by the mainstreaming of open racism and bigotry to cut off all contact from it. Regard the two-bit racists and alt-right tryhards with all the disdain that they deserve. Chastise anyone who makes the mistake of taking them seriously.
Meanwhile, those who refuse to do this – who continue to flirt around with the forces of racial hatred that have served as the primary scourge of humanity over the last centuries – can no longer act surprised when others start taking note.
Birds of a feather flock together, and kinship with white supremacists does not speak well for one’s character.