America Is Being Terrorized by a Loser Who Never Got Picked for Dodgeball

Thoughts on Stephen Miller

There are men who are dangerous because they are competent, and then there are men who are dangerous because they are pathetic. Stephen Miller belongs squarely in the latter category — a man so nakedly insecure, so chronically aggrieved, that the only way he can experience importance is by borrowing the force of the state and pointing it at people who can’t hit back.

As Axios reported yesterday, Kristi Noem remarked after Alex Pretti’s execution that, “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen.” Never mind that she is already trying out the “Just following orders” defense that others have famously attempted. The point is that even Noem — a cabinet secretary — is making it clear that it is Miller’s inhumane (and inhuman) policies that she is executing.

Despite how he hopes to be portrayed, Miller is not the dark prince of American authoritarianism. He is the hall monitor who finally found a gun.

Miller is the political equivalent of the kid in the cafeteria who got picked last for dodgeball, who stood at the edge of the playground and shouted insults at anyone having fun, and who now, decades later, uses the full force of the federal government to try to harm a country because he thinks his classmates ignored his genius in high school.

There is nothing accidental about Miller’s cruel, bruising brand of politics. Not his obsessive targeting of vulnerable migrants. Not the way he falsely spun the Minnesota shootings into a tale of imminent “massacre.” And not his stubborn grip on an administration that is now unraveling politically because of the very excesses he championed. What we are witnessing is the culmination of a lifetime of insecurity masquerading as authority.

Miller grew up in California, in the famously liberal enclave of Santa Monica. Yet even then, the boy who would become the architect of America’s harshest immigration policies was conspicuously out of place. At Santa Monica High School he penned letters to local outlets piously complaining about “students lack[ing] basic English skills,” and having sex (horror of horrors!). He made repeated appearances on conservative talk radio — not to contribute to a debate, but to broadcast his own grievances.

Fast-forward to adulthood, give that same boy proximity to power, and suddenly his worst instincts metastasize into national policy.