Conspirituality - Brief: “Weird Stephen” Miller

Oct. 18, 2025 - Conspirituality

30:13

Brief: “Weird Stephen” Miller

Stephen Miller is once again making headlines for saying the quiet part out loud. Derek and Julian look into this strange little man from Santa Monica. Show Notes Stephen Miller: Understanding the man who became ‘Trump’s brain’ through his Chronicle opinion column ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat What Stephen Miller Was Like in High School - Charles Gould Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	You had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you know.
	Five, six white people pushed me in the car.
	I'm going, what the hell?
	Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.
	All you gotta do is receive the packet.
	Don't have to open it, just accept it.
	She was very upset, crying.
	Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light.
	Listen to The Chinatown Sting wherever you get your podcasts.
	I'm the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash.
	And we have plenty of cannons.
	That's White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Trump's homeland security advisor, Stephen Miller, when he was just 17.
	In the video, he has more hair, but no less gross attitude than we see today.
	Imagine your high school political platform was about lauding your privilege over janitorial staff by asserting your right to throw trash wherever you like.
	Yeah, I think in high school we wanted more chocolate available in the in the cafeteria.
	I I don't remember any fucking people wanting to throw trash wherever they like.
	But this isn't Santa Monica, which we're gonna get to because as much as people associate Los Angeles with being a liberal city, uh there's some fine points we'll get into.
	But let's get into this brief.
	Uh, you are listening to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, authoritarian extremism, and the anti-genitor attitudes of the right.
	I'm Derek Barris.
	I'm Julian Walker.
	As always, you can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod.
	We are all individually on Blue Sky, and you can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at Patreon.com slash conspirituality.
	We also post our bonus episodes every Monday to Apple Podcasts via Apple subscriptions.
	As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
	Stephen Miller, older but certainly not any wiser, had a moment of massive media exposure on October 7th, just a couple weeks ago.
	It's an important moment to unpack, but I also want to use it as an opportunity to dive into who this person really is, what he's up to, how much power he has over both the ominous and illegal actions of masked ice agents and the fascist militarized presence on blue city streets.
	Before we get into some clips, I'm sure a lot of people know the basics of Miller's background, but I think it's important to point something out.
	A lot is made of the fact that he grew up as a flagged in Santa Monica, which is in Super Blue Los Angeles.
	But there's a few things people might not realize.
	Yes, it is a largely liberal city, but Santa Monica particularly has a bit of a libertarian ethos.
	It's the only city within the city of Los Angeles because it refused to become part of LA itself.
	So unlike neighborhoods you hear about, like Hollywood or Culver City, Santa Monica is an incorporated city.
	It's its own island, it has its own police department, fire department, and public services.
	When I moved to Los Angeles from the East Coast in 2011, I lived in Santa Monica for the first year before I moved over to Mar Vista.
	And it's a bit more conservative than you might assume.
	And there's also a lot of pseudoscience that floats around that neighborhood particularly.
	There was a measles outbreak in 2014.
	We've covered it on this podcast before.
	And it was centered in Santa Monica and neighboring Brentwood, which are two upscale areas where the concept of medical freedom was alive long before COVID-19 and the rise of Maha.
	Yes, as a voting population, Santa Monica is blue.
	I have many friends there.
	There are definitely progressives and liberals and even leftists there.
	But the conspirituality vortex that we've long discussed is super concentrated in Santa Monica and Venice, right?
	On the West Side.
	And even now Culver City, which is a little further out, but hey, there's an errow on there now, and medical medium spoke there, and like over a thousand people came.
	So, you know, it's definitely spreading its tentacles.
	So all this is to say that the veracity of Miller's white nationalism is a little surprising, but the fact that an entitled power-hungry bigot would come from that region isn't exactly shocking.
	Yeah, that's really that's really good analysis.
	I hadn't thought about it that way because people do often refer to it as like the people's republic of Santa Monica, like it's this kind of like almost socialist blue bastion.
	But all of that analysis is on point.
	Oh, but and plus the taxes are crazy in that area because it's its own, they have to provide their own services.
