The White Nationalist Chief of Staff

Here are seven stories I wanted to share from my recent surfing around the internet. We will win. I’m glad you’re here.

Major media outlets sanitize Stephen Miller’s white nationalist ideas (Judd Legum, Popular Information, Link to Article)

Media outlets fail in their job to inform the public when they refuse to describe something obvious.

But, as Judd Legum found, only two out of 105 articles about President Trump’s appointment of Miller used the phrase “white nationalist” to describe the new chief of staff.

Stephen Miller is a white nationalist. There is no doubt about this fact. Miller has been clear about where he stands. As Legum explains:

That Miller frequently advances ideas that are central to white nationalism is undeniable. While Miller has done so throughout his adult life, it is not something that is limited to his past. It is something he continues to do regularly.

In an October 10 post on X, Miller promoted “remigration,” the mass removal of non-European immigrants and their descendants. It is a “white supremacist policy concept,” according to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

<snip>

Miller also claims that Democrats are involved in a conspiracy to “displace” Republican voters with non-white immigrants. This is known as the Great Replacement Theory, and it plays a central role in white nationalist movements across the globe.

<snip>

In a June 25 Fox News appearance, Miller said that if people from third-world countries “never had contact with the West [they] would have never developed the combustion engine or airplanes or televisions or radio or the Internet.”

A core tenet of white nationalism is the “alleged inferiority of nonwhite groups.” The supposed superiority of “Western Civilization” has “been used to justify racism since it was coined,” according to historians David Perry and Matthew Gabriele.

Legum includes more details about the interviews and emails where Miller has promoted these toxic beliefs.

Reporters have normalized the Trump regime and its leaders over the past decade. If media outlets won’t inform the public, Democratic elected officials need to do so. Creating the conflict may give reporters a reason to drop the euphemisms.

Stephen Miller, reactionary ideologue and white supremacist, promoted head of Trump administration (Piotr Smolar, La Monde, Archive Link to Article)

You see, U.S. media? It is okay to be direct. Look how informative that headline is! Piotr Smolar also demonstrates how to write clear and direct descriptions.

Miller is the most influential representative of white supremacy in the United States and of the idea that there is discrimination against white people throughout society, a notion that has persisted for decades. According to this belief, it begins in the teaching of history in schools, which is seen as too focused on the fate of Native Americans and later on slavery and segregation. It continues with the selection process for students entering universities, and in recruitment within the military, public administration and private companies. All these areas were the subject of presidential executive orders in the first 100 days of Trump's presidency, which Miller and a small team of advisers and law experts had prepared well in advance.

The new chief of staff sees conspiracies everywhere. He has spread lies about imaginary electoral fraud that supposedly benefited Joe Biden during his 2020 victory. But above all, he has become obsessed with the idea of purifying American society, which he claims is threatened by the presence of millions of undocumented immigrants, who, he alleges, have entered at the invitation of the Democrats.

This is who Stephen Miller is. He embraces it. Reporters should be clear about who Miller is because it explains why the immigration crackdowns have been so severe and without any mercy. He is the reason children have been separated from their parents, why children have to defend themselves at deportation hearings, and why a masked secret police force can lie, injure, and kill with impunity.

Donald Trump doesn’t do reconciliation. He is doubling down, empowering the person who created the policies that cost the Republican Party the support it thought it would have forever among Latino voters.

You cannot negotiate with someone like Stephen Miller. He must be defeated and held accountable for the harm he continues to cause.

Don’t Let Trump Up Off The Ground (Brian Beutler, Off Message, Link to Article)

The initial response from the Democratic Party’s elected leaders after the midterm elections was shockingly bad. After all the atrocities of the Trump regime, talk about reaching across the aisle or using the Republican Party’s frame about retribution is loser politics.

And enraging. Democrats already tried accommodating Trump with infrastructure weeks after the 2018 midterm election win. Are we ever going to learn? As Brian Beutler writes:

Few Democrats would dispute that a big reason their own voters lost faith in them after the 2024 election—why even after winning a historic landslide, their Capitol Hill offices are inundated with phone calls from people demanding new leaders—is a sense that the party’s approach to opposition politics had failed. Democrats lost two of three elections to a revolting charlatan, and at critical moments between those two elections, when Democrats had opportunities to run Donald Trump out of politics for good, they let him get away.

It’s no stretch to suggest that if something like that happens again, the grassroots mutiny will make the past year’s primary season seem in hindsight like a friendly family dispute.

Trump’s appointment of Stephen Miller as Chief of Staff seems to have focused minds on the stark reality of the Trump regime’s response to the midterm election. It brought out the best of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, who was accurately blunt when asked about Miller’s elevation:

This is the way. I’m glad to see him do so much better after his initial post-election reactions.

But, as Beutler explains, Jeffries should build on this reaction. He can immediately impose consequences on the Trump regime in ways that would get the president’s attention.

Trump is discredited and unfit to serve. The purpose of Democratic politics should be to reinstill this for the public on a rolling basis. Hakeem Jeffries should take a page from Dr. Amy Acton, who defended her decision not to accept a concession phone call from Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump is no less degenerate than Vivek. Jeffries can announce whenever he’d like that Trump will never again address a joint session of Congress. If he dies in office, or at any time when Democrats control Congress, he will not be honored with a state funeral. He’s disgraced the nation and will be remembered as a disgrace.

Democrats need to be aggressive. Make clear how unacceptable the Trump regime has been. This is not normal. Democrats should highlight that as often as possible.

