Over the past few months, the nation has come to know Stephen Bannon, who serves as the Chief Strategist of Donald Trump’s White House, as a conniving, crass bigot who made a single hop from the leader of Breitbart, the nation’s most bigoted mainstream website to bullying his way into the highest office in the land.
For those of us who have been targeted by Breitbart for years, we see Bannon’s fingerprints all over Trump’s executive orders. Breitbart is basically known as a platform that targets and harasses immigrants, Muslims, refugees, people of color, and women — so, seeing Trump appoint a cabinet and issue orders that do just that all were right in line with the Breitbart philosophy of the world. It’s also why the meme of Bannon as Trump’s puppetmaster has taken hold.
But this weekend the nation got a new level of confirmation that Stephen Bannon is not the only Steve pulling the strings. Stephen Miller, a 31-year-old Duke graduate who somehow found a way to be an outspoken critic of Maya Angelou while in college, now serves as Donald Trump’s Chief Policy Advisor.
Nevermind that he has no advanced experience crafting policies. Nevermind that he, like most of Trump’s cabinet picks, lacks any graduate education on policy or law or international affairs or diplomacy. The most educated man in the White House knows how to perform brain surgeries — so, naturally, they put him in charge of housing.
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For the past few months I repeatedly heard that Stephen Miller was a pompous, arrogant, rude, bigot. This remark from a Duke administrator says it all:
“He’s the most sanctimonious student I think I ever encountered,” said John Burness, Duke’s former senior vice president of public affairs and government relations. “He seemed to be absolutely sure of his own views and the correctness of them, and seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking. Incredibly intolerant.”
It’s deeper than that. People who knew Miller in middle school said he was a bigot back then and expressly ended childhood friendships with Latino students over their ethnicity. “I can't be your friend any more because you are Latino,” Jason Islas says he was told by Miller the summer before they began high school. In fact, in an amazing piece of investigative journalism from Univision, they uncovered instance after instance of bigotry, xenophobia, and homophobia from throughout Miller’s time as a student at Santa Monica High School. Because it was simply not that long ago, witnesses and documents have been relatively easy to find.
Students said he ended all relationships with any non-white students that “he used to make fun of the children of Latino and Asian immigrants who did not speak English well.” Not only that, but in his own writings uncovered by Univision, he regularly complained about the rights and privileges of Muslim students, LGBT students, and particularly Latino students — who made up over 30% of his school — the largest school in the district. The very existence of a gay club spooked him. He could not believe that the school invited a Muslim guest speaker.
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School Board member Oscar de la Torre shared repeated stories of clashes with the teenage Miller and recalled that the student showed up for a meeting designed to discuss school support for black and Latino students. Except Miller showed up to destroy the meeting, de la Torre told Univision Noticias.
“He wanted to sabotage us,” de la Torre said. “He confronted everyone, denying that racism existed. He said that was a thing of the past.”
Are you reading what I’m writing here or what? In the White House right now, serving as Chief Policy Advisor, is a young, inexperienced bigot whose racist roots go back to his childhood. Another student, Natalie Flores, said Miller had “an intense hatred toward people of color, especially toward Latinos."
Yet another student, Charles Gould, who attended elementary through high school with Stephen Miller, called him “an unabashed racist.” Gould continued, “he was constantly making disparaging remarks about the African American, Latino, and Asian students at our school.” Multiple former classmates, including professional baseball player Cody Decker, have all spoken of how Miller was booed off of stage “by 4,000 students” when he was running for class president. In the speech, Miller alluded to how students should not have to pick up their own trash or clear their own cafeteria plates, because the cafeteria workers, who were almost exclusively black and Latino, should do it for them.
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And, so it appears that the kid who harassed and belittled immigrants, Muslims, and other students and staff of color, was actually the architect of Donald Trump’s disastrous Muslim ban. Of course he was. Your Chief Policy Advisor should play a chief role in crafting policies, but this man is dangerous. He has no substantive experience crafting policy. Even in his limited roles working for, of all people, Michelle Bachman and Jeff Sessions, he wasn’t crafting policy, he was a communications guy. He has no credible national security experience, but was said by two government officials to be running some National Security Council meetings — which is batsh-t crazy.
While the Trump administration has been one giant mess these past few weeks, we had not yet had the distinct experience of hearing Stephen Miller talk much. He would frequently be peering over Trump’s shoulders as he signed random executive orders, but pretty much kept quiet. Then, this weekend, perhaps thinking he was ready for primetime, the White House unleashed Miller on the Sunday morning shows.
What I saw was not simply unconventional or weird, even, but downright disturbing and unethical. Often looking like a deer caught in the headlights, or perhaps reading from a teleprompter, with tones and vocalizations that seemed not to quite match the words coming out of his mouth, the man simply told lie after lie after lie. I would call it peculiar, but dishonesty is now the norm out of the White House. However, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever watched - in part because it’s not actually a joke — this inexperienced bigot is crafting America’s new (failed) policies.
In evaluating his statements, independent fact-checkers repeatedly gave him four Pinocchios, the worst score a statement can receive. He lied over and over and over again — with a straight face - to the very intelligent people who were interviewing him and refused to allow him to lie without being challenged.
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You must see it for yourself. It’s a frightening spectacle. And without seeing it, everything I have just told you will make far less sense. Here is a video montage of his comments. From the moment it begins, it’s as if we’ve gone into an alternate universe. It’s worse than fiction. It was just a matter of him “not being ready for primetime,” which he isn’t, but it appears that he was actually operating at maximum capacity. It’s just that his best is offensively terrible.
OK. Now that you’ve seen that, if you have not yet seen Miller’s extended interview with George Stephanopoulos, it’s three of the most painful minutes my brain has ever experienced. I hate to even ask you to watch it, because it’s not fair for you to have to suffer through it, but he lies over and over and over and over again. It’s preposterous. Watch it here.
If “Saturday Night Live” created that very skit, with his actual words, tone, and behavior, it would seem like they did too much. Again, though, this is not about style — it’s about a man with a deep history of bigotry and discrimination and no credible history in making policies, now crafting policies that affect our nation, our security, and honestly have a far reaching impact on the world at large.
Shame on the 62,979,879 who voted for Donald Trump. This is pretty much what we thought we’d get from him, but seeing it in action is worse than I could’ve ever imagined.
Zeitgeist 