Stephen Miller and the Passover Message
Stephen Miller, President Donald J. Trump’s repellent senior advisor, deputy chief of staff, and director of the interagency Homeland Security Council, posted on social media two months ago:
“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”
Miller called for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government. “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history,” he said.
Miller was presumably exposed annually from an early age to the Passover story from the biblical Book of Exodus, ritualized according to the textual telling in the Haggadah every year at this time around the seder table. Here we learn that the Jewish people were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years and had none of the rights accorded the non-Jewish members of that society – such as they might have been living under the pharaonic god-kings. They were, you know, a “labor class” without rights.
The lesson commonly drawn from the story since ancient times is that slavery – having a designated labor class with no capacity to influence the conditions of servitude – is, you know, really abhorrently bad. This has engendered an ethic of inclusivity, an embracing of the other, that has been a core value of Jewish culture.
Let’s revisit the stirring admonition from Leviticus 19:34: “But the stranger who dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
This is resoundingly rejected by Miller, an Ashkenazi Jew whose family escaped Russian pogroms and the Holocaust. His forbearers along with millions of diaspora Jews arrived on our shores in the late 19th and early 20th century fleeing oppression born of bigoted exclusion by the dominant societies of the countries where they had been living and here aspiring to social and political inclusivity. They slaved away in sweatshops in this country while living in some of the most appalling conditions of poverty in the world, struggling for full participation in a pluralistic society in a nation where they would be full members.
Now that he has benefitted from the activism of his forbearers and attained residency in the inner sanctum of the citadel of power he is dedicated to ensuring that others, particularly people of color, cannot be welcomed into the same privileged circle of full citizenship as he, essentially supporting the Egyptian side of that ancient conflict.
Further revealing his deeply odious philosophy, in January, Miller told Jake Tapper on CNN that:
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power … These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
The only iron in this discussion is between Miller’s ears.
His nearly unimaginable moral monstrousness exhibits an arresting consistency. If it is righteous for any stronger person to brutalize a weaker person, then one must be always vigilant, in essence perpetually paranoid, because assailants may be lurking anywhere and there is no respite, no protection, that a humane society or government can, or what is more, ought to even aspire to provide.
There are other worlds, like mystical nesting vessels, co-existing right here in the same space and time as the one Miller proclaims we live in, that are invisible to him and his supporters due to stunted and distorted dimensions of human consciousness. The world of most of the folks I hang out with features awareness of our mutuality as fellow beings sharing a fragile planetary biosphere where, in the poignant words of the poet Auden written at the outset of the second world war, “we must love another or die.” I encourage anyone who has not read his poem September 1, 1939 in a long time to revisit it now.
As the late Buddhist monk and revered teacher Thich Nhat Hanh illuminates:
“There is a tendency to be individualistic in us, a seed of egoism, but that isn’t all that is in us. There is the other seed, the seed of togetherness, the desire to help and be kind to others. If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.”
Which seed are you watering?
Stumbling Along in Hitler’s Footsteps
World War II, at least in Europe, can be blamed on a single man — a dictator who gained absolute power because of the fecklessness of democratically elected politicians in his country. Afraid to challenge a politician popular with much of their lumpen proletarian base, they hoped to be rid if him by making him head of the representative body that was supposed to control him. They even granted him unusual emergency powers, in hopes that he’d mess up and be destroyed politically.
They gave this power to a man who had a thuggish cult-like following and who had earlier been jailed for organizing a failed putsch that was intended to topple the government and put them and their leader in power, The violent coup attempt failed, with some putschists and a few police killed. Their leader, who fled and hid out for two days was arrested. Tried and convicted of treason, he remained popular among his followers, and only served 9 months of his five-year sentence before being released.
Had Adolph Hitler, whose popularity was owed to his scapegoating the blame for Germany’s economic woes onto Jews, Communists, Socialists and European countries, been kept in jail to serve his full sentence, and had he been properly barred from running for national office because of his record of treason and fomenting revolution, he might never have been able order the annexation of Austria, the takeover by force of the German-speaking “Sudetenland” region of Czechoslovakia, or the invasion of Poland. That last decision set the war in Europe in motion because of mutual assistance pacts that obligated France and Britain to come to Poland’s defense, Thus began the war that ultimately led to the destruction of most of Europe and much of Asia and to the deaths of over 60 million people, most of them civilians, in what remains most terrible and bloody conflict in human history.
If this story sounds oddly—and disturbingly—familiar, it should, for it is being repeated before our eyes right now in the United States of America and the Middle East. In this version, a more porcine and less articulate, but at least as narcissistic and psychopathic a man, Donald Trump, was returned to the presidency in 2024 by the slimmest of pluralities and, despite his having four years earlier attempted to foment a coup to overturn the election of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.