The American Brain Drain Claims Another Scientist (Eli Saslow, New York Times, Link to Article)

The Trump regime’s march to destroy our nation’s scientific supremacy will harm people for generations.

The Trump regime has attacked scientific funding and scientists themselves. Since the end of World War II, the world’s brightest have come to study and research in the United States.

The Trump regime has thrown those advantages away to own the libs.

Eli Saslow shares one example of one of the world’s top scientists leaving for Europe to ensure steady funding while prioritizing doing science—rather than editing proposals to strike references to DEI initiatives. We learn why Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, one of the world’s top astrophysicists, moved her research and family from Vanderbilt to the Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

But Europe and Asia had begun to catch up. A few months after Trump’s election, Levi saw a poll of 1,600 U.S.-based scientists published in the journal Nature in which 75 percent of respondents said they were considering leaving the country. As president of the Dutch Research Council, Levi proposed setting aside €50 million to recruit some of them. The Netherlands named the program the Tulip Fund, after a flower the Dutch had imported from the Ottoman Empire four centuries earlier and then made their own.

“The roles have been partially reversed,” Levi said when the program began in July 2025. “Some of the brain drain is now moving the other way.”

More than a dozen other countries landed on a similar idea, starting programs to poach American scientists. There was APART-USA (Austria), Safe Place for Science (France) and Canada Leads. The European Union set aside $560 million. South Korea promised a fast track to citizenship.

The trust that other nations had in American science will take years to recover, if it is even possible to do so. It could be one of the longest-reaching negative impacts of the regime.

Scott Colom (D-Mississippi) Wants to Discuss Impact of Candidate Ratings (Link to Article)

Likely Senate-elect Scott Colom from Mississippi has some pointed words for the polling and rating organizations that make it almost impossible for candidates like him to break in because few want to donate to someone with no chance of winning.

As Colom writes:

At some point, we have to talk about @CookPolitical and other “prognosticators” who had me and other southern candidates labeled as solid R for much of the campaign cycle. They made it much more difficult to fundraise and are part of the reason the South has been neglected for so long.

They’re only a reflection of the past and mysteriously avoid any accountability when they’re wrong. One of their “analysts” was extremely condescending to me (not Jessica) when I tried to make my pitch for why they were wrong about my rating like he knew something about MS politics when he’s never been to the Sip. This attitude hurt Jaime Davis & others so much.

These editorial decisions do matter. And, at a minimum, the employees at these agencies should show candidates the respect they are due.

Colum is a serious candidate with an impressive biography. We need to have a conversation about the gate-keeping role these organizations can play. Can political parties and other organizations help give candidates more of a chance to get their message out?

Is Trump doing to America what Pete Wilson did to California? (John Stoehr, The Editorial Board, Link to Article)

California used to be a solid Republican state. But that changed in the 1990s, as John Stoehr explains:

Time will tell whether I’m right, obviously, but we’ve been here before. In California, prior to 1994, Hispanic voters supported Republican candidates in robust numbers. The party was conservative. It produced Ronald Reagan. It sent Republicans to the Senate. Yet Hispanics found a home there. Many believed it was a means of achieving the American dream.

That changed dramatically after Pete Wilson was elected in 1991. The Republican governor set in motion a series of actions making it clear what his party really thought of the state and the place of Hispanics in it – California was a white man’s republic and they did not belong.

The most notorious of these was Proposition 187. It was a ballot initiative Wilson pushed for while running for reelection. It denied state services to undocumented immigrants, including health care and public education. To their shock, voters approved the measure in 1994.

Beforehand, Hispanics could believe the GOP's party line – if immigrants work hard and play by the rules, the doors of opportunity and freedom would open to them. Afterward, it was no longer possible to believe that. The welcome mat had been pulled. The truth has been revealed. Prop 187 triggered a political backlash that has defined the Golden State since.

This betrayal of the Latino community helped change California into a blue state.

Donald Trump promised to deport the worst of the worst. Instead, he has allowed Stephen Miller to seek to achieve his white nationalist dreams. People who have lived in this country for decades without any issues are being rounded up in violent ways and sent to concentration camps to await deportation.

Have Donald Trump and Stephen Miller pulled a national Pete Wilson? Tuesday’s election results point to a voter transformation that is underway.

U.S. citizens who voted for Trump have had relatives snatched off the streets and have been forced to carry their papers on them because of Miller’s Camp of the Saints-inspired radical racism. A political party that has done what the MAGA Republicans have done deserves to lose again and again.

Space Force scrambles as Musk’s SpaceX retires its major rocket (Audrey Decker, Politico, Link to Article)

SpaceX’s plans to retire its most popular rocket could jeopardize the United States’ ability to launch military satellites — a plight compounded by the Pentagon’s dependence on Elon Musk’s company.

Why is Elon Musk permitted to make this kind of decision without consulting the Pentagon first?

Musk should not have so much control over how the Pentagon can send satellites into space or how the United States and its allies like Ukraine can use satellite internet services.

Democratic elected officials, in D.C., Texas, and other states, need to make reining in Musk a priority. He is a national security risk.

Follow me on BlueSky to see the stories I’m finding and sharing throughout the day.

Craig Cheslog (@craigcheslog.com)

GenXer against fascism. Talking politics, women’s soccer, WNBA, Manchester United men and women, USWNT, USMNT, Green Bay Packers, Boston Celtics, Chicago Cubs, and Taylor Swift. (he/him/his) My newsletter: https://thelongtwilightstruggle.com/.

Bluesky Social