The Ugly Ignorance and Illusions of Miller’s Xenophobia
Miller continues to invite comparisons to the ugliest ideology of the 20th century.
So I noted the following from the Deputy Chief of Staff on Friday:
It was so absurd on so many levels that I actually checked to make sure it was’t a parody account. But, of course, it isn’t.
By now, it is possible that the reader has already encountered a take-down of the tweet, but I just feel the need to say the following.
First, and part of the reason this felt like a parody, is that this is such an on-the-nose thing for a bigot to say without noting how self-contradictory it is. It could also be an attempt to poke fun at someone like Miller by trying to make it seem that he doesn’t realize how ridiculous the content of his tweet is. But, rather than being some attempt at satire, this is Miller doing what so many bigots do: ignore the self-contradictory problem with hating on immigration, because Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra are the children of immigrants.
They exemplify not some past purity vision of White America producing its culture all by itself. No, citing those names, especially Sinatra, is to demonstrate how much of American culture has been generated by the children of immigrants. Frank Sinatra was, and in many ways still is, a major American cultural icon. But his parents were Italian immigrants who came during a period of fairly open borders (more open than now, I would note).
Miller’s tweet is utterly self-defeating from his own ideological point of view. (And we won’t even get into the fact that Miller’s own great-grandparents were immigrants).
Some additional thoughts:
Second, Miller is engaged in a weird nostalgia about decades in the past (which is on point, given his reactionary ideology). Presumably, he is talking about the Dean Martin & Frank Sinatra Family Christmas Show, which aired in 1967. Not quite the 50s, which is where so much MAGA nostalgia centers, but Martin and Sinatra are avatars of that era, without any doubt.
Third, Miller is just lying about “infinity migrants from the third world.” While I am sure that there are people out there who advocate for utterly open borders and draining the whole of the world into the United States, this is not what any mainstream debate is about.
Fourth, Italians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (when Sinatra’s and Martin’s families would have come to the US) would have decidedly been considered the colloquial equivalent of the “third world” (although the term would not be invented until the mid-20th century).
Fifth, is this guy so consumed with hate and fear that he watches a 58-year-old Christmas special and it makes him think about how much he hates immigrants? Spoiler: Yes. Yes, he is.
The errors are multiple. The core problem, at least for Miller, is that he is proving the direct opposite of what his ideology preaches: people like Martin and Sinatra are quintessential examples of how migration enriches America and that, indeed, diversity is our strength.
How much of art, science, and industry is the result of immigrants and their children?
A simple example: I had a Star Trek rerun on the hotel TV when I started writing this. Just looking at this one example, I am reminded that my life has been enhanced by Canadians Bill Shatner and James Doohan. Leonard Nimoy was the child of Ukrainian immigrants. George Takei’s father was born in Japan, and, of course, some Stephen Miller of the time had his family put in an internment camp. Walter Koenig’s parents were Russian Jews.
That’s just one simple example: two immigrants and three sons of immigrants. That kind of outcome is easily replicated across shows, movies, and, of course, in industry (not to mention families*).
All of this is made all the more absurd by another Miller tweet on Saturday.
I guess we will just ignore that Oppenheimer’s father was an immigrant from Prussia, and never mind the role German immigrant Wernher von Braun played in the rocket program (to name just two very famous examples). The notion that the American automobile industry, its development of atomic weapons, and its mastery of the space race were all the result of “heritage” Americans and that immigration is to be seen as nothing but a negative is historically inaccurate and also quite foolish.
By the way, if anyone doubts the usefulness of celebrating things like Black History Month (or any other group), just look at how Herr Miller is trying to whitewash prominent immigrants and/or children of immigrants from the collective consciousness. We need more reminders of who brought us where we are, not fewer.
BTW, I know that “third world” is doing a lot of racist work in Miller’s demented formulations, but Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are from South Africa, which would have been categorized as “third world” back when that was a thing, and even now ranks lower than many Latin American countries in terms of a variety of development variables. Of course, hue is a variable that Miller considers and that most empirical assessments of development leave out.
