Racism and Hate Crimes

Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller, one of the few surviving initial appointees in the administration and who has been credited with orchestrating Trump’s draconian immigration policies, shaped the 2016 election coverage of the hard right-wing website Breitbart with material drawn from prominent white nationalists, Islamophobes, and far-right websites, according to a new investigative report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Miller also railed against those wishing to remove Confederate monuments and flags from public display in the wake of Dylann Roof’s murderous 2015 attack on a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and praised America’s early 20th-century race-based, draconian immigration policies. Miller obsessively focused on injecting white nationalist-style talking points on race and crime, Confederate monuments, and Islam into the far-right website’s campaign coverage, the SPLC report says. Miller had a “strikingly narrow” focus on race and immigration, according to the SPLC report. At various times, the SPLC reports, Miller recommendations included the white nationalist website, VDare; Camp of the Saints, a racist novel focused on a “replacement” of European whites by mass third-world immigration; conspiracy site Infowars; and Refugee Resettlement Watch, a fringe anti-immigrant site whose tagline is “They are changing America by changing the people”.

Can we see now the link between the resurgence and increased legitimacy of racist views and the FBI report that hate crimes and threats have reached their highest levels in the US in 16 years and that the most serious and violent forms of hate crimes are increasing to dramatic levels.

Brian Levin, the director for the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, who analyzed the data in recent years, the spikes in incidents have consistently correlated with political attacks against specific marginalized groups, said: “The more we have these derisive stereotypes broadcasted into the ether, the more people are going to inhale that toxin.”