A great deal has been said about Charlie Kirk’s murder and the memorial service that was held for him in Phoenix last weekend (September 21). I’m hesitant to add to the noise, not because I’m afraid to say what I think of Mr. Kirk’s short life or the movement he helped build, but because the rancor of the discourse has been so predictable and depressing. Trump’s speech, including “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want what’s best for them,” was another low point in America’s story of ongoing democratic decay, and the Christian nationalism on display in Phoenix, by this point, is nothing very new.
But there’s still a piece to this story I feel compelled to engage with. Something disturbing, but also derivative. Frightening, but also deserving of ridicule.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, addressed the audience in terms we absolutely have to call out. His speech was short, less than seven minutes, but the fury and venom behind the words–and the words themselves–have been deeply disturbing to many, although the audience in Phoenix received him warmly.
If you want to know what “divisive narratives and improper ideology” look and sound like, Miller’s eulogy was one of the darkest things I have witnessed from a government official. Honestly, this was the most Hitlerian speech I have ever seen in public politics. The froth and vitriol were off the charts, and the bulging veins atop Miller’s shaven head and the sweaty upper lip only helped to amplify the apocalyptic tenor of the whole, ugly, spectacle. Only forty years-old, Miller, it seems, wants nothing more than to be a thundering godhead atop Mt. Olympus. The savior of what he insists on calling “western civilization.”
I won’t/can’t recommend that anyone watch, but in case you’d like to see what I’m describing below, here is the video ( 6 mins. 37 secs.) of Miller’s full tirade.
Miller begins with the story of a warrior caught out in a storm. The storm whispers to the warrior, “You can’t endure my strength.” The warrior steels himself and replies: “I am the storm.”
Continuing in the same vein, Miller hammers on the theme:
“We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. Our lineage and our legacy hails [sic] back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.“
In my Mastodon feed, one commenter rightly observed that these are all references to slave owning societies. Miller’s ancestors didn’t build America’s cities or raise the crops that fed them. But others “cracked the whip on the backs of those who did.” Men like Miller want full credit for achievements that came to his beloved homeland through labor that was, too often, coerced or stolen. But I digress…
MAGA’s enemies on the left, Miller says later, have built nothing. They have nothing to offer, as they have none of the virtues that greatness requires. These less-thans, these sub-humans, they imperil the nation through their vacuous immorality. “They ARE nothing,” Miller tells the audience. Pure darkness–a void–and, therefore, pure evil. He actually says this, friends. I do not embellish.
In the Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer observed how the Nazis engrained two words in the German consciousness: Aktion (action) and Sturm (storm). Besides being a cauldron of resentments and conspiracy theories, Nazism, as I have written elsewhere, was a linguistic barrage and a corruption of longstanding values.
Klemperer noted how Sturm quickly became the animating concept of the “manly beer house.” It promised the return of a strict militarized hierarchy. Hitler built his party militia around this word; hence, Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung). More than anything, perhaps, Nazism sought to convince ordinary Germans that theirs was no ordinary time. In a storm-tossed world, Germans had the opportunity to become a storm themselves. While “storm” and “action” had been in circulation before the rise of the NSDAP, no other German party put those words to work in the same maniacal way.
Miller says that MAGA’s “enemies” can’t understand the meaning or strength of the movement he now helps to spearhead.
But we understand all too well.
This kind of blood and soil rhetoric is far from new. It’s woven into the historical record, as are its terrible consequences.
When leaders use this kind of language–the language of civilizational struggle, battles between light and dark, the cult of the warrior, fire and brimstone–the trajectory has always run toward violent eliminationism. Miller is engaged in an extermination operation, which is why the formula of “us versus them” appears everywhere throughout the speech.
Trump, Vance, Miller and others in the MAGA clique say that comparisons between MAGA and Nazism are a driver of violence. That’s nonsense.
Reporting on the storm does not cause the storm to manifest. Observing the violence of its gales, does not cause the cyclone to spin.
If MAGA would like thinking people to stop calling them Nazis, then my advice is simple. Stop talking like Nazis. Stop aping the style of Nazis. Stop governing like Nazis.
Stormy weather, friends. It would be nice to simply batten the hatches. But this rhetoric and the project it seeks to advance demand a forceful and organized and active response. So much depends on us standing upright against this storm.
ALEXANDER KARN 
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