Stephen Miller’s rant about a “self-loathing” America was swamped by online backlash as critics lined up to credit immigrants with America’s biggest leaps.
Miller, 40, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and hardliner immigration czar, fired off a late-night X post on Sunday, complaining that the modern world does not match “what our ancestors imagined” because America and the West supposedly spent generations in “a vast, consuming project of self-loathing, self-denigration and the redistribution of our national resources.”
It followed an earlier post from the previous evening, where Miller wrote: “Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon—but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire third world for sixty years.”
Suggesting that technological advances had faded away due to immigration, he’d added: “For those who don’t know, the U.S. had negative migration for the half century between the first nonstop transatlantic flight and the moon landing.”
But Miller’s reading of history was derided for being myopic, misleading, and hypocritical, since Miller himself is a descendant of Jewish immigrants who fled persecution abroad and built a successful life for themselves.
Jon Favreau, Barack Obama’s former speechwriter and a host of Pod Save America, led the pile-on. “You’re only here because America decided to welcome your family when they were refugees fleeing poverty and violence,” he replied, before skewering Miller as a rich kid from California who rose through elite schools into an administration run by “insanely rich elites” who’ve “made themselves even richer” through “open corruption.”
“Maybe, since you’re in charge of it, you can take some responsibility for the modern world not looking like what your ethnic minority refugee ancestors might have imagined,” he wrote.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan, who runs media outlet Zeteo, urged Miller to “learn to use Google,” which he noted would have easily shown that an Egyptian-American Muslim scientist named Dr. Farouk El-Baz helped pick Apollo landing sites and train astronauts for NASA’s moon-landing.
Others also rebutted Miller on his technological timeline. Several X users rattled off a list of immigrant innovators behind iconic breakthroughs, from German engineer Karl Benz’s car to Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi’s work on the atom, reminding Miller that Neil Armstrong was also the descendant of European immigrants.
They noted that without immigrant scientists and engineers, America would not have reached the moon, developed color TV, or built much of its modern economy.
Some users argued that postwar foreign aid was not “self-denigration,” but an assertion of strength aimed at helping weaker nations adapt American values. Another pointed out that Miller’s “redistribution of resources to the undeveloped world” argument collapses under “basic arithmetic,” noting that foreign aid is roughly 1 percent of federal spending.
Miller’s posts also revived a long-running charge of hypocrisy against him.
As Trump’s immigration policy lead, and the driving force behind the administration’s 3,000 daily deportations target, Miller has pushed for mass arrests, drastic cuts to refugee admissions, and the rollback of protections for more than a million people—policies critics say would have barred families like his from ever arriving.
Miller’s own cousin, Alisa Kasmer, condemned his anti-immigration crusade earlier this month, saying their Jewish great-grandparents had fled persecution and successfully rebuilt their lives in the United States. Kasmer accused him of “trying to take away the exact thing that his own family benefited from.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Miller for comment.
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