The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda by Jean Guerrero

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda by Jean Guerrero Jeanguerrero.com “A vital book for understanding the still-unfolding nightmare of nationalism and racism in the 21st century.” –Francisco Cantu, author of The Line Becomes a River Stephen Miller is one of the most influential advisors in the White House. He has crafted Donald Trump’s speeches, designed immigration policies that ban Muslims and separate families, and outlasted such Trump stalwarts as Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions. But he’s remained an enigma. Until now. Emmy- and PEN-winning investigative journalist and author Jean Guerrero charts the thirty-four-year-old’s astonishing rise to power, drawing from more than one hundred interviews with his family, friends, adversaries and government officials. Radicalized as a teenager, Miller relished provocation at his high school in liberal Santa Monica, California. He clashed with administrators and antagonized dark-skinned classmates with invectives against bilingualism and multiculturalism. At Duke University, he cloaked racist and classist ideas in the language of patriotism and heritage to get them airtime amid controversies. On Capitol Hill, he served Tea Party congresswoman Michele Bachmann and nativist Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. Recruited to Trump’s campaign, Miller met his idol. Having dreamed of Trump’s presidency before he even announced his decision to run, Miller became his senior policy advisor and speechwriter. Together, they stoked dystopian fears about the Democrats, “Deep State” and “American Carnage,” painting migrants and their supporters as an existential threat to America. Through backroom machinations and sheer force of will, Miller survived dozens of resignations and encouraged Trump’s harshest impulses, in conflict with the president’s own family. While Trump railed against illegal immigration, Miller crusaded against legal immigration. He targeted refugees, asylum seekers and their children, engineering an ethical crisis for a nation that once saw itself as the conscience of the world. Miller rallied support for this agenda, even as federal judges tried to stop it, by courting the white rage that found violent expression in tragedies from El Paso to Charlottesville. Hatemonger unveils the man driving some of the most divisive confrontations over what it means to be American––and what America will become. Jean Guerrero is the PEN-winning author of CRUX and the forthcoming biography of Trump's senior advisor Stephen Miller, Hatemonger. Her writing is featured in The Best American Essays 2019. She is an Emmy-winning investigative reporter for KPBS, contributing to NPR and the PBS NewsHour. She started her career at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires as a foreign correspondent in Mexico.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. This is a podcast we've been excited to do for a while. We got an advanced copy of the book by Gene Guerrero, A Hatemonger, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. You've probably seen us talking about it and promoting it a little bit because we were really excited about it, so we'll talk some more about that. So be sure to go to thecvpn.com, Chris Voss Podcast Network.

Refer the all-night podcast to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Make sure you subscribe. If you want to see the video version of this discussion, go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. You can see all the wonderful videos that we have up there as well. Today, we have an accomplished author, award-winning author. Gene Guerrero is an award-winning investigative journalist and the author of the new book that just came out this week, Hatemonger, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Her first book, Crux, a cross-border memoir, won a Penn Literary Award. Her writing is featured in the Best American Essays 2019. She is an Emmy-winning border reporter contributing to NPR and the PBS NewsHour and more. Welcome to the show, Jean. How are you doing? Good. Great to be here. Thanks for having

me. Awesome sauce. And as I was just showing you earlier, your book was so informative, we filled it with posts and notes. And so it's an extraordinary book. If I can give it a plug, I recommend everybody go out and grab this book. You really need to understand the undercurrents and the essence of the complexity of what's really going on behind the scenes in the Trump administration and what made some of the monsters that go into it. So, Jean, give us an overview of what brought you to the book or wanting to write the book and kind of an overview of the book, if you would. Well, I've always been drawn to the stories of outsiders,

you know, people on the fringes. I wrote my first book about my dad who, you know, struggled with substance abuse and believed the CIA was after him. And, you know, spent my career as a journalist telling the stories of asylum seekers and, you know, deported migrants and right-wing extremists. And I decided, you know, Stephen Miller, even though he's now one of the most powerful people in the White House, he, for a majority of his life was was somewhat of an outsider, you know, growing up in liberal Santa Monica,

California, a very, very progressive town and espousing very conservative views, even through his time on Capitol Hill, when Republicans were really moving towards a more moderate line and compromising with the Democrats on immigration, Stephen Miller was pushing it in the complete opposite, very fringe and hardcore anti-immigration direction. So I was attracted to telling the story of Stephen Miller as an outsider and trying to understand it. Also because, you know, I'd been covering the impact of Stephen Miller's policies from day one of the Trump administration. You know, as an immigration reporter at the busiest border crossing in the country, the San Diego-Tijuana border crossing,

you know, I was, especially during the family separation crisis, I really started to think about Stephen Miller because I was interviewing all of these parents whose children had been taken away from them. In most cases, parents who had presented legally at ports of entry had no criminal records, hadn't broken any laws, and had simply asked for asylum the way that federal law requires and had been separated from their children. In one case, there was a father from El Salvador whose one-year-old baby was taken away from him and he was locked up for eight months without knowing where his kid was. And when he finally gets the baby back, the baby, covered in lice and just traumatized. You know, he was kept

at a tender age facility for, that was later closed as a result of alleged abuses against these children. So I wanted to understand, you know, the White House kept saying that this was a policy about law and order. It was about, you know, just enforcing the law. But I knew that that wasn't the case because, you know, I wascing the law. But I knew that that wasn't the case because, you know, I was on the front lines. And for me, that raised the question, well, if this isn't about law and order, then what is it about? And for that answer, I had to really start to investigate the life of Stephen Miller, the man who was crafting these policies and trying to understand, you know, what makes them tick.

