Exclusive — Stephen Miller: ‘Cancel Culture Goes Hand in Hand with Rise in Violent Crime’

Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, told Breitbart News exclusively on Tuesday night that “cancel culture” is fueling the American left’s policies that are causing a spike in violent crime across the United States.

In an appearance on Breitbart News Tonight on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, Miller noted that most Americans—as evidenced by polling—support police nationwide. But if the Democrats rose to power in the United States, what they would do first, he said, is pass a number of policies that would make Americans less safe. As such, most Americans oppose the left’s police defunding and other anti-policing policies, but because of the environment created by the left and the media, termed “cancel culture,” those very same Americans are scared to speak up in opposition to the left for fear of what might happen to them.

“The overwhelming and vast majority of citizens support their police and they’re horrified by the Democrat plan to destroy policing in this country,” Miller said. “Again, make no mistake, if the Democrats gain power, the first thing they would do is they would end all immigration enforcement so the criminal aliens would be able to prey upon citizens with impunity, and they would pass legislation to tie the hands of every single police department in this country, whether it be in the cities, the suburbs, the rural areas, everywhere. Now the vast majority of Americans, and I mean the overwhelming majority of Americans, support the police and know that we need more police in our community, that police are often overworked, they’re often underpaid, that there’s not enough resources to investigate every crime to close cases and to put dangerous predators behind bars. They know this, but citizens are afraid to speak the truth.”

Miller noted that this fear-driven environment of cancel culture is fueling this leftist lawlessness.

“This is where cancel culture goes hand in hand with the rise in violent crime you’re seeing in leftist cities, and that’s really the long-term danger for our country, that the majority of people will be intimidated into not speaking the truth,” Miller said. “They’ll know that what they’re seeing is wrong, what they’re seeing is outrageous, what they’re seeing is dangerous, but they’re worried that they’ll be handed out of their jobs; that if they own a business, their business will be the subject of unruly, even violent demonstrations; that they’ll be the subject of political persecution; that they’ll face financial consequences, personal consequences, you name it.”

The good news however, Miller said, is that Americans can fight back against the Democrat leftist lawlessness effectively—if they break the loop and speak up together to stop the cancel culture that fuels it.

“The key thing to understand here is that the way it works in cancel culture is they pick you off as individuals,” Miller said. “But if everybody just speaks their minds and says the truth, then there’s too many of us. You can’t cancel us all because we’re the majority. So if everybody just said ‘enough, I’m saying what I think, I’m saying what I know is true, and I’m not going to apologize for speaking the truth, I’m going to stand up for objective fact in this world,’ and you just speak your mind respectfully, but honestly and without fear, then cancel culture falls apart. Cancel culture relies upon a minority of radicals, Marxists, Communists—the like—intimidating the vast majority of citizens, be it a Democrat, a Republican, or independent who know what they’re seeing is wrong and who will line up to support Donald Trump in droves because they know that he’s standing for what is true, just, and right. We need everyone to start speaking out now.”

The first part of Miller’s interview focused on the actions that President Trump took to force the governor or Oregon and the mayor of Portland to lift stand down orders they issued barring state and local law enforcement from protecting federal property from violent rioters besieging Portland. Next, Miller zoned in on the rising wave in violent crime across America in Democrat-run cities. Recent reports have indicated that as many as 36 such Democrat-run cities nationwide have seen, just this year, a double-digit surge in homicides. But the riots and the violent crime wave, Miller noted, are linked in that they represent a general lack of law and order that the Democrats foster.

“So the riots and the violent crime are two different sides of the same coin—different problems, but caused by the same thing, which is the left’s permissive attitude, and actually encouraging attitude, towards violence and the effort to completely demoralize, dismantle, and destroy our police departments,” Miller said. “So sometimes that takes the form of violent crime. Other times that takes the form of violent riots. Different strategies have to be deployed here, obviously. But both of them are caused by the left’s effort to both incite or excuse or make allowances for violent activity, and then also to try to drive the police out of our communities. So, what you’re seeing in New York City, what you’re seeing in Atlanta, what you’re seeing in Chicago, what you’re seeing in Los Angeles and what you’re seeing in cities all over the country that are run exclusively by Democrats is an uptick in violent crime caused by these factors that I’ve laid out for you.”

As the Trump administration stopped the violence and riots in Portland through federal agents surging in to force the local Democrats’ hands—at least for now—the president is also, through a number of avenues like Operation LeGend, forcing the hands of local Democrat officials in a number of other cities nationwide by sending federal agents to assist local law enforcement.

