There’s Nothing Controversial About Calling Stephen Miller What He Is

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller might finally get what he wants, with Donald Trump vowing, "We want to go in a tougher direction" on immigration. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump reportedly told him "you're in charge" of the administration's immigration policy. Miller may have also had a hand in pushing out Kirstjen Nielsen as secretary of Homeland Security. Nielsen reportedly enraged Trump in her unwillingness to resort to illegal measures, like closing down the border entirely and reinstating the family-separation policy for people crossing the border after a judge ruled against it.

In response to the news that Miller was pushing for more extremist officials to run Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency under DHS, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar tweeted: "Stephen Miller is a white nationalist. The fact that he still has influence on policy and political appointments is an outrage." Some of Omar's critics took the moment as an opportunity to make a peculiar attack: Donald Trump Jr., Breitbart writers, and New York Representative Lee Zeldin condemned her as an anti-Semite for calling a Jewish member of the Trump administration a white nationalist. But as Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan pointed out, none did so when he levied the very same charge against Miller last year.

Omar, of course, isn't alone here. Even those close to Miller have made the same observation. Miller's own uncle has said his draconian policies would have doomed their Jewish refugee ancestors to death in pogroms. And actual neo-Nazis see him as advancing their goals: Andrew Anglin of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer called Miller "the last person in the White House that has any sense," referring specifically to Miller's anti-immigrant agenda. That's been apparent to those who have worked with him, as well. A White House adviser, referring to images of families being split apart at the border, told Vanity Fair that "Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border. He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS."

Miller has a long history of singling out minorities for ostracism and vilification, starting at a young age. Before high school, according to The Atlantic, he informed one friend that they could no longer be friends, citing his "Latino heritage" as one of the reasons. As a college student at Duke, he started a program he called the "Terrorism Awareness Project." In his words, it was meant "to make our fellow students aware of the Islamic jihad and the terrorist threat, and to mobilize support for the defense of America and the civilization of the West."

In the process he worked with David Horowitz Freedom Center, a famously Islamophobic organization, and tried to coordinate anti-Muslim newspaper ads with Duke classmate Richard Spencer, a white supremacist who has called for a "peaceful ethnic cleansing" of non-white people in the U.S. Spencer also claimed to have mentored Miller. And while Spencer denied that he was an actual white supremacist (a common gaslighting tactic among white supremacists: using coded language), he said of Miller: "He is a strong American nationalist, you could say."

As White House adviser, Miller masterminded Trump's original Muslim ban, and he has since claimed to be the idea man behind Trump's traumatic family-separation policy. In interviews, he's unapologetically called it an easy decision to make. Miller has endeavored to make legal immigration much harder. “He doesn’t treat them as human beings. They’re animals, or they’re a product,” a former National Security Counsel official told Politico of Miller's approach to immigrants. He's also ratcheted up attacks on immigrants who are coming to the U.S. legally, demanding immigration cuts and reportedly saying, "I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil."

Stephen Miller has made the ideology driving his policies toward non-whites quite clear. There's no reason to dance around the end goal.