And you did an extraordinary act of journalism in this book. I mean, in reading the author's note back here, your note, I should probably say, Hatemonger is based on more than 150 interviews, more than 100 of them directly acquainted with Miller's friends, family, or colleagues. It draws on hundreds of pages of court documents, email, correspondence, and other documents. How long have you been writing this book? This sounds like a Magnus Opeth of 10 years or something. That's the perception I got when I read it.

It's so detailed. Yeah, well, thank you. No, I mean, I had to turn it around on a very quick timeline, you know, six-month timeline, because we really wanted timeline, you know, six month timeline, because we really wanted to, you know, inform the conversation, you know, leading up to, you know, just informing the conversation in 2020 and making sure that, you know, putting this book out when it's still relevant. And so I, you know, I got to work immediately when I got the book deal in May of 2019 and turned it in around the end of 2019.

Wow. I mean, just an extraordinary piece of journalism. This thing is so heavily detailed. And like you probably saw me say on Twitter, I've been watching Stephen Miller from the beginning, and I've known that he's a bit of a puppet master behind the scenes, but I didn't know how much, and I didn't know what built this Frankenstein. And you go into such detail and you map from the beginning of his childhood and the arc of how he goes through his life, the people who have the influences on him and everything else. um what was what was interesting this is a book that i wanted to see written like i've been waiting for years i've been waiting for years going somebody's going to write the history of this

this uh mofo and uh and uh and and it's going to be interesting and so when you when you came to me and said you've written this i i was like yeah somebody's wrote it. The history is out there. And so I was really excited from that nature. So you've written one of the book, Crux. And so this book starts out, you start out talking about kind of laying the foundation of what his childhood was like. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, one of the things that was most interesting to me when I learned about Stephen Miller is, you know, he's from California. He grew up in Southern California during the 90s, which is the same time that I grew up in Southern California. I'm just a couple years younger than him, and I grew up a couple hours south of where he did in Santa Monica, California. And so when I started reporting this book, I really wanted to show, you know, how, how he was shaped by the California of the 90s. Because, you know, from my conversations with

people who knew him back then, Steve Miller is truly a product of that environment. For people who don't, weren't in California, and don't live in California California and weren't there in the 90s, it's probably surprising to hear this because California is such a blue state and kind of leads the charge against the Trump administration now in many ways. But California in the 90s, when Stephen Miller was growing up there, there was a lot of anti-immigrant hostility. The Republican governor, Pete Wilson Wilson was blaming all of the state's fiscal problems on a, quote, invasion at the border. And there were unprecedented bipartisan attacks on, you know, bilingual education, on affirmative action, on social

services for children of undocumented migrants. So, you know, Californians really learned how to scapegoat against immigrants that decade. And Stephen Miller was listening to, you know, Rush Limbaugh at the time. He was reading conservative writers. And so you start to see him really internalizing a lot of this racist rhetoric and antagonism against brown and black people from a very young age. And for me, one of the most interesting things discovering, you know, about his childhood is that Stephen Miller is a case study in radicalization. You know, when he was a teenager, he'd recently had to move from this very affluent part of Santa Monica to a slightly less affluent part. His dad had been struggling with his real estate company. He was

plagued by bankruptcies and legal disputes related to his real estate. And so the family loses a bunch of money and they have to move. So during this period, Stephen Miller kind of perfectly fits the profile of someone who is predisposed to being radicalized. You know, he's feeling lost, he's feeling angry, he's feeling displaced. And this is around the time that he meets David Horowitz, who is a man who is a former Marxist and who became a right-wing radical, and at the time was looking for young conservative men like Stephen Miller to teach the tools of the civil rights movement in order to attack the civil rights movement. So, you know, using the same language of the civil rights movement against it, you know, painting people of color and liberals as racists or as oppressors and, and painting white conservative

men as victims of discrimination based on their skin color, you know, this real white grievance mentality, which was an inversion of, of, of, you know, the civil rights movement and a perversion of it. And he gave Stephen Miller these tools, introduced Stephen Miller to the fantasy that everything that we hold dear as Americans is a result of white men. You know, this idea that white men created liberty and equality and all of these things, completely ignoring the role of, you know, people of color in this history and in the civil rights movement. But Stephen Miller,

for some reason, despite being the descendant of Jewish refugees, was really taken with this identification with whiteness and white male mentality. And you see him at school, like in high school, starting to go around expressing very racist sentiments, you know, telling his Mexican classmates to go back home to their countries, telling them to speak English, breaking up with a Mexican friend and telling him that it's because of his Latino heritage, going into school board meetings to argue passionately against measures to improve racial equity in the school. So just stuff that you wouldn't expect to see out of a teenager.

