Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind.

King Lear

I know I’m a little behind the news cycle now, but there was so much hand-wringing over Stephen Miller’s speech at the Charlie Kirk memorial service that I had to check out the full text and weigh in. The typical liberal reaction was a direct comparison of Miller’s remarks to Joseph Goebbels’ greatest hits, a clear ramp-up to full-spectrum fascism. While there is some truth to that comparison, I was more struck by the cartoonish theatricality of Miller’s speech, rantings of a beta male getting revenge on the beach sand-kicking bully. I also did a quick review of his bio, because I really didn’t know much about him, aside from his resemblance to the kind of mortuary worker that is not allowed to speak to the bereaved families.

Let’s start with the bio stuff. Miller turned 40 this year, and is married with three kids. He grew up in Santa Monica CA, where he became a conservative after reading a Wayne Lapierre book (the NRA guy). And apparently, instead of enjoying the beautiful SoCal weather and vibe, he became politically active as a youth, criticizing his high school’s liberalism instead of, you know, maybe getting busy and surfing and whatnot. He went to Duke for PolySci, and while there, he defended the falsely-accused white lacrosse players who were smeared as rapists of a black woman (I’m sure this helped form his Woe-the-Travails-of-the-White-Man sentiments). After college, it appears that he waded right into the swamp, becoming a Congressional staffer at 22. Ever since then, he has been in the bowels of the Deep State, writing speeches, bashing immigrants, founding quasi-legal foundations, etc. He was the architect of the beloved family separation policy, as well as the Muslim ban from Trump 1.0.

One final bio note. Miller is Jewish, descended from grandparents who escaped persecution in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. So despite his appearance as an SS farm team scrub, he is someone who should be intimately familiar with the horrors of discrimination and oppression, and also with the dangerous implications of ethnic cleansing language. So is there some cultural self-loathing here, projected out onto others? Could be. Let’s dive into some of the text of Miller’s speech at the Charlie Kirk event.

“Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and the architecture. They built the industry.”

• Here’s an initial clue as to what’s going on. As mentioned, Miller is Jewish, so his ancestors were likely not in Athens or Rome. I haven’t seen his family tree, so this is speculation. Maybe his forefathers and foremothers were Jews in Greece and Rome. But the tenor of his remarks is not about his 23-and-Me DNA details. He’s invoking a fully WASP sense of heritage here. And his ancestors certainly were not in Philadelphia or Monticello. But that’s really beside the point. He is laying the groundwork for the usual us-vs-them theme that ramps up big time later in the speech.

“Erika [Kirk, Charlie’s wife] stands on the shoulders of thousands of years of warriors, of women who raised up families, raised up city, raised up industry, raised up civilization, who pulled us out of the caves and the darkness and into the light. The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.”

• Taken out of context, this looks ominous and dangerous. But in context, knowing what we know about Kirk’s actual killer, this is just ridiculous cosmic boasting, all over the tragic actions of another troubled young man (Robinson, Kirks’ killer, is 22) with access to the dark corners of the internet and a gun. A lonely, bitter incel is not exactly equivalent to the “forces of wickedness and evil.” Miller also here introduces the light-vs-dark motif, a Christian staple of end-times infatuation, but also a nice dog whistle to Kirk’s largely racist base of supporters. For those who might see some kind of feminist message here, with women being the bedrock of civilization, I would take that with a grain of salt. He’s fluffing up the lady folk a bit, but only because they are all there ,nominally, to comfort Kirk’s widow. So that’s a tiny bit of female empowerment messaging bobbing on top of an ocean of trad-wife bullshit and patriarchal misogyny from the MAGA movement in general.

“And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing, You can produce nothing.”

• There’s a lot here, but first of all, as of 2024, blue counties accounted for 62% of GDP. That’s a whole lot of nothing that gets “produced” and “built” by the horrible dens of darkness and sin that are Democratic cities and towns.
• Second, Miller himself is a lifelong swamp monster, never actually doing anything aside from fomenting hatred and creating division. As usual with Trumpsters, the shit they protest is mostly self-description.
• But most of all, this Any Rand type of rhetoric is clearly the desperate, empty boasting of a milquetoast loser, a perennial speech writer living as a lifelong remora, attaching himself to the actual alpha males that he so wants to be.

“You have no idea the dragon you have awakened. You have no idea how determined we will be to save the civilization, to save the West, to save the republic, because our children are strong and our grandchildren will be strong. And our children’s children’s children will be strong.”

• To start with, I would wager that his own children will get as far away from him as possible, as soon as they’re able, provided that they can escape this bullshit theocratic brainwashing. Young people are usually pretty insightful, and the blanket hatred of people just because they are different than you is not something that is going to age well in the near future.
• Also, saving “the West?” Gimme a break. His concept of The West is vermicelli-thin. We’ll get back to this later on.

“And what will you leave behind? Nothing. Nothing. To our enemies, you have nothing to give. You have nothing to offer. You have nothing to share but bitterness. We have beauty. We have light. We have goodness. We have determination. We have vision, We have strength. We built the world that we inhabit now, generation by generation. And we will defend this world. We will defend goodness. We will defend light. We will defend virtue. You cannot terrify us. You cannot frighten us. You cannot threaten us. Because we are on the side of goodness. We are on the side of God.”

