Stephen Miller’s uncle slams his nephew in Politico article, calling him an ‘immigration hypocrite’ – By Jaclyn Reiss (bostonglobe.com) / Aug 13 2018
(Andrew Harnik)/Associated Press White House Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller in July.
Stephen Miller, a senior policy advisor to President Trump who has been widely denounced for masterminding some of the administration’s cruelest immigration policies, was taken to the mat in a Politico Magazine article penned by his uncle.
Yes, his uncle — as in, his mother’s brother.
David S. Glosser, a retired Boston University neurology faculty member, wrote in Politico that his nephew’s American existence was the result of their ancestors’ chain migration to Pennsylvania in the early 1900s in an attempt to escape violent pogroms in what is now Belarus. The Jewish family eventually worked their way up to own a successful company of supermarkets and department stores.
“This family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens,” he wrote.
Glosser said he has 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.”
Glosser also said that if Miller’s policies — which include the travel ban, the separation of migrant children from their parents, and even potentially limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — were in place in the early 1900s, their family’s ancestors likely wouldn’t have been able to make their “desperate bid for freedom.”
“Had [our ancestor] 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,” Glosser wrote. “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.”
Citing Miller’s policies, Glosser said that his nephew and Trump “may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions.”
“Like other immigrants, our family’s welcome to the USA was not always a warm one, but we largely had the protection of the law,” he wrote, adding that his family was able to thrive and fulfill the American dream — something that is not necessarily an option for modern-day immigrants.
Glosser, who said he meets immigrants regularly through volunteer work with a nonprofit that helped his family acclimate in the 1900s, also shared the story of an immigrant who came to America in the early 2000s, “in the hope that my nephew might recognize elements of our shared heritage.”
Recounting the immigrant’s story, Glosser also threw shade at his nephew, saying that while the immigrant was tortured and abused, his nephew was “famously recovering from the hardships of his high school cafeteria in Santa Monica.”
“Trump and my nephew both know their immigrant and refugee roots. Yet, they repeat the insults and false accusations of earlier generations against these refugees to make them seem less than human,” Glosser wrote.
The Politico article rocketed around the Internet Monday morning, and quickly became a trending item on Twitter, leading to several reactions online.
Not every day that your uncle takes to a national publication to call you a hypocrite https://t.co/C9DAyuIPSR
— Sam Stein (@samstein) August 13, 2018
https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1028969648929341440
In the long history of Jewish intrafamily smackdowns, this smackdown of Stephen Miller by his uncle might be the greatest ever https://t.co/f23GxqdaiM
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) August 13, 2018
