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Episode 215: Jean Guerrero on Community, Journalism in the Age of Trump, and Her Stephen Miller Biography 'Hatemonger'
127 Plays4 years ago
"It's a whole new world. I remember I was reporting for the Stephen Miller book, I went to Trump's first reelection rally in Orlando. And it was the first time that I had ever been in a place where I felt reluctant and kind of scared to tell people that I was a journalist. I wasn't there undercover. I was there to interview people. It made me nervous to be walking around with my notebook out because there were so many chants against journalists," says Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.
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Parallels in Improvement: Golf and Writing
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Sessions with me include several back and forths of drafts, email support, Skype calls, and get this, transcripts of our call. Oh no. Did I just butcher my own house ad?
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You know, if there was a transcript of this ad, there would be some gobbledygook right there. But in any case, it's transcripts of our calls so you can reference them at your own pace. If you're ready to level up your writing, I'd love to help. Email Brendan at BrendanAmerican.com to start a dialogue.
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Yeah, these are performatively cruel policies. I mean, several of my sources have said this to me, and it's stuck with me, that the point is the cruelty.
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Well, hello there, fellow CNF'er. How's it going? It's a creative nonfiction podcast to show where I talk to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories.
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00:02:01
Speaker
I was thinking I might put my intro riff at the end of the show post-interview. That way, we're not lolly gagging.
Jean Guerrero on 'Hatemonger' and White Nationalism
00:02:11
Speaker
And you can dive into the show today with Jean Guerrero. She returns to the podcast. She's the author of Hatemonger, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.
00:02:22
Speaker
Two weeks in a row dealing with white nationalism. Sunny days on the pod. So, in theory, I could just roll into the interview now and spare you the usual bullshit you've come to expect. It's not disappearing, we're just taking time apart. The intro and outro are just...
00:02:39
Speaker
They're trying to figure things out. Yes, the intro just bought a bunch of IKEA furniture and moved into a studio apartment at the end of the podcast, but we just need some time apart. So for yucks, let's do that. Here's my conversation with Gene Guerrero.
Impact of COVID-19 on Journalism and Book Promotion
00:03:04
Speaker
and for you, how have you been navigating your job in this time, just reporting on everything and trying to stay safe, but also do what you do? Yeah, so when this all started, the first thing I did was a report for the PBS NewsHour about
00:03:24
Speaker
the border restrictions as a result of the coronavirus and how the coronavirus was impacting asylum seekers in Tijuana who found themselves stuck there because the United States was no longer accepting anyone at all. I mean, Stephen Miller had already done everything that he could to completely obliterate the asylum system, but this time with the coronavirus, they were able to shut it down completely. So I went down there and this was before there were
00:03:53
Speaker
very, very strict, like before they shut down the border. And before journalists started doing almost everything remotely. So I did a quick story down there. I mean, we had masks on and everything, but we were going into the migrant shelters and interviewing people about how horrified they were that they not only had to worry about the violence that they were fleeing in Central America, but also
00:04:22
Speaker
now this virus that it was keeping them like prisoners in Mexico. But after that, I got kind of lucky in the sense that I had to focus on my book and setting up the promotion and figuring out how to get the word out. And that was a lot of work done from my apartment, which was, I mean, it just
00:04:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I've just been kind of cooped up, which I mean, everybody is cooped up now, but I haven't really had as much reason to go out into the world and to do reporting in the field. But yeah, I mean, journalism is like completely transformed. Now, as you know, everything is almost everything is done remotely, which I'm still getting used to like trying to set up interviews through Skype and stuff. It's like,
00:05:19
Speaker
It sucks not to have that human face-to-face connection with people, but unfortunately that's just how it's got to be for now.
00:05:26
Speaker
And I think a lot of people who listen to the show too, who aspire to write books or do long form reported work or memoir or whatever, you touched upon some of the table setting you're doing for the book promotion. So what does that look like for you and what are you going about to make sure that you can get as much momentum behind your book as possible?
Book Promotion Strategies
00:05:52
Speaker
Well, so the most amount of work that I have to do is just coming up with essays that relate to the book, trying to place. We have an excerpt that's coming out.
00:06:05
Speaker
Sorry, I'm sure it'll have come out by the time this comes out. But yeah, I've just been writing essays and also just trying to reach out to different organizations that I know would be interested in learning about Stephen Miller, immigration advocacy organizations.
00:06:24
Speaker
immigration, legal organizations, just different groups that I know are invested in understanding how our immigration policy gets made and making sure that they're aware that the book is coming out.
00:06:42
Speaker
And also just connecting with journalists whose work I've been following and whose work inspired me and helped me, you know, by providing breadcrumbs along the way in my reporting process for the book, reaching out to them, letting them know how much their work helped me and making sure that they have a copy of the book if they want one and can help spread the word with their own readers.
