The Nourishing Hate Of Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller is probably the best case for the existence of demon possession. 

His sunken eyes ringed with darkness, his gaunt expression, his pasty skin, his snarling mouth: It’s the face of someone who has been overtaken by some particularly noxious entity. Every word that tumbles out of his hideous mouth is engineered to stir petty hatreds and long-simmering prejudices, to make the nation’s dominant groups feel threatened by the powerless, to make the powerless seem like an unstoppable juggernaut of cultural and political might, to sow fear where once there was none. 

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Miller’s demon, if he has one bouncing around that big, swollen head of his, is infecting everyone and everything from his perch of executive branch power. It’s a demon spawning demons spawning demons, hoping to shatter peace and love wherever it stands in the nation Miller hates. It’s a wonder they never made an Insidious sequel about Miller. Maybe they will one day. I'd watch it.

Perhaps that’s too generous. Maybe the idea of Miller being the plaything of a restless evil spirit from Down There removes his agency and excuses the behavior of one of the most singularly evil men in American history, a marauding troll shaped in the bowels of the internet’s fascist inner-chambers, released into the world to spread hate and pain and torment, and empowered by a man, the president of the United States, who views hate and pain and torment as a means to an end, as a way to secure what he wants: Money, unchecked power, domination – the domain of mad kings.

Miller has been like this since adolescence, when he mocked his high school janitor for being poor and Latino, then played the victim when he faced backlash for the trolling racism. He continued this prototypical nihilistic trolling – a tradition shared with fascist movements of the 20th century – during his college career, when he defended white student-athletes as victims of women of color who had accused them of sexual misconduct. I remember seeing his rat face on Fox News every night for weeks back then. Expertly weaving racist and sexist tropes and dog whistle insults, clearly having ingested the poison pumped out in the racist backwater regions of the early social internet, Miller created a bad-faith reality in which rich-boy lacrosse players at Duke University were the aggrieved victims of a powerful lobby of black and brown young women. 

I remember thinking: This guy understands the formula for flipping the script of victimhood so that dominant forces could use it to crush their opponents. It was frightening just how easily Miller and his demon, smiling behind those dead, black eyes, were able to pull off this trick for a national audience. 

Miller is indeed the Worst Millennial. When he talks, he barks tonelessly, doing his best to appear outraged or passionate. His eyes betray him though: There's nothing there, certainly no passion. His barking is but a means for spreading the hate that churns in him so furiously every waking moment of every day. Miller – strangely, for a guy who's on national TV a few times a week – sounds like he's never had a conversation with another human. Perhaps his demon is a sufficient conversationalist.

Over the weekend, as Miller engineered a police-troop riot in Los Angeles after a few hundred LA residents stood up to the Trump regime’s secret police kidnapping people off the streets of their city, ABC News’ Terry Moran made the career-threatening mistake of telling the truth about Miller and his demon from the depths of the Twin Peaks Black Lodge. Moran, presumably speaking from his experience covering the Trump regime and all its miserable, loveless members, said Miller is “richly endowed for the capacity for hatred” and that he is a “world-class hater.” 

Those hatreds, Moran said, are Miller’s “spiritual nourishment,” the same way the entities from the Black Lodge feed on the pain and fear of human beings, both the ones they inhabit and the ones they target for torment and death. “He eats his hate.” 

These are beautiful turns of phrase. Moran should look into blogging.

Without that hate, one would imagine, Miller would cease to exist. He has come to rely on hate not just as a political weapon that has catapulted him to the height of fascist power, but as a life force, the way you and I would die if deprived of water or food for too long. I like to imagine Miller one day undergoing the exorcism Leland Palmer endures in the apex of Twin Peaks’ early-90s run, when the Black Lodge spirit known as BOB pulls the ripcord and ejects from his weak-willed longtime vessel of pure evil. Like Palmer, perhaps Miller will be overcome by the pain he has infused into the world. Or maybe he'll recognize the terrible things he's done and the ways in which he has made the world a worse place and his ugly little mouth will twist into a wretched excuse for a smile.