	When we threw the Tadasina festival in 2012, which is how you and I met initially, Julianne.
	Yeah, I remember we had to move it to a parking lot.
	Oh no, I'm sorry, we we we hosted it in Santa Monica, and then later we found out if we were would have gone to a few blocks down on the beach to Venice and hosted it in a parking lot there, we would have saved 40,000 just in taxes.
	And you're talking about a few blocks.
	Wow.
	So Santa Monica is is very like it's libertarian, but it's also super taxed.
	It's a very weird, weird area in that sense.
	So any of our listeners who are loyal to us in Santa Monica, this is what your tax dollars are paying for.
	Stephen Miller is not an unknown figure by any means.
	He's he's he's been in the news a lot lately, but this appearance on CNN was was really uh quite a moment.
	He's he's discussing the National Guard deployment to Portland with the anchor uh Baro Sanchez.
	He accuses protesters of engaging in street terrorism, and he called the judges uh blocking the National Guard deployment legal insurrection.
	And then there's this key moment that comes after that.
	So we'll pick it up a little bit before then as they discuss the court cases around Trump using the National Guard inside America.
	You have called you've called the district judge's ruling blocking the deployment of National Guard in Oregon legal insurrection.
	Does the administration still plan to abide by that ruling?
	Well, the administration filed an appeal this morning with the Ninth Circuit.
	I would note the administration won an identical case in the Ninth Circuit just a few months ago with respect to the federalizing of the California National Guard.
	Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the president has plenary authority.
	Has Stephen Steven.
	Hey, Steven, can you hear me?
	Yeah.
	So the anchor thought that there might be some technical difficulty, but many people, including me, thought we saw something different because Miller seems like he realizes he's overplaying his hand and he stopped right in his tracks.
	I see the gears turning in his head as to how he can dig himself out of this hole.
	And Sanchez does it for him by going to an ad break.
	Upon returning, it was like nothing had happened.
	Neither mentioned the words plenary power again.
	And Miller was back to his aggressive rhetorical style.
	In fact, he ramps it up.
	He gets louder and louder in volume and more nastily adamant with each fact check from Sanchez as he tries to keep things tethered to reality.
	And here the CNN anchor has pointed out that claims of Portland being a war zone were rejected both by judges and were not borne out by the police data.
	So let's break down this phrase that caused Stephen Miller to glitch like a confused robot during the interview.
	It was plenary authority.
	Now, plenary means something like complete and unrestricted.
	In legal terms, plenary authority means having complete power over an issue.
	Did Miller freeze because he was getting ahead of himself?
	I mean, he's building the propaganda case with all of this hysterical hyperbole about Antifa and violent terrorism for martial law or for imposing the insurrection act.
	But mentioning the prescription while still trying to get the country to buy in on his claim of the disease is definitely a slip-up.
	I had a similar reaction to you.
	It reminded me of Mitch McConnell freezing in front of the microphone, which he did twice, I believe, last year.
	But we know that McConnell was having a neurological event of some kind with Miller.
	Yeah.
	The event seems like he told the truth for once in his life.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And McConnell, you can really see like, oh, something's wrong with this guy.
	Miller just seems like he's sitting there like trying to figure it out.
	Yeah.
	He's trying to figure it out.
	And plenary authority, you know, you gave the definition, but it is the entire goal of Project 2025.
	It is the foundation of the unitary Executive theory, which we've covered endlessly here.
	That is the highly disputed legal concept that all branches of government are there to support the whims of the executive or the president.
	This is explicitly stated throughout Project 2025, and we all know that's what this administration is going for, but actually saying it out loud seems to have broken poor Steven's brain.
	Yeah, being honest about the particular angle he's taking to try and get there.
	Some have pointed out that Title 10, which he said gave Trump plenary power, makes no mention along these lines at all.
	So maybe he paused for so long because he realized he had misspoken to some kind of lawyerly, you know, recognition.
	But maybe, you know, it's possible something really happened on his end to the live feed that made him think he was disconnected.
	And so he was just awkwardly sitting there.
	But we're all watching this uninterrupted sound and video.
