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Sunday, January 7, 2018

How Stephen Miller plugged white supremacy while sparring with @JakeTapper on @CNN for #Dotard #Trump's amusement

There has been a lot of discussion of the Stephen Miller fracas with Jake Tapper on CNN today, but since I haven't heard anyone comment on how Miller smuggled white supremacist dog whistles and talking points into his monologues, I thought I'd make this contribution to the discussion.

There are two place that Miller did this:

Stephen Miller @7:48
I think that what the point is is that his [Steve Bannon] role has been greatly exaggerated whereas the president hasn't gotten the due that he deserves for the movement that he put together to tap into the kinds of people whose life concerns don't get a lot of attention on CNN, not a lot of hours of coverage on this TV talking about the working class construction workers who've lost their jobs to foreign labor, there's not a lot of coverage on this TV about the people getting slaughtered in sanctuary cities, you don't do a lot of human interest stories about immigrant communities under siege from ms-13, he tapped into a reality that has happened in this country [that] is not covered on this network and I know you think I'm interrupting you but I think the American people deserve to have two or three minutes of the truth and we've let you know here's the truth.
It's interesting that he used the phrase "tap into" and "tapped into" to describe the nature of their propaganda operation. You tap into, or mine, something that already exists, in this case racist elements within American culture, because you can turn it into something of value to you. For Donald Trump, this means power and money. The policy dog whistles are what they use to drill down into the psyche of the worker, sometimes without her even realizing it, to extract that wealth, in this case votes and political support.

Even though automation has been the main competitor for jobs in the United States, and the AI revolution promises to replace 7 million professional driving jobs in the next decade, Miller draws attention to foreign workers facing the same dilemma.

He talks about people getting slaughtered in sanctuary cities when only a tiny percentage of the murders in any US city are committed by people here illegally.

To prove he's not racist, Miller speaks of concern for immigrant communities, but his real point is how terrible ms-13 is. The truth is the new Trump/Miller immigration policies are the biggest problem these communities now face, while sanctuary cities exist to allow these besieged immigrant communities to feel that they can call the police when ms-13 comes around.

Stephen Miller @11:06
The president's tweets absolutely reaffirmed the plain spoken truth. A self-made billionaire, revolutionize reality TV, and tapped into something magical that's happening in the hearts of this country. The people that you don't connect with and understand, the people whose manufacturing jobs have left, who've been besieged by high crime communities, and who've been affected by a policy of uncontrolled immigration, those voices, those experiences don't get covered on this network.
Again Stephen Miller resorts to the language of exploitation before enumerating his racist talking points. This time it is "tapped into." What he calls "magical" is simply a resurgence long ingrained reactionary ideology and culture, and what he euphemistically calls "the hearts of the country," are the fears some white Americans have about a future where they don't automatically come first.

Of course, he has no solution for the manufacturing jobs that have left, and the reality is that jobs leaving for foreign shores is no longer a big job killer. The big job killer is automation, and Trump and company have just passed a tax bill designed to encourage corporations to bring billions of tax free dollars back to the US to invest in automation and things like driverless trucks.

Instead he points them at what he wants everyone to see as the problem: "high crime communities," dog whistle for communities of non-white people, and "uncontrolled immigration," meaning non-white foreigners.

While the main point of Stephen Miller's little fracas with Jake Taper was to defend his boss from charges that his lunacy is evolving, we can see from his statements above, pushing their white supremacist agenda is never far from their thoughts.



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