Profiling an extremist

Another book I am dipping into is ‘Alt Reich: the network war to destroy the Western world from within’ by the Indian writer, Nazeem Ahmed. I have searched on Stephen Miller’s name:

Here is an extract:

The acolyte

After 9/11, the focus on Islam and Muslims as a threat generated a new dynamic for Horowitz. The DHFC established a number of projects which began to focus increasingly on demonising Muslims. Around this time, he met a young high-school student, Stephen Miller, who would later go on to become a senior policy advisor and speechwriter for President Donald Trump. Miller invited Horowitz to speak at his school, and he also had an article published on the DHFC website.

This was the beginning of a long relationship, in which Horowitz would mentor and support Miller through his university degree and beyond. In 2007, Horowitz recruited Miller to lead a national Terrorism Awareness Project which promoted anti-Muslim stereotypes and anti-Arab racism. ‘The goal of the Arabs is the destruction of the Jews,’ its website read, claiming that the goal of Muslim ‘jihad’ is ‘world domination’, although, as mentioned, most Muslims interpret the term to broadly entail striving for moral and societal improvement. The website also advertised a range of anti-Muslim books, including by a well-known anti-Muslim blogger, Robert Spencer.53

The blogger

David Horowitz was Robert Spencer’s principal supporter. In 2003, they launched Jihad Watch as a project of the DHFC. Jihad Watch regularly portrays American Muslims as extremists and depicts American Muslim civil society groups as little more than terrorist front organisations affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 2003, Spencer told MSNBC that ‘80% of the mosques in the United States are actually controlled by extremists’ during a televised interview.54 ‘I have written on numerous occasions that there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists,’ wrote Spencer on Jihad Watch in 2005. ‘While Americans prefer to imagine that the vast majority of American Muslims are civic-minded patriots who accept wholeheartedly the parameters of American pluralism, this proposition has actually never been proven.’55

Spencer’s blog rapidly became the lodestar of what would style itself in the US as the ‘counter-jihad’ movement, a far-right network viewing Islam as an existential threat to Western civilisation and Muslims as a ‘fifth column’ working secretly to destabilise Western societies. In 2010, Spencer teamed up with fellow anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller to write a book claiming that President Obama was waging ‘war on America’.

The following year, he wrote an article in Crisis Magazine attacking multiculturalism as a ‘heresy’ that is ‘denigrating and ultimately destroying the Judeo-Christian West’. Tellingly, he also recommended a famous 1973 book, Camp of the Saints, authored by Jean Raspail. Notoriously popular in white supremacist circles, Raspail’s book is widely known as a racist novel depicting the destruction of Western civilisation due to mass immigration.56 Although bankrolled largely by David Horowitz, Jihad Watch was also supported by several other major conservative foundations, such as the Bradley Foundation.

This is an example of a young man who was a white supremacist even whilst at high school.

An article here provides an insight:

born in Santa Monica and attended Franklin Elementary School, Lincoln Middle School, and Santa Monica High, aka SAMOHI. The 33-year-old was bar mitzvahed at Beth Shir Shalom and confirmed at the Santa Monica Synagogue……..Miller, described by one of his Hebrew-school instructors as a born oppositionist, repeatedly challenged those administrators and tested the limits of their beliefs..

https://lamag.com/politics/stephen-miller-samohi-oral-history

And more from ‘The Alt Reich’ book

Trump’s senior policy advisor in the White House, Stephen Miller, was also plugged into this white nationalist network. He had previously worked as communications director for Jeff Sessions in his senate office, having crafted the strategy to defeat a bipartisan immigration reform bill in 2013. During his university days, while being mentored by anti-black and anti-Muslim activist David Horowitz, he had worked closely with the neo-Nazi leader and founder of the term ‘alternative right’, Richard Spencer. Miller denies having worked closely with Spencer when they were at university together as members of the Duke Conservative Union. But, according to Spencer, Miller helped him with fundraising and promotion for an on-campus debate on immigration policy in 2007, the same year Miller was coordinating Horowitz’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness events on college campuses.

That particular event, organised by Spencer with Miller’s support, featured Peter Brimelow, who runs the white nationalist website VDARE, which regularly publishes articles by neo-Nazis. Miller’s relationship with Spencer at this time has been confirmed by email correspondence between Spencer and Brimelow. Spencer would later become head of the white supremacist National Policy Institute, which had also received funding from the Nazi Pioneer Fund.288

An email leak in 2019 would reveal that Miller secretly fed white supremacist conspiracy theories to Breitbart while forging close ties with its then executive chairman, Steve Bannon.289 In the Trump administration, Miller would become known as the man who led the charge on drafting the Trump executive order that would ban travel from a group of predominantly Muslim countries in Africa.290

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About borderslynn

Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers. In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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