Number Two

At the beginning of the year, I wrote but did not publish a column of questionable taste. Friends who are smarter than I am persuaded me it would be misunderstood and used by white supremacists to underpin their antisemitism.

The column was based upon a Yiddish term I have done much to popularize. A “shanda for the goyim” is applied to Jewish people of disrepute who are reflexively detested by other Jews because they provide ammunition for bigots, inasmuch as their malfeasances seem to confirm hateful, inaccurate stereotypes about Jews. I suspect other ethnicities have similar terms for similar things.

In that column I named the 10 “worst” shandas among the fetid cloud of apologists and enablers in Donald Trump’s inner circle. The problem was that the whole idea seemed arbitrary and brackish; I could have just as easily found, say, ten slimy evangelical Christians, or ten such people of Italian descent, etc., so why did I pick on the Jews? It would have been a fair question. (An answer is “Well, everyone picks on the Jews,” but that wouldn’t have held water.)

So that column died, deservedly. I’m not going to reveal the 10 people on that list, for the same reason I hope you will not speculate on them.

However, today I do come back to one of them! It’s not because he happens to be Jewish. It is because he happens to be slime.

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision rolling back a decades-long Statue-of-Liberty-inspired humanitarian immigration program offering temporary protection for Haitians and Syrians escaping brutal regimes or deeply unsafe circumstances, people who would presumably be subject to prison or death if they returned to their countries.

Xenophobes and other bigots have been working feverishly to rescind this policy. Until now, they had been overwhelming stymied by lower-court decisions identifying their efforts as racist and anti-American. The Supreme Court’s reversal, when enforced, could well lead to deaths of innocents who had been working here legally, and productively, for years.

Yesterday, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller said this of the ruling: “This is a victory ten years in the making. We can finally remove these Haitian illegal migrants from the United States.”

Yay. I now feel not just empowered but obliged to print Miller’s little thumbnail from that original column right here. Like many lists, it was a numbered countdown to the bottom. This is how the column ended:

Number Two: Stephen Miller

I know, you expected this guy to be Number One. A surprise awaits at Number One.

Miller earns this position for reasons I and others have enumerated ad nauseam, primarily for his role as Trump’s unofficial Cruelty Czar. An unapologetic White nationalist, he has his hand in every particularly barbarous position of the regime — demonizing immigrants, encouraging ICE brutalities, and so forth. Miller was the principal architect behind the 2017 "zero tolerance" enforcement framework, which led to the forcible separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents at the southern border. It was inhumanity, institutionalized.

Exalting in his president’s antipathy toward immigrants, and assuming this enthusiasm was a mainstream opinion, Miller jubilantly once told Americans: "You’ll set your alarm clock two hours earlier every morning just to get two more hours of daylight to watch the deportation flights happen."

Miller wrote Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech goading the crowd to riot.

And, sadly, he fits a stereotype: A bloodless behind-the-scenes power manipulator.

But I confess I do need to apologize to Mr. Miller. I have written in the past that he most closely resembles Heinrich Himmler, but I have now discovered this this is wrong. The person he most resembles is Reinhardt Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague:

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And coming in at Number One:

Jeffrey Epstein

Sure, he is technically not still alive.

But isn’t he, really, in a way?

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Today’s extraneous Gene Pool Gene Polls:

Thanks. We are done.

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