But this is when he was being mentored by people like David Horowitz, who Horowitz in particular becomes kind of like a father figure to Stephen Miller and, you know, helps him publish self-promotional articles on his website, you know, hooks, eventually shapes his career, gets him his first jobs in Congress and goes on to play a direct influence on Trump's rhetoric and Trump's policies through Stephen Miller, according to private correspondence that I obtained for the book, which I can talk about later. and and i've all my life i've always been enamored by why people do what they do and what gets them what's that moment you know that they fall off the bus or the wagon they they hit their head their mom drops them on their head as a kid and and suddenly they turn into a monster like hitler mussolini etc um and so you you detail as close as you can i mean you really couldn't interview i

guess stephen miller and his mom they weren't really interested probably in talking to you. No, you know, from the very beginning, I, I reached out to Stephen Miller in the white house and told them that I wanted them to be a part of this process and give, you know, Stephen Miller an opportunity to not only respond to other people's comments, but also, you know, recommend people that he thinks I should talk to. But no, I just never heard back from Stephen Miller or the White House. And it's interesting to me because I've always looked at Stephen Miller and tried to figure out where he dropped, where he, you know, became this toxic thing. It's apparent in your book and the detail that you go into it. His father seems pretty toxic. He's in fights with his law office. He's in fights with his family. They're always in

court. They're losing. They're having to step down from their kind of higher, richer life, and he has to go to a different school that's filled with more immigrants because of his father constantly having this toxic sort of relationship. Is my perception of that right? Well, from my conversations with people who knew Stephen Miller's father and from review of the court documents, his dad, he's described to me as being very trump like you know he's described to me as very combative the court documents describe him as a masterpiece of evasion and manipulation you know he was getting into disputes with his own brother who eventually his brother is a psychologist who it gets you know permanently separated from the family through a no contact order and a settlement

agreement. And it also ends up deprived of a majority of the family inheritance due to alleged bullying by Stephen Miller's father, according to the court documents. And so it appears there's some very interesting parallels, especially if you're familiar with the Trump family and the Mary Trump book, you begin to realize that there are some striking parallels between the family of Stephen Miller and the family of Donald Trump. And it helps to explain why these men have been able to, you know, jibe so well together and, you know, mutually benefit one another and understand each other in a way that, you know, few other pairs inside the White House do. But yeah, I mean, his father, his father was expressing, I mean, he was initially a Democrat, and he starts to express his Republican viewpoints when things start to kind of fall apart with his real estate company. And so, you know, it's not

that hard to see a direct line between Stephen Miller and his conservative contrarian viewpoints and the ones that his father began to express around the time that his business dealings were falling apart. I mean, he used to talk about the ridiculous liberal elites and all of their regulations, et cetera, et cetera. And this is when you see Stephen Miller start to adopt the same kind of aggressive hostility towards liberals and as well as people of color. And that's usually what you find with racism. People are, you know, stuff isn't working out for them in life, and they decide to blame some other group of people for, you know,

oh, it's their fault that I'm not succeeding in life, which is just awful and horrible. And it certainly doesn't help their situation or anyone's situation in the destructive nature of it. In looking at the profile you draw of Stephen Miller through your interviews, you know, Stephen Miller has always kind of struck me as an incel, like if you're familiar with the incel sort of generation. And, like, I've always looked at him and gone, has that guy ever had a girlfriend in his life?

And then you paint the picture of him being the troller, you know, and some of it early on just being, like, for the attention. It seems like that's the only that, that toxic self is, is the only way he knows how to get some attention, which is kind of interesting. Yeah. I mean, in high school, he runs for student government under the platform of, you know, students shouldn't have to pick up their trash because they're, he says that that's what the janitors are there to do. And he knew, you know, that this was going to provoke outrage and shock in the student body. You know, one of the student government leaders who was there thought he was trying to provoke a race riot. That, you know, there had been fights before in the school of that nature. And it appeared that that's what Stephen Miller was trying to do.

And people were, you know, screaming at each other, throwing things. And, and she had to push him off the stage to, to avoid, you know, people going, getting too, too riled up. But that, you know, from my conversations with Stephen Miller's friends, it appears that from a very young age, he's wanted to, he's used to the, you know, expressing very offensive and out there beliefs as a way of getting attention as a way of of getting power and and and it worked i mean he he ended up getting invited onto the larry elder show as as a kid repeatedly complaining about multiculturalism

and left-wing indoctrination like you know on the radio as a kid. And he just slowly realizes that this is a real path to power. And even though for a long time people kind of rolled their eyes at him and thought he was offensive, but people thought he was just kind of a pariah and that he could never actually do any real harm because he was just so out there. And it actually turned out that they were wrong because Stephen Miller was able to use this to get more and more attention using, you know, David Horowitz's tools that he taught him, like appealing to desires for diversity and multiculturalism in order to attack diversity and multiculturalism. So, you know, at Duke

University, he gets a regular column at the paper in part because some people on the staff saw him as adding to, you know, the diversity, intellectual diversity in this case, just because his beliefs were so out there. But yeah, absolutely. It starts with him, you know, trying to get attention and then realizing that this is actually working. And it starts to become more and more ingrained in his identity until he's consumed by it and is an extremist who truly believes in the things that he is saying and is led, you know, by a man, David Horowitz, who believes that there is no racism in this society except for racism against white men, and that anti-white racism represents the gravest threat to society.