00:07:07
Speaker
And some people, you know, scoff at some of the sort of marketing, like, you know, shilling of the book and all that. And I get it on one hand, but I guess on the other hand, it's just like, well, this is kind of the ecosystem we're in and you can choose to embrace it or not. And you're already alluding to some of the things you're doing, but how has your mindset maybe changed or stayed the same around, you know, marketing and selling the book and that part of
00:07:36
Speaker
the process and being creative around that process because it's not going away, so you might as well kind of lean into it, right? Yeah. So I mean, that's a really good question because I initially really just shrunk at the idea of like doing my own marketing and publicity and I really didn't like it. And I didn't do that much of, I mean, I did like legwork for crux, but I kind of
00:08:01
Speaker
viewed it as the publisher was going to be taking the lead on publicity and marketing and that I believe was a mistake and I've learned that from talking to various authors that like the author needs to take the lead on marketing and publicity because you are the one who knows your subject better than anyone and you know the readers who are going to who are
00:08:22
Speaker
who are going to be invested in the story that you're telling. So this time around, I made sure that I was very involved in the process and brainstorming with my publicist. I mean, I did that with crux, but definitely not to the extent that I'm doing it now. And I also just view publicity and marketing differently now.
00:08:44
Speaker
I used to just hate the idea of networking because we're just kind of sucking up to the powerful and reinforcing existing power structures. I just hated that idea. But now I've realized that networking and kind of putting your work out there, it's a lot more about
00:09:10
Speaker
building a community of people who have the same interests and goals that you do. And that's sort of like a lifestyle. It's not just a part of marketing a book. It just has to be a part of your lifestyle. Just constantly reaching out to people whose work takes your breath away, letting them know.
00:09:39
Speaker
You know, just propping other people up and just approaching networking with gratitude rather than self-interest and like, how can you help me? That builds the spirit of people want to collaborate and help you because you're helping them. And so it's really a mutually beneficial
00:10:23
Speaker
celebrate each other's work and then in in celebrating others work you know it'll not doing it in a way that it's like oh well if I celebrate someone else it's gonna come back to me but like but doing it with genuine love for the craft and what you're doing and then yeah well it should boomerang back to you but that shouldn't be the reason and I just love that ethos that you're that you're taking to this that's right it's just really great to hear yeah and I mean it just
00:10:25
Speaker
approach to networking.
00:10:50
Speaker
It's something that I learned from other people doing it with me and mentors.
00:10:59
Speaker
I just had so many instances where people helped me out when they didn't need to help me out. And I realized that if you take that approach in your own work and try to help and encourage and prop up other writers, we need community right now in journalism. We are being vilified and there's so much anti-media hostility right now that it's really important for
00:11:26
Speaker
for journalists to stick together and help each other out. And in terms of that anti-media hostility, how are you handling that? And perhaps even when you are confronted with people who are believing that vilification, how do you go about saying, no, no, no, this is a necessary part of our democracy, and what I do is
Challenges of Journalism in Hostile Environments
00:11:50
Speaker
It is part of the fabric of what it means to be in this country, in the fourth estate and everything. So how have you just been navigating all these darts that are getting thrown at you for the last three and a half years?
00:12:07
Speaker
Well, I mean, it's just, it's a whole new world. I remember while I was reporting for the Stephen Miller book, I went to Trump's first reelection rally in Orlando. And it was the first time that I had ever been in a place where I felt reluctant and kind of scared to tell people that I was a journalist. I mean, I wasn't there undercover. I was there to interview people.
00:12:34
Speaker
It made me nervous to be walking around with my notebook out because there were so many chants against journalists, against the so-called fake news and people with poster boards against the so-called fake news.
00:12:56
Speaker
Yeah, it was the first time that I felt like I wasn't comfortable advertising the fact that I was a journalist. And yeah, I still haven't figured out how to navigate that. I mean, with this book that I just wrote, I decided to pay for a service called Privacy Duck, which helps, they eliminate
00:13:21
Speaker
If you haven't heard of it before, basically they eliminate your personal data, like your physical address and other personal data from search engine, from people search web search engines, like white pages, for example. And I did that for myself and most of my close family members. And the reason I did that is because I had been in conversations with PEN America. They have some really great folks who help journalists prepare for
00:13:50
Speaker
controversial stories and books that they're publishing and it's a safeguard against being doxed because there's a lot of people who ascribe to far-right ideologies who go around
00:14:07
Speaker
doxxing people whose work that they don't like. And my first book was such a personal book that included the names of my mother, my father, et cetera. And I just wanted to make sure that they were protected and that I was protected. And it's so weird to be living in the United States, which is supposed to be a beacon of freedom and justice. And to have to worry about your safety that way, it's unprecedented.
00:14:35
Speaker
Yeah, I know my friend Bronwyn Dickey who wrote Pitbull, Battle of an American Icon, which came out in the spring of 2016, I believe. She lives in the South, and she was under...
00:14:50
Speaker
a lot of attack from people just for writing about the science around pit bulls. That was inciting a lot of people. And yeah, she was getting all kinds of threats. It's crazy. It's the kind of world we live in. And it's only ratcheted up from there, of course.
00:15:12
Speaker
Yeah, I'm I'm already getting tweets telling me to go back to Mexico. And even though I was born in the United States and I, you know, you just kind of have to shrug it off because if you get caught up in it, it really is distracting. Is there any fear or apprehension that you have around with this book coming out?
00:15:34
Speaker
Yeah, of course. I mean, my main fear is just about just trying to make sure that my family is protected because you just never know what people are going to do. And so I just tried to take all the steps that I could to protect their privacy. And of course, I'm sure that they're going to take
00:16:01
Speaker
parts of my first book out of context to try to paint me as some kind of open borders advocate and not a serious journalist. That's to be expected because of the way that the far right operates. But yeah, I mean, I'm just trying to stay focused on like, I've written this book, I think it's an important book and I want to
00:16:26
Speaker
I'm trying to focus on making sure that people read it and people learn from it and trying not to get too caught up in the worries and anxieties.
