“Remember, Google is your friend”, said Thing 2, my more tech savvy daughter. She was right – she’s usually right. Ms Google became one of my very best friends and, through her, I discovered Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge.
In Wikipedia, I came across ‘disambiguation’ for the first time. I sussed out that it is just a fancy term for ‘clarification’. I start with a disambiguation.
Do not confuse Stephen N Miller with Steven Hawthorn Miller, founder of the Steve Miller Band, who had three number one hits between 1973 and 1982. This is about Stephen N Miller’s biggest hit, ‘The Ironic Hypocrisy March’, playing right now all across America.
Stephen N Miller never uses the short form ‘Steve’. In 1982 Steve Miller sang: “Abra…Abracadabra/I wanna reach out and grab ya.” That is exactly what Stephen N Miller wants to do – grab all non-white persons in America who talk ‘funny’ and send them to faraway countries where everyone talks funny.
Don’t blame the parents – the origins of Stephen Miller
Podcaster Jennifer Welch said: “I think Stephen Miller was probably born terrible.” No, he was born in 1985, to a very nice family in Santa Monica, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. He didn’t become terrible until he turned 15. In high school he was a well-known bigoted xenophobe.
Miller rose quickly through the Republican ranks, working for a couple of representatives, then became adviser to Senator Jeff Sessions. In 2016 he joined the Trump campaign and became his speech writer. (Stephen really does have the best words.) Once Donald Trump took office, Miller was his senior policy adviser, especially on immigration, responsible for the Muslim ban, separating migrant children from their parents, limiting the number of refugees allowed in to 15,000 per annum, and ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA –“Dreamers”).
Boys will be Nazis
The Welch quote came in a discussion about a Young Republican leaders chat group with comments like “I love Hitler”; “You’re giving nationals too much credit and expecting Jews to be honest”; “Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber”; “I’m ready to watch people burn now”; and, talking about the National Basketball Association finals in which many of the players are Black, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkeys play ball.”
JD Vance, a heartbeat away from the presidency, dismissed it all. “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.”
Most of these ‘kids’ range in age between 24 and 35. Michael Bartels works for the Trump administration as a senior adviser in the office of general consul in the Small Business Administration. He’s not a kid.
It reminded me of another stupid offensive joke in 2016: “When you’re a star, you can do anything … grab ‘em by the p—y.” It was dismissed as “just locker room talk”. Boys will be boys. That boy was 70 years old and became president.
Is Trump dancing to Miller’s tune?
Miller is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, which may be misleading. Chief of staff Susie Wiles deals with administrative matters. Miller deals with Trump. Phenix Halley writes that Miller is “the primary driver behind the administration’s severe agenda”. He also writes that “political insiders say that Miller is the one pulling the real strings”.
Trump tends to be all over the place. Also, he’s a few bricks shy of a load, as we used to say in the Ozarks. Miller, on the other hand, is totally focused on MAWA (Making America White Again). Hence his hit, ‘The Ironic Hypocrisy March’.
David Glosser wrote an article in 2018 with the headline: “Stephen Miller Is An Immigration Hypocrite, I Know Because I’m his Uncle.” Miller’s great-great grandfather, Wolf-Lieb Glosser, escaped the persecution of Jews in Belarus, coming to America in 1903 with $8 in his pocket and knowing no English. Through hard work and determination, he and his family went from peddling on street corners to becoming entrepreneurs – a classic rags-to-riches all-American story.
From Ellis Island to iron walls
The subhead of Glosser’s article reads: “If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.” America used to welcome immigrants. The Statue of Liberty says it all: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
And that’s both the irony and the hypocrisy. If someone with Miller’s policies on immigrants had had power in 1903, the current Stephen N Miller could not now be pulling Trump’s strings.