You know, this is completely a historical and counter to reality, but Stephen Miller was young and vulnerable and he, you know, came to be consumed by this idea and this mission that he needed to keep brown and black people out of this country because he believes that too many brown and black people pose some kind of existential threat, in part because he's been reading so much white supremacist and white nationalist literature, which I delve into in the book, you know, which paints brown and black people, you know, the white supremacist literature paints brown and black people as being more innately violent than white people, using misleading stats and anecdotes.

And the same kind of stuff that you see Stephen Miller now inserting into Trump's rhetoric, very gruesome details about alleged migrant crimes, slaughtering little girls, taking a hammer to crush a woman's eye sockets, really vivid language that is supposed to get you to be fearful and hateful of immigrants and to believe that they pose some kind of threat. I, you know, and I take to Stephen Miller as a man in my perception of him growing up. I know what men go through or he goes through. And so one of the things you mention in your book is there's a conversation he has with somebody about his parents. And one of the things he hates is when they give him the silent treatment, when they ignore him.

And I'm wondering how much that came out. What was interesting to me, also in your book, it was all interesting. But what was interesting is he has a Mexican girlfriend in, I believe, college? Yeah. So going back to your incel remark, he actually has had a girlfriend. You know, prior to his now wife, Katie Miller, he had one serious girlfriend that his friends are aware of. And this is a Mexican-American girl that he met freshman year at Duke University who he dated for the entire year. But she, you know, she ended up leaving Duke University after freshman year and and they broke up you know after that but it's interesting because his friend their friends described that relationship as very

you know awkward to me like apparently she uh didn't want people to know that she was you know in a romantic relationship with Stephen Miller and so she was trying to keep it secret and he liked her a lot more than she liked him but they spent all their time together anyway and um you know it's just an interesting an interesting courtship and she's a mexican american girl who had conservative beliefs you know she uh she was pro-gun rights, very pro-gun rights and things like that. So it kind of makes sense why they were attracted to each other. But it is interesting, given that Stephen Miller has dedicated his life to demonizing and punishing the immigrant community, that his only girlfriend prior to his wife is someone of mexican descent

and see to me what i mean what you see in a lot of these different monsters is is what happened in the mid-childhood or what affected them and and what shaped them and then you know whatever whatever vehicle of of monstrosity that they decide to adhere on to fix or to deal or to pave over the demon inside them. And early on, he was reading Rush Limbaugh. You mentioned he was growing up on right-wing talk radio, which was on the rise. Rush Limbaugh, you quote him as saying, it was like a page turning throw to me. Every page was like a new revelation. And Rush Limbaugh was railing against feminazis, Christopher Columbus being trashed, had a lot of hateful things to say about people of race and also women and very sexist comments about women.

And what I see is a young man in high school who there's another example you give where he's running up to a classmate, Keisha Ram, and she's doing some organized events for climate change. And he launches into speeches while he's lecturing her. And I see an incel sort of person who's attracted to women. And as guys, we kind of all go through this experience where we have to learn that approaching women is very different than how we interact with us guys. Like if you remember when you were a kid, we all did the cooties things with our shoes or something. At least my generation did. But you had to learn that you had to deal with women very differently.

You couldn't go up and treat them like another guy. And the Mexican girlfriend is an interesting sort of thing that he finally gets. But you see him acting out all through high school and he can't get a girlfriend. And I'm sure, you know, he's a young man. and he's trying to figure out how this isn't working for him, you know, the girls don't seem to like it, and so it turns into kind of a twisted sort of sick fantasy or fetish or something, where he's like, well, I'm just going to say more offensive things, and maybe that'll work, you know, or maybe that's his punishment for the thing, and it reminded me of James Baldwin's sort of experience, what he wrote about with the contorted sexuality and and uh attraction and the and the people that the race hadn't dealt with he writes in going to meet the man where uh it dramatizes racism as symptomatic

of an inner disorder that reveals itself through the protagonist's sexual dysfunction and the malady of a defective mind. And so to me, like, and I don't know definitively, but to me that seems to be a lot of this crux of what started this internal crisis. And like you say, he's driven to first Rush Limbaugh, and then he gets on the Larry Elder show. I didn't even know this stuff existed, so you enlightened me with a lot of stuff. And Larry Elder puts him on the radio and starts, like you say, using him as a protege and radicalization.

And then, of course, he goes from there to David Horowitz, who David Horowitz was like a huge shaping in the arc of his life. Exactly, Yeah. Yeah. But it does, it does have, you know, I don't delve too much into it in the book, but there, there is some interesting parallels with, you know, just these toxic manifestations of, of, of masculinity, like a rigid notion of what it means to be a man. And you see it in the people that Stephen Miller chooses to idolize, you know, John Wayne and later Donald Trump being his ultimate hero. And just this idea that, you know, misbehavior and breaking and and just breaking the law and stuff it was like very cool you know if it's a white man but if it's a person of color then it's completely different but yeah you see steven

miller getting obsessed with mobsters too like he was really into this martin scorsese film called casino and he would dress up as robert de niro's mobster character in the movie, you know, with these really bright colored flamboyant suits on trips to Las Vegas, which is one of his favorite places, according to his friends, like he would always go there on birthdays dressed up as this mobster, you know, with like the rings and the chains and like up until he was like in his 30s. So this isn't just like a young man thing. This is like a real obsession that he's had for a long time it's interesting to kind of you know interrogate that a little bit and and where where that comes from and a lot of it was just the narratives that steven miller was being exposed to as a young man which led him to identify with these you know white male antiheroes. Yeah. And, and, you know,

man, I lost my point that I had on that. But what you see through him as a young man is he doesn't go through the experience that most men and women go through where they, they get married at a young age. You have kids, you, you learn a decorum of empathy.