	There's no sense on our end that there is any kind of glitch.
	We'll never really know for sure.
	I was listening to an interview this morning with Russ Voigt, and I have to say the interviewer was very good and was rolling with him as he said things.
	And Voigt is so practiced that he was able to manipulate in real time and use qualifiers.
	And he was able to wiggle his way out of it.
	Miller doesn't seem that skilled.
	He seems very much like he reminds me when you said of him being just getting louder.
	He reminds me of that famous debate between uh Sam Harris and Deepak Chopra, where Deepak gets frustrated and just starts getting louder, and Sam just sits back and he said, saying something louder doesn't make it true.
	Yeah.
	But but Miller doesn't, Miller doesn't have those sorts of skills.
	He just he feels that amping up the volume will therefore give him more power.
	He's not that, he's not that skilled.
	He's not that manipulative.
	Yeah, a fun fact.
	I was in the front row for that debate live, and it was it was quite something.
	But speaking of getting louder, I said that that's what is about to happen.
	This is the Bar Sanchez really trying to keep things uh calm and grounded and actually talk about the facts.
	And here's an example of what Miller does.
	They they are actually, as we speak, trying to overthrow the core law enforcement function of the federal government.
	Boris, this is I think what we're talking past each other.
	When ICE officers have to street battle against Antifa, hand-to-hand combat every night to come and go from their building, when they try to exit in a vehicle, when they are swarmed and surrounded and they try to tip the vehicle over, when people bring weapons to an ICE facility to try to engage in direct violent assault against ICE officers, what is the purpose?
	It is to prevent immigration and customs enforcement from carrying out the mission the American people elected them to do.
	Their objective is to make it impossible for ICE to carry out ICE enforcement.
	When in our history have we tolerated unlawful riotous assemblies night after night around FBI buildings or ATF buildings or DEA buildings?
	This is the textbook definition of domestic terrorism.
	Using the actual imminent threat of violence to keep federal officials from doing their jobs.
	And unless we send in troops and resources, then we will continue to bleed federal law enforcement resources in these street battles.
	It's absurd, it's unconstitutional and must be put down.
	It's amazing when he starts to get up that rhythm and then he just ramps it up and ramps it up and ramps it up.
	Part of presentation is knowing your assets.
	And I know, like Steven, I don't have a lot of base in my natural speaking voice.
	So I don't intentionally get loud often because it's not very threatening.
	Like the three of us, I think Matthew naturally has the most base.
	If he wanted to scream more, he would probably feel more threatening from that perspective.
	Yeah.
	Miller just he sounds like he's whining.
	Totally.
	And so there's no threat to it.
	Although if I were in a room with him, and maybe if I were a woman, for example, I feel like he's the kind of psycho that might do something that wouldn't behoove him.
	So when he's I just hear this little fucking South Park figure yelling when he's on camera.
	Yeah, and this may be part of the reason that uh according to journalist Michael Wolf, Trump has given Miller the nickname Weird Stephen, right?
	It's like this there, there's the set of um characteristics that he's had that are that are that he has, which are kind of mismatched, right?
	And it's it's disturbing.
	It's disturbing to hear that kind of rage and sort of hysterical description of something that he's making a case for, almost like a lawyer, at that high-pitched frequency from a guy who looks the way he looks.
	It's just, it's just kind of a weird thing.
	It only gets worse as the interview continues.
	At one point, he tells Sanchez that one of his questions is incredibly stupid.
	So it all makes me wonder like, who is this guy?
	How did he even get here?
	Let's start with some fun speech writing facts, which I didn't realize until I started looking into this.
	Miller didn't just come out of nowhere.
	It turns out he was the primary author of Trump's GOP convention acceptance speech back in 2016.
	And then after that, he and Steve Bannon, so he said good company in terms of weirdness and darkness, co-wrote that ominously memorable 2017 inauguration speech about American carnage and putting America first, a phrase we may have heard somewhere before in our proto-fascist history, so as to quote win like never before.
	That's Stephen Miller's handiwork.
	I think the word you're looking for is infamous, which I know a lot of people confuse for famous, but that is not what it means.
