The Glee is Gone

Stephen Miller’s Parody of Propaganda

The image below is from a CSIS report, “Left-Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in the United States: What the Data Tells Us”

“If you look at two photographs and you see a normal American in the street and you see an Antifa protest, why do the people that are violently demonstrating – why is there not one normal-looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

Stephen Miller, July 16 2026

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Stephen Miller tried with all his might to manifest his version of the political left into existence, or at least into the minds of his audience. He visualized. He thought he could. He repeated his affirmations religiously: The left is violent, leftists are terrorists, leftists are freaks, leftists are jealous of us good, normal people. Miller apparently considers himself a “normal-looking person,” but he looked and sounded to me like someone who has never—to borrow a line from Sheryl Crow--had a day of fun in his whole life. Miller has always seemed about as much fun as the headmaster at a finishing school for Hitler Youth, but a year ago he was the 1933 version of said headmaster. In his July 16^th speech, Miller came across more as the post-Stalingrad, 1943 headmaster. The glee was gone. The twinkle in his eye had faded. It was as if he had just been informed that somewhere in the United States a Hispanic child was untying the bow on a brand-new bicycle.

“Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?”

Stephen Miller, 2002, Santa Monica High School (his junior year)

Stephen Miller fans will defend his statement about janitors as a provocative joke or an example of boys being boys. Nope. He was just Stephen Miller being his racist, classist self. None of us should be judged by our worst moment in high school, but Miller’s 2002 campaign speech for student government was a normal moment for him and matches his rhetoric today.

Once, when I was a junior in high school, I caught the cord of an electric desk calculator while buffing floors at the coal-fired power plant just outside of my hometown. The calculator smashed into the floor, and pieces of it scattered under desks and across the room. It looked unsalvageable, but I gathered the pieces and put them back together one by one. I plugged the calculator in and tested all the keys and operations (math is fun!). It worked perfectly, as far as I could tell, so I left a note on the desk and got back to work. Buffing the floors was the last step of that job. I had already cleaned the bathrooms, emptied the garbage, and swept and mopped the floors, because I was the night janitor.

Not only was I a janitor, but it was a hand-me-down job from the same cousin whose newspaper route I had inherited years earlier. I was the substitute janitor while he was out of town. My maternal grandfather was a farmer and high school janitor. I don’t think it is a great difficulty for the Stephen Millers of the world to pick up their own trash, even when the janitor isn’t a blue-eyed Norwegian farmer.

Miller’s contempt for labor and his contempt for appearance are the same instinct. He sorts people into worthy and unworthy by surface markers rather than argument, and he employs rhetorical devices in the service of his political vision, where anyone who disagrees with his view is a sub-human terrorist. In his July 16^th speech, he began with a denunciation of left-wing political terrorism, but then his references turned to “leftists” and “the left” in general. So, if you’ve been to a “No Kings” protest, Stephen Miller was talking about you. He thinks you are not fully human, and neither is anyone who stands with you. Miller combines dehumanizing language with false universality. He repeats a version of “not one looks normal” three times and states that something is “always” true of you five times. He says that you are “fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy.” And you covet people like him.

“I’m talking about a much deeper kind of coveting – coveting people who are morally superior, who are superior in the simple, truthful way they live their lives, people that they look at who are happy and ordered and peaceful and contributing to their communities. That burns an ember in them, and that’s how you end up with the horrors we’ve seen throughout history, where good families are dragged out into the street and executed.”

Stephen Miller, July 16 2026

It gets worse. Leftists are intruders in your civilization, and “you must defend it with the same passion and force as if an enemy intruder is inside your own house where your family lives.” Not only that, but the threat is apocalyptic. The left is “a fatal cancer of civilization,” a “mortal threat,” that always leads to the gulag.

I suppose it’s fortunate, then, that the “beautiful and good and natural” people who have a “perfect family, perfect life” can judge a leftist book by its cover. They can see the fatal cancer in the outer appearance and know that the girl with purple hair and a nose ring is an existential threat.

All of this is horrible, of course, and his claims about left-wing violence as a predominate threat are false, but at least Stephen Miller does not seem to be having as much fun as back in the days when he echoed Goebbels at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. (“We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create.”)

Maybe, if he had ever done the kind of work that teaches you that everyone’s labor is dignified, Miller would have realized sooner that the janitors will win.

We are the ones who know how to make ourselves useful. We are the ones who don’t look down our noses at others. (We don’t even understand this need to feel superior.) We are the ones who patiently put together what has been shattered and then get back to work. And we know how to have some fun.

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We can put together what has been shattered, but only with a Congress that is willing to roll up their sleeves and do the work. Governor Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) has said that Congress needs to take back its power. I’m glad he agrees with me, and we both know that North Dakota’s incumbent Congresswoman is not up to the job. I would appreciate your support in my campaign to replace her in the U.S. House of Representatives.