Leaked Emails Show Trump’s Minion Promoted White Nationalism

Many Republican "friends" take offense when confronted with the reality that one of the Trump/Pence policies that attracted swing voters that allowed Trump to eek out a narrow Electoral College win is the active promotion of white nationalism.  Perhaps that truth hits a bit to close to home for their consciences. In any event, newly leaked emails underscore how Trump point man on immigration, Stephen Miller, the Joseph Goebbels of the Trump/Pence regime, actively promoted white nationalism to pander to the ugliest elements of the GOP base.  As noted previously, good people do not support bad people and cruel and vicious policies based on hatred. Republican "friends" need to decide whether or not they are indeed good people and cease their support of Trump/Pence and white nationalist policies or, instead, admit to themselves and the world that they are not good people and are cut from the same cloth as Stephen Miller and the overt racist policies he espouses. They do not get to have it both ways. The Washington Post reports on the cache of Miller emails. Here are excepts:

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller sought to promote white nationalism, far-right extremist ideas and anti-immigrant rhetoric through the conservative site Breitbart, according to a report released Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The report is the first installment in a series that draws on more than 900 emails that Miller sent to a Breitbart writer over a 15-month period between 2015 and 2016 and were given to the SPLC. The report describes Miller’s emails as overwhelmingly focused on race and immigration and characterizes him as obsessed with ideas such as “white genocide” (a conspiracy theory associated with white supremacists) and sharply curbing nonwhite immigration.

In the wake of the news Tuesday, at least one member of Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), called for Miller to resign.

Among the more damning email exchanges highlighted in the SPLC report is one that shows Miller directing a Breitbart reporter to aggregate stories from the white-supremacist journal American Renaissance, or “AmRen,” for stories that emphasize crimes committed by immigrants and nonwhites. In another, Miller is apparently upset that Amazon removed Confederate battle flag merchandise from its marketplace in the wake of the 2015 Charleston church massacre; others reportedly show him promoting “The Camp of the Saints,” a racist French novel popular among white nationalists.

SPLC’s report indicates Miller was widely successful in molding the race- and immigration-focused stories that appeared on Breitbart. It repeatedly details how an email from Miller corresponded to a related article later appearing on the site.

The emails were provided to the SPLC by Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart writer and editor who exchanged scores of messages with Miller during his time transitioning from a press aide for then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to a senior adviser with then-candidate Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. . . . McHugh has since denounced her association with white nationalism and the far right.

“[McHugh] is well aware of the risks she took in giving us the material and confirming information,” said SPLC investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden, who wrote the report. “I think that’s incredibly brave.”

Hayden told The Post that he made contact with McHugh earlier this year as she was formerly on the periphery of several extremist groups he was following. McHugh was familiar with his work, Hayden said, and mentioned having materials she wanted to show him. After allowing him to view the emails on what Hayden recalled was “a very old computer,” McHugh ultimately decided to release the emails to him.

“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” McHugh said to the SPLC.

Several years on from the email exchanges, Miller is probably at the height of his power within the West Wing. As The Post previously reported, Miller is one of Trump’s longest-tenured advisers — along with Kellyanne Conway and Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner — and the most influential adviser shaping the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Excerpted emails shared with The Post show Miller drawing on stories from outlets such as the anti-immigration white-nationalist site VDARE and the conspiracy theory website Infowars and sending them to McHugh. Miller appears to urge McHugh to write about the stories and discusses how to frame them and push them to prominence on Breitbart’s site.

Hayden said. “The most important takeaway for me is that Stephen Miller found the basis for his ideas on websites that traffic in hate, and made it clear in his emails."

Miller is a thoroughly foul individual who has even been condemned by his own family members for his racism and advocacy for inhumane policies. He is a modern day Goebbels.

Trump's Phony National Emergency

Trump and Goebbels want to be, Stephen Miller.

Two pieces in the Washington Post look at Trump's phony national emergency declaration.  One looks at Chris Wallace of Fox News confronting Stephen Miller - Trump's equivalent to Hitler's propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels - and the other looks at Trump's own and his administration's undermining of Trump's own declaration.   Both ultimately look at the non-existent emergency at the US/Mexico border. As prior posts have indicated, the only emergency is a political one as Trump faces disappointing his virulently racist base.  First the piece that looks at Wallace's take down of Miller:

Unstoppable rhetoric collided with immovable facts on “Fox News Sunday,” as White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller defended President Trump’s national emergency declaration and invoked the potential for a veto if Congress disapproves in an interview with Chris Wallace.

Miller described an onslaught of drugs and migrants flowing over the border as justification for the emergency declaration.

