After the Signal Chat revelations?
It does appear that one Stephen Miller, a Trump White House advisor ….
Has the ‘Juice’ to shut down the Trump Chief of Staff and the Vice President….
Below is from a linked piece that attempts to explain the ‘WHY’ Miller is SO high strung against migrants who DO tend to be the very minorities he had to deal with in his growing up….
At 39, Miller is a millennial (51 percent of voters age 30 to 44 voted for Harris); he was raised Jewish in a Reform congregation (84 percent of Reform Jews voted for Harris) and grew up in Santa Monica, California (Santa Monica’s precincts ranged from 71 to 86 percent for Harris); he has parents with advanced degrees and himself graduated from top-ranked Duke University (56 percent of college graduates and a likely 75 percent of students at Duke voted for Harris); and he has lived his entire postcollegiate life in the District of Columbia (92 percent of DC voters went for Harris).
Miller has the profile not of a typical Trump supporter but of a garden-variety liberal Democrat. Nevertheless, he is arguably one of the president’s most influential and ideologically fervent loyalists. Having previously served as chief speechwriter and a senior adviser for policy in Trump’s first term, this year he returned to the West Wing as deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser in Trump’s second—roles that mark him as one of the most powerful people in the Trump White House and, by extension, the world. As a January New York Times profile put it, “Mr. Miller was influential in Mr. Trump’s first term but stands to be exponentially more so this time.”
One of the architects of the attempted “Muslim ban” as well as the infamous child-separation policy during Trump’s first term, Miller has now pledged to oversee “the largest deportation operation in American history,” indiscriminately targeting the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants believed to be living in the United States, with the full coercive power of the executive branch. To whatever extent he is successful, he will transform America demographically, culturally, and economically in ways he has fantasized about since his early teens; in many respects, he already has.
How to make sense of Miller and his trajectory? While he has made his share of public appearances to push his ultra-nativist views, he rarely speaks about his own political evolution. To date, the only authoritative biography of Miller is Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, by the reporter Jean Guerrero. Published in 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and during a presidential election that saw voters reject Trump, the book was well received by reviewers but arrived at a moment when Miller seemed, mercifully, to be fading in relevance. But the story Guerrero recounts is an urgent one, packed with insights into the kind of personality that self-radicalizes toward the far right in the unlikeliest of circumstances. As we now know, Miller was only just getting started during Trump’s first term. The particular brand of virulent xenophobia he represents is now politically ascendant, and his biography is inescapably central to the history of the present….
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In middle school, Miller was already drawn to right-wing subcultures that distinguished him from his peers, purchasing a subscription to Guns & Ammo magazine and finding himself inspired by the writings of Charlton Heston and Wayne LaPierre on the Second Amendment. His father was also moving right, alienated by bad relationships and burned bridges with his liberal Santa Monica cohort, and Stephen seems to have inherited his father’s contrarian streak. By the time he enrolled in the public Santa Monica High School, which Guerrero portrays as neatly internally segregated between professional-class, college-bound whites and working-class Hispanics, he was a full-fledged conservative provocateur.
For Miller, a key entry point to the right was The Larry Elder Show, whose Black host had built a following among right-wing Angelenos for his verbal assaults on political correctness and liberal shibboleths. Miller called in to the show and invited Elder to speak at his high school, and he subsequently became a frequent guest, a precocious teen reactionary holding forth on his high school’s alleged anti-Americanness in the wake of the 9/11 attacks before an audience that spanned Southern California.
Miller’s provocations became more outlandish as he advanced through his teens. He cultivated a mid-century gangster affect:….
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He was known for arguing with teachers, hijacking school events, and winning attention with his outrageous antics. In both high school and college, he would be repeatedly observed throwing trash on the floor and then insisting that the custodial staff pick it up. (“Am I the only one here who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?” he is quoted as saying at one point.) A number of students and faculty found this behavior appalling, but Miller’s shameless transgressiveness at least got him a lot of attention.
His willingness to upset liberals and thrive on their outrage put Miller on the radar of David Horowitz, the nationally notorious firebrand whose red diaper upbringing and early career involvement with the Black Panthers were followed by an abrupt rightward turn beginning in the 1970s…
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Perhaps the most vocal advocate against immigration in that media space was one Donald Trump, who had leveraged his celebrity to become the leading exponent of the “birther” conspiracy theory during the Obama years, impressing Miller greatly in the process. “Our whole country is rotting, like a third world country,” Trump told Breitbart in the wake of the Obama immigration bill’s defeat, prompting Miller to e-mail his friends that “Trump gets it…. I wish he’d run for president.” When Trump began his long-shot campaign the following year, Miller, barely 30, joined up, and the two quickly hit it off. Where more traditional young Republicans might have spent their early careers preparing to work for a more conventional Republican candidate like Jeb Bush or Chris Christie, Miller had presciently spent his preparing for a candidate like Trump. And with Trump’s victory came opportunities to do the kinds of things that his more seasoned peers might never have proposed….
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In addition to the president himself, Miller built a close relationship with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, ensuring a level of family trust that protected him from the turnover for which the Trump administration became infamous. If xenophobia was the policy through line for most of Miller’s efforts, competent bureaucratic maneuvering and absolute loyalty to Trump were what empowered him to execute his agenda. Miller’s fingerprints are likewise all over the early initiatives of Trump’s second term, including turning legal refugees away from the United States, suspending foreign aid, launching ICE raids on major cities, and leaning on the major tech companies to ban diversity initiatives.
The world according to Stephen Miller is a cruel and callous one, in which America is strictly for unhyphenated Americans and those here “illegally” must be forcibly returned to the “failed states” where they were born. To Miller, the crumbling American heartland is being preyed on not by rapacious capital but by an invading army of gangsters, thugs, and terrorists waved in by coastal liberal elites—in other words, by exactly the kind of people he has always lived among…..
image….Southern Poverty Law Center
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