Miller is a grotesque figure granted power, a carnival barker of repression whose racism operates as projection: a deep, unresolved self-loathing displaced outward and weaponized.

White House adviser Stephen Miller seems torn from the darkest archive of the 1930s. His ideological fever, spittle-laced tirades, compulsive lying, and theatrical rage are not excesses but instruments: performative rituals through which cruelty is normalized and racism is taught.

Goebbels’s Ghost and Miller’s Dream of a “Unified Reich”

BY HENRY GIROUX

What he stages is not only a ruthless infatuation with power and updated fascist politics but also a psychic unraveling masquerading as authority. The spirit animating his rhetoric, saturated with hate, fabrication, and manic spectacle, recalls a historical moment when cruelty became a governing principle and racism the moral grammar of the state.

Miller is a grotesque figure granted power, a carnival barker of repression whose racism operates as projection: a deep, unresolved self-loathing displaced outward and weaponized. In targeting immigrants, dissenters, Muslims, people of color, and all those outside the narrow confines of white Christian nationalism, he seeks not just power and disciplinary panopticon order but racial purification, not truth but erasure, transforming inner emptiness into a politics of cruel collective punishment. In this role, he is the archangel of a gangster state, reviving the racial cleansing and colonial violence of a prior age with an apocalyptic urgency driven by nihilism and Trump’s fevered fantasies of a unified Reich.

Miller is one of the principal architects of a fabricated “war on drugs,” a manufactured emergency used to justify extraordinary violence—from illegal boat strikes and the killing of more than one hundred people without due process to the kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Maduro and his wife. What appears as a series of discrete acts is, in fact, something far more consequential: the deliberate fusion of the so-called war on drugs with the long-standing war on terror. Under Miller’s ideological guidance, these once distinct campaigns collapse into a single, permanent state of exception in which mafia-style threats and force replace law, and violence becomes the primary instrument of both domestic and foreign policy. Miller aggressively emulates Trump’s relentless calls for militarization, normalizing a logic in which alleged criminals, political opponents, and entire populations are reclassified as enemy combatants. In this convergence, policing becomes warfare, warfare becomes governance, and the language of security is weaponized to erase due process, sovereignty, and accountability altogether.

His fear of dissent, people of color, and the very idea of law is not merely rhetorical; it is visceral. It surfaces in his permanent war mentality, his embrace of imperial aggression, and his eagerness to militarize both domestic governance and foreign policy. His unhinged defenses of the invasion and political abduction in Venezuela, along with his casual assertion that Greenland “rightfully” belongs to the United States, reveal a fascist worldview in which legality is meaningless and sovereignty collapses before brute force. For him, law does not restrain power; it sanctifies it. This contempt for ethical and political responsibility is laid bare in his declaration on CNN that the world is governed not by justice or rights but by “strength,” “force,” and “power,” which he calls, with totalitarian assurance, the “iron laws” of history.

Taken together, these claims form not only the language of realism; they also constitute the creed of an emerging fascist politics. It echoes the vocabulary of Hitler and the Third Reich, where politics was reduced to struggle, morality dismissed as weakness, and domination elevated to destiny. In this worldview, force turns out to be truth, violence becomes virtue, and the rule of law is replaced by the racialized mythology of survival through conquest. In Orwell’s warning that when the clock strikes thirteen, something has gone terribly wrong, Miller’s language marks precisely that moment—when power openly declares itself the only truth, domination becomes common sense, and fascist lies no longer bother to disguise themselves as reality.

Miller’s hatred of dissent is most fully revealed in his relentless effort to seize control of public culture, not as a secondary battlefield but as the central terrain on which authoritarian power is forged and sustained. He operates with the clear understanding that domination requires more than repression, it demands the production of compliant fascist subjects and the systematic erosion of the cultural institutions capable of nurturing critique. As the chief architect of book bans, the hollowing out of schools and universities, and the destruction of culture as a site of democratic possibility, Miller wages war on the very conditions that make resistance thinkable and culture a vital sources of social change. His assault on critical consciousness, historical memory, and critical pedagogy reproduces the racial logic of colonial rule, a politics designed to manufacture terminal zones of exclusion, enforce the violence of organized forgetting, and cultivate a colonized imagination trained to mistake obedience for order and silence for civic virtue.

This systematic war on culture is not merely ideological; it is pedagogical in the deepest sense, shaping how people learn to see the world, themselves, and those marked for exclusion. What Miller models is authoritarian pedagogy at work, teaching people how to think, how to feel, and who to despise. In this way, he helps manufacture the fascist subject, training audiences to confuse domination with strength, obedience with virtue, and dehumanization with patriotism. His politics echoes the architecture of a Nazi state; this authoritarian logic is rehearsed daily, disciplining the public to accept exclusion, erasure, moral collapse, and racial terror as common sense.

Miller is not a foot soldier of authoritarianism. He is a chief instructor, a propagandist of racial fear whose power lies in shaping the cultural and psychological conditions that make fascism feel normal, necessary, and even virtuous. In that sense, Goebbels is not an exaggeration but a mirror. History is not whispering a warning here; it is returning as a scream, ripping through the present and demanding to be recognized.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His latest book is The Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence (Bloomsbury in 2025). He is LA Progressive's Associate Editor. His website is www.henryagiroux.com

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/09/goebbelss-ghost-and-millers-dream-of-a-unified-reich/

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