Yet, like a small army of fact-checkers have noted before, Wallace told Miller the vast majority of hard drugs seized by Customs and Border Protection are captured at points of entry, not between them, and unlawful migration over the border has fallen 90 percent since 2000.

So what crisis is the wall supposed to solve? In shades of former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” theory, Miller invoked what could not be demonstrated by his own administration’s statistics. The segment took a tense turn after Wallace pressed Miller, a self-proclaimed constitutional conservative, over measures designed to block the president from obtaining funds outside Congress.

[T]he move lacks precedent, Wallace said, in how Trump has sought to secure his funds. Miller repeatedly refused to acknowledge it has not happened before and tried to fire back with a question of his own.

Wallace sailed past the dodge. “Then answer my question, can you name one case where a president has asked Congress for money, Congress has refused, and the president has then invoked national powers to get the money anyway?”

[Miller] suggested that if Congress passes a resolution disapproving of the emergency, Trump would probably veto it. “He’s going to protect his national emergency declaration, guaranteed. … If the [Trump] president can’t defend this country, then he cannot fulfill this constitutional oath of office.”

The second piece is a column by former Republican Jennifer Rubin, a vocal Trump critic, who lists out how Trump's own actions underscore the lie that a national emergency exists.  Here are excerpts:

None other than Ann Coulter declared on Friday, “The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.” She has a point. The president’s declaration, in the words of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), amounts to “a power grab by a disappointed President, who has gone outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process.”

Even the best-executed power grab would have been difficult to defend in court. . . . . Nevertheless, in 10 steps, Trump irretrievably ruined whatever legal case he would have had.

First, he did not address the issue when the Republican Party held majorities in both the House and Senate, when, for example, he had the ability to push through measures on reconciliation.

Second, he rejected a deal for $25 billion in border security in exchange for legalization of “dreamers,” which doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you’d do in a real emergency.

Third, he signed a continuing resolution that kept the government running until Dec. 8, 2018. Again, you wouldn’t agree to that in the face of a real emergency.

Fourth, Congress passed another continuing resolution to keep the government open until Dec. 21, 2018.

Fifth, the president provoked a 35-day shutdown that ended with a three-week continuing resolution. Again, this doesn’t give off an emergency “vibe.”

Sixth, as appropriators negotiate, the president repeatedly threatens to us emergency powers until Congress gives him what he wants. The critical precondition for an emergency declaration is lack of congressional compliance.

Seventh, appropriators reach agreement — and Trump signs it.
 Eighth, there is no report or analysis demonstrating why Congress’s response is inadequate. Instead, Trump declares an emergency on the same day as the signing, a transparent effort to eclipse his utter failure to deliver on a campaign promise.
 Ninth, at a bizarre Rose Garden press conference on Friday, Trump declared, “I didn’t need to do this. . . . I just want to do it faster.” It is difficult to imagine a more damaging confession that the emergency is figment of Trump’s frail ego and thirst to avoid disappointing his base.

Tenth, Trump tells a set of ridiculous lies to justify his border wall. . . . Trump’s irrational, desperate and incoherent approach has not merely damaged his chances of surviving a court challenge. He has made it infinitely harder for Republicans to defend him and vote against a resolution reversing the declaration. Trump told them there was no emergency.

Stephen Miller's Uncle Unleashes on Miller's Racist and Anti-Immigrant Hypocrisy

Stephen Miller - who reminds me of Josef Goebbels - and Der Trumpenführer.  

One of the goals of this blog is to expose hypocrisy.  Nowadays, thanks to the Republican Party and its "conservative Christian base," the Trump/Pence regime, and, of course, the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, there is almost an unlimited supply of material.  Interestingly, Stephen Miller, seen by many as the guiding force behind Der Trumpenführer's anti-immigrant jihad - Mike Pence likely applauds it while pretending to "know nothing" - today finds himself being lambasted for his hypocrisy by his own uncle in a piece in Politico.  Miller's uncle recounts the immigrant history of Miller's own family in America, which is hundreds of years shorter than that of many blacks and Hispanics, and calls Miller out as a foul hypocrite. Yet, Miller's hypocrisy is no less than that of many Trump supporters whose families came to America as immigrants far more recently than the ancestors of many of those whom they hate and deride.  Here are highlights from the Politico piece (as you read the entire piece, think of similar hypocrites in your own social circles): 

Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.  It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy.

In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.

I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.

I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.