At least most people do that aren't narcissists, I suppose. You know, you, you learn a lot about life through those experiences but he doesn't he doesn't go through those because well i can't get any girlfriends uh in fact one of the stories that was funny in your book you wrote about how with his girlfriend in college he he put the trash cans outside of her college

door and to lock her in and just just yeah thought that was interesting. Yeah. Yeah, he traps her inside. He, like, you know, tries to imprison her inside of her dorm room by putting the trash cans and, like, taping them in a way where she can't get out. Like, I don't know, some kind of makeshift border wall. I have no idea. I mean, her roommate thought it was kind of, like, half insane, half a joke, but, but like a weird joke.

And yeah, it's just, it's curious. His romantic life is, it could probably be an entire book in and of itself. Note to self, don't pick up chicks. Anyway, so that's it. But he really gets in deep into it. You have some quotes from the book. Racism does not exist. It's in your imagination. He also said, segregation wasn't legally imposed. So it was a revelant, he puts, there can be no 50, 50 Americanism in this country. There's only room for 100% Americanism and only those who choose or only those who are Americans and nothing else, which is pretty interesting. We've had a lot of discussion about the white

nationalist sort of stuff. So you write about how he goes all through this stuff and it's, it's really detailed. That's what I loved about the book, because you can see just what creates this man in an arc. And more and more, like I said, he's single, he can't get a girl, and so it seems like a lot of this funneling of hate and anger and frustration, probably from an incel sense in some cases, just gets funneled just more deeply into hate. It just becomes ingrained. And what was interesting in your book, too, is you talked about how much David Horowitz

just pretty much guides him right into the White House. It's crazy. Exactly. Throughout college, he recruited Stephen Miller to lead his terrorism awareness project, which is just this project of conflating Muslims and Arabs with terrorists through, you know, this website that published Islamophobic material and also through campus events. And but like I said, you know, Stephen Miller graduated from college kind of a pariah, didn't know where he was going to go or what he was going to do. And David Horowitz swooped in and rescued him. You know, he got him a job with Tea Party Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, who he thought would be a good fit for Horowitz because he thought that Bachman shared their views about Muslims. And so he gets him a job as a press secretary working for Michelle Bachman,

where, you know, he learns the ropes of Capitol Hill. He gets tired of working for her. And so David Horowitz gets him a job with Arizona Congressman John Shedegg for a few months. And then from there, he gets him a job with Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, which is where Stephen Miller, you know, works for several years and really starts to flex his muscles as someone becoming obsessed with immigration and, you know, attacking immigration as a way of reengineering demographic flows into this country, which is an idea that he was introduced to when he was at Duke University. You know, he worked with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was also a student there at the time, to bring Peter Brimlow, a white nationalist, to campus. And he had written, Peter Brimlow had written this book called Alien Nation that talks about the need, from his perspective, to pause all immigration into this country to, you know, keep it a majority white country. So, you know, when he's working for Sessions, Stephen Miller successfully works to derail this historic bipartisan immigration

compromise that Republicans and Democrats were working on to finally, you know, like really tackle the immigration issue, you know, further militarizing the border, but also, you know, trying to provide a legal by what he called globalist elites who were just trying to destroy the United States through limitless importation of cheap labor, which completely mischaracterized the bill because, you know, legitimizing a portion of the workforce would have required a fairer wage for them, not, you know, making it harder for people to exploit them. And so he succeeds in derailing this bill through partnerships with right-wing media. He was, you know, he got chummy with Ann Coulter, with Tucker Carlson. Stephen Miller has always been really good at networking in the right-wing media sphere. And so he works to derail this compromise. And eventually Trump catches his eye. You know, he hears Trump talking about how the United States is turning into a, quote, third world, which is something that is often used by white supremacists to describe the, quote, browning of America. when Trump announces his candidacy, Stephen Miller starts to immediately contribute free

labor to the campaign, you know, sending over memos with talking points, sending over immigration policy, and eventually gets recruited formally to the campaign as a top speechwriter and a senior policy advisor in January of 2016. And remember, this is a man who has no prior policy experience. He's a public relations flack and he's hired to shape Trump's policy. And he draws almost exclusively from think tanks for the immigration policy. He draws from think tanks that were created by white supremacists who believe in population control for non-white people. And this is what, you know, I try to connect the dots in the book to show people that, you know, Stephen Miller has learned how to very effectively launder white supremacist ideas through the language of heritage, through the language of, you know, economics and national security, painting this as something that's about heritage and the economy and national security, when in fact, if you actually connect the dots and look at where he's pulling this material from, it is about race.

