According to a report from the Daily Beast, Stephen Miller, the highly influential advisor to President Donald Trump, is the end result of a shadowy network rmade up of racist organizations and PAC's designed to push a white nationalist worldview from the fringes into deep inside the White House.
Using a batch of Miller's emails recently unearthed by the Southern Poverty Law Center sent between 2015 and 2016 as a leaping off point, the Beast's Mark Potok took a deep dive into the network --and the man who created it -- that brought Miller along.
As Potok writes, "Miller has long been a close ally of the nativist empire built over decades by the late John Tanton, who was himself revealed as a white nationalist in private communications that became public years ago. Tanton’s many powerful groups—which include the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and Numbers USA—adopt varying degrees of camouflage, but at their heart are infected with Tanton’s view of America as a nation for white people."
Pointing out that "FAIR officials have testified more than 100 times to Congress and CIS propaganda is regularly cited by politicians and other important players," the report states, "They are not alone. Tanton has founded or funded more than a dozen anti-immigration groups, and those groups have in turn worked with many smaller groups in a continuing battle for immigration restriction."
Tanton, who died in July at the age of 85, once wrote, "Demography is destiny. We decline to bequeath to our children minority status in their own land,” the report states, with Potok adding, "Above all, Tanton wanted to overturn the 1965 immigration law that ended a racist quota system instituted in 1924. He idolized the architect of the 1924 law, John Trevor Sr., a man who warned of 'diabolical Jewish control' and distributed pro-Nazi propaganda. To Tanton, as he wrote to a FAIR board member, Trevor’s work should serve as 'a guidepost to what we must follow again this time.'"
That, the report states, helps inform the worldview of Miller who has been the architect of Donald Trump's immigration policies.
Miller, "has repeatedly cited CIS, an organization listed by the SPLC as a hate group. In May 2015, Miller was the keynote speaker at a CIS awards ceremony, where he praised staffers extravagantly. In February 2017, he cited misleading CIS claims about terrorism to support Trump’s Muslim ban, and six months later he cited the group again while arguing for drastic reductions in legal immigration. He spoke to CIS and other nativist groups in a January 2018 phone conference," the report states.
"He [Miller] suggested the staffer [cited in the emails] read articles from American Renaissance, a racist journal published by Jared Taylor—a man Tanton also admired and who once asserted in his publication that '[w]hen blacks are left entirely to their own devices… civilization disappears,'" Potok writes, adding, "Miller’s views are loathsome. But Miller is both a promoter and, to some extent, a product of a much wider racist network aimed at preventing non-white immigration into the United States."
"It is possible, if unlikely, that the Miller brouhaha will lead to his demise as a presidential adviser," the report concludes. "But the larger world of the racist Tanton network—a network that already has contributed several key officials to the Trump administration and has repeatedly worked to frustrate comprehensive immigration reform—constitutes a grave threat to rational and humane immigration policies that will continue long after Miller is gone."
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