Why Stephen Miller won't call off the invasion of Minneapolis

For years, it felt like it was best to just ignore Peter Brimelow of VDARE.com. 

Who had time to care about the proud “European identity” freaks? The leaders of the GOP were doing just fine with their sly racist dog whistles like “welfare queens,” "radical Muslims," and “illegals." Maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability was key to the whole scam. The gutter racists just harshed that vibe and needed to be shuffled off into the wings when they crossed the line. Like Steve King of Iowa, who you may remember got too close to exposing himself as a white nationalist and risked losing his safe Iowa district, so he had to go.

So I had to assume we could safely ignore a fancified gutter white nationalist, like Brimelow. 

Dude's solution wasn’t persuasion. It was simple white supremacist arithmetic: reduce immigration, yes, but more importantly, maximize white racial solidarity so that changing demographics simply wouldn’t matter. Make America Alabama again. Ha. Yeah, right? Like that was going to happen after Barack Obama became the first president to win 51% of the vote twice since Dwight Eisenhower. So for a long time, we assumed folks like Brimelow were locked in some kind of Phantom Zone where they could rant on websites you’d never have to read.

Well, who was reading and taking literal notes? Stephen Miller. And that's why we know this regime won't back down in Minneapolis—unless he absolutely has to.

When Michael Edison Hayden first reported in 2019 on more than 900 leaked emails from Miller to Katie McHugh at Breitbart, it felt like a landmine had gone off.

For years, a Senate aide-turned-chief speechwriter for a GOP presidential nominee, then a key White House aide in charge of U.S. immigration policy, had been dousing his brain in the gutter internet racism of VDARE and American Renaissance?! And he was shaping the news cycle by suggesting hateful rage bait stripped of context and resurrecting the most obviously white nationalist grievances. Like when he helped incite the defense of Confederate monuments after a white supremacist murdered nine people in a Charleston church.

WTAF?

Democrats and even a few Republicans were repelled to find that their worst assumptions about Miller were nowhere near pessimistic enough. Hundreds of members of Congress signed a letter calling for Miller to be pushed out. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called him a “bona fide white nationalist.” The story had weight, momentum, the shape of something that should have mattered. It provided the structure to explain why Trump, in his first term, wasn’t just trying to round up undocumented immigrants as his predecessors had (with a cruelty that paved the way for Trump), he was trying to terrorize these migrants who had come to this country the same way Miller’s ancestors had and all white Americans had. He was trying to make the messy, barely legal or illegal struggle to live out the American Dream into the sort of nightmare that always accompanies concentration camp regimes.

Couldn’t we all agree at least that kidnapping thousands of kids to settle a racist grudge is.. not good? And we did, for a minute. But it didn’t stick. Because what does?

People apocryphally quote Sinclair Lewis saying, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." But it turns out those fascists also need a third hand for a neuralyzer from Men in Black to wipe our memory each day so we become numb to the horrors around us. Part of the success of fascism in America comes from the Trump/Miller/Bannon strategy of flooding “the zone with shit,” creating a Black Hole of meaninglessness that makes it difficult to keep the plot… of anything.

This makes it hard to get any sense of what matters. And the constant high-pressure system of unprocessable information catered to us through algorithms supercharges our denial. The forces at work against us were bad, but they couldn’t be that bad… We have video phones now, like the Jetsons! How could the future possibly be taken down by spirits rising up from the cadavers of the worst villains of American history, the slaveholders, the segregationists ans the deadenders who refused accept the leaps of the 20th century.

But don’t worry! They had to be crusty fools with no real strategy or hope of beating the march of time? Can’t we just go back to ignoring them and send some more millions to try defeat Mitch McConnell as he stomps us by twenty points.

And that’s the most agonizing part of all this. While we were doing our best to overcome the noise and denial, Miller wasn’t screwing around or wasting his time. He was obsessively turning Peter Brimelow’s gutter worldview into reality.