It is about reengineering the ethnic flows into this country because he believes, because he was radicalized and indoctrinated at a young age, that brown and black people are, that they pose some kind of apocalyptic threat yeah yeah i mean i had to learn that uh in 2016 when i had to start going what what is white nationalism what's going on here why is this getting elected um and the keywords you know uh culture uh our culture uh our heritage and stuff you know and i had heard that stuff but i i hadn't equated with anything and then doing the research uh you know i had to go go, wow, okay, this, wow, they've hijacked these terms. I got to be careful what I say.

In fact, just jumping back a little bit, this floored me when I read it in your book. Michelle Bachman's running for office, and she's arguing with her opponent. And Michelle Bachman responded that his remark was highly offensive to the victims of migrant criminals. She said migrants were bringing in diseases, bringing in drugs, bringing in violence. Her language reflected Miller's views. And that's Donald Trump at the bottom of the elevator on day one, right? Exactly, yeah. Holy crap.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, Stephen Miller didn't shape those, at least according to the campaign officials who I spoke to. He didn't play a role in that first speech that Trump gave. But Stephen Miller, you know, used a much more effective apocalyptic language to rile up fear. You know, Trump's initial comments about Mexicans as rapists and criminals were really offensive and, you know, they were offensive, but they didn't incite as much fear as the language that Stephen Miller uses. Like, you know, really talking about American carnage, talking about, you know, as I said earlier, you know, migrants slaughtering little girls, just very vivid language that Trump isn't very good at using because he's not a very

articulate man. But Stephen Miller, you know, brings that to the table as a very bookish person and as a person who's been reading a lot of white supremacist literature and knows how to demonize migrants in a very effective way, you know, from day one in the white house, Stephen Miller, one of his first actions is to create an office that is date dedicated to the daily demonization of migrants, you know, pumping out press releases about the crimes of migrants. He specifically asked officials to include photos of, of,

of people's gang tattoos to try to like you know really rile up fear um and and so yeah i mean stephen miller just brought to the table his work ethic and his his knowledge of white supremacist literature and it was this extraordinary detail what you put in the book where you talk about how he literally starts just running all these different departments and border patrol. And he basically just starts running them. And he starts kind of personifying or acting like, well, this is what Donald Trump wants. And if you're talking to me, you're talking to Donald Trump. And people, you know, fall to him with this fealty and this authoritarian sort of thing.

And, you know, I don't know if he was the one who really pushed this in the White House or if Donald Trump's narcissism did, but he really propagates that whole either everybody marches the same thing or we, you know, he moves people out that get in his way or that have some concerns. He even controls the narrative of the PR. At one point, someone says, you know, well, immigrants that come to this country contribute $68 billion to the economy. So there's kind of a net positive there. And Miller's like, bury that. Like, everything is about the demonization. And it really becomes a sickness to a point that, what was it that someone wrote? The point is the evilness or the meanness. The cruelty. The cruelty is the point.

Yeah. Yeah. It really is the performance of cruelty. From all of my interviews with White House officials, it is clear that Stephen Miller, in many cases, was motivated by trying to perform cruelty in order to deter people from coming. He thought that, you know, if you have the systematic separation of children from their parents, that this would traumatize enough people that, you know, the word would get back to Central America. Don't go to the U.S. They're going to, you know, traumatize your family permanently. And, you know, in a sense, in a sense, it worked. I mean, they permanently traumatized these families, children who, you know, to this day have nightmares and attachment issues, you know, fearing that

their parents are going to be disappeared. And in many cases, hundreds of parents were deported without their children, you know, total chaos. And part of this is because Stephen Miller, you know, was ramming these policies through without consulting with the national security experts, without consulting with the normal bureaucratic or policymaking process. And so, you know, agencies were not communicating with one another. People weren't keeping track of people. And it just created a real disaster. And so, you know, sometimes people say, well, I mean, look at all the times that the court has stopped Stephen Miller's actions. Doesn't this mean he's been largely ineffective in the White House? And while that's true that the courts have stopped many of the things he tried to do, like, you know, the systematic separation of families, it's still just the mere fact that it happened, you know, had some kind of effect that was thrilling and Stephen Miller a further opportunity for demonization because now they can demonize the, you know, what Stephen Miller calls the liberal activist judges, the entire

judiciary is now the enemy. And so it just, it continues to provide them with further demonization abilities. And then, you know, for them, it's about getting reelected and staying in power. And Trump believes that if he continues to demonize and hurt communities of color the way that Stephen Miller has helped him do from the very beginning, that he is going to get reelected. He thinks that he got elected in the first place because of Stephen Miller, and he thinks that he needs Stephen Miller's extremism in order to get reelected again in November. That was the thing I was going to ask you. Would we have Donald Trump as president if it hadn't been for him meeting Stephen Miller's extremism in order to get reelected again in November. That was the thing I was going to ask you. Would we have Donald Trump as president if it hadn't been for him meeting Stephen Miller? You know, I really don't think that we would, because when Trump first, you know, announced his candidacy, his only real solution for stopping immigration was the border wall.

