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Self-Hating, Santa Monica Goebbels is Pure Evil
Every great nation in decline eventually produces a state sponsored plague—a powerful government official so morally depraved, so pathologically obsessed with control and punishment, that he or she mistakes cruelty for clarity and repression for reason.
In our own rotting republic, that odious creature and Trump enabler is Stephen Miller.
This week, Miller emerged from whatever MAGA crypt or right-wing, cable-news segment he haunts to attack a federal judge—Judge Sparkle Sooknanan.
The reason? Committing what, in Miller’s warped theology, is the ultimate sin: treating immigrant children like actual human beings.
At 2:30 in the godforsaken morning— the Judge stopped the secretive deportation of nearly 600 children to Guatemala. That’s right. Children.
Not gangsters, not cartel lieutenants, not the villains Miller obsesses over in his dreams of racial purity.
They had been bundled into U.S. government vans like dry cleaning and loaded onto charter flights under cover of night, with no lawyers, no hearings, and no one to speak for them—until the judge, in a moment of judicial courage, said: "Enough."
The judge issued an emergency 14-day injunction that forced ICE to keep the kids in U.S. custody.
Court filings confirm the planes were on the tarmac in Texas and the children were already seated, when the order hit.
Miller reacted to this not like a man engaged in policy debate, but like a cornered rat on a sinking ship. Miller, who is to Trump what Joseph Goebbels was to Hitler, (and Miller bears a striking resemblance to Goebbels) called the ruling “lawless.”
He accused the judge of sabotaging immigration enforcement. He frothed about “radical open borders,” as if pausing the forced expulsion of terrified children was tantamount to giving everyone in El Salvador a key to the White House cafeteria.
And again, consider what the judge did. She PAUSED the deportation.
She asked for basic answers: Were these children afforded the rights guaranteed to them by federal law? Were they given hearings? Counsel? Was notification given to their families?
The government could not—or would not—answer. And so the judge issued a stay. It was a modest act, entirely consistent with legal precedent and common decency.
In Miller’s retelling, it was an insurrection against the Republic.
One suspects that if Miller had been advising Pharaoh during the plagues, he’d have blamed the frogs on the Hebrews and proposed deporting the firstborns by chariot at midnight. Miller’s taste for theatrical cruelty is not accidental.
It is his raison d'être.
The Trump Deputy White House Chief of Staff seems to wake up each morning hoping to find some new category of person to make miserable, some new group to blame for his own emotional impotence and white nationalist rage.
Let’s be clear. Like some of the worst ghouls we’ve covered in Trumpworld, Stephen Miller lies for sport.
He lies about what judges say. He lies about what laws require.
He lies about Supreme Court decisions he clearly hasn’t read, and he lies about inflation in tones that suggest he once skimmed an Ayn Rand novel and mistook it for an economics degree.
In Miller’s world, everything from the price of eggs to the fall of Rome is somehow the fault of a child crossing the Rio Grande barefoot with a plastic bag and a hope for a better life.
Miller’s spasm at Judge Sooknanan is not the outrage of a patriot defending the law. It is the tantrum of a bureaucratic sadist denied his midnight spectacle.
Miller was probably already picturing the headlines: “Children Deported Before Dawn” with a nice picture of children suffering to really put the goose in his step that day.
It would have been a masterstroke of Trumpian cruelty. Except that a woman in a black robe had the gall to ask: “Is this even legal?”
That question, to Miller, is the true obscenity. He seems to consider legality a nuisance to be negotiated—a polite fiction to be overcome with volume, jargon, and bile.
This latest episode is not an aberration but the purest expression of the Miller doctrine: weaponize bureaucracy, obscure accountability, and treat empathy as a national security threat.
His politics are devoid of soul and beyond extreme. If Kafka had invented a villain to run immigration policy, even he might have dialed Miller back a bit.
How did Miller, lacking any charm and possessed with the heart of a Gestapo officer, gain such a foothold in U.S public life? The answer is as American as a border fence: Miller speaks to the most craven instincts of Trump’s MAGA movement.
It’s a cult still addicted to punishment, still nursing the fantasy that America’s greatness depends on the exclusion of non-whites. Exclude Latinos today, African Americans tomorrow, Asian Americans next week, and lord knows who else after that.
Don’t be fooled.
Miller is not offering policy. He is offering vengeance and hatred in a tailored suit with a West wing credential around his neck and his lips firmly and frequently attached to Donald Trump’s ass.
In attacking Judge Sooknanan, Miller is trying to discredit the last remnants of judicial independence, one of the only bulwarks that stands between children and the machinery of state-sponsored disappearance.
Miller wants obedience, not justice. Miller wants silence, not oversight. And if it takes libeling a judge, rewriting case law, and lying on the spot, so be it.
There is an old saying that every nation gets the monsters it deserves. But surely, with Trump and his sick collection of sycophants, we’ve overpaid any debt we incurred by now.
Stephen Miller’s record is hatred. His currency is fear.
And his legacy, if there is any justice, will be lifelong shame (and a prison cell, if we’re especially lucky).
Denying justice to children? Good grief.
David Shuster is an Emmy award winning broadcast journalist who is best known for his work at NBC News and as an anchor MSNBC. He is a contributor to Blue Amp Substack and co-host of our weekly show (Thursdays, 2pm et, on Substack), “Amped Up w/ Cliff Schecter.”