The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America first” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.
 True, Jews were excluded from many occupations, couldn’t buy homes in some towns, couldn’t join certain organizations or attend certain schools or universities, but life was good. As in past generations, there were hate mongers who regarded the most recent groups of poor immigrants as scum, rapists, gangsters, drunks and terrorists, but largely the Glosser family was left alone to live our lives and build the American dream. Children were born, synagogues founded, and we thrived. This was the miracle of America.
 Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics, Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions. After all, Stephen’s is not the only family with a chain immigration story in the Trump administration. Trump's grandfather is reported to have been a German migrant on the run from military conscription to a new life in the United States, and his mother fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City. (Trump’s in-laws just became citizens on the strength of his wife’s own citizenship.)
 These facts are important not only for their grim historical irony but because vulnerable people are being hurt. They are real people, not the ghoulish caricatures portrayed by Trump. . . . I meet these statistics one at a time through my volunteer service as a neuropsychologist for the Philadelphia affiliate of HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the global nonprofit that protects refugees and helped my family more than 100 years ago. I will share the story of one such man I have met in the hopes that my nephew might recognize elements of our shared heritage.
 In the early 2000s, Joseph (not his real name) was conscripted at the age of 14 to be a soldier in Eritrea and sent to a remote desert military camp. Officers there discovered a Bible under his pillow which aroused their suspicion that he might belong to a foreign evangelical sect that would claim his loyalty and sap his will to fight. . . . “They smashed my face into the ground, tied my hands and feet together behind my back, stomped on me, and hung me from a tree by my bonds while they beat me with batons for the others to see.”

Joseph was tortured for 20 consecutive days before being taken to a military prison and crammed into a dark unventilated cell with 36 other men, little food and no proper hygiene. . . . When he was too weak to stand, he was taken to a civilian clinic where he was fed by the medical staff. Upon regaining his strength, he escaped to a nearby road where a sympathetic driver took him north through the night to a camp in Sudan where he joined other refugees. Joseph was on the first leg of a journey that would cover thousands of miles and almost 10 years.

Before Donald Trump had started his political ascent promulgating the false story that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, while my nephew, Stephen, was famously recovering from the hardships of his high school cafeteria in Santa Monica, Joseph was a child on his own in Sudan in fear of being deported back to Eritrea to face execution for desertion. He worked any job he could get, saved his money and made his way through Sudan.

He endured arrest and extortion in Libya. He returned to Sudan, then kept moving to Dubai, Brazil and eventually to a southern border crossing into Texas, where he sought asylum. In all of the countries he traveled through during his ordeal, he was vulnerable, exploited and his status was “illegal.” But in the United States, he had a chance to acquire the protection of a documented immigrant.

Today, at 30, Joseph lives in Pennsylvania and has a wife and child. He is a smart, warm, humble man of great character who is grateful for every day of his freedom and safety. . . . He hopes to become a citizen, return to work and make his contribution to America. His story, though unique in its particulars, is by no means unusual. I have met Central Americans fleeing corrupt governments, violence and criminal extortion; a Yemeni woman unable to return to her war-ravaged home country and fearing sexual mutilation if she goes back to her Saudi husband; and an escaped kidnap-bride from central Asia.
 Trump wants to make us believe that these desperate migrants are an existential threat to the United States; the most powerful nation in world history and a nation made strong by immigrants. Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human.
 Most damning is the administration's evident intent to make policy that specifically disadvantages people based on their ethnicity, country of origin and religion. No matter what opinion is held about immigration, any government that specifically enacts law or policy on that basis must be recognized as a threat to all of us. Laws bereft of justice are the gateway to tyranny. Today others may be the target, but tomorrow it might just as easily be you or me.
 As free Americans, and descendants of immigrants and refugees, we have the obligation to exercise our conscience by voting for candidates who will stand up for our highest national values and not succumb to our lowest fears.

From time to time, all of us find ourselves in situations where we must choose between supporting good or supporting evil.  Sadly, the Trump/Pence regime and its Republican enablers and sycophants now are the face of evil.  If one is decent and moral, there is no option but to oppose their agenda and vote to defeat Republicans in order that a Democrat controlled Congress can blunt the worst of the Trump/Pence/Miller evil.  If one choose to nonetheless vote Republican, than you deserve to be viewed by others with contempt and deemed a hypocrite. 

White House Staff Undermines Shutdown End

White supremacist/White House adviser Stephen Miller

Reports are coming out from both Republicans and Democrats that a principal obstacle to a resolution of the budget impasse and associated federal government shutdown is White House staff members, specifically white supremacist Stephen Miller who even looks as if he could have been one of Adolph Hitler's unsavory, murderous thugs (to me he is reminiscent of Josef Goebbels).  The Hill reports that Lindsey Graham has stated that as long as Miller is involved in negotiating the immigration portion of the dead lock, "we age going nowhere."  Graham said yesterday that Miller has "been an outlier for years" on the issue of immigration. A piece in the Washington Post looks at Miller's toxic influence in the negotiations.  Here are excerpts:

Stephen Miller, one of the few remaining original advisers to President Trump, invited a small group of writers and editors from Breitbart News to the White House last fall for a conversation on immigration. The conservative news website — headed at the time by one of the former White House advisers, Stephen K. Bannon — has been a steadfast cheerleader for Trump and his nationalist anti-immigration agenda.

