Civil War II: The Wrath of Steve

This isn't quite how I though this would go. I figured that our nation's second civil war (it's canon, Captain Pike said so) would start as a slow burn initially fought by essentially guerilla forces, terrorist attacks by the same kind of cultists that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, rubes that follow the tyrant-in-chief's mob-boss-like instruction; those attacks would then escalate to conflicts with authorities that escalate to conflicts between authorities that escalate to federal crackdowns.

Instead, the regime is skipping all those preliminary steps and just diving in with federal oppression. Why warm up?

The assault by ICE agents in Chicago, along with other factors of note—POTUS47's unexplained absence from view for several days at a time; the illegal murders of Venezuelans on the open sea; multiple claims by the tyrant that Portland, Oregon, is "burning to the ground" and "war-torn" when the real circumstance involves a small protest outside an ICE building by a guy in a chicken suit and a preacher (who was shot by an ICE agent with a non-lethal round after he told the agents they could still repent their sins); and myriad other actions taken under the auspices of DHS—lend considerable credence to the theory that Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is really in charge of the regime, at least so far as non-economic policy goes.

We all know that the alleged president is too stupid to orchestrate anything himself—not effectively, anyway; when he tries we get tariffs that cripple the whole economy. He is instead manipulated by his puppeteers to authorize what they want to do and then they do it without interference. Miller is the chief puppeteer, the architect of the most Nazi-esque policies of the regime, and he isn't subtle. He's a blunt instrument. His only warmup moves for his remake of DHS into a fascist secret police force were building/expanding DHS detention facilities and putting out the call that ICE would hire anyone who could pass a sort of inverse background check. Do you have a history of antisocial behavior? Violent outbursts? Have you ever been fired from a job for your racist attitudes? Are you well-versed in a variety of slurs and hate speech? Did you beat up smaller kids in elementary school? If so, you are the ideal candidate for a career in the new ICE Thug Force. With his secret police all staffed up, he can just exploit the boss' ignorance to get authorization for terror campaigns in cities across the country.

It's possible that Miller is so tunnel-visioned in his racism that he doesn't realize that commando raids on minority-majority neighborhoods will have blowback, but I think it more likely that it's part of the plan. He wants the blowback, he wants the escalation, he wants to rain hellfire on anyone that reminds him of people he hated as a child.

Once again, I note that a person like this would never be allowed near the halls of power if the majority in Congress respected their oaths of office. I mean, no one in this regime would be, it's entirely staffed by authoritarians and idiots. But Miller seems a special case. He has no redeemable quality. If there is a fictional metaphor for Miller, an actual Jewish Nazi, it's Armus, the "skin of evil" from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Armus was the sludge making up all of the hatred, animus, and cruelty of an alien race, expunged from them and abandoned on a barren unpopulated world.

The tyrant-in-chief is the most dangerous person in the world because he wields power, but he's stupid and, I would bet, demented and dying. Miller is nearly as dangerous because he pulls the strings and wants to cement his place in power before the alleged president kicks the bucket.

Ruled by a skin of evil.