Major media outlets sanitize Stephen Miller’s white nationalist ideas

Miller has a long history of promoting some of the core tenets of white nationalism. Media outlets, with few exceptions, chose not to describe his views in plain terms.

Newly appointed White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is seen in the Presidential limousine in West Palm Beach, Florida on November 6, 2026. (Alex WROBLEWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)

After a historic defeat in the 2026 midterm elections, President Trump named Stephen Miller as his new White House chief of staff, elevating his longtime aide to one of the most powerful positions on earth.

Who is Stephen Miller?

The Washington Post described Miller as someone who “has long railed against political correctness“ and “a prominent voice on issues such as race, gender and immigration.” The Wall Street Journal said Miller has “zealous views.” The New York Times noted that Miller is “a perennial target of critics of Mr. Trump, who have highlighted his right-wing views.” The AP cast Miller as “an immigration hardliner and a bombastic critic of Democrats.” Reuters called Miller “caustic and uncompromising.”

These are all euphemisms for Miller’s actual beliefs, which nearly every major media outlet neglected to state in plain terms. The record is clear: Miller has repeatedly promoted white nationalist ideas.

A Popular Information review of 105 articles about Miller’s appointment in 36 mainstream publications — including CNN, NBC News, CBS News, ABC News, CNBC, NPR, Newsweek, Axios, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Time, and Semafor — found only two (USA Today and Politico) used the term “white nationalist.” Even those two articles attributed the description to an outside group or “critics,” rather than stating it as a fact.

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.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based NGO, explains that remigration is used by the European far-right to mean “forced deportation of migrant communities, with the intent of creating an ethnically or culturally homogeneous society.”

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.

Miller expressed his views at length in an interview with Fox News’ Mark Levin on January 14, 2024. Levin said it was not a “replacement theory” but “replacement reality.” He said that “leftists” have “condemned the White Europeans for settling this country and that White Europeans are actually the illegal aliens and every other person in the world… who wishes to come [to] the United States, they are the indigenous peoples.” Levin continued that he “cannot even think of another rationale for allowing over 10 million foreigners in this country.”

Miller’s response:

Well, Mark, once again, I mean, you’ve asked exactly the right question. Is there another explanation? Of course, there isn’t another explanation…

They have been open for years. I mean, I grew up in Southern California and I can remember from the age I was in high school, especially that the left talked openly about the fact that they saw mass illegal immigration as a social justice endeavor to reduce the voting and economic power of the descendants of the people who founded and settled this country and to bring in people that were the victims, in their mind, of European colonialism and European conquest, and Western expansionism. And they were very open about this, and have been for so many years.

And so you’ll just have to, excuse me for being outraged to now have major corporate media figures saying, oh, some kind of conspiracy theory, that there’s some sort of demographic or other goal to having a wide open border.

An investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) found that the Great Replacement Theory was “an organizing principle of white supremacist extremists across the globe.” The Anti-Defamation League explains that it is closely associated with the infamous “14 words,” a white nationalist rallying cry: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

In a June 30 appearance on Fox News, Miller said that the United States needed to end birthright citizenship because people from “third world nations” — code for non-white immigrants — are civilizationally inferior to the West.

We have people from all over the world, from third world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel, and they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital, paid for by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen.

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.

Miller has also promoted the 1924 Immigration Act as a model. In a December 9, 2025 Fox News appearance, Miller was asked “[D]o we need something like the 1924 act?” Miller responded that the law was “such a good example” of an effective immigration policy because it had “very strict immigration quotas” and ushered in an era of “negative migration.”

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains that the quotas imposed by the 1924 Immigration Act were “inspired in part by American proponents of eugenics” and “calculated to privilege ‘desirable’ immigrants from northern and western Europe.” The law “limited immigrants considered less ‘racially desirable,’ including southern and eastern European Jews.” (Specifically, the law “provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census.”)

The U.S. State Department acknowledged that “the most basic purpose of the 1924 Immigration Act was to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.”

The email leak

In the run-up to the 2016 election, “Stephen Miller promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols,” according to hundreds of leaked emails obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch.

The emails reveal communications between Miller and Katie McHugh, then an editor for Breitbart, a far-right media outlet. In the emails, Miller sent McHugh a link from VDARE, a white nationalist website. He also recommended that Breitbart publish an article comparing the Pope’s comments in support of immigrants with the novel The Camp of the Saints, the 1973 book by French author Jean Raspail. The novel is “an apocalyptic tale that attempts to depict the destruction of white, Western society at the hands of mass immigration from the Global South.” The book gained popularity “among American white supremacist and anti-immigrant groups in the 1980s and 1990s.”

More than 80% of Miller’s emails dealt with race or immigration. After reviewing more than 900 emails, the SPLC “was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.” McHugh said that years of communicating with Miller illustrated he was “a person who believes in discredited race science and eugenics“ and uses it to “craft policy to hurt people, especially people of color, especially Muslims.”