And in the eyes of really anti-immigration restrictionists and hardliners who've been following the immigration issue for a while, they kind of rolled their eyes at that. You know, they thought of it as kind of a joke because, you know, we have hundreds of miles of border fencing already, and all it has done is, you know, result in tunnels, clandestine tunnels being built as far deep as 90 feet underground and,

you know, flows of people getting moved into other places, you know, the desert, the ocean, underground. And so it wasn't until Stephen Miller came onto the campaign and started pulling policies directly from these think tanks that want population control for non-white people that Trump's, you know, appeal grew beyond, you know, it massively grew to encompass, you know, many anti-immigration restrictionists and people, you know, who harbor racist beliefs. And they were able to really stoke white fear and white hatred in order to get Donald Trump into the White House in a way that I feel like Trump would have, you know, tried to do, but been kind of at a loss for how to strategically do without Stephen Miller. Well, you said something really stuck out at me where you,

where you said, you know, Stephen Miller as well, Stephen Miller's well-read, you know, he educates himself. We know that Donald Trump, you know, I don't, I don't know that he's ever read a book and like, I mean, maybe if his name was on the cover or that Donald Trump, you know, I don't, I don't know that he's ever read a book and like, I mean, maybe if his name was on the cover or something, but you know, this seems to be the real arc behind him. In fact, the wall was a mnemonic device that, that, that, uh, I think was designed by two of his two people. Um, yeah, just to, just to, you know, keep them on message, keep them on message. Exactly.

The wall was an easy thing to remember the immigration issue with. The thing you detail in your book at the end part is how the horrors of what they do to these kids, these families, and the cruelty. Have they even gotten all the kids back together with their parents? I don't think they have ability to, because no one kept track of it. Well, so the thing is, you know, when the federal judge in San Diego ordered them to stop separating families, there is, you know, Commander, Commander Jonathan White at the Health and Human Services Agency that, you know, oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement that's in charge of the kids,

who really did a fantastic job of, you know, reuniting these children and tracking down these, it was a really hard thing to do, you know, going into Central America and finding these parents who in many cases don't even have a cell phone and somehow, you know, piecing these families together or getting consent to keep them separated. The problem is that family separations continue to happen through today, even though the federal judge said that they can no longer happen. You know, the zero tolerance policy was revoked, but, you know, there's these executive orders that Stephen Miller worked on in January of 2017 that can remain in place that expand Border Patrol and ICE's ability to keep people detained. And if you are going to keep people detained, the only way to skirt legal it's continuing to happen, and these agencies lack transparency, he's always at work to do something else.

And I think he just laughs. Like, I really would like, it's too bad we can't find out if there was like a lot of Mexican girls who rejected him in high school. And this is like what the core of his thing is. You know, you start the book out and you end it on an interesting note. There's an anonymous letter that goes out through, I think, a school email system. And it's highly racial. And the implication is that it might have been him that wrote it. Well, so actually, I mean, I don't believe that Stephen Miller wrote it because he was around five years old when it went out. But I think it's, I found it so important to highlight this hate crime because the letter, you know, everything in the letter, you then saw santa monica high school when steven miller was

a student there so for me the implication is he was he was still he was he was exposed to it in some way and and i i felt it was important because you know as as as influential as steven miller is in the white house um i feel like he sometimes get the gets the carl rove treatment where people paint him as the as the brains behind bush behind trump in the way that where people paint him as the brains behind Bush, behind Trump in the way that Karl Rove was the brains behind Bush. And I think it's important to distinguish between that and what is happening with Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller is not inventing this stuff. He didn't come up with this stuff. His skill is the work ethic and the discipline, but also just how good he is at regurgitating other people's talking points and other people's points of view. And that's why I see him as a case study in radicalization, you know,

an extremist who was indoctrinated and is now in the White House, because, you know, he didn't invent this stuff. And from the time he was a little boy, there's this letter that, you know, goes out to hundreds of families with Hispanic surnames from this very school that Stephen Miller would later attend, you know, saying that Mexicans are brown animals and that, you know, white people are going to gas them like Hitler gassed the Jews. And, you know, just really horrific hate language. This crime was never solved. And this letter was continuing to circulate because there was a lot of racism among, you know, the white community in Santa Monica at the time.

And so it's not surprising that you then see Stephen Miller echoing, you know, the letter attacks multiculturalism, the letter attacks gays and lesbians, the letter attacks this man named Oscar de la Torre, who was a school counselor at the school who Stephen Miller fixated on the school, the letter attacks, you know, alleged, alleged double standards for Hispanic students and says that Hispanic students are the real racists. And all of this language is language that you see Miller regurgitating

down to the attacks on the gay and lesbian club. Like it was, it's a true study in radicalization and what happens when people are exposed to these demonizing and false, you know, narratives during a time when they want someone to blame because they have personal problems. Do you think that there's a reconciliation where he or maybe Trump too gets held for crimes against humanity? I mean, it's a U.S.-based thing. I don't think it would end up in Geneva or The Hague. Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see what happens. I mean, Stephen Miller's own family members have said, have told me, as I quote in the book, that they believe he should be tried for crimes against humanity.

Wow. That makes for for interesting family get together hey there's the guy uh um i would like to say my first vote right here chris voss um i would like to see him tried for crimes against humanity and uh and uh donald trump i what they have done is so horrendous and the the heartbreak of the people in the book, there's a few things that he was in Doctrine 2, John Bannon with the Camp of the Saints, this genetic superior of whites, which when you look at Steve Bannon, if he's the genetic superior of whites, I don't want to be part of the white race.

