<p>When news broke that a key adviser to President Donald J.Trump was a white nationalist, conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg captured the reaction of many Americans.</p>
<p>“Show of hands,” he tweeted. “Who was surprised by the Stephen Miller story?”</p>
<p>The answer, of course, is almost no one.</p>
<p>Lots of folks suspected Miller, now the leading architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, had some racist tendencies. Now, we have proof in the form of hundreds of emails he directed to former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh in the hope of shaping the website’s news coverage.</p>
<p>McHugh handed those emails over to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which published excerpts on its Hatewatch blog.</p>
<p>In the interest of full disclosure, McHugh has her own checkered past. She was fired from Breitbart in 2017 for her anti-Muslim tweets, but she has since renounced her far-right views.</p>
<p>Now, she sees Miller wielding influence on a far bigger stage.</p>
<p>“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” she told Hatewatch.</p>
<p>Miller sent some of the emails after joining the Trump campaign in January 2016, but he sent most of them while still a staff member for then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who went on to become part of the Trump administration as attorney general. Miller sent many of the messages using an official government email account.</p>
<p>The messages included links to the white supremacist site VDare and to articles about such things as “white genocide,” the belief that non-whites are conspiring to eliminate the white race.</p>
<p>“Americans should be terrified by the casual way that Stephen Miller, who has enormous influence in the White House, shares racist content and speaks the language of white nationalists in emails to people he apparently considered fellow travelers,” Michael Edison Hayden of Hatewatch said in a news release.</p>
<p>The Hatewatch article discusses Miller’s perspective on race and immigration.</p>
<p>“When discussing crime, which he does scores of times, Miller focuses on offenses committed by nonwhites,” it says. “On immigration, he touches solely on the perspective of severely limiting or ending nonwhite immigration to the United States.”</p>
<p>In June 2015, when many Americans were reeling from the horror of a white supremacist slaughtering African-American worshipers at a church in South Carolina, Miller had another concern. He was complaining in emails to McHugh about efforts by Amazon and other retailers to shut down sales of the Confederate battle flag, the racist emblem that killer Dylann Roof had proudly displayed on his Facebook page.</p>
<p>The Southern Poverty Law Center is circulating a petition calling for Miller’s firing.</p>
<p>“Hate doesn’t belong in the White House,” the organization tweeted.</p>
<p>In a typical response, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham attacked the messenger, calling the center an “utterly discredited, far-left smear organization.”</p>
<p>“They libel, slander and defame conservatives for a living,” she said. “They are beneath public discussion.”</p>
<p>Generations of oppressed minorities would likely disagree with that characterization.</p>
<p>Granted, the center has seen its share of controversy and upheaval, but its goal for nearly five decades has been consistent – to fight hatred and come to the defense of those facing social injustice. The organization has made a business of bankrupting groups like the Ku Klux Klan.</p>
<p>And its efforts have not gone unnoticed. The organization’s headquarters has been firebombed, and its leaders have been targeted by death threats.</p>
<p>Lots of people have tried and failed to silence its voice.</p>
<p>Our attention here should not be focused on the Southern Poverty Law Center. It should be focused on the hate-filled messages of one Stephen Miller, senior policy adviser to the president of the United States.</p>
<p><em>Kelly Hawes is a columnist for CNHI newspapers in Indiana.</em></p>
