There are only a handful of things that amuse me about White House senior advisor Stephen Miller. I still find it funny and shocking that he’s only 32 years old, the same age as Robert Pattinson, the Olsen twins, Lady Gaga and Megan Fox. I’m not joking. I also enjoy – uncomfortably enjoy – all of the “jokes” about Stephen Miller killing hobos on his days off. I think you have to laugh to avoid crying, so those are just a few brief moments of levity in this utter catastrophe. Miller is, weirdly enough, a Jewish man and a white nationalist. He plays footsie with the same Alt-Right movement which hates him. His policies are written for them, the white folks who want to see people of color punished for being people of color. He’s also the “architect” of Trump’s deplorable immigration policies, from turning away victims of terrorism and abuse to throwing children and babies in cages.

Well, Miller’s uncle David S. Glosser has written a great essay on why his nephew is a schmuck and a dumbass. You can read the full Politico piece here – the basic gist is that Miller’s family came to America because they were fleeing anti-Jewish terrorism at the turn of the 20th century.

Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration. It begins at the turn of the 20th century in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweat-shop toil Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hard-working immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister. I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.

I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants— been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom. The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America First” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family would likely have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.

[From Politico]

It goes on from there and it’s a good (albeit depressing) read. I think Uncle David makes one mistake though: Stephen Miller cannot be shamed. Miller doesn’t feel shame, not about killing hobos and not about devastating the lives of thousands of immigrants. He is proud of his work on behalf of white nationalism and the neo-Nazi movement. He thinks stoking fear among uneducated and racist white folks is a great idea. Everything is going along according to his plans.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.