There is also an entire digression that needs to note how enslaved Africans (you know, the “third world”) literally helped build America, including the White House where Miller works.
There is also the fact that all but one of Trump’s children are the children of an immigrant, as is true of all of JD Vance’s kids. The lack of any kind of real self-awareness about what he is preaching and saying is pretty stunning, but it also speaks to the way ideology can blind a person.
I think it is important to not only comment on the specifics of Miller’s rants, but also to continually remind everyone that this all sounds a lot like Hitler (see my post entitled Echoes of Mein Kampf, also about Miller, for details). Miller’s fantasies are backward-looking attempts to propagate an imaginary past wherein we are supposed to concentrate on the “real” non-immigrant Americans (or the “heritage” Americans) who created a magical culture full of wonderful TV specials and space flight! And in the telling, we will just utterly forget how the heroes of the tale, both the artists and the scientists, were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. And in the telling, we will just keep pointing to the “third world” as some terrible place full of undesirable people.
I have noted more than once that this sounds very much like Hitler’s own backward-looking fantasies about the way things were when the world was right, and the Aryan dominated the Fatherland. Never mind that it was all a fantasy, and never mind that Hitler himself did not present as a tall, blond, blue-eyed Aryan godling in the same way that Miller, a Jewish man only a couple of generations removed from immigrants himself, is not the White Christian Mayflower-descended Heritage American.
One thing is for certain: Miller is one of the most odious persons to achieve significant political power in the United States in my lifetime. And even his passing observations about old TV specials reinforce this fact.
*My wife’s father was an immigrant, as was her maternal grandmother. My sister-in-law is a first-generation American. How many of us can immediately identify immigrants in our families?
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Amen! In addition to the stunning lack of self-awareness, what is fascinating about Herr Miller is his apparent need to go on Xitter and remind everyone what an asshole he is.
That, and that the Manhattan Project was largely staffed with refugees like Teller, Fermi, and Szilard. The latter, BTW, was the one who set the thing in motion by having that other refugee, Einstein, write a letter to FDR urging the development of the atomic bomb.
Indeed. And Miller knew the MAGA would read his statement as “white”. Dean and Sinatra’s parents would have been considered pretty swarthy*, not really white, when they arrived, but that’s a level of sophistication Miller knows the MAGA won’t apply.
* Everybody remember why Benjamin Harrison decreed Columbus Day a national holiday? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
“There is also the fact that all but one of Trump’s children are the children of an immigrant, as is true of all of JD Vance’s kids”
I was going to correct you on this but remembered that JD Vance doesn’t have kids with Erika Kirk.
@gVOR10:
At this point, I am going to assume the Miller himself doesn’t have that level of sophistication. I think he believed all his own racist bullshit.
He keeps telling us who he is, so I am not going to try and parse it out and just believe he is who he says he is.
The line back in HS about the janitors picking up the trash? That wasn’t a teenager trying to be edgy for attention. That was an asshole who really thought he shouldn’t have to pick up the trash.
@gVOR10:
This is worth remembering.
Indeed, I had an acquaintance who was maybe ten years younger than me from a small town in Alabama who married a guy who was descended from Eastern Europeans, and her mother didn’t like that she was marrying someone “swarthy” (that word has stuck in my head). This would have been somewhere in the late 90s/early 2000s.
@Charley in Cleveland: I was ruminating over your question why Miller needs to trumpet his odious opinions. I have to believe he believes this benefits him or the administration somehow. I can only assume he thinks he’s assembling and encouraging all like-minded persons to act up and act out. [series of outrage emojis]
This is all about akin color. Ivana Trump and Melania Trump are immigrants, sure–but they’re both WHITE. No one minds white immigrants. Heck, we even give white women Einstein visas for posing nude. (That would be the third Mrs. Trump.)
But by all means, keep out those brown and Black people!!!!!!!
Self-contradictory is par for the course for white supremacists, no? Those who argue for the supremacy of whites are never paragons of the race.