00:16:36
Speaker
Right, and to your point about the press being vilified, our mutual friend and gopher and Stephanie Gorton, with her Citizen Reporters book, she cited some instances, even going back to Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt, people who benefited from the media, and then of course they turn around and
00:16:59
Speaker
and try to smear it. It's this thing that's been going on for almost as long as this republic has been on its feet.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah, and Stephen Miller really knows how to manipulate the media.
Stephen Miller's Influence and Radicalization
00:17:15
Speaker
Part of my reporting was about how when he was working for Alabama, Senator Jeff Sessions, he knew how to twist arms in journalism to get his side and Jeff Sessions' side of the story printed and was willing to play dirty to get that to happen.
00:17:39
Speaker
And early in the book you write that Miller's story is America's story, a microcosm for our path to the present. So in what ways would you identify that his story is a microcosm of the American story?
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to talk about to report about Stephen Miller's life is I grew up in Southern California during the 90s at the same time and same region that Stephen Miller did. And I knew I was familiar. I mean, yeah, so I was familiar with the fact that during that time period, there was this
00:18:23
Speaker
unprecedented anti-immigrant hysteria in California. I mean, typically today when we think of California, we think about, you know, we think of it as a very blue state and currently it's like leading the charge against Trump's policies nationwide. But back in the 90s when Stephen Miller was growing up in California and when I was growing up there,
00:18:47
Speaker
You saw attacks on bilingual education, attacks on affirmative action. You saw attacks on social services for children of undocumented migrants. You saw the governor Pete Wilson blaming all of the state's fiscal problems on what he called the invasion at the border. So when I was watching Trump's rise in 2016,
00:19:16
Speaker
I just had major deja vu. People were acting like it was just crazy and Trump created the notion of the border wall and the notion of an assault on immigration. But to me, I was like, wait, no, I remember this. I remember growing up in this ethos.
00:19:38
Speaker
And so my reporting compelled me to explore how that impacted Stephen Miller when he was growing up in Southern California. He was exposed to this anti-immigrant hysteria. So when Stephen Miller was in high school, he was railing against all of the same things that the governor and that right-wing talk radio in California were railing
00:20:06
Speaker
against, so multiculturalism and bilingual education. He was clearly very impacted by the political environment in California, in the California in which he grew up. I wanted to explore how it was possible that a Jewish American who was the descendant of refugees
00:20:27
Speaker
who fled persecution and vilification, the same type of persecution and vilification that the Trump administration has come to embody. How does someone like that go and lead the country's attacks on asylum seekers, on refugees, on people fleeing horrific conditions of violence and poverty?
00:20:53
Speaker
It's not like he was a victim or displaced by immigrant labor or things that point to, things that the alt-right points to as taking the white man's jobs.
00:21:10
Speaker
And he never seemed to be a victim of that, and yet he glommed on to that narrative nevertheless. It must have been bizarre in your reporting just to find out that it's like, what's your beef, man? Why? I see Stephen Miller as a case study in radicalization because all of his extreme beliefs
00:21:36
Speaker
He embraced them during a very difficult time in his youth. The family had been forced to move from a very wealthy, mostly white neighborhood in Santa Monica, California, the coastal city, to a slightly less wealthy neighborhood that was more diverse.
00:21:55
Speaker
And Stephen Miller's father, who's a real estate investor like Trump, he was tangled up in numerous bankruptcies and legal disputes.
00:22:09
Speaker
And the friends of Stephen Miller's who I spoke with tell me that at that time, Stephen Miller was sort of trying to get his father's attention, that his father was sort of absent or busy often, and it made Stephen Miller start to seek out other male authority figures.
00:22:30
Speaker
And that's when he met, I mean, that's when he started reading a lot of far-right literature, like the NRA, Wayne LaPierre's book, Guns, Crime and Freedom. He also met David Horowitz, who is classified as an anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
00:22:58
Speaker
So Stephen Miller met Horowitz when he was like 16 years old, right after 9-11, which had an incredible impact on Stephen Miller's life, both 9-11 and his meeting with David Horowitz.
00:23:12
Speaker
his friends tell me that after 9-11, I mean, he'd already been exploring these far-right ideologies, but after 9-11, he became completely consumed by them because he believed that America was under attack and that he needed to attack back. And that's something that David Horowitz taught him explicitly. David Horowitz is a man who says that the entire political left
00:23:43
Speaker
of the United States of America poses an existential threat to the country because of their allyship with Muslims and because of their allyship with other people of color. He says that Black people owe their freedom to white men and that white men are largely responsible for creating the values that we hold dear as Americans, such as
00:24:05
Speaker
freedom and equality and justice, which is completely ahistorical and ignores the central role that people of color played in the civil rights movement and making these once false ideals of our founding documents actually true. But David Horwitz, he brought these ideas to Stephen Miller, as well as other, Miller was listening to Rush Limbaugh,
00:24:28
Speaker
He talks about the Native American genocide and justifies it, and he was also exposed to various other far-right media personalities.
