Recent polling shows that American attitudes toward racial integration and immigration have become more open among liberals and conservatives alike, 4 with two-thirds of Americans in a recent Pew Research Center survey saying that “openness to people from all over the world is essential to who America is as a nation.” Intriguingly, the divide on this question is as much a factor of age as of political inclination. Yet public attitudes thankfully have changed for the better. Anti-Semitism, meanwhile, had been an ugly feature of American political discourse well before the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank prompted the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. was one of the most distinguished proponents of eugenics, and the idea that immigrants bring crime and disorder dates back to the anti-Irish panics that occurred throughout the 19th century. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The fear of immigrants of different religious traditions also has a long history in the United States it fueled nativist political party the Know Nothings of the 1850s and the racist rules of the 1924 Immigration Act, which among its many outrages prevented immigration from Asia and remained in effect until 1965. Concepts of white supremacy were at the heart of the defense of slavery and central to the Lost Cause myth that justified segregation after the fall of the Confederacy. In many ways, this is a return of an old American political tradition rather than a wholly new phenomenon, but it has taken on a new form and uses a language that must be properly understood if it is to be successfully challenged. Anti-Semitism was the only missing white nationalist trope in the emails-perhaps unsurprisingly, as Miller himself is Jewish. These included the “great replacement” theory, fears of white genocide through immigration, race science, and eugenics he also linked immigrants with crime, glorified the Confederacy, and promoted the genocidal book, The Camp of the Saints, as a roadmap for U.S. In the emails, Miller, an adviser to the Trump campaign at the time, advocated many of the most extreme white supremacist concepts. Miller has been careful not to talk openly about his political views, so this correspondence proved to be revealing. Miller, who began his role in the Trump administration in 2017, is widely considered the president’s most ideologically extreme and bureaucratically effective adviser. In December 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch published a cache of more than 900 emails 2 Miller wrote to his contacts at Breitbart News before the 2016 presidential election. For a starting point, one must look no further than President Donald Trump’s senior adviser for policy and chief speechwriter, Stephen Miller. These notions, once the preserve of fringe white nationalist groups, have increasingly infiltrated the mainstream of American political and cultural discussion, with poisonous results. But there is another, more dangerous, side to this debate-one that seeks to rehabilitate toxic political notions of racial superiority, stokes fear of immigrants and minorities to inflame grievances for political ends, and attempts to build a notion of an embattled white majority which has to defend its power by any means necessary. The recent protests and public reaction to George Floyd’s murder are a testament to many individuals’ deep commitment to renewing the founding ideals of the republic. The United States is living through a moment of profound and positive change in attitudes toward race, with a large majority of citizens 1 coming to grips with the deeply embedded historical legacy of racist structures and ideas.
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