Once his oath of office vowing to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States had been sworn to, he took advantage of a July 2024 ruling by a stacked right-wing Supreme Court majority. That ruling, Trump v. United States granted all presidents absolute immunity from prosecution for any of their “presidential acts,” and pardoned all the Make America Great Again (MAGA) cultist insurrectionists, who four years earlier had, upon his orders, stormed Congress, hoping to prevent Congressional certification of the 2020 election that Trump had just lost. Subsequent to that, Republicans, with control of both houses of Congress, but still nearly all afraid of this modern-day “Hitler’s” cult followers’ ability to deny them renomination as candidates in their next re-election bids, acted much like like the cowards in the Bundestag (German parliament) in 1933: they granted Trump the powers of an absolute monarch, unconstrained by Constitution, courts or even moral qualms.
Trump’s MAGA cult is kept stoked by his endless fear-mongering about a nonexistent “tidal wave” of immigrants of color —“murderers and rapists” that he claims are “diluting the blood” of “real” (meaning White) Americans.
It’s nonsense, but the hate-spewing tactic works just as well in 2026 on the down-trodden MAGA working class-whites in the US looking for some group to blame for their failure to earn a decent living, as it worked 1933 for Hitler on the downtrodden German masses in the depths of the Great Depression years of the 1930s.
At this point, with the president claiming, without any objection from his party, which controls both houses of Congress, that he doesn’t need permission from Congress or the UN Security Council, he has launched an all-out war of choice on Iran, a country that poses no risk to the US, half a world away. It’s a war a large majority of Americans oppose, yet a sycophant Congress won’t even debate a War Powers Resolution that could bring it to a halt.
Like Hitler, Trump, who is known to have long admired the impetuous Nazi Führer, is taking his own council in his war decisions, allowing genocidal Israel to do much of the bombing with its now honed and practiced lack of concern about mass casualties of civilians. And like Israel, he has adopted the idiotic policy of murdering the enemy’s leaders—a practice called “decapitation.” It’s a short-sighted tactic long opposed by military leaders and outlawed in the Geneva Accords because, as Trump is discovering, doing so makes it difficult if not impossible to negotiate an end to the fighting.
HItler basically lost his war before he started it, by failing to first plan on how he would obtain the massive amounts of oil needed to fuel his huge war machine — something he never managed to do successfully. Similarly Trump failed to realize how easy it would be even for a heavily bombed Iran to shut down shipping through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, cutting off 20% of the entire world’s oil supply and creating a massive global and domestic US economic, diplomatic and political crisis.
Hitler, whose military experience was limited to his having been a private and a corporal during WWI was also overconfident in the power of his modernized military and his Aryan soldiers, and dismissive of his generals. He didn’t believe the Soviets, with their Slavik peasant army, could resist and defeat this massive Wehrmacht. He likewise assumed wrongly that he could conquer Britain quickly, either through mass bombing or a cross-Channel invasion. Trump, who had no military experience having dodged the Vietnam-era draft by claiming to have “bone spurs” on his feet, has similarly miscalculated how hard Iranians, faced with an existential threat to their nation, would rally to resist the US onslaught.
Like Hitler, Trump thinks he knows everything, and he clearly doesn’t.
Germany before the war had in its excellent universities some of the top physicists, chemists, engineers and mathematicians in the world. Some of them, like scientists in the US, Britain and eventually the USSR, were warning that there was a way to produce a super bomb based upon releasing the energy found inside the nucleus of the uranium atom. In the US, Britain and the Soviet Union, these warnings led to secret crash programs to develop an atomic bomb—ironically out of a fear the Nazis would get an atomic bomb first. But Hitler blew off his scientists’ dire warnings, dismissing the idea of such a weapon, as well as the theory of quantum mechanics that underlay it, as “Jewish science.” He refused to provide the funding for such a costly “crackpot” idea..
In a similar manner, the smug know-it-all current US Commander-in-Chief, who has bragged of having “The highest IQ of any president in history,” ignored expert advice from the State Department, the Pentagon and intelligence people that Iran would not be a pushover like Venezuela or ISIS in Syria. An ancient civilization with a unified language and national pride as well as an educated population, Iran has showed it will resist, and has the means to do so, proving this with its precision strikes on US bases across the Middle East, and with little evident public protest from the population being bombed.
We are at this moment being misled in the US by a man whom Rex Tillerson, the corporate CEO who served as Secretary of State for the first two years of Trump’s first term, once inappropriately but aptly labeled, “a moron.”
We can only hope that Trump’s blundering into a war the US cannot win, will not end up killing as many innocent people as Hitler did with his World War II blunder of invading Poland and later the USSR. And we can only hope that this biggest disaster of his political misadventure in The Middle East will drive him out of office and end a most shameful chapter in US history — one that hopefully will also school Americans about the danger of supporting grandiose charlatans to rule as as kings.
There were good reasons American farmers craftspeople and others from all walks of life in the colonies took up arms against the most powerful military in the 18th century world: to throw off the yoke of King George’s tyranny,
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