“The Operation LeGend that you reference is an effort to send in additional federal law enforcement to some of the most crime besieged cities in America,” Miller said. “Now, it’s important to note that most law enforcement officers in the country as a mathematical proposition are state and local. The comparative number of federal law enforcement officers is smaller than all the various cities instead. So the job of policing still falls primarily on the shoulders of the state and local police. But the federal government does have significant resources that it can bring to bear with FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, as well as various elements of the Department of Homeland Security, like Homeland Security Investigations, which is housed within ICE. So, we’re sending additional law enforcement into certain key cities, including Chicago, to work with the local police departments and, you know, they’ll obviously be as effective as their mayors will let them.”

As such, Miller said that it is imperative Americans continue to pressure these Democrat mayors to force them to restore order.

“So that’s a key issue is keeping pressure on these mayors to let their police work with us,” Miller said. “But to work with the local police departments to identify and remove criminals from the community and put them behind bars and federal prison where possible. A lot of these crimes have a federal nexus. For example, you have a gang shooting and the gang member in question has violated a federal firearms law that can face very significant federal penalties, or he smuggled contraband across state lines or engaged in extortion or terroristic threats, or civil rights violations. There’s many federal crimes that can be brought to bear that can have very steep federal penalties associated with it. Very long hard time behind bars, and so that’s a significant threat to a lot of these criminal organizations that are operating in these cities, and then also you bring DHS to bear and the ability to enforce immigration violations on illegal alien criminals and cartels and gang members and drug traffickers—we’ll be able to get a lot of arrests.”

Building in-depth cases against criminals takes time and resources, too, especially when trying to secure convictions on federal charges. So, to see the law and order surge through, Miller said, Americans need to ensure Democrats do not rise to power to be able to stop these cases and let these criminals off the hook, which is exactly what they would do should they win elections.

“It’s going to take time to build these cases, you know. Crime-fighting is a hard job,” Miller said. “It requires diligence, it requires focus, but we’re going to use every ounce of strength we have to try to get as many criminal arrests as we can to make these communities safer. We also need to launch a full-scale national campaign against these leftist mayors to get their constituents to vote them out of office. You want a safer city in, say New York, you’re going to need a different mayor. And so, at the end of the day, you’re going to have to get these communities to elect mayors and states to elect governors that want to be active partners with the federal government. Now contrast that with what you would see if Democrats were in power. Democrats would be trying to appoint social justice prosecutors, mayors, police chiefs, sheriffs in every single city and community in this country, and then from Washington, DC, they will pass rules so that even if you elect a good mayor, even if you elect a good sheriff, even if you appoint a good police chief, they will tie their hands, they will bind them down, they will micromanage their every move, they will use the full weight of the Justice Department to actually prevent them from doing their jobs so that no city will be safe. No community will be safe. No family will be safe. Every city put on a path and made to resemble Chicago. That is the danger that every citizen faces if Democrats are allowed to take power.”

That gets back to the broader point Miller was making about cancel culture fueling the left’s policies that encourage the crime wave. The only thing that stands between the Democrats and power, at this stage, is the silent majority. And Miller argued that the silent majority needs to start not being so silent anymore, as the country needs Americans to stand up against the lawlessness.

“The silent majority is bigger and stronger than ever. They don’t want to let Democrats come to power, wipe out the suburbs, wipe out our police departments, put every single city on the path to being the next Chicago in all 50 states,” Miller said. “Nobody is more enraged by this than, frankly, millions of former Democrats who left their party and abandoned the party entirely and are going to be voting for us in record numbers. But to make this movement even more powerful, my encouragement again is for people who have been silent to cease being silent, you know, everyone listening to your show tonight should just do it a small exercise and just text or email just two or three people you know, and tell them they need to support the movement and they need to stand up for what they know is right. Just take the time to text a few of your friends and say it’s outrageous the way the left wants to defund the police. Stand with Donald Trump. Stand with law enforcement. If everybody just reaches out to a few people and does that every day and makes the effort, it makes the movement even more unstoppable. Just put in that little bit of extra effort and the silent majority will not only cease to be silent, but they will become a super majority, because what the Democrats in Washington stand for right now is in effect a modern day fascism that says, ‘if you don’t think what we think, if you don’t believe what we believe, if you don’t act how we act, then you’re going to be written out of society.’ That is fundamentally contrary to everything we stand for as an open, tolerant, pluralistic society. If that agenda ever gained power, if they could actually put law behind that thought process, then we would be living in a true nightmare.”

LISTEN TO STEPHEN MILLER ON BREITBART NEWS TONIGHT: