Reeves Wiedeman — The Duke Lacrosse Scandal and the Birth of the Alt-Right

It not only launched [Richard] Spencer’s career, but that of White House adviser Stephen Miller, too.

Richard Spencer has become somewhat of a fringe Alt-Right character if not caricature. Conversely, Steve Miller is a presidential adviser in the Trump administration with a West Wing office adjacent to the Oval Office along with Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and Kellyanne Conway, in addition to VP Mike Pence. Miller is the youngest of the group and an up-and-comer in US politics. He is a person to watch.

New York Magazine
The Duke Lacrosse Scandal and the Birth of the Alt-Right
Reeves Wiedeman

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Miller parlayed his experiences as a conservative activist at Duke into a job on Capitol Hill, where he worked for former Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, then for Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s choice for attorney general. It’s in Sessions’s office where he came into his own in Washington.

Miller was someone on whom Sessions “relied very heavily,” said Andrew Logan, who worked as Sessions’s press secretary while Miller served as communications director. “He sort of necessarily became involved in all of the policy areas as well.” According to Logan, Miller was involved in writing nearly all of Sessions’s speeches.

Miller quickly became associated with the hardline anti-immigration, anti-globalist views that characterize Sessions and which became a main theme of the Trump campaign....

Miller is also closely connected with Bannon.

Though Miller preceded Bannon on the Trump campaign, they got to know each other while Bannon was still running Breitbart.

“I know Bannon feels the same way that I do about him,” said one Breitbart News staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Always expressed a lot of admiration for him.”
The staffer referred back to a speech Jeff Sessions gave at a Breitbart-sponsored CPAC event two years ago in which Sessions spoke about being a populist, and tied it to Miller.

“That Sessions speech at CPAC was basically Breitbart laying down the ‘This is what we believe on immigration’ and that’s pretty much inseparable from Miller,” the staffer said.

Asked to describe Bannon and Miller’s relationship, a former Breitbart Newsstaffer said “Sponsor-client relationship from what I can tell, or mentor-mentee, which is the policy Bannon regularly adopts with younger people.”

“You could not get where we are today with this movement if it didn’t have a center of gravity that was intellectually coherent,” Bannon told Politico Magazine last year. “And I think a ton of that was done by Senator Sessions’s staff, and Stephen Miller was at the cutting edge of that.”

The Atlantic
How Stephen Miller's Rise Explains the Trump White House

Rosie Gray