Stephen Miller: Fundamental Errors

January 30, 2026

Leading US presidential homeland security advisor and deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, apparently known in the White House as “Mr. Prime Minister,” has glorified and promised the return to what he believes is the old way of constant warfare:

We live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.

This is hubris born of its usual ignorance. Stephen Miller taunts his interlocutor as being soft and a bit dim, presenting as “truth” an assumption more worthy of a high school boy—or an ignorant dictator—than an adult.

“Blood alone literally moves the wheels of history,” said Benito Mussolini, and it did, including for him. Shot and later hung by the feet with his mistress and others outside a gas station, he saw that blood doesn’t always flow downhill, though some of his must have on those sunny days in Milan.

I’m not sure how much history Stephen Miller has read. I think he read what you might call hopeful history, which is writing by would-be autocrats so as to subvert the past and create a new future. It’s mostly about about the great history they are making, or think will as soon as they can get everyone else out of the way. It’s programmatic, like Mein Kampf and Miller’s/Heritage Foundation Project 2025.

Maybe Miller read the history of the desires of dictators and other blood fanatics, but not how quickly they were brought down, sometimes one by one, sometimes by complete and total surrender. Listen to Mr. Miller and you will hear desire history—as my father used to say, “I know I’m right; don’t confuse me with the facts.”

It’s important to read actual histories as well as ideology, racist rants, plans, and complaints. Most importantly, we must read the painstakingly re-assembled histories of the generations of human beings, groups, survivors, merchants, farmers, laborers, and peacelovers that continued after every regime, dynasty, empire, or warlord’s domain had died. No empire or dynasty has ever outlasted its population (though they likely moved away or surrendered to conquerors), or we would still be Romans, or even Assyrians.

Empires and dynasties have been more or less successful lineages of “leaders” kept in power sometimes by their own wisdom or brutality. But they couldn’t, and never did, do this alone. They were “served” and mostly managed by elites with their own interests and games, and by the oppressed who were forced to serve them. But it never lasted. Never. If you would like to read a good book on this, I recommend Lewis Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse (2025).

As Lewis Kemp explains on the basis of over 320 cases of societal survival and collapse, regimes run by violence and conquest never work because this isn’t how the universe works. If things were this way, we would be no more, because aggressors are as weak and susceptible to failure as those they mock, if not more so.

Any and every person, group, organization, nation state, kingdom, or empire that tries to live by power and control will still die like everything else. For the whole to continue, the parts are refreshed and replaced. Nothing lasts except in its detritus, and perhaps in the painful legends or silences of those who were wronged. People pick up the pieces of their own lives, and the ones they gather help them to continue.

There is no king of the solar system, no emperor of the trees, no dictator of squirrels. In trying to be these unnatural or mutant strains of natural order, in trying to kill or deport or deny adversaries, concentrate wealth, subjugate others, and most important, shrink the human capacity for thought, beauty, spiritual awareness, and compassion, all authoritarians, totalitarians, oligarchies, and other hierarchical (Lewis discusses this) forms of social structure run counter to the way the universe runs. The universe sustains itself with a leaderless, equal order, the cooperation of all elements, and the disappearance of abberant and destructive patterns. We can’t say the sea is better than the land, and the stomach is no less important to my survival than my brain.

By “leaderless” I don’t mean some primal intelligence, some awareness, which may indeed exist, but it isn’t necessary to posit one for this observation. I mean only that no part of nature schemes against itself for its own gain.

So, Miller’s pronouncement is not wisdom but ignorance. Behind his old school “nature red in tooth and claw” is a simple fact: strength and force don’t sustain human groups; they pit them against one another—and one and then both lose.

Why are there always force and violence? Because they don’t work, but people think they will. It feels good to hate or overpower someone; it’s all easy from there, no? No, because any so-called power will succumb to someone else’s also misplaced conviction that the world is run by powerful men. That group will be fresher, a bit larger, more ruthless—the old bull loses to the young one. But in time the young age, too. The universe rolls from one configuration to another so as to keep the whole the same, and the same is coherent, infinite, and unchanging in its rules. Little blips called force and power aren’t iron laws; they’re human aberrations.