00:24:40
Speaker
But David Horwitz kind of took him under his wing at this time when Stephen Miller was kind of vulnerable and insecure and helped him and continued to correspond with him throughout his years at Duke University, helped him find jobs in Congress. He connected him with
00:25:01
Speaker
with all of the jobs that he had on Capitol Hill, including his important role as communications director for Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, which eventually landed him the job with Donald Trump. So it hasn't been reported before the extent to which Horowitz shaped Stephen Miller's career, but not only did he
00:25:25
Speaker
you know, play this integral role in shaping his ideology when he was a young man. He also played a direct role in shaping the Trump campaign. So during the Trump campaign, Stephen Miller was constantly going to David Horowitz for ideas. And so for example, like Trump saying, Trump talking about radical Islamic terrorism, Trump comparing inner cities to war zones, all of that was coming from David Horowitz, who shared a strategy paper with Miller
00:25:54
Speaker
at one point that said that the most important thing that the Republican Party could do is to play on people's fear and other hostile emotions by vilifying and demonizing liberals, which you see to this day kind of now more so than ever because
00:26:15
Speaker
You see Trump, like in this period of crisis, relying more and more heavily on Miller, who was shaped by Horowitz, and talking now about far-left fascism and unhinged left-wing mobs and kind of blaming everything on the political left. And you see Stephen Miller going on Fox News talking about how
00:26:37
Speaker
the left, how this is about the survival of America and how, you know, again, it's just echoing Horowitz's language. And when you are familiar with the ideas that Horowitz pushed on Miller, when Miller was a young man, you start to understand what's motivating Stephen Miller, like what is actually motivating the crackdown on immigrants and the apocalyptic demonization in Trump's rhetoric.
00:27:06
Speaker
It's amazing how, you know, you see this, there'll be like some old aging, you know, alt-right troll, and they try to glom on to like the next generation. Like you see this with Derek Black, what was happening with him. I think like David Duke was really instrumental in trying to mentor Derek Black before Derek got the hell out of there, as like brilliantly told by Eli Sazzlo's book, Rising Out of Hatred.
00:27:33
Speaker
So it's just one of those things where, you know, Horowitz got his teeth into a young up-and-comer. He's like, well, if we buy our cards, right, maybe this person will be in a position of influence. And look what happened. Yeah, I mean, he David Horowitz runs a nonprofit that that is like, according to the IRS, these
00:27:59
Speaker
These types of organizations are forbidden from directly getting involved in political campaigns. Horowitz has found a way to do it, where he's sort of dancing around the law in ways that he says are not actually breaking the law. But the most obvious example is the way that he has shaped Trump's campaign and Trump's administration through Stephen Miller, who is
00:28:28
Speaker
who has recently been classified himself as an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of the way that he speaks and the views that he, the white supremacist and white nationalist views that he launders through the language of heritage and through the language of patriotism and sovereignty in the White House.
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's just it's like the it's the very idea is the campaign contribution and it's just like the the inception of that virus is is that is there and like you said so brilliantly just now like laundering these ideas through these ideas of like heritage and everything and it definitely it it cleanses what is actually very racist and hateful rhetoric.
00:29:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it almost like I don't know if whitewashes is the right term or the wrong term, but it like it's it's something that's been happening. It started it started in the 90s in in largely in California. But one of the leading figures behind this is a man named John Tanton, who created well, first of all, the biologist. Yeah, he was an eye doctor who believed that
00:29:46
Speaker
He believed in race-based pseudoscience. He believed in population control for non-white people. He believed that non-white people posed an existential threat to American heritage the way that Horowitz claims as well, although he focuses his attacks on liberals. But Tanton was a racist. He was a white supremacist. And Tanton created these, he helped, he played an instrumental role in creating three think tanks.
00:30:16
Speaker
called the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Numbers USA. And these three think tanks have since the late 1900s been doing what Miller is doing in the White House, which is to launder a white nationalist agenda through the language of economics and the language of heritage, etc.
00:30:42
Speaker
Stephen Miller went, he cultivated close relationships with these three think tanks. I hesitate to call them think tanks, but they're self-styled think tanks. He cultivated relationships with them when he was working with Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. And if you look at FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, one of these groups,
00:31:09
Speaker
They put out a blueprint for the Trump transition team for immigration policy in November of 2016, and Stephen Miller adopted that blueprint almost verbatim in policies, starting with, for example, their demand
00:31:29
Speaker
for an end to what they call chain migration or the family-based migration. That has been a hallmark of American history and an end to catch and release, which is the practice of allowing asylum seekers who prove a credible fear of persecution to be released on parole while they await their court hearings.
00:31:53
Speaker
All of these policies that Miller has pushed for in the White House have echoed this blueprint that was issued by FAIR. When you connect the dots, you see that there's a straight line from eugenicist propped up think tanks
00:32:16
Speaker
and the policy that's coming out of the White House. And that's why we called the book, Hatemonger, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, because the White House is implementing a white nationalist agenda. I mean, it comes straight from these think tanks, which were created in large part by John Tanton, who was a complete racist and white supremacist overtly.
Cruelty as Policy in Immigration
00:32:44
Speaker
And the first half of the book, by and large, concerns itself with Miller's sort of education and his rise in terms of his ideology, and then the second part is that ideology given empowerment and permission, and a psyche turned loose.
00:32:59
Speaker
So what was more challenging for you as a writer to lay this stuff out in a way that is brilliantly paced and makes sense and shows the building of this person? Yeah. Because I had such a tight timeline in which to do this book, I had a six-month deadline from the start of reporting to finishing writing.
