Less than a week after copying a Joseph Goebbels speech to mythologize Charlie Kirk, Stephen Miller is trying to gin up outrage because Gavin Newsom’s trollish Xitter account called him, accurately, a fascist.
Because Stephen Miller’s expression of outrage about the use of inflammatory language — even the use of the word fascism — necessarily involved Miller projecting his own actions onto someone else, it led him to go on Hannity and confess he has been engaged in stochastic terrorism for years.
Hannity: Here with reaction, White House Deputy Chief for Policy, Homeland Security Advisor, our friend Stephen Miller. You know, it’s clear they don’t care. It’s clear the incendiary language will continue. Uh, it’s clear that in spite of threats against you, your children, your wife, that they’re not stopping going after you personally and by name.
Uh, uh, your reaction to it all?
Miller: Well, the Democrat [sic] Party has become a party that openly aids and encourages and foments violence. You know, we all live through the unspeakable tragedy of nearly two successful, of two nearly successful assassination attempts on President Trump. A bullet came with a centimeter of taking his life.
We watched in agony and horror as a crazed left wing terrorist murdered Charlie Kirk. Just while he’s giving a speech, having a debate on a college campus. We watched the United Healthcare CEO get gunned. Down. In cold. Blood. We saw just days ago a sniper try to take out ICE officers. And what do all of these killers and assassins have in common?
They’ve been radicalized by Democrat [sic] Party rhetoric that describes anyone who doesn’t share their warped, twisted worldview as fascist, worthy, by implication, of execution. They’re using this language to mark people. To put a target on them. And then on top of all of that, what else do they do? When Antifa, when these left-wing terrorists attack our law enforcement, Democrat [sic] judges won’t put them in jail.
Democrat-led police departments refuse to arrest them. Democrat [sic] mayors and governors refuse to pursue them, so when violence is openly occurring against the targets that they have named and identified, they will not arrest the violent agitators. And that’s why President Trump signed an executive order is called a National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM, and that is when you change the formal national security policy of the country.
And so President Trump issued an NSPM last week that for the first time ever, establishes a national counterterrorism strategy to dismantle these radical left-wing terror groups, including, but not limited to Antifa. President Trump’s gonna find the members, he’s gonna find the funders, he’s gonna find the violent terrorists.
He’s gonna find everybody involved in these criminal conspiracies and one by one, Sean, we’re gonna dismantle them.
Hannity: Well, we’ve got to, and this rhetoric, I don’t care what people say. I, I hold people accountable for their actions, but you cannot convince me that this never-ending Nazi fascist, racist, you know, refrain of theirs is not impacting, especially people on the edge.
I’ll give you the last one.
Miller: It’s deliberate. Yes. I mean, so, you know, I asked the question why did. It was a rhetorical question, of course. Why did Gavin Newsom say Stephen Miller is a fascist? It is a message that his team is sending to all the crazies and lunatics out there, and we’re not gonna absolve the Democrats of responsibility anymore.
There’s a reason why all of these killers, all of these lunatics, all of these terrorists adopt the same language. They say they’re trying to kill the fascists. They’re trying to stop the fascists. This is deliberate. President Trump is saying that we as a nation are not gonna tolerate anymore and the Joint Terrorism Task Force at the FBI is gonna find these terrorists and we are gonna put the behind bars, Sean.
Hannity: Alright, Stephen Miller, you and your family, we pray for your safety.
Miller’s comments are riddled with lies.
- Having law enforcement twice prevent attacks on Trump is not a tragedy, it’s a success
- The ideology of most of the killers and attempted assassins Miller mentioned (Ryan Routh may be the big exception) are more ambiguous than Miller lets on — the commonalities to all of them are access to guns and mental health problems
- To claim Democratic rhetoric (and not guns, online culture, or mental health problems) is the cause of this violence, Miller ignores a bunch of other attacks, like the two attacks by former Marines over the weekend, the far right Evergreen shooter, the conspiratorial views of the CDC terrorist, the ideologic mush of the Annunciation shooter, the right wing views of Melissa Hortman’s killer, the right wing views of those who tried to kidnap Nancy Pelosi and Gretchen Whitmer, the Jan6ers specifically incited by Donald Trump to attack the Cincinnati FBI and stalk Barack Obama’s house
- It is false that cops or judges, whatever the ideology, are refusing to arrest actual assailants
- Likewise, it is false that all the judges who’ve denied detention requests are Democratic appointees
This is a transparent attempt to exploit the Kirk killing to start criminalizing opposition to Trump and truthful description of Stephen Miller’s own actions.
