There’s an adage:
You can pick your friends.
You can pick your nose,
but you can’t pick your relatives.
Stephen Miller is a low-keyed senior White House advisor to Donald Trump. He is singularly the father of the Zero Tolerance policy that separated immigrant children from their parents. He shares credit for Trump’s Muslim ban with former WH senior staffer Steve Bannon.
Recently an op-ed piece appeared on Politico’s web site and magazine titled:
Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.
Miller’s uncle and author of the piece, David S. Glosser, volunteers his service as a neuropsychologist for the Philadelphia affiliate of HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the global non-profit agency that protects refugees and helped his family more than 100 years ago. He writes,
“If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”
Glosser, Miller’s maternal uncle, details the families escape from the anti-Jewish pogroms and childhood conscription of Tsarist Russia in 1903. Had the family been stuck in the small Russian village of Antopol, now Belarus, they most certainly would have been victims of the Nazi genocide that massacred the 2000 Jews living there.
Glosser adds,
“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and 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.”
Glosser also points out that “chain migration”, a common Trump trope, is how Trump’s own grandfather and Melania’s parents entered the US.
To get an idea of when Stephen Miller formed his hard-line immigration beliefs, one need only to go back to his days as a high school student in Santa Monica, California. He decried immigration, multiculturalism and bilingualism. He wrote several op-ed pieces for the school newspaper blaming America’s ills on immigrants, school administrators and Muslims.
In one piece he wrote,
“When I entered Santa Monica High School in ninth grade, I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills. There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that
attend our school.”
Yeah, right. The subtle implication here is that Hispanics as a whole are less intelligent than Caucasions.
He saw himself as an outcast in a liberal enclave, he actually became something of a national figure, going on national conservative radio’s The Larry Elder Show, to grouse:
“Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash? We have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us.”
The arrogance and superiority complex of a person who would say something like this just jumps out and slaps you in the face. Remember the episode of The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon Cooper needed three non-physicist bodies to fill out his Physics Bowl team and it turns out that the janitor was a physicist in the former Soviet Union. “Moscow U. Go Polar Bears!”
Miller also equated liberals as terrorists and criticizing his school’s response to 9/11 he said,
“Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”
Given his Jewish heritage, it would be easy to understand his dislike of Muslims. The conflict in the Middle East between Israel, Palestinians and the Arab countries is a tragedy that has been ongoing for most of the 20th century and into the 21st, and it shows no sign of abating. Trump’s declared recognition of Jerusalem as the real capital of Israel and moving the US embassy there isn’t going to hasten any peace process. It’s worthwhile to note that of the seven countries listed in the original Muslim ban, Saudi Arabia was not included though 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists were Saudis. Osama bin Laden is Saudi.
Note also that since 9/11, all but two of the mass shootings in this country, schools, churches or otherwise, were carried out by white American citizens.
Miller went on to attend Duke University graduating in 2007 with B.S in political science. He continued writing conservative columns for the school newspaper. While at Duke, Miller accused poet Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia”
In addition, Miller and the Duke Conservative Union helped co-member Richard Spencer, a Duke graduate student at the time, with fundraising and promotion for an immigration policy debate in March 2007 between the open-borders activist and University of Oregon professor Peter Laufer and journalist Peter Brimelow, the founder of the anti-immigration website VDARE. Spencer would later become an important figure in the white supremacist movement and president of the National Policy Institute, and famous for coining the term “alt-right”. Spencer advocates white-European unity and a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” of nonwhites from America. He was a featured speaker in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which an alt right supporter drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing one and maiming two others.
In a December 2016 interview with Mother Jones, Spencer admitted that he wanted to keep his relationship with Miller quiet.
“I knew [Miller] very well when I was at Duke. But I am kind of glad no one’s talked about this, because I don’t want to harm Trump.”
In another interview with Vanity Fair six months later, Spencer was more open, claiming that he mentored Miller, calling him “ballsy,” Miller denies he had a relationship with Spencer.
Duke University’s former senior vice president, John Burness, told The News & Observer in February 2017 that, while at Duke, Miller
“seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking—incredibly intolerant.”
After graduating from college, Miller worked as a press secretary for Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Congressman John Shadegg, both members of the Republican Party. Miller started working for Alabama Senator and future Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2009, rising to the position of communications director.
Miller worked with Senator Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, to enact policies restricting immigration and cracking down on sanctuary cities. The WH said it would withhold federal funding to sanctuary cities. A policy which was quickly challenged in Federal court.
Also with the formal implementation of Miller’s policies, i.e. “Travel” Ban (no matter how the WH tried to rename it, it’s a MUSLIM ban), Zero Tolerance and Trump ending DACA, there have been a plethora a legal challenges against them in Federal courts. No other president has had his policies challenged as much as Trump has. What does that say about Trump and his respect for the Constitution.
Trump has made it a practice to publicly rebuke Federal judges and the courts. In a response to the Federal judge who blocked the Executive Order to withhold funds to sanctuary cities, the WH released this statement from Trump,
“The San Francisco judge’s erroneous ruling is a gift to the criminal gang and cartel element in our country, empowering the worst kind of human trafficking and sex trafficking, and putting thousands of innocent lives at risk,” the statement said. “This case is yet one more example of egregious overreach by a single, unelected district judge.”
Miller is on record for blasting the Federal judiciary. In a February 2017 appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation, Miller criticized the federal courts for blocking Trump’s travel ban, accusing the judiciary of having
“taken far too much power and become, in many cases, a supreme branch of government … Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
“…will not be questioned” ???? Spoken like a true dictator. DUMMY!
We have something in the Constitution that gives all three branches, Executive, Legislative and Judicial, something called checks and balances. The First Amendment protects free speech AND the freedom of the press.
The press is known as the Fourth Estate despite the fact that Trump has labeled it “the enemy of the people.” No sitting president has EVER made such a dangerous statement.
Cornell Law School professor Jens David Ohlin said Miller’s statement showed “an absurd lack of appreciation for the separation of powers” set forth in the Constitution.
Bannon is long gone, yet Miller is still in the White House and he still has Trump’s ear when it comes to anything about immigration. Glosser’s rebuke of his nephew will probably have no effect on Miller and certainly not Trump.
The only thing that stands between Trump, Miller and tyranny is the Federal courts and the Constitution. God bless America!