Brimelow was always explicit: deportation alone could never work. Even mass removal couldn’t reverse demographic reality — births, citizenship, and legal immigration all continue. As Hayden notes, even Richard Spencer acknowledged this to his own audience: even if you remove all the undocumented people from the country, whites will be headed for a minority. The real play was political. Increase the white vote through racial polarization. Alabama wasn’t a cautionary tale. It was the blueprint — 88% white voter turnout for Republicans.

Win not by building a majority, but by hardening one. Like Alabama.

Miller understood this. He lived it. What he did — what the emails, the memos, the speeches all show — was take that fringe logic and make it the daily operating system of the federal government. Not slogans. Enforcement quotas. Regulatory perversion. Rewriting the Constitution on the fly. Deliberate cruelty, laundered as deterrence.

Methodically, ideas once confined to the darkest corners of the internet began showing up in press briefings and the mouths of ICE agents assaulting citizens and non-citizens alike in broad daylight.

Here’s the part that keeps nagging at me, the thing I think had confused me for years: the policies were never meant to work. Not in the way people who care about government and their neighbors want things to “work.”

Family separation was brutal yet inefficient. Slashing refugee admissions did nothing to truly change how America looks. “Invasion” rhetoric produced chaos, not control. I kept reading these failures as failures — as evidence that the people in charge were incompetent, or cruel for cruelty’s sake.

But once you run it through Brimelow’s lens, the confusion disappears. These policies weren’t meant to solve problems. They were meant to stage conflict.

The drama was the point. Every spectacle — the crime stories, the Confederate statues, the racist porn of the horrible French novel Camp of the Saints— was designed to do the same thing: spike identity. Remind white voters who they were, what they were losing, and who was to blame. Immigration policy became a storytelling machine.

Miller’s fixation on symbolic battles makes total sense once you see it this way. It always made sense. I just wasn’t looking at it right.

Our failure to stop Miller in 2019 — when his fanaticism was plainly exposed, when Hayden’s reporting laid it all out — reveals something uncomfortable about how ideas move from fringe to center. Miller didn’t need a revolution. He needed a bureaucracy.

And yet by pretty much every measure you can imagine, Miller is floundering.

He has guided Trump to depths of unpopularity not seen since January 6th or George W. Bush after Katrina. And he’s nowhere close to his 3,000 deportations a day quota. More and more communities are rejecting ICE. Court opinions are increasingly screaming, “WTF?!” And the Republican nub of a House majority is barely functional after delivering an unprecedented humiliation to a sitting president with the release of the Epstein Files.

In a normal political enviroment the calls to dump Miller or Impeach President Miller would be ringing across the Universe. Instead, he’s a tumor being left to metastasize due to his proximity and usefulness to Trump, who still radiates overwhelming fear to most anyone—except, apparently, Rand Paul and Thomas Massie—who ever has to think about facing GOP primary voters again.

The truth is, Miller’s sort of cruelty has always floundered when it’s executed. Voters have rebuked the Trump regime nearly every chance they’ve gotten since he returned to power, just as they did in 2022, 2020, and 2018. People don’t want moms’ windshields busted at school pickup lines or five-year-olds used as lures for sport. The spectacle works as spectacle. It doesn’t work as a life that most Americans want to lead.

So there are two choices: Back off or double down. And you never need to guess which Stephen Miller will pick.

Under his leadership, this regime is increasingly driven to escalate the conflict beyond the point of ridiculousness, achieving nothing but the pain inflicted on perceived enemies. But what about the elections that might put a check on Trump’s power?

Miller has a plan. He’s sure that anything he can do to make white people feel they need to lash out to avoid demographic peril will only make him more powerful, and who’s going to stop him?

The Republicans on the Supreme Court? Ha.

Nope. There’s only us. The people who should have stopped this all in 2019. The ones we have been waiting for are us. We cannot miss another opportunity to stop Stephen Miller. Because we know Miller won’t rest until only white men feel safe in America.

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