Miller is a weaselly looking guy who is under 6’ tall and clearly couldn’t take a punch from a random abuela. None of the American accomplishments he notes in his post are from someone of his ilk. Miller is the poster child for a white person born into privilege who has failed up into prominence.
Both sides of my family were in this country at the time of the Revolution. My parents had little money, yet sent all four of their kids through college. From humble beginnings, I’ve done quite well living the American Dream. I am the quintessential White Christian Heritage American and Miller has no place speaking for me. If I had my say, they’d be flying Miller to CECOT.
Black people were brought over against their will and separated from their heritage through force.
White people just did it to themselves. Tossing away the cultures and traditions of their ancestors as a part of their transition from being Swarthy Italians or whatever into being White.
White Supremacy bothers me because there’s just nothing there to be Supreme. (Also bothered by the racism, etc). It’s a celebration of ahistorical blandness and a rejection of the past.
There’s a point to the comment, I just haven’t figured it out yet.
I was recently doomscrolling and came across the Neo Nazi fondness for Agartha — the city on the inside of the Earth, where Aryans come from, possibly originally populated by aliens who were also the Norse Gods. All of the lost kingdom stories are steeped in white supremacy at this point — Hyperborea, Lemuria (sadly, not run by lemurs), Atlantis…
I guess anything is better than the Out of Africa theory if you’re a White Supremacist.
@Gustopher:
By the millions. And we stole half of Mexico, complete with Mexicans. Seems a little late now to want no immigrants.
I am (paradoxically?) the person that Miller both loves and hates.
The love: My mother’s side of the family is German, French and English (so far so good); “Yankee” (which was, way back, an English minority); and Irish. I don’t think the “one drop” rule applied to the Irish, and I’m sure that Miller has no clue that us Irish were “third world immigrants” until recently.
From family stories, one of my grandmother’s (English, German, French, Yankee) ancestors was a slave trader. So… bonus points?
On my father’s side? I’m a 2nd generation American. My grandfather came over from Croatia after WWI. I’m quite certain that I’d qualify as “descended from swarthy heritage” based on that.
I mean… I’m a Slav. It’s *literally* the origin of the word “slave”.
As the child of both an immigrant family and a “heritage American”*: Stephen miller can [redacted].
And, @Scott F: I’m a fat old man, and I’m fairly confident that I could take out Miller in a gloves-off fight.
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* I hate having to type that term to describe me.
@Gustopher:
I recall reading something from the 1930’s, that referred to the Nazi’s Aryan nonsense. with the obvious historical reality that if “Aryan” or “Indo European” meant anything as a linguistic/cultural category, it obviously included both Slavs and northern Indians.
iirc the statement was:
“If you intend to mean German, you might as well say German.”
And the really amusing thing, about history and language to those of a US-version “white supremacist” inclination:
“Aryan”
What do you think the etymology of “Iran” might be?
roflmao
@Mu Yixiao:
The “Slav” = “slave” connection is a bit of historic irony.
In Slavic languages “slav” mostly translates as “honourable” or even “glorious”
It just happened to be close to Latin “sclave” = slave.
And because the Slavs were, in the late Roman/early mediaeval period, prey to slave trade as “non-Christistian” (it gets complicated) the connection stuck.
European history has a long and sorry history of groups predating on others, as even a basic knowledge of such will confirm.
Part of the reason why the the US was regarded as a beacon of liberty by Europeans is that it was thought the US had got past such ethno-hierarchial silliness.
I’m an oldish fellow, but not really that fat, and I’d really be quite amused to encounter Mr Miller if both of us had a rapier to hand.
Benefits of obscure interests, lol.
“You care for the medieval, Mr Miller? Come, let me oblige you with an education.”
I’d suggest two more movies for Mr Miller:
Once Upon a Time in America (Jewish Gangsters)
The Gangs of New York (Irish Gangsters)
My first non-Native American ancestor arrived in Jamestown about 1619 from England/Scotland a couple of years before the Mayflower (religious refugee (Protestant)). The last was a bit before 1900.
@Richard Gardner:
Or for that matter “Once Upon a Time in the West”
About how attempting to fulfill your dreams at any cost can lead to ruin.