It's a wonderful life - until Stephen Miller takes an interest in it
Trump's scurvy little spider is issuing bigly threats weeks before his return
By Sam Bellamy
Like most Americans, I celebrated when Donald Trump lost power in 2020. But there was one other person I was nearly as happy to see departing – Stephen Miller.
He’s back, of course. Miller is once more scuttling around like “a scurvy little spider,” to borrow a phrase from anti-fascist George Bailey – intent on inflicting as much pain as possible on our own Bedford Falls and redeveloping it as MAGAville.
In recent days, Miller’s America First Legal Foundation – a purveyor of uberconservative causes – has sent letters to about 250 election officials across the country threatening incarceration of anyone who tries to interfere with the Trump administration’s planned roundup of undocumented residents, aka “illegal aliens.”
The niceties of an inauguration and a swearing-in by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court really aren’t necessary for a man as righteous as Miller to begin talking about imprisoning or bankrupting political enemies.
Miller’s missives also threaten to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act statute, or RICO, against anyone “concealing, harboring or shielding aliens.”
This tactic – developed decades ago to shut down Trump’s former and perhaps current associates in organized crime – could stick elected officials in sanctuary cities with personal financial liability if they stand in the way of detaining the migrants who pick our tomatoes, fix our roofs, and perform many other jobs vital to our economy.
The children and spouses of those workers must go, too, of course – for in Stephen Miller’s world there are no good reasons that people might hurry across our borders, by legal means or otherwise, to escape poverty, political persecution, or drug cartel warfare. Better to let your family suffer than disrupt interior designer Stephen’s carefully prepared color scheme.
“Your jurisdiction’s sanctuary laws or policies … make a mockery of American democracy and demonstrate a shocking disrespect for the rule of law,” Miller wrote in a pre-Christmas greeting to the county executive of Howard County, Md.
Imagine that. Someone in the incoming Trump administration concerned about the rule of law. Praise the Lord and pass the fundraising envelope.
Many of us have pointed out the practical as well as the moral flaws in this mass roundup plan.
Central American Resource Executive Director Abel Nunez – perhaps the Bedford Falls version of MAGAville’s Devin Nunes? – says these missives are “just threatening letters to confuse people, to make it seem a larger contingent of Americans wants this.”
Nunez, whose group provides services to Latino immigrants, is among many who point out that the Trump administration simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to conduct mass deportations – to round up immigrants, detain them, find countries to take them, or even to fly or sail them home.
And that means these letters are a rather puny attempt to frighten jurisdictions into voluntarily doing what Miller and friends know they can’t possibly accomplish on their own.
But what worries me most is the prospect of the administration launching a bumbling, mean-spirited campaign to round up immigrants on Jan. 20 or soon thereafter, knowing full well that their plan will fail spectacularly.
Any mass hunt for undocumented immigrants is certain to be poorly executed. Federal immigration officials will need help – from local and state law enforcement and, perhaps, as Trump has blustered, the U.S. military. Coordination on this scale is difficult, particularly if some of the participants may have doubts about the wisdom of undertaking it. Violent confrontations are a distinct risk.
If the various forces don’t do the job to MAGA’s satisfaction, will Trump followers take it upon themselves – with Trump’s wink-and-nod approval ala Charlottesville, Va. – to chase and detain?
Would this free-lance operation devolve even further, with self-licensed bounty hunters capturing anyone who vaguely looks “foreign” – even those whose families have been in the country for generations?
And with or without that MAGA assistance, what happens when the Trump administration can’t find the space to detain those they do manage to round up? Shove more immigrants into a cage than “humanely” fit?
What happens when Trump’s little army can’t feed, clothe or provide medical care to detainees? Do they cut corners until there are no corners?
What’s the final solution, so to speak?
This juncture, as paranoid as it may sound to some, is precisely where I do not want a grinning Stephen Miller lying in wait.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, among others, has posted a long list of scurvy quotes from Mr. Miller that evoke a visceral chill like the one that characters in horror movies display right before a malevolent ghost or bloodthirsty monster rounds the corner.
We’ve seen Stephen Miller peek around that corner many times before.
When Trump instituted a policy of separating immigrant children from their families in his first term, a White House insider told Vanity Fair, “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border.”
Let’s also take note of what Miller wrote in a speech delivered by Trump in commemoration of the Warsaw Uprising, of all things, in 2017: “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
This is more than a minor footnote from history: Be wary of anyone who talks about triumph of the will over people who are subverting and destroying Western civilization.
“Like the mystics of old,” Miller opined in 2015, “the one sure way to get rich in modern America is to offer yourself up as a virtue signal to those seeking to prove themselves members in good standing of the national religion – diversity.”
When he served as a communications aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, Miller sent so many emails ranting about immigrants that even colleagues in his own party greeted their arrival with an eyeroll. “I just started deleting them when I’d see his name,” a Republican staffer told The New Yorker. “Everyone did.”
Miller tried to get an editor at Breitbart News to write about and raise awareness of a racist 1973 French novel called “The Camp of Saints,” a favorite of neo-Nazis and white power goons because of its depiction of “white genocide.” This is a harsher term for “the great replacement theory,” a bugaboo of Tucker Carlson and others who contend (or pretend) there’s a devious plan afoot to replace white people in the United States with people of color.
White power goons are no stranger to Miller, in fact. He was a classmate of and collaborator with Richard Spencer, the charming fellow who was the featured speaker at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. While they were students at Duke University, Miller and Spencer recruited Peter Brimelow, a proponent of what he calls “racial nationalism,” to speak on campus.
Just in case these facts and quotes aren’t chilling enough, I’ll leave you with this one, uttered by Miller on Face the Nation in 2017: “The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
In some quarters around the world, right arms were no doubt raised in a familiar salute, heels kicked up to goosestep.