00:33:29
Speaker
I just went about it. I knew I was going to write the book chronologically or at least I suspected I was going to do it that way and that is how I ended up doing it because I didn't have time to try to structure it in a more experimental or back and forth way. So I laid out
00:33:51
Speaker
I was learning everything that I possibly could. I read everything that was already written about Stephen Miller and made source lists of people to reach out to along the way. And from the very beginning, I was reaching out to them and asking them for other sources.
00:34:09
Speaker
to contact and calling them as well. And so just endless phone calls, endless reading for the first couple months, meetings as well. I went to DC. I went to Johnstown where Stephen Miller's maternal family grew up. I went to Los Angeles.
00:34:27
Speaker
to Santa Monica, sorry, where he grew up. I went to Durham where he went to college. And so I was just, it was this never ending, very fast paced reporting process where I was gathering everything that I could and just laying it out on a timeline. A timeline was like very helpful because then I was able to
00:34:53
Speaker
go back and make sure that I wasn't missing any important events in his life. And also it helped to give me context and understand the context in which things were happening. So like Stephen Miller working for Sessions when so-and-so was going on at the border. These things were really important to keep in mind.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah. Well how do you how did you navigate writing a biography of a living person who is like not you know integral to it in terms of your having access to him and being able to interview him. What was what was that like for you to tell the story and getting the right access to the right people. How did you go about that.
00:35:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, from the very beginning of this project, I reached out to the White House and I reached out to Stephen Miller, letting them know that I wanted them to be part of this process and help shape the book. But they never declined. They simply said that they were thinking about it up until my deadline, which they knew was my deadline and never got back to me.
00:36:01
Speaker
So unfortunately, I was never able to speak to Miller. I did speak to more than 100 people who knew him well, family, friends, colleagues, and tried to paint a picture of how he came to be the way that he is. One of the really helpful things that I did that I'm really glad that I did was I
00:36:27
Speaker
I had never reported out of DC before and I was not very well sourced in the White House when I first started this project and I just kind of swallowed my pride and reached out to the White House reporters whose work I admired and who I'd been in touch with before and asked if they'd be willing to give me any advice
00:36:48
Speaker
Um, and I was, I was surprised at how generous people were. I mean, people shared really hard to get phone numbers for people. Um, they were extremely generous and that was critical for me and being able to start out. So, so, um, I'm really, I'm really glad that I did that. But, but to me, like I, I was trying to find
00:37:13
Speaker
I was trying to find the humanity in Stephen Miller from the very beginning. I approached this with a completely open mind. I don't believe in straight up villains. I think that people are very complicated and I wanted to understand those layers that make up Stephen Miller without romanticizing or glorifying him, of course, because I know that our culture has
00:37:38
Speaker
sort of this fetish for the anti-hero, and that's part of what led Miller down his own path.
00:37:44
Speaker
But I did want to be fair to Stephen Miller, obviously, as a journalist. And so I was looking for his humanity in every single interview that I did with the more than 100 people who knew him in every single video that I watched of him talking in all of the books. I read all of the books that I learned inspired him when he was growing up and just kind of immersed myself in his thinking.
00:38:11
Speaker
And that was a really critical part of the reporting process as well. But what was interesting to me is that as I went along, the more I learned about Stephen Miller, the less complex he became. It was surprising to me because usually the opposite happens, right? Like you're learning more and more about a person and they become more and more complicated in your mind. They become more dimensional.
00:38:40
Speaker
And the thing is, when I was learning about Stephen Miller, I found his humanity in stories about him as a little boy when he was wanting to spend time with his father and expressing insecurities and acting out in Hebrew class, which I documented in the book. But yeah, as time went on, he became less and less.
00:39:02
Speaker
And to me, it's a case study in radicalization. It's what happens when someone is consumed by an ideology and essentially supplanted by it. He became a person who is consumed by a single mission and regurgitating talking points that he's been immersed in his entire life.
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, even the behavior when he was even in high school and extended to the college where he would just throw trash on the ground and just say, no, it's the janitor's job to clean up after us. And it's just like, yeah, it's just like he's kind of a, there's not a, he hasn't really grown much out of that. He's just become more shrewd and certainly more, you know, like a worm tongue behind King Theoden and Lord of the Rings.
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah, Stephen Miller, he sounds the same today as he did at age 16 when you look at, when you examine the way that he speaks today and the way that he spoke and the subjects that, and the way that he wrote back then and the way that he writes now. It's eerie how similar the language and the obsessions with
00:40:22
Speaker
very limited subjects are. But again, that's just what happens when people are radicalized at a very young age. And Stephen Miller's own friends, I spoke to one of his best friends on condition of anonymity. He was worried that if people found out his name, that he would lose his job because of the fact that he is a friend of Stephen Miller's.
00:40:47
Speaker
And he was telling me that as he was watching Stephen Miller, that Stephen Miller changed over time and that he became more and more focused on this anti-immigrant mission. And that at one point, during the Trump campaign, his friend was worried about him, watching him on, I believe it was CNN. And he was watching his friend on TV and realized, oh my God,
00:41:17
Speaker
He sounds almost unhinged. I better give him a call and ask him if he knows what he's doing and if he really wants to be doing this. And so he called him and asked him. And Stephen Miller said that he wasn't worried about it or he wasn't worried that he was going to be ruining his job prospects. He didn't feel that that was going to happen the way that his friend feared for him.
