“Der Sturm bricht los”: Stephen Miller’s Nazi Eulogy
An old playbook has returned. There is power is knowing.
On Sunday, Charlie Kirk’s memorial drew upwards of 100,000 to Glendale, Arizona, and included nearly the entire upper echelon of the executive branch of the U.S. federal government, along with numerous legislators and right-wing luminaries. Even Elon Musk made an appearance.
While some of the speakers did not take political advantage of the situation—to her credit, the widow’s speech was largely about forgiveness—others used their time to rain fire on their enemies. Several speeches, including Donald Trump’s, went far outside the pre-2025 Overton Window, but one in particular deserves a careful analysis—Trump Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller.
Turning Point
In July 1932, Hitler’s German Worker’s Party (NSDAP) was trying to win a majority in the Reichstag over the Social Democrats (SPD). Weimar Germany was in the throes of the Great Depression. Millions were unemployed, and daily clashes erupted between Nazi and Communist paramilitaries.
On July 9th, Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, gathered more than 10,000 in the Berlin Sportpalast, including thousands of uniformed members of the Brownshirts or SA (Sturmabteilung)—the “Storm Department”. Goebbels speech was published under the title “Der Sturm bricht los,” “The Storm Breaks Loose,” or alternately, “The Storm Is Coming.”
The speech was designed as a mass radicalization and mobilization event prior to the elections at the end of that month. The Sportpalast remained a key locus of Nazi propaganda and radicalization through the end of WWII.
There are several central features of Goebbels July 1932 speech which bear a striking similarity to Stephen Miller’s.
Central storm metaphor designed to inspire an image of elemental violence.
Existential dehumanization of the enemy as “nothing.”
Martyrdom transformed into an immortal mission.
Millenarian Aryanism as mystical privilege.
Generational destiny and civilizational rescue as moral imperatives.
The Storm Is Coming
The “storm” was common in Nazi imagery, but Goebbels 1932 speech was one of his favorites; he repeated the “Storm, break loose” metaphor in numerous later speeches. “The Storm Is Coming” is also one of the most common QAnon slogans, which has been reposted by Donald Trump more than once.
Miller’s speech uses the term in much the same way:
MILLER: “The storm whispers to the warrior that you cannot withstand my strength and the warrior whispers back, "I am the storm." Erika is the storm. We are the storm.“
GOEBBELS: “People, rise up, and storm, break loose!”
“You Are NOTHING”
Miller’s speech, like Goebbels, projected violence being created by his own supporters on his political enemies and dehumanized them as unworthy of life.
MILLER: “And to those trying to incite violence against us… You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.“
GOEBBELS: “Red murder rages through the streets… More than that, the red battalions preach civil war and bloody class conflict that are tearing our nation apart, giving the German people no peace.”
Both speeches present a prime illustration of DARVO—Deny, Attack, Reverse, Victim & Offender—and share striking linguistic parallels.
MILLER: “The dragon you have awakened. You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization, to save the West, to save this Republic.
GOEBBELS: “Well, we the people have awakened! We have risen against oppression, 15 million people have joined in an army of revenge.”
Martyrdom → Immortality
In 1929, Brownshirt Horst Wessel was killed and became a martyr for the Nazis. At the memorial in Arizona Sunday, Donald Trump said:
“Charlie Kirk is now a martyr for America.”
Stephen Miller and Goebbels leaned heavily into this theme as well.
MILLER: “The day that Charlie died, the angels wept, but those tears had been turned into fire in our hearts. And that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend or understand. You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk. You have made him immortal. You have immortalized Charlie Kirk.”
GOEBBELS: “So our dead comrade Horst Wessel wrote, and we are fulfilling his prophesy. The others may lie, slander, and pour their scorn on us — their political days are numbered.”
Millenarian Aryanism
The white supremacist, racial undertones of Goebbels speech were largely implied, while Stephen Miller’s were more explicit. Miller’s explanation of “our lineage and our legacy” leads strictly through white European history, skipping over every other human civilization.
“Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello, our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry… The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil.”
“The light will defeat the dark” is intentionally dual-meaning: dark is wicked and evil; light built everything good. It is racist, to its core.
White People to the Rescue
Both Goebbels’s 1932 speech and Miller’s 2025 speech set similar stakes: the enemy lies and leads the people to disgrace; we will rescue civilization from those who would destroy it.
Miller also shares Goebbels’s predilection for anaphora, the repetition of phrases in speech for effect.
MILLER: “We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity. You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization, to save the West, to save this Republic. Because our children are strong. And our grandchildren will be strong. And our children's children's children will be strong.
GOEBBELS: ““They promised you, workers, citizens and creative Germans, a Reich of freedom and beauty and dignity… You are the witnesses, the builders, the will-bearers of our idea and our worldview…We will not allow Germany to sink into disgrace. We will give back to Germany a reason for its existence, a meaning to life.”
Why It Matters
Unlike Donald Trump, whose only ideology is his own narcissism, Stephen Miller is a true ideologue. His path has been unwavering since he was forced to go to a Santa Monica public high school as a boy. He has wanted to wreak revenge on the entire liberal democratic project, and everyone who is not white, ever since. He cannot be argued out of his goal; he cannot be persuaded to moderate; he is determined to ethnically cleanse America.
The fact that he is so obviously, intimately acquainted with the rhetoric of the chief propagandist and planner of one of the worst mass-killing machines the world has ever known should be of serious and immediate concern. None of it is accidental; Stephen Miller seems to have practiced all his lines in front of a mirror.
Stephen Miller is the “brains” behind the Nazification of the Trump regime—with a big early assist from his fