Ex-Trump advisor goes on weird rant about trans ‘ideology’, accuses Jane Fonda of treason

Jun 11 2021
Written by Maggie Baska

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller looks on as then-president Donald Trump addresses reporters on 15 July 2020 in Washington DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images)

Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller has given a series of bizarre interviews, attacking “transgender ideology” and legendary actor, activist and ally Jane Fonda.

Miller, who served as a senior advisor to former president Donald Trump, told Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Broady that he joined in a lawsuit against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) – a division of the US government to enforce civil rights laws against workplace discrimination.

He explained that he took issue with the EEOC’s new guidance on sex discrimination which includes protections for transgender employees.

Miller, who earlier this year started a far-right law firm called America First Legal, claimed the EEOC failed to “include a constitutionally required religious exemption” in the new guidance. He tried to argue that the inclusive policy would force “people of faith” to “violate their deeply held beliefs” to “adopt a transgender point-of-view”.

The former Trump adviser shifted to using the tired argument that furthering trans rights and inclusion is a “radical agenda” and somehow an “assault” on the US nation and “Western civilisation”.

However, America’s leading scientific and professional organisation representing psychology, the American Psychological Association (APA), has continually pushed back at such notions. The APA has said that transgender and non-binary identities are “healthy” and have existed for hundreds of years across cultures spanning the globe. So transgender identities are not new and have been woven into the fabric of history.

Miller is listed as an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Centre.

He tried to argue that the USA is a “country whose ethical, religious and moral heritage is Judeo-Christian”, adding that his personal view is that the acceptance of transgender people is “destined to topple in on itself”.

“For this agenda to succeed, for the transgender ideology to succeed, they need people to be scared and quiet and not to speak the plain truth,” Miller argued.

In a bizarre twist, Miller is not only attacking transgender people but also actor and activist Jane Fonda. Miller accused Fonda of committing “treason” in the 1970s during an interview with Fox News Primetime.

The former Trump adviser was invited to come on the show to discuss the proposed oil pipeline in northern Minnesota. The discussion then turned to Fonda, who has joined the protests against construction of the pipeline which demonstrators say would violate Indigenous American lands.

But Miller took the time to bring up Fonda’s participation in protests against the Vietnam War almost 50 years ago. In 1972, she carried out a highly-publicised two-week tour of North Vietnam, which the US was at war with at the time. The actor visited villages damaged by the US military forces and even asked pilots to stop the bombings. She later apologised to American veterans for her actions.

During the Fox interview, Miller questioned what “kind of movement holds up a leader” like Fonda, who he claimed was a “tool of North Vietnamese communist propaganda”.

“By any definition, what she did in the Vietnam war is treason, and she’s held up as a hero?” Miller said.

One Twitter pundit questioned what Miller’s definition of “treason” is, sharing a photo of Trump supporters climbing a wall during the January riots on the US Capitol Building.