00:41:46
Speaker
What were the conversations like when you were approaching people and granting them anonymity because they feared professional retaliation? How were those conversations conducted so you could get their thoughts and their quotes on the record while also protecting them too?
00:42:09
Speaker
So that was something I went over with the attorney at HarperCollins and my own attorney just making sure that there was nothing identifiable. I mean initially we were going to say where one of his close friends
00:42:24
Speaker
this person I was just talking about, we were going to say, because he had agreed to us using his place of employment, but we realized that the city in which he works, but we realized that that might be too identifying, so we removed that. I talked it out with the source when we set the terms of our conversations at the beginning, and then
00:42:48
Speaker
and then went over it again to make sure that we weren't missing anything with the attorneys. But yeah, it was really, really important to me to talk to people who
00:43:01
Speaker
to people who had a more favorable outlook of Stephen Miller, because there are, most of the people who are willing to talk about Stephen Miller are people who don't like him. And it was very important to me to get the other side of the story. And so I was willing to work with this particular source, his close friend, even though I ordinarily would not, he's, I believe the only, maybe there's another, there's numerous officials in the White House to whom I granted anonymity.
00:43:30
Speaker
But he's the only major character who has anonymity and it was because I felt his perspective was so important and I also was able to verify his friendship with Stephen Miller by looking at photographs that he shared with me of the two of them together throughout the course of Stephen Miller's life.
00:43:48
Speaker
And you've been immersed in covering immigration for years, and it seems like something like a lot of people on the surface think they might have some sort of an understanding, but the more and more you burrow into it, and your book, of course, illustrates this beautifully, is how nuanced and complex it is.
00:44:08
Speaker
For people who might not know where to turn to, to at least get a primer on immigration in this country, maybe specifically the southern border, where would you point someone like that who wants to learn a bit more and realize just how nuanced this is? Well, the first nonfiction book that comes to mind is actually All American Nativism by Daniel Denver because
00:44:34
Speaker
When I read that a few months ago, it helped me understand that the dichotomy between legal and illegal immigration is a manufactured dichotomy that has allowed American politicians on both sides of the political spectrum to vilify and harm migrants for decades.
00:44:58
Speaker
And I hadn't realized that before, even as an immigration reporter who'd been covering immigration under both Obama and Trump since 2015. So that book does a really great job of highlighting some of the nuances around immigration. I mean, one of the classics for me is
00:45:20
Speaker
The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Rea. I mean, he doesn't delve into what's going on under the Trump administration because that book was written, I believe, in the 90s, maybe the early 2000s. But it's still extremely relevant because what's happening today has honestly not, the only real difference between the
00:45:41
Speaker
Trump's immigration policy and the militarization of the border that we saw under Bill Clinton and even under Obama and of course under Bush.
00:45:54
Speaker
is that Trump relies on demonization in order to push these policies into an even darker and harsher place. Trump did not invent the concept of the border wall. We have hundreds of miles of border fencing already prior to Trump taking office, but he did
00:46:17
Speaker
through Stephen Miller, because Stephen Miller was writing his speeches, and Stephen Miller's obsessed with demonizing, using demonizing language. He relies on demonization to push these policies to a place where they're not just cracking down on people who are jumping the fence, or people who are
00:46:44
Speaker
who are trying to sneak into the country. They're also cracking down on people who are seeking asylum and refuge in the United States, so families and migrant children. And the reason he's able to do that is in part because Democrats and Republicans kind of set the stage for this since the 90s.
00:47:08
Speaker
It's a shared responsibility, what's going on at the border. It's an American phenomenon. It's not a Trump phenomenon. And that's what I was trying to communicate in this book through Stephen Miller is that Stephen Miller, I think one of the mistakes people have made is people have given Stephen Miller the Karl Rove treatment, painted him as this mastermind pulling the strings behind the administration. But Stephen Miller, he didn't invent these ideologies.
00:47:37
Speaker
He is having an outsized influence in the Trump administration because of the fact that he gets Trump in a way that nobody else in the administration does, and that in part stems from events in his childhood, which I document in the book.
00:47:52
Speaker
But he is not the mastermind behind this. He's just more hardworking, more disciplined than most of the other people in the White House. And he's just constantly working on this because he's obsessed with it. And that's how he ends up having this outside influence. But he's not a mastermind. He's just
00:48:14
Speaker
He's really skilled at mimicry and at channeling the ideas of other people into sound bites for the president and into executive orders and other policies that hurt migrant children and asylum seekers and families.
00:48:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I think you quoted someone that in terms of just migrant families and the children at the border and the separation that they've been able to wield as a weapon, he's like, the intention was for children to be irretrievable. Not in every case, but just enough to frighten people. And it's just, it's preying on that fear and this
00:48:59
Speaker
It's just such an ugly and nasty way to go about business, but as you document, he's not afraid to get dirty and play in the mud. Yeah, these are performatively cruel policies. Several of my sources have said this to me, and it's stuck with me, that the point is the cruelty. I call them performatively cruel because it stems from
00:49:27
Speaker
Stephen Miller's hate-mongering through his own speeches and through speeches of Trump and through the rhetoric that he shapes. This hatred, this contempt, and this fear of migrants because his people to cheer on and support and rally around policies that involve
00:49:50
Speaker
systematically tearing apart children from their parents and that involve systematically turning away every single person who comes to our border seeking refuge and asylum fleeing horrific conditions of violence. It's what enables all of that.