	I want to even go back a little bit further because when I saw that, I'm like, well, even then, you don't get to American carnage without having honed your craft for a while.
	And it turns out he has.
	After graduating from Duke University, Miller worked for Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.
	And while there, he drafted an immigration handbook.
	It's about 25 pages long.
	I read through most of it.
	This was in January 2015, and this served as a GOP talking points memo for the entire party.
	And it was effective because that handbook is credited with bringing down the bipartisan gang of eight plan, which sought to establish a path to citizenship for immigrants that are in America illegally, but it also tried to strengthen border control.
	Apparently, the latter wasn't enough for Stevo.
	In the handbook, he likened immigration to the welfare state, and he wrote, quote, Republicans have a historic obligation and opportunity to write the wrong.
	The wrong here is the idea that illegal immigrants are allowed to stay, to return the government to its people and to tell the special interests get lost.
	Now his writing skills, skills predate this moment because for a year and a half, he had a column in the Duke Chronicle that he called Miller Time.
	Uh-huh.
	His first column dropped on September 4th, 2005, and it was titled Welcome to Leftist University.
	Yeah, he felt Duke was too diverse.
	In that gem of a column, hey, Julian, you want to read this?
	It's it's wonderful.
	Let me give you an example of Duke's bias.
	Many of you have recently experienced.
	For the conclusion of freshman orientation, Maya Angelou gave her famous address to the incoming class.
	I can imagine you must have been very excited to hear her speak, especially since the orientation pamphlet lauds her legendary wisdom, known outside of academic circles as tired multicultural cliches.
	But I shouldn't kid.
	After all, it was Maya Angelou who had the great wisdom to condemn the show Jeopardy for being racist.
	How could you, Trebek?
	Now, whether you share her racial paranoia or not, the point remains that she is a leftist, yet she is invited to give the orientation speech every single year.
	Has the administration ever heard of balance?
	Why not invite someone with another perspective from time to time?
	Maybe someone who instead of talking about multiculturalism talks about patriotism, or would that be inappropriate?
	Think of the audacity of being a little fucking 19-year-old kid talking shit about Maya Angelou, one of the great 20th century authors that this country has produced.
	So we can just see he has not changed that much since fucking complaining about janitors at Santa Monica High School.
	Speaking of infamous, Derek, it's also worth noting that Miller wrote that fight like hell speech that Trump delivered from the ellipse to kick off the January 6th insurrection.
	So he's the guy who's put all of these proto-fascist words directly into Trump's mouth during the first term.
	He also reportedly tested out anti-immigrant bits during rallies, and this dovetails with what you were just saying, and then chose the ones that did best in terms of crowd response for use in Trump's more official speeches.
	During Trump's second term, though, Miller has left the speech writing to a couple of his proteges, and he's moved on to now shaping policy directly, especially on immigration.
	He was behind some of the sweeping executive orders that set the gears in motion during week one, including the attempt to abolish birthright citizenship.
	Adding to this, Miller also reportedly laid into a meeting of top officials at the ICE DC headquarters back in June, where he demanded that national arrest quotas be pushed to 3,000 people a day.
	And this is less than six months after Trump 2.0 had started when ICE already had close to 50,000 people in detention and had already outstripped all the money that Congress had budgeted to fund this horrible initiative.
	Returning to that CNN interview, Miller had this very interesting overconfident slip-up that hasn't been as widely reported.
	Some commentators picked up on it, though.
	See if you can catch what it is right here, Derek.
	Just think about this for a second.
	If I put federal law enforcement and National Guard into a nice sleepy southern town, is anyone gonna riot?
	If I put, if I put, not if President Trump puts.
	Not if the administration puts, not if we decide to, if I put, I think that's there's something there.
	Yeah, and we know that Trump is just mostly the media figure here.
	That the idea that Miller is running immigration is absurd.
	But as we reported on Thursday's episode, or maybe it was last Thursday, I get confused now.
	But we just had historic highs in America in terms of polling for overall support for immigration.
	It was over, it's like some 79%.
	It was the highest ever recorded in American history because people are seeing what's going on.
