Last week I came across a pair of radio advertisements by a man named Glenn Miller who is running for U.S. Senate in Missouri. The ads were so racist that at first I thought they were a joke, but after doing some background research on Miller, I found that he was deadly serious.
Miller is a former Klansman who spent three years in prison after violating a court order. Miller ratted out many of his old buddies in return for a lesser jail sentence. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Miller admitted to taking $200,000 in stolen money from Robert Jay Mathews to set up and finance the White Patriot Party. Mathews is the founder of The Order, a notorious neo-Nazi organization whose members murdered Jewish radio-talk show host Alan Berg in 1984. Miller ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2006, receiving a whopping 40 votes. It is doubtful that he will receive many more this time around.
This is one of the few times that I feel obligated not to include a link to the ads but you can easily find them if you Google “Glenn Miller racist radio advertisements.” Before the ads aired on a local radio station in Missouri, the station put out a disclaimer stating that it was mandated by law to run the ads. Miller used his airtime to call out white people living in the United States, calling them “stupid” and saying that “the future for white children will be a nightmare.” He blames this nightmare on “mud people” whom he believes are destroying the very fabric of the United States. The ads also go on to bash Jews whom he says have “taken over our government, our banks and our media.”
I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Miller’s anti-immigrant views are even more prevalent than his anti-Semitism in the advertisements. Miller promotes Joel Kotkin’s anti-immigrant book The Next 100 Million, and his language is just a step more extreme than that of John Tanton’s powerful anti-immigrant network.
Even though the John Tanton Network enjoys mainstream respectability, its framework for talking about immigration and its anti-immigrant rhetoric are easily picked up by hardcore racists like Glenn Miller. This is hardly surprising considering that the Tanton Network is founded on the basis of white nationalism. FAIR solicited and received over $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation that has a history of promoting the genetic superiority of white, European-Americans. Other examples of the Tanton Network’s connections to white nationalism/anti-Semitism are Roy Beck, the president of NumbersUSA, appearing at the conference of white nationalist organization Council for Conservative Citizens, and John Tanton’s editor at The Social Contract, Wayne Lutton was also involved with the overtly racist organization.
Miller states that if elected he intends to “station at least 250,000 [U.S. military troops] on our southern border to stop the invasion from South America, in compliance with Article 4 Section 4 of the US Constitution which states: ‘The federal government shall protect each state from invasion’.”
This is reminiscent of statements by Tanton Network spokespersons like Rosanna Pulido (a long-time representative of the Federation for American Immigration Reform) who once said, “Our open borders are a surrender of the United States to anarchy and the bill that the senate purposes [sic] is selling out the American public and the rule of law.”
Glenn Miller also said he would like “to establish strictly enforced federal laws that will imprison American employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens.”
This sounds similar to the work of the Tanton Network legal group, Immigration Reform Law Institute, and its efforts to pass aiding and abetting ordinances around the country. Which begs the question, what’s the real difference between Glenn Miller and so-called “mainstream” anti-immigrant groups?
Not much.