There’s a video on the internet of Trump advisor Stephen Miller making a speech for a student government position during his junior year at Santa Monica High School in California in the spring of 2002. In that speech, he said, “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up our trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?”
Funny how some people never seem to manage to evolve and become better people. And it doesn’t take a brainiac to figure out that the “janitors” he was referring to were likely people of color on the lowest-rung of the social and economic totem pole who Miller still believes are beneath him because he’s white and male and they are not. The only thing they are worthy of is picking up his trash. Listen to his vitriol and one would think he’s time traveled from a certain country in Europe in the 1930s.
I’m reading Erik Larson’s book, The Demon of Unrest, and boy, am I learning a lot about the “planter class,” particularly in South Carolina, and the vitriol they were spewing in the months leading up to the start of the Civil War. As one observer said about South Carolina at the time, it was too small to be a republic and too big to be an insane asylum. And boy, what these Southerners were saying in 1860-61 in the defense of slavery sounds too similar to what people like Miller are saying about immigrants now. And it makes me wonder if we aren’t too big to be an insane asylum.