	And so specifically that was that immigration is is overall a good thing, right?
	Yeah, correct.
	So to answer Steven's question, yeah, you might see some fucking writing because what you're doing, or whoever is doing it for Trump in the uh agricultural department by fucking over farmers and tariffs and everything you're doing.
	Yeah, I would expect to see some of those I hate America rallies coming to very deep red areas very soon if you keep this up.
	So we've established that Miller has this strong presence in the current administration.
	He's shaping policy behind the scenes, then he's arguing for it belligerently in the media by repeating propaganda narratives that advance the justification for this unconstitutional, illegal, militarized authoritarianism.
	And he accidentally referenced before freezing up what kind of the end game is for this.
	He also held the pen that put the words into Trump's mouth for some of the most starkly alarming speeches during his first term.
	So Miller comes across to me like he's playing a role.
	He's got this odd supervillain quality.
	And AOC, a lot of people probably saw, recently roasted him as a prime example of overcompensating insecure MAGA men.
	And she should, we should just laugh at them.
	This all got me curious.
	Like, how did he get this way?
	Did he grow up under the influence of right-wing culture?
	Was he bullied?
	Well, it turns out that investigative journalist Jean Guerrero went deep on his background for her book Hate Monger, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.
	And Miller actually grew up in Northern Santa Monica neighborhood, right where I had my first yoga teaching job for 11 years, starting in 1993.
	And it is traditionally quite blue politically, but as you pointed out, Derek, it's prone to the exact conspirituality features we've covered for years now.
	White, privileged, libertarian, and susceptible to pseudoscience wellness and anti-vaccine beliefs.
	Miller went to all the local schools there, and it turns out that even then he was an anti-immigrant white supremacist sociopath from quite early on.
	Here's a classmate who is now a stand-up comedian.
	His name is Charles Gould.
	Stephen Miller was never bullied in high school.
	Stephen Miller was the bully.
	Stephen Miller bullied kids in our school who were new to this country, who were learning English as a second language.
	He bullied the kids who are already marginalized by our society, and he continues to do that from the white house today.
	Tell us how you really feel, Charles.
	That clip is five minutes long.
	I'll post it in the show notes because you should really watch the whole thing.
	His commenters say it's it's not really comedy.
	It's during a comedy show, but this particular moment is him just airing out some truth.
	Yeah.
	Now that kind of cruelty reads us especially depraved when we realize that Miller is himself the grandchild of immigrants, Eastern European Jewish immigrants, to be specific, who fled the pogroms in Belarus in 1903.
	Nonetheless, he was best known in high school for actively opposing, taunting, and harassing Santa Monica High's Chicano student group for persuading prominent conservative radio host Larry Elder to visit the school and then getting neocon activist David Horowitz to back his initiatives to get the school to institute the Pledge of Allegiance.
	He also ran for the position of being student announcer, campaigning in part on this issue, as well as his whole shtick about not wanting to pick up uh his own trash.
	It's watching, I've said this before, but watching the bullies from high school gain so much power while simultaneously always claiming to be the victim has been, I think, emotionally one of the hardest things about the ascent of this administration because I was someone who was bullied growing up.
	I know how it feels from that end.
	And from my particular high school, through the wonders of Facebook over the years, I've seen a lot of those people uh turn out to be okay people.
	You know, you're young, things happen.
	Uh, I'm not gonna go so far, like JD Vance to say, oh, everyone loved Hitler, whatever.
	They're kids, you know, that happens.
	So to watch the people who don't.
	It reminds me of that high school athlete who in their 40s and 50s, their glory days were in high school, and they're gonna go through every moment to try to just keep reminding you about it.
	That that cuts across so many of these figures in the administration.
	The fear of aging, the fear of being irrelevant, the insecurities.
	And I feel in terms of a psychological profile, the fact that Stephen Miller, this very small little man would be the bully, part of the overcompensation that AOC pointed out, and the fact that he's still doing it is just such a fitting archetype.
	The problem is all of the people that are being harmed by him right now, yeah, and increasingly so, especially moving into well, the day this drops, because many of us will be at the No Kings protests, and we're gonna see what happens there.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's it's tough for all the marginalized people.
	It's tough for anyone who's ever been bullied, as you were saying.
	It's tough for anyone who has kids to be like, okay, the the the worst exemplars of relational kind of emotional intelligence are actually the people who who are in charge now, and this is how they act.
	Uh, you can't you can't point to anyone in the administration and say that that's a that's how to be a decent human being.
	And in fact, you have seen some excerpts from Gene Guerrero's uh book about Miller, in which they talk about how he he he started styling himself in high school as a gangster.
	He would wear, he would wear a pinky ring, he would wear certain kinds of necklaces.
	He would he started doing this like steepling of his fingers when he would talk to people, you know, the whole the whole way that he's compared to the to the villain in The Simpsons.
	And uh apparently he also had first a best friend and then later on a girlfriend who were both Hispanic, that he ended up cutting out of his life with a brutal kind of breaking up speech in which he listed everything that meant everything about them that wasn't good enough for him, and included in that was, and you're Hispanic.
	So this is quite a character.
	I would highly recommend reading Gene's book.
	Gene interviewed me for the LA Times years ago, uh, early on in Conspirituality, and I've occasionally stayed in touch.
	She is a fantastic journalist.
	So uh definitely if you want to get deep into the psychology of Miller, I'll I'll include a link in the show notes as well.
	Yeah, so we have one more little clip here that illustrates what we've been talking about.
	This is Miller in high school on the school bus, just being the most disgusting edgelord imaginable.
	To the issue of the Iraqi civilians.
	I think that as many of them should survive as possible, because the goal of any military conflict is to kill as few people as possible.
	But Astro Sladom Hussein is henchmen.
	I think the ideal solution would be to cut off their fingers.
	I don't think it's necessary to kill them entirely.
	We're not a barbaric people.
	We respect life.
	Therefore, torture is the way to go.
	Because torture people can live.
	Torture is a celebration of life and human dignity.
	We need to remember that as we enter these very dark and dangerous times in the next century.
	And I only hope that many of my peers and people who will be leaving this country will appreciate the value and respect that torture shows towards other cultures.
	Yeah, I mean, I think we often uh try to resist diagnosing from afar, but that that just sounds like a budding sociopath to me.
	And we see the evidence in how he's transforming America into a racist authoritarian police state.
	I mentioned JD Vance a moment ago, so if listeners aren't aware of what happened, I would say that that moment is the perfect example of the sort of text chains that I'm about to describe because political recently broke a story about a group text thread between young Republicans, and you know, this clip is just that.
	The messages from that young Republican, very recent text chain include things like everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.
	And great, I love Hitler, and they love the watermelon people.
	After the story broke, social media was flooded with commentary about this article, but also people sharing photos of these young Republican all men.
	I'm generally not one for physically shaming anyone, but the point here is that these men pretty much look like who you would expect to send such such messages.
	They pretty much look like an outcast Stephen Miller in high school yelling about janitors, to be honest.
	And in this sense, I think shaming is really important and pertinent here.
	It's a powerful tool.
	But I'm also cognizant that people like this who have no moral core are the exact men who become top advisors to presidents or presidents.
	The role of shame in societies is to keep people in check.
	The problem is that what works in small group settings doesn't have the same effect online.
	So I'm gonna guess that these young men, if they come across the shaming posts about them, they're only gonna use that as fuel for their grievance politics.
	They're gonna dig in deeper, they're gonna crave power that much more, and if all goes well for them, which in this current political moment, they'll probably be ice agents or the head of ice agents, they're gonna use that fuel for even more hatred.
	In fact, Andrew Torba, who is the founder of the right-wing chat messaging app, Gab, he tweeted out that group chat was tame.
	They have no idea what's coming.
	Wow.
	For which he was rewarded with over a thousand retweets and 15,000 likes, along with hundreds of comments, mostly supportive.
	Now, obviously, some number are bots, some number are foreign nationals loving the discord in American society, but I'm gonna guess plenty of those are full throated support for whatever civil war against woke people like Torba and those young Republicans dream of.

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