Stephen Miller instantly fact-checked after latest rant about immigration: ‘Learn to use Google’
Stephen Miller took to social media to post a late-night rant about immigration, which quickly garnered criticism and prompted fact-checking.
The White House deputy chief of staff — who has spearheaded the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown — blamed what he described as a lack of technological innovation in the U.S. on the “underdeveloped world.”
“A young man who watched the Wright brothers take flight lived to watch American astronauts stroll on the moon,” he wrote on X at 11:20 p.m. last night.
“So why doesn’t the modern world look like our ancestors imagined it?” he questioned. “Because America (and the West) spent subsequent generations engaged in a vast, consuming project of self-loathing, self-denigration and the redistribution of our national resources to the states and peoples of the undeveloped world.”
It followed a post he made the previous night on the same subject.
“Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon — but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire third world for sixty years,” he wrote. “For those who don’t know, the U.S. had negative migration for the half century between the first nonstop transatlantic flight and the moon landing.”
While a number of users expressed their agreement, many also castigated Miller’s historical interpretation as misleading and hypocritical — with several pointing out that he himself is descended from Jewish immigrants who traveled to the U.S. to flee persecution in Europe.
“You’re only here because America decided to welcome your family when they were refugees fleeing poverty and violence – the same time the Wright brothers took flight,” Jon Favreau, who worked as a speechwriter for former President Barack Obama and hosts Pod Save America, wrote on X.
“Maybe, since you’re in charge of it, you can take some responsibility for the modern world not looking like what your ethnic minority refugee ancestors might have imagined,” he added.
Others piled on, noting that immigrants have been pivotal in driving innovation across key American industries — including space exploration.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan highlighted that Dr. Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian-American, played a major role in NASA’s Apollo program, much like fellow immigrant Wernher von Braun, a German aerospace engineer and former Nazi Party member.
“Learn to use Google, Stephen,” Hasan wrote.
Another user, described as being “anti-MAGA,” echoed this sentiment, writing, “From the auto industry’s factory floor, to the scientists who built the bomb, to the engineers who designed the rockets that got us to the Moon, immigrants have been central at every step.”
Others emphasized how immigrants and their descendants have fueled America’s success in recent decades.