00:50:09
Speaker
What would you say your optimism lies with respect to everything that you cover? Is there a light that you see at the end of the tunnel? That's not a freight train barreling at us. Yeah, I mean, honestly, my optimism, most days it's very hard for me to be optimistic, but I take
00:50:38
Speaker
optimism from looking at California, actually, because I think that the United States is going through growing pains in the same way that California was going through in the 90s. In the 90s, white people became a minority in California for the first time. And that is going to happen nationally by 2050.
00:51:02
Speaker
And I think that we're seeing a resistance and, you know, a lot of fear, a lot of unfounded fear related to that. This idea that has been promoted by John Tanton, the white supremacist whose think tanks Stephen Miller has been drawing from. It's the idea of white genocide, the idea that
00:51:29
Speaker
that people of color are systematically replacing white people and that we pose an existential threat to white people. But when you look at California, I mean, that never happened. I mean, there was never white genocide. It just
00:51:46
Speaker
it became a much more diverse and multicultural state. And I think that's ultimately what's going to happen in the United States. And hopefully some of the polarization and the hate that we see is going to be assuaged the way that it was in California as people realized that there is no threat inherent in people of color. And I believe that we're going to become an increasingly mixed
00:52:14
Speaker
Society in the way that we in the way that it happened in California, and we're going to essentially become a mestizo nation and that what that what that's going to do is people are going to there's gonna be more people who.
00:52:29
Speaker
who identify with multiple ways of being, with multiple nationalities, with multiple, you know, both white and black and brown. And there's just not going to be as much tribalism because people are going to have multiple identifications and these hyphenated identities that Miller has attacked since he was a teenager.
00:52:55
Speaker
And speaking of tribalism, early on in the book, you quote Miller at a San Diego rally, and he's like, are you ready to talk about something, or ready to do something they'll write about for the next thousand years? And that just harkens right back to Thousand Year Reich of Hitler Manifesto. And it's just so scary to hear that on a pulpit in 2020.
00:53:20
Speaker
Well, whatever year that was, I don't know if that was a recent rally or a more early presidency or pre-presidency, but the fact that a Jewish man would even harken to that, it just blew me away, blew me away. Yeah. I mean, Stephen Miller's – his own grandmother on his –
00:53:42
Speaker
mother's side tried to warn him about the dangers of demonization. She spent her retirement compiling the family history, and she specifically wrote into the family history that she was documenting this for
00:54:00
Speaker
her grandchildren and their children so that they would remember the value of the people who came to this country with nothing but rags and speaking no English whatsoever and realizing the dangers of nationalist agitators and
00:54:18
Speaker
and the massacres of the Jews that they were fleeing. So this was a message that Stephen Miller's grandmother recorded for him and the rest of her grandchildren. And if I had a chance to talk to Stephen Miller, one of the first questions I would ask him is what he thought about his grandmother's message. His grandmother just died from the coronavirus. And
00:54:43
Speaker
I spoke to Stephen Miller's uncle about her condition a couple months ago because she contracted the virus in the spring. Even though she's 97 years old, she survived the initial infection, but it left her with profound pulmonary and neurological damage, which ultimately took her life. The White House is claiming that
00:55:06
Speaker
she didn't die as a result of the coronavirus, even though her death certificate says that she died because of the coronavirus. And what Ruth Glosser stood for was remembering. And I really would like to know what Stephen Miller thought about her message and whether he had any communications with her on her deathbed and what he told her.
00:55:32
Speaker
It's funny you say that would be your first question. The question I wanted to ask you was, if you were granted an hour with Miller, what would you ask him? So there's one. What else would you want to, what else would you pick his brain about? Yeah, I mean, there's so much I would want to ask him about. I mean, just a lot, you know, some of the things
00:55:57
Speaker
that his friends told me about how, you know, I would ask him a lot about his childhood. I would want to know like what he was thinking when he first started befriending David Horowitz, what he was thinking when he started going on the Larry Elder Show to rant against multiculturalism. And I would just, I would, I would want to know what, what I would, I would want to know more about his state of mind during that time period. And
00:56:28
Speaker
Obviously, it would be important to ask him about these policies that he has orchestrated in the White House. But I also know that he's really good at not answering reporters' questions and just kind of delivering his talking points without addressing what is being asked. So, yeah, I would just kind of have to keep that in mind. What does your gut tell you? Do you think Trump wins or loses in November?
00:57:06
Speaker
I really don't know, actually. I really don't know. I don't even want to venture a guess because I was so convinced that Trump was going to lose in 2016 after the Axis Hollywood tapes came out. I remember thinking he's done. There's no way our country is going to elect a man who
00:57:30
Speaker
brags about sexually assaulting women. That's the game over. And obviously, that's not what happened. And in large part, that was because of what Stephen Miller was doing behind the scenes. Stephen Miller was a critical player in that campaign, and that is why he's been able to stick around for so long in the White House. Outlasting stalwarts like Sessions, the former Attorney General, Steve Bannon himself,
00:57:56
Speaker
It's because he played such a role in making sure that Trump won in 2016. And I know that Miller is doing the same now. And so, I mean, I think it depends. What happens in November is going to depend on how effective Stephen Miller's strategies are. And I think that's why this book is so important right now, to have people recognize what is motivating him and what his strategies are.
Trump's Diversion Tactics
00:58:23
Speaker
And right now what Trump is trying to do is distract from his complete failures of leadership in regards to the coronavirus and the struggling economy by vilifying the Democratic Party and progressives in Black Lives Matter and just anyone that he can vilify to distract from his own feelings. And Stephen Miller is really effective at doing that.
00:58:51
Speaker
I mean, Trump will lose if enough people wake up to the fact that they are being manipulated and that their fear and hatred is being puppeteered from within the White House. And it's just a matter of whether that's going to happen.
00:59:12
Speaker
I just got one more question for you, Jean. You've crux, memoir, this one, it's pretty much straight journalism. Which sandbox do you like playing in the most and where do you see your work maybe going from here?
00:59:30
Speaker
Well, both books were really, really emotionally demanding books, one for personal reasons, the other for, you know, it was such an important topic and I wanted to make sure that I gave it my all.
00:59:48
Speaker
I feel like in the future, I'm probably going to try to do some, at least for a while, I'm going to take a break from really serious subjects and try to focus on something a little bit more fun. I think a collection of essays where you can combine some personal things and reporting, you know, I think that would be, that's something I would be very excited to read from you.
01:00:13
Speaker
Oh, thank you. Yeah, I've thought about that a collection of essays. I'm working on a children's book with my sister who's an illustrator. Yeah, it's just trying to do something different. But yeah, they were completely different books. I mean, in crux, I was mining my own psyche and trying to get to the bottom of my father's illness. And but in a way, they're also linked, you know, I don't want this to become become like the defining
01:00:41
Speaker
principle of my reporting from now on, but like both of these, both my father and Stephen Miller, like it's stories of, they're stories of outcasts of people on the fringes. In Stephen Miller's case, it was an outcast who came into the seat of power and began to govern major decisions in the White House. But yeah, I've always been drawn to characters who embody extremes and
01:01:12
Speaker
but it is like very emotionally taxing to be spending so much time thinking about them. So I'm going to take a break.
01:01:18
Speaker
Nice. Well, Jean, always a pleasure to get to talk to you. So your book is outstanding. It's, I think, a great documentation and an important book for people to read and to get that nuanced look at immigration and specifically how those levers are getting pulled by the people who made it into power these last three and a half years. So thank you for the work and best of luck with it. Thank you so much.
A Break from Serious Topics
01:01:44
Speaker
I appreciate you having me on.
01:01:56
Speaker
be honest tell me what you think you like getting right into the interview a la jeopardy or do you like having me as a warm-up that you can and most likely do skip to get to the interview I don't know email the show with questions and concerns and
01:02:16
Speaker
questions and concerns that you might be having with your work, not questions or concerns you might have for me and my headspace, I'll address maybe your questions and concerns on the show. I mean, why not? This is first and foremost a community and I make the show for you. So if there's ways I can be of greater service to you and the CNF and wallflowers around you, or that one little freak in the mosh pit, let's let's do it. Let's go for it. You know, life.
01:02:44
Speaker
In any case, thanks for making it this far, and thanks to Jean for coming back on the show. Always a pleasure. She's a good one. You know, I'm done with white nationalism for a while. Say we're Darby, Jean Guerrero. Tap me the fuck out, man. No more of that. Done. Done. Okay. Well, you know what I started doing? I started bullet journaling.
01:03:13
Speaker
don't know if that's in vogue or kind of nerdy bulb or Makes me like a kind of a loser. I don't know. Maybe it makes me in the in crowd I don't know it seems pretty cool. I came across a Bujo article in the New Yorker and Had heard over the years that it's a great notebooking system for people who you know have like scrambled eggs for brains So I figured why not give the method a go with one of my field note? Notebooks, you know give it a try give it a little audition
01:03:43
Speaker
I don't know if it's cool or uncool to say this, but I really love it. It's tamped down my anxiety quite a bit. I haven't bit or picked my nails in like three days. I know that might sound kind of gross, but I have my chronic nail biters since I was like four years old. I was born without nails, believe it or not. So anyway, I've been getting tasks done at work for this enterprise and around the house.
01:04:09
Speaker
My wife is like, WTF is going on around here. So I ordered an official bullet journal and I'm reading writer Carol's book about it. And he's the creator of the whole method. Trying to get him on the pod actually to unpack that shit. You know, anyway, makes sense to me. And I'm someone who has at last count, like a trillion give or take notebooks in circulation. I know.
01:04:38
Speaker
Haven't touched the book I've been writing and trying to finish in over a week. Gotta finish that. Gotta do it. Gotta follow my own advice and pick away at it. Then I have to go over it again to copy edit the little fucker and send it off to my coach. Anyway.
01:04:55
Speaker
That's where we're at. Here's the intro and the outro or a new outro or whatever you want to call this thing. I hope you enjoyed the conversation we just had with Jean. That moment early in the show where she talked about networking more as community made me feel all gooey inside.
01:05:12
Speaker
If you like this show or any of the other 200 plus, please link up to us on social media at cnfpod. Tell your friends, tell the CNF'er in your life that BO is more than a snitch. And if you can't do interviews, see ya!
01:05:51
Speaker
you