But Miller’s goal on this occasion was to sell the group on a compromise: a possible deal offering protections to the young undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers” in exchange for tougher immigration provisions, such as an end to family-sponsored migration. 

Now the 32-year-old former Senate aide is at the center of the fiery Washington battle over what to do about the dreamers, whose protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will soon be rescinded by Trump and whose cause has been taken up by Democrats. Miller was among those in the Oval Office this month when the president ragedabout accepting immigrants from “shithole countries” 

On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) — whose doomed immigration compromise with Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) was the target of that Trump tirade in the Oval Office — blasted Miller as a primary reason for the continuing standoff over border issues.

“As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we are going nowhere. He’s been an outlier for years,” Graham told reporters at the Capitol. . . . . every time we have a proposal, it is only yanked back by staff members.”

Miller’s driving obsession is immigration, an area where he has long pushed hard-line positions . . . . . In Washington, as an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), he was instrumental in helping to kill a bipartisan effort in 2013 for a broad immigration deal. He and Sessions helped galvanize House conservatives to block the bill passed by the Senate, including distributing a handbook of talking points aimed at undercutting the compromise. 

Some in the administration also view Miller as an opportunist. . . . . Miller frequently reads Breitbart and, early in the administration, was spotted carrying a pile of Breitbart articles into Bannon’s office. White House aides said Miller was a prime supplier of Breitbart clips to Trump. He also takes personal pride in successfully pitching stories to the site, associates say.

Note this photo of Goebbels - there is a resemblance in my opinion that extends beyond physical appearance.  

Goebbels

Stephen Miller May Have Some Russia Problems

It seems that with few exceptions there are two commonalities between senior members of the Trump presidential campaign and the now inner circle of the Trump/Pence regime: efforts to secure contacts with Russia operatives and lying about said contacts. A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at yet another member of Der Trumpenführer's inner circle who has his finger prints all over efforts at collusion and the firing of James Comey as Comey began to connect the dots linking the Trump campaign to a conspiracy with a foreign enemy.  That individual is the vile Stephen Miller, one of the proponents of Trump's racist/white nationalist agenda.  Here are column excerpts:

Fascinating piece here in the Times applying some Times level sleuthing to shed more light on those Papadopoulos court documents from last week. We get some idea of the backstory of Joseph Mifsud, apparently a failing and shambling academic career that was on its final skid when Russians showed up in 2014 with money and newfound respectability, an old story. Other gaps of the story are filled in. But the big one is Stephen Miller. According to the Times, Miller is the “senior policy advisor” referenced in the Papadopoulos court documents. He was the only unnamed player still unidentified. This means that Miller was one of the top Trump advisors Papadopoulos was keeping posted on his efforts to set up meetings between Russian officials and Trump campaign officials, perhaps even (preposterous as it may seem) a meeting between Trump and Putin himself. This revelation is important for at least three reasons.

First: The most mundane is that Miller was at the highest level of Trump’s campaign advisors and remained in at least as high a role into the White House and up until today. He is within the innermost circle.

Second: Miller was also one of the advisors pressing hard for President Trump to fire James Comey. Indeed, Mueller’s investigators just interviewed Miller, apparently mainly about the Comey firing. Miller was one of the small group of Trump lickspittles who accompanied the President on the lost weekend at Bedminster when he stewed over Comey and resolved to fire him on his return. He also wrote a first draft of Trump’s firing letter, which the grownups back in Washington, horrified, dramatically revised. In short, Miller’s hands are all over the Comey firing. Now that we know he was in the loop for the Russia contacts, we know that in seeking to fire Comey he was at least in part seeking to kill an investigation into himself.

Third: Miller came to Trump via Jeff Sessions. He was a top staffer to Sessions in the Senate. By 2016 he had risen to Communications Director. And when Sessions endorsed Trump in late February 2016 he brought Miller into the Trump circle. As a speechwriter and advisor, Miller played a key role taking Trump’s instinctive racist-nationalist politics and aligning it with the comparable policy mix Sessions had been pushing, with no great luck, in the Senate for years. We still don’t have a terribly good explanation of how Jeff Sessions got on the Russia bandwagon, how he ended up having as multiple private conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak over the course of 2016, including one private meeting in Sessions’ senate office in September. Miller seems like at least one likely conduit. At a minimum, Miller getting updated on Papadopoulos’ adventures makes it much less credible that Sessions knew nothing about the channels opening up between the campaign and Russia.