If you want to lose Texas forever, you promote Stephen Miller

You promote Stephen Miller to Chief of Staff after you led your party into the worst electoral drubbing since before disco for a simple reason: it’s your only move.

Ever since you became a birther, every bet you’ve placed on being the biggest heel on TV has paid out with compounding interest, ballrooms, and crypto. The losses belong to the rest of us, suckers; the leverage is yours alone. You’ve tested the limits of how much resentment a republic can absorb, and every time you pushed past the breaking point, the universe rewarded you with more power. Except in 2020 and now. Maybe. But you can't let that thought reside in your hauntedly decrepit brain.

So don’t stop now!

Draw another card from the bottom of the deck: The Asshole Card.

And yep, the face staring at us from that card is Stephen Miller, the guy—as Marcy Wheeler keeps noting—who, besides Donald Trump, is the most responsible for the GOP losing Texas. At least once.

Translating VDARE Into Federal Policy

I’ve spent some of the last year trying to explain to people that no one has polluted their brains worse than Stephen Miller. He gave us Donald Trump by using the trolling techniques developed by Internet gutter racists. Following most directly the mold of VDARE’s Peter Brimelow, he recognizes that we will never change America’s demographics enough to make it the never-ending white sale Stephen Miller needs America to be. But he has a plan to win despite an America that struggles to repair the wounds of enlavement, segregation, and systemic bias.

Buoyed by the excellent work of many, including Marcy, Michael Edison Hayden, and Greg Sargent, I’ve tried to communicate how Miller has institutionalized Peter Brimelow’s vision of a never-ending race war by championing white identity in the executive branch. Brimelow long argued that mass migration is a deliberate “demographic project” designed to make Western nations “less white”, urging the right to abandon code words and embrace explicit racial self-consciousness.

Miller took that blueprint and adapted it for the edgelord age.

He believes that even if demographics will never return to the 1920s Klan era, you can make the modern electorate function like a cross burning, as Alabama or Mississippi did before this election. You do this by turning the government into a never-ending trolling machine, using freak tragedies to generate hate and wielding the power of the state to drive immigrants from their homes and Black people from their positions in education, government, and corporate America.

He translated fringe racial panic directly into the grinding gears of federal power.

How the ICE Overdrive Broke Texas

We know Miller’s ICE overdrive helped cost the GOP Texas, even though Elon Musk spent more than the entire George W. Bush 2000 campaign to try to buy Ken Paxton a Senate seat. We know this because a late-January poll commissioned by the leading super PAC backing James Talarico signaled “immense outrage among Texas Democratic voters over ICE’s Minneapolis crackdown.”

Capitalizing on that fury, the PAC immediately launched an ad cutting a speech Talarico gave at an anti-ICE rally. As Garry Jones, the director of Lone Star Rising PAC, told POLITICO, “It really moved voters,” anchoring a 244-day campaign message that ultimately helped propel Talarico to a victory Elon will never stop stewing over. Hopefully.

The Soul-Poison of the Late-Era GOP

And Miller has learned nothing, as his goons terrorized schools and shot peaceful protesters. He always wants to escalate. He is only leashed by a president who generally gets which fights to pick, even if Trump can’t do his normal total backtrack out of Iran. Miller is also reportedly behind the most obvious crime of this regime: the murder spree in the Caribbean, slaughtering civilians out of the malice of pretense.

And Bobby Kennedy Jr. called him the “most MAHA” member of the regime, which signals something that has been clear all year. Miller, like Kennedy, who spewed against Arabs in a Klan-like manner to try to defeat Abdul El-Sayed, really believes this stuff in a deeply sick way. And by “this stuff,” I mean the eugenics of the early 20th century that inspired Hitler and the worst atrocities humanity has ever witnessed.

This weaponized malice is the guiding operational philosophy for an entire administration eager to institutionalize cruelty and DNA tests across every federal agency. It’s Miller turning birtherism into everything.

I’m a decade older than Miller, but we both grew up in the Los Angeles area during the most transformative shift of state power in recent American history: the end of the California Republican Party as a viable entity.

I think most people think of that beginning with Prop 187, which sought to deny public education, healthcare, and basic services to undocumented immigrants. But I want to connect Stephen’s appointment with Prop 227 a few years later, which continued the GOP’s escalation against immigrants just to make a point that died at the ballot box along with the CA GOP’s dim hopes for the future.

Some background: California in the 1990s served as the laboratory for the modern anti-immigrant playbook, with Pete Wilson as Donald Trump without the borderline personality disorder manifested into Norman Vincent Peale’s “positive thinking”; Wilson, who wanted to be president, proved that a party could win a short-term news cycle by scapegoating vulnerable families while permanently severing its relationship with a growing majority. And he did it by emptying the electorate of Republicans in one of the two states that decides more than any other who runs America. Whoops!

Wouldn’t want that to happen again.

Naturally, Arnold Schwarzenegger complicates this neat little laboratory history with his own brand of sun-drenched Bush-Reagan dog whistles and optimism that appealed to California’s large population of star-fuckers. Just as Trump and his forever-wars complicate the straight-line escalation of Stephen Miller’s bureaucratic brutality. But the throughline still travels through America like our interstate highways.

Immigration enforcement will never matter more to most Americans than the price of gas. But the people targeted by these crusades—and everyone who loves them—will never forget how eagerly the GOP hunted them and the people they love like beaten dogs in the street.

Stephen Miller embodies the exact soul-poison of the late-era California GOP, but worse: he’d rather lose than change, because guys like him never actually think losing is an option. The race engineers who inevitably drive the humans they hate into camps, cages, and worse, always envision a never-ending Reich. And what they don’t get is that when they lose, the world lines up to spit on their graves.

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