I remember his spray on hair. And then one of the things you talk about in the book you know early on he tries to kind of be the face of of maybe the trump administration and come out and he does those extraordinary just like off the wall like the president has the ultimate power and he shall not be questioned you're just like what the hell's going on and then he he just dips back under the radar. And it's amazing, too, because he's been one of the only surviving cabinet members other than Alonka and whatchamacallit, just about, than anyone. He's the longest lasting advisor outside of the president's family.

And it's because he gets Donald Trump. He gets him emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, in part because of his childhood, which I delve into in the book. But also, they have this shared instinct for violence, a shared fascination with it. You see it in the language that they use from a very young age. Trump talks about how he wants to be seen as a killer and, you know, how important it is to be a killer. And Stephen Miller shares those instincts for violence and has his hands on the pulse of Trump's most violent voting base because of the fact that he's been reading white supremacist literature for so long.

And so this is how you see. And also the fact that Stephen Miller skirts a bureaucracy in the same way that Trump does, you know, just having no regard whatsoever for the officials who have worked there for decades and have expertise to bring to the table. So, you know, it's really remarkable how these two men work together. It really is. And the detail you put in the book with Trump, you know, he was really remarkable how these two men work together. It really is, and the detail you put in the book. With Trump, you know, he was the same sort of just toxic child,

so much so that his family sent him to the military school. You know, they're just like, hey, man, come back when you're 18. So you detail in this in the book. It's an incredible book. As I was going through it, like, number one, one of the things I kept thinking is, like, this feels like it spent years. I mean, it's just wonderful investigative journalism and so detailed. And I was just blown away.

And I really want people to read it because they need to understand the undercurrents, the powers that are going on behind the thing and um the other thing i i saw in reading especially the second half of the book when you get into his time in the government is how much money we are spending how much time we are spending in the persecution of these people uh these immigrants these human beings um and and how much money like that he came into power under this guys that well these people steal your jobs and and they take all the money out of this economy and blah, blah, blah. And you look at the amount of money that we spend to persecute these human beings. That's a really great point. You know, especially, I mean,

because it is like, this is an issue that affects everyone regardless of whether you care about immigration or not, because of the money that is being spent on this persecution as you so articulately point out right now and also just because you know the focus is no longer on actual serious threats to America such as the pandemic or such as you know domestic terrorism the threat is the the focus is is on families and trying to keep families out of this country because there's some fear about, you know, them reproducing too much in this country. And so it really impacts everybody.

You know, Stephen Miller's extremism. And we probably could have all those voters in the steel towns that died and they don't have any industries. And I feel for them. I'm empathetic for them. But they voted for Trump because he promised jobs. We could have built them mansions. Yeah. If somebody calculates the money and stuff.

And, Jean, it's been wonderful having you on the show. Anything more we need to know about the book as we close out? You know, it's just the fact is that Donald Trump is going to be leaning more and more on Stephen Miller leading up to the election because of this era of crisis and his need to distract from his disastrous response to the pandemic. And so if you want to understand the disaster that we're living in 2020, it's very important to understand the story of Stephen Miller and how he came to power and the influence that he's had over Donald Trump. And also that if he gets reelected, we got more of this stuff coming down the pike. And I just, I just, I'm just trying to get to the election and keep my sanity together. But there you go. So grab the book, Hatemonger by Gene Guerrero, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.

I talk to a lot of people that, you know, they're just normal, everyday folks. And I'm like, Stephen Miller? Stephen Miller who? And I'm like, start explaining it to them. And they go, what? This is going on in our government? And I'm like, yeah, you need to read this book so you understand what's going on. Because, you know, you and i have been studying this

from the beginning because like right away i was like i gotta find out what the hell just happened because uh this is really this is really freaking out there and your background um uh from reporting from that area uh does a lot of that uh give us your plugs uh gene so people can look you up on the interwebs oh yeah people can find me at my website, jeanguerrero.com, or you can follow me on Twitter, which is Jean, J-E-A-N, G-U-E-R-R-E. That's my Twitter handle as well as my Instagram handle. Awesome sauce. Go out and get the books, guys.

Share it with your friends. Share it with people who need to vote. Share it with people that don't understand the white nationalist agenda. We literally have a KKK racist. And, you know, I might be embellishing a little bit, but I honestly think if Donald Trump wins four more years, they're all going to be walking around in hoods. I'll be, I don't know, moving to Canada or Mexico, actually, trying to hitchhike my way out. But I can't get out now. So there you go.

I'm stuck. So anyway, check out her book, guys. Go to Amazon.com. It's an incredible, detailed, journalistic read. This is like a Bob Woodward sort of read in just the details on what goes on and mapping it out. And you get to see the monstrosity that this has created and the cruelty. And hopefully it will cause, I think historians will be talking about it in the future.

So you've written a great magnum opus here. Thank you so much, Chris. Thank you, Jean. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to go to theecbpn.com and take and refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Make sure you subscribe. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss and chrisfosspodcastnetwork.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.