But it is also a confession.
The man who wrote the speech that led thousands of Donald Trump’s followers to attack the Capitol, many violently, has been exploiting such dehumanizing language, including the word “fascist” for years. He has particularly used it to refer to rule of law, the moderation of extremist — including overtly Neo-Nazi — speech, and Black people.
He called Biden “fascist Dukakis” for wearing a KC helmet.
He called Meta’s moderation of speech on its platform fascist.
He called the Democratic Party fascist because Trump got fined for lying on loan applications.
He used it when DOJ — with no involvement from Biden — prosecuted Trump along with 1,500 other people who broke the law on January 6.
He called both Fani Willis and Tish James fascists because they applied the law to Trump like they did others.
He used it when the Federal government investigated racism at Tesla.
He called Alvin Bragg a fascist for treating Trump like any other criminal.
He used it in conjunction with the NAACP when they called for a boycott after Xitter started replatforming far right extremists.
He called DHS efforts against disinformation fascist.
He used the word fascist to describe a discussion of platform moderation in conjunction with Elon Musk’s plans for Xitter (which looks more ominous in retrospect).
There was a clear progression here: Miller started by claiming it was fascist to moderate the speech of explicit Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, but eventually he came to use it about Democrats generally, particularly the Black prosecutors who deigned to prosecute Trump for crimes others also get prosecuted for.
If Miller believes the word fascist inevitably leads to violent targeting, then he needs to be prosecuted himself for the violent threats that Trump’s prosecutors faced, or that immediately plagued Nina Jankowicz.
And while Miller generally stopped using the word fascist after Harris referenced John Kelly’s use of it to apply to Trump (as part of an effort to blame Democrats because a registered Republican who also considered targeting Biden shot at Trump), to this day — even in this speech — Miller uses dehumanizing language every chance he gets. He simply uses “Marxist” or “communist” or “radical” instead.
That’s not the most obvious case of Miller’s incitement of violence. Miller wrote the speech Trump delivered on January 6, which included these lines:
The media is the biggest problem we have as far as I’m concerned, single biggest problem. The fake news and the Big tech.
[snip]
All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media.
[snip]
Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. All he has to do, all this is, this is from the number one, or certainly one of the top, Constitutional lawyers in our country. He has the absolute right to do it. We’re supposed to protect our country, support our country, support our Constitution, and protect our constitution.
States want to revote. The states got defrauded. They were given false information. They voted on it. Now they want to recertify. They want it back. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people.
And I actually, I just spoke to Mike. I said: “Mike, that doesn’t take courage. What takes courage is to do nothing. That takes courage.” And then we’re stuck with a president who lost the election by a lot and we have to live with that for four more years. We’re just not going to let that happen.
[snip]
And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution.
Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.
[snip]
And you know what? If they do the wrong thing, we should never, ever forget that they did. Never forget. We should never ever forget.
[snip]
Or you will have a president, to put it another way, who was voted on by a bunch of stupid people who lost all of these states.
You will have an illegitimate president. That’s what you’ll have. And we can’t let that happen.
According to the January 6 Report, much of the targeting of Mike Pence was not in the prompter, though Miller was involved in restoring attacks on Pence after Pence refused to obstruct the vote certification.
And the speech had precisely the same effect that Trump’s attacks on Nancy Pelosi and Gretchen Whitmer had or his false claims about the Mar-a-Lago search had on Ricky Shiffer or that his posting of Barack Obama’s address had on Tyler Taranto or that non-stop attacks on Anthony Fauci had on the CDC terrorist.
Thousands of people marched the Capitol. Hundreds of those assaulted law enforcement. Scores of people wandered the halls calling for the assassination of Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell.
And now Stephen Miller confesses that the use — his use — of dehumanizing language to target someone demonstrates intent? Now Stephen Miller describes precisely how such inflammatory language — the kind he used in the speech he cribbed from Goebbels and QAnon — used against Democrats?
The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.
They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. 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. You can create nothing.
Yes, Stephen Miller used his Hannity appearance to spew lies, lies about what lies behind the non-stop wave of shootings in the United States, projection to blame Democrats when the commonalities start with guns and include mental health struggles.
But he also confessed.
Stephen Miller confessed that when he uses such dehumanizing language he is, “using this language to mark people. To put a target on them. … It is a message [he] is sending to all the crazies and lunatics out there” to go target the people he dehumanizes.