• First of all, if this asshole is on the side of God, that’s all the evidence you need that there is no true god, only a devil. A god animated by cruelty, racism, and hatred of the other is no god. A god who condemns all who are not white, not Christian, not American enough, not heteronormative — a god who relishes in the crushing of the weak and the degradation of the downtrodden — that is truly a force for evil in the world. Not a god.
• As mentioned above, it has become fashionable to see Miller as Goebbels, some kind of evil fascist genius, pulling the levers of power with Machiavellian skill. But when I read this speech, I see the frenzied thoughts of a small man, a man who hates or at least downplays his Jewish heritage, while desperately wanting to be full-fledged White and Christian. There is a profound desire here to be Greco-Roman and not Jewish, and to be just the Christian side of Judeo-Christian.
• And it has to be said, Judaism is not an inherently cruel religion. The motif of the Chosen People has always been apropos of the underdogs, the outsiders who have experienced millennia of of oppression and marginalization. Unlike Zionism, Judaism proper is not a faith tradition that is comfortable with out-group hatred and persecution. In its true form, it is a humble and inclusive tradition, welcoming to outsiders, and a partner in the US to other minority groups and their struggles.
• … as is the Jesus tradition, as opposed to the Christian Nationalist abomination we see in Trumpism. Jesus, a Jew of course, spent his life lifting up, healing, and serving the poor, the persecuted, the foreigner — the very people that wannabe tough guys like Miller see as “nothing.”

That’s enough of the direct quotes. Let’s get into some final thoughts. Without his position of power, Stephen Miller wouldn’t be able to enforce his idiotic ideas on anyone. He is not charismatic, inspiring, imposing, or even interesting. To use MAGA’s own terminology, he’s a beta male cosplaying as a tough guy, getting his revenge on the hated libs by leveraging the Deep State powers that his movement supposedly hates.

And what exactly is this Western Civilization, the West, that he imagines he and his ilk are saving? Does he want kids to study the pantheistic ideas of Plato and Aristotle, the naturalistic/materialist thought of Thales and Democritus, and the clashing schools of Epicureanism and Stoicism? Greek and Roman thought, the foundation of the beloved West, is chock-full of skeptics, proto-atheists, pantheists, hedonists, and anti-authoritarianism, as well as a host of conflicting approaches to life, nature, and history. Should our children, our children’s children, and our children’s children’s children be studying the barbarism, cruelty, and ignorance of the Dark and Middle ages, where Christian tyrants murdered millions of innocent people, keeping them in a state of squalor and fear, while Islamic scholars kept the flame of Western civilization alive for centuries?

In his breathless engorgement over “the West,” will he pay deference to the titans of suspicion, who all came from European societies: Nietzsche, the uber-German, who laid waste to the hypocrisy and emptiness of Christianity; Marx, who was a bad predictor of the future, but a brilliant sociologist, laying bare the exploitative mechanics of capitalism; Freud, who exploded the illusory myths of religion, establishing a scientific approach to the mind, sexuality, and culture? And of course, the biggest (IMHO) Western titan of them all, Charles Darwin, who elucidated the most important idea in the history of thought: evolution by natural selection. In the United States, we have still not dealt with “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” which is really a key indicator of our struggles to acknowledge the reality of human nature and its place in the wider natural world.

And let’s not forget all the movements challenging entrenched power and the status quo, many of which have come out of the West. Feminism, civil rights, socialist populism, even anarchism. These are all largely Western/European/American phenomena, with as much homegrown Western authenticity as all the reactionary and conservative movements that they combat.

In short, with Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Steve Bannon, and the like (I don’t include Trump himself in here, because he has no interest in this egghead stuff), what we’re looking at is a pitiful shrinking down of “The West” into a purely racial, ethnic, and religious entity, and not an acknowledgement of what truly made our civilization an admirable thing: the Enlightenment tendency to expose, challenge, debunk, and dismantle the errors and superstitions of ossified tradition, and the sociopolitical raising up of the downtrodden, as they struggle to break the chains of authoritarianism, theocracy, and plutocracy.

What Miller and his cronies really mean when they talk about “The West” is something more unseemly yet pedestrian: straight-up white supremacy; taking back any power and influence that women, minorities, and other marginalized groups have fought for over the last 50-100 years (and remember here the words of Cicero, another Western dude, that “freedom is participation in power” — so by taking away people’s hard-won power, you are taking away their freedom); enforcement and official establishment of a hyper-narrow strain of Christianity, a theocratic project more at home in Iran or Saudi Arabia than in America (as usual, the conservative obsession with “Sharia Law” coming to America is more about their own desires for a theocratic state than it is about any actual threat from Islam); economic re-colonization, but without the military backstopping, as those resources have to be deployed internally to control domestic troublemakers (in practice, this is just blanket bullying of anyone whom Trump thinks is “so mean and unfair” to him, which bruises his Faberge ego).

Despite its many faults, The West can still be a source of pride, but not for the backward-looking, heel-digging, reactionary theocratic fascism espoused by Miller, Project 2025, and the other malignant remoras of our would-be king. Instead, the best of the West means: critique of all religion, including Christianity; critique of colonialism and its long-tail damage to countries and peoples around the world; honest historiography that unflinchingly looks at our many sins along with our many triumphs (it was that main Western guy Socrates, after all, who told us to “know thyself”); relentless scientific rationality, not for power alone, but to rid the world of ignorance, superstition, and the charlatan grifters who profit from it; an ecological mindset that understands humanity’s place in nature, our only true home; practical agnosticism and even atheism, ways of thinking that can have more humility and awe before the cosmos than any religious tradition; feminism and other challenges to the hardened systems of oppression that have been crushing people under their weight for millennia.

So to conclude, screw Stephen Miller and his cosplay warrior buddies. They’re not going to save The West. The West needs to be saved from them. Our civilization has produced incredible and amazing things, along with a lot of bad stuff too. As always, our challenge to get to a better place together, a future that is more just, more fair, and more inclusive for all, so that we can all thrive together, and start to repair the damage we have done to the natural world and to each other. Archaic ideas of blood, soil, kings, and gods are not going to get us there. We’ll need to transcend the small world of small men like Stephen Miller. But we can do it.