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For telling the truth about the most despicable living American – who has much competition for that title – Moran was awarded a suspension by ABC News and a promise from the regime’s surgically-altered henchmen and henchladies of investigations into the news outlet. Moran, a longtime straight news guy, shared his observations about what motivates one of the most influential people in modern American life and was punished for it. ABC News fell for the authoritarian playbook so quickly it would be laughable if it weren’t so shameful. 

It's not a secret that Miller is an avowed, unrepentant white supremacist who, as a young man, was cooked to perfection in the nightmare swamp of neo-nazi social sites before he was unleashed on an unsuspecting American public that had no idea such hideous digital spaces even exist. It was Trump himself who once said with the chuckle of a proud grandfather that if it were up to Miller, his deputy chief of staff, there would be only 100 million people in the US, "and they would all look" him. A racially pure nation of big fucking racist dorks.

It was back in 2018 that I joined a bunch of journalists who sounded the alarm as Miller's influence grew in the first Trump term, while standard-bearing Republican guardrails fell away one by one and monsters like Miller barged through and filled the vacuum once filled by the Responsible Adults who tried and failed to keep Trump from dipping American democracy into a vat of toxic waste. I begged folks to realize Miller was speaking in carefully-crafted white supremacist language meant to wink and nod to fellow hate-filled people who now knew they had a brother in high places. This kind of man in such a place of influence, I thought, was a national emergency.

Miller in an August 2018 interview with CNN echoed a white nationalist refrain about the poem on the Statue of Liberty—the one about “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—being added to the structure after its construction. He said, repeating the talking points of white supremacist internet forums, that "the notion that speaking English wouldn’t be a part of immigration systems would be actually very ahistorical." White power types like Miller really hate Emma Lazurus' beautiful poem, The New Colossus, which calls the Statue of Liberty a "mighty woman with a torch" and "the mother of Exiles." Nothing could be more insulting to the fascist ear.

Miller was among the first in the Trump regime to regularly use the loaded, antisemitic term "globalist," and call for federal immigration policy that prioritized “real flesh-and-blood citizens who together create this body politic, this nation, this home, represented by that flag.”

Miller is a real blood-and-soil guy. If only media outlets had the capacity to educate the public about the genocidal history of such an ideology.

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Today he's busy trying his damndest to craft reality from the White House. Miller has posted throughout the past few days, as masked, anonymous ICE agents acting as Donald Trump's secret police rampage through Los Angeles, that the regime has no choice but to use force, and a lot of it. Miller is calling peaceful protests an "insurrection" and claiming again and again that we are in the midst of a national emergency brought on by criminal gangs importing millions of criminal immigrants into the United States.

None of this is true. None of it happened. But for a bad-faith dealer like Miller, creating a reality in which the country has been invaded and violent citizens are resisting government efforts to remedy the situation is the most efficient way of creating the conditions for a racial purge of the United States.

There has to be an emergency in order for Miller to deploy the extreme policies him and his demon have always wanted. So when everyday folks in LA stand up and say they don't appreciate having their neighborhoods invaded by the regime's kidnappers, this constitutes insurrection, and insurrection demands an even more extreme response. Miller and his ilk must have (wholly invented) crises if their solutions are going to seem even halfway reasonable to Americans. Such is the power of bad faith: These heavily armed cops and soldiers are being attacked by people doing line dances at pro-immigrant rallies. Therefore we must invoke the Insurrection Act. The unreality is total, and that unreality is converted into reality via right-wing cable news and the fascist X algorithm.

Reeling from Elon Musk having taken his wife, the thoroughly cuckolded Miller is madder and more determined than ever to use the force of government against its people. He told LA Mayor Karen Bass in an X post over the weekend that she had "no say" in the chaos created by re regime and that "federal law is supreme and will be enforced."

It's a nice line. You have to wonder if his demon came up with it. Either way, I'll fantasize about the day that line can be turned around on Miller and his repulsive political allies. He won't be protected by the power of the executive forever.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social