The Vile Mind of Stephen Miller
German Jew-hatred was a florid abomination, manifesting in a garden of terrors. It was an evil mix of social exclusion, economic pressure and, ultimately, annihilation. The program succeeded with a kind of brilliant ruthlessness. Two out of every three European Jews were murdered. In its scale and savagery, it was an unprecedented event. We should not imagine that the disaster was mitigated by the remnant that survived or its post-war achievements. Nothing could somehow offset the catastrophe.
We should also remember that, in its early stages, German anti-Semitism was translated into images that stoked loathing for people who would ultimately be gassed. The idea was that the Ewige Jude—the Eternal Jew—was a repellent creature ripe for extermination. Jews were tentacled beings with disfigured faces, hairy body parts, and crippled posture. They were vermin scuttling through the trash of Europe, their malevolence visible on their monstrous features. Books for children depicted their appearance as the stuff of nightmarish apparition, always in comparison with Aryan purity and wholesomeness, the big-bellied banker and the pig-tailed maiden.
Enter Stephen Miller, architect of evil, and chief engineer of the president’s assault against immigrants. It isn’t enough that, over two administrations, he has separated children from their parents, built vast concentration camps, stripped legal protection for multitudes, and killed American citizens. What was the sin of Alex Pretti and Renee Good? They had the nerve to protest his program of deportation.
But for Stephen Miller that is never enough. He has now embarked on a campaign of demonization, calling out his foes on the political left, especially activists from the ranks of Antifa. I don’t know exactly who he’s talking about, but let’s say that “Antifa” means people like us who rightly abominate Stephen Miller’s fanaticism; his arrogant and racist animus toward migrants; the persecutory politics that ground his career. Taking a page from Third Reich propaganda, Miller told a State Department gathering this past Saturday that this was no mere disagreement between rivals, but a final battle between good and evil:
“You look at these violent Antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled — to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way — in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”
If this language worries you, it absolutely should. Stephen Miller is a Jew from Santa Monica, yet he rants like a modern Hitlerite fanatic, a resurrected Goebbels fulminating against the Other. How can we tell that Antifa is evil? Because its supporters are twisted and repellent figures, crawling out of the sewers and cesspools of the underworld to put golden, church-going folk at risk. You heard it first from the sallow Stephen Miller, whose dead, hooded eyes make him a echt nazi (spelling intentional) henchman. We have never had an enemy more dangerous or consequential.