Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda

"This book is ostensibly a biography of Stephen Miller but, at the same time, it is also a history of the white nationalist turn in the US. What Guerrero does is tell Stephen Miller’s story, but then show how he rises up the ranks in the Republican Party as it is transformed into a white grievance party. His rise corresponds with the framing of immigrants as the fundamental threat and talking about the border as the most important issue in the US. At the same time, Republicans are starting to dabble in white supremacist ideas like the great replacement. These notions of whiteness were very extreme and fringe 40 or 50 years ago, but have been sanitized and moved back into popular discourse in the United States by people like John Tanton and his network of anti-immigrant groups. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Stephen Miller has been a key player in a lot of that. He was in Jeff Sessions’s office in the Senate, who was the most anti-immigrant senator and who had a close relationship with the Tanton Network groups. Then Miller moved to Trump’s campaign and became a key figure in Trump’s White House. He is also closely tied to a number of the more extreme white supremacists, people like Peter Brimelow and Richard Spencer, as well as the anti-Muslim activist David Horowitz. They have been mentors to Miller. Guerrero takes us behind the scenes to understand those connections between the Republican Party, which is the public face, and the white supremacy that is increasingly framing the policies that they are implementing in the United States. Yes, that is right. There is a base of people in this country that this sort of language appeals to. Still, I think it has been surprising quite how quickly it shifted back into the mainstream. Of course, the language of white supremacy was mainstream in the United States from its founding through the 1950s. The unusual period is the 1960s through the early 2000s, when racist thought was pushed to the side, at least in terms of acceptable public discourse. Behind the scenes during that period, Tanton Network groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, and Numbers USA sanitized and repackaged white supremacist ideas. Then figures like Miller and Trump moved those ideas back into the mainstream of political thought on the right. So, in some ways, it is a reemergence of things that were there before. I think what Trump did was he made it okay to say these things. Trump was the megaphone but people like Miller were giving him the right things to say, framing immigration in particular ways, and then implementing their exclusionary vision when they got into power. I would say no. Biden did come to power, Trump lost the election, but we are at critical point in the US. The people who support the white nationalist view of the country, who believe in the great replacement theory that immigrants and people of color are replacing white people in their country, feel like this is the moment to make a stand on this issue. What that is going to look like over the next few years is, I think, a little frightening. I have been surprised how quickly the great replacement went from a fringe idea to being a widespread view today. Newt Gingrich talked about the great replacement in an interview. Tucker Carlson is saying it over and over again. He is valorizing someone like Viktor Orbán in Hungary who has already done an authoritarian takeover. So, I’m concerned about how far they might go to protect their view of a white America."