IT’S ALL WOGS ONCE WE LET THE SCOTS IN:
Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State (Greg Sargent, 12/15/25, New Republic)
Yet at the time, many Americans didn’t think people like Miller’s ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race—it was rooted in the “scientific racism” of the day. But it also involved a somewhat different claim: that the new arrivals suffered from a “social degeneracy” or “social inadequacy”—two typical phrases at the time—which rendered them a threat to the “civilization” the United States was in the process of becoming. In this telling, as prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross declared in a 1914 broadside, these new immigrants were inferior to Americans who descended from the “pioneer breed” who’d given birth to the American nation. The new arrivals, Ross said, had “submerged” that ancestral connection to the “pioneer breed,” setting the nation on a path to the “extinction that surely awaits it.”
“There is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and this stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World,” declared one congressman not long after. As historian Gary Gerstle, author of the great book American Crucible, noted in an email to me, many nativists at the time lamented the “civilizational vulnerability” of the United States, believing that “white, Christian, and western European culture” stretching back to “ancient Greece and Rome” represented the “summit of human achievement” and the core of American civilization. This was under dire threat from “groups outside that culture” who were “unassimilable, with Jewish ranks full of Bolsheviks and Italian ranks full of anarchists.”
More than a century later, those diatribes about people like Miller’s ancestors are very similar to claims Miller makes today about the threat to “civilization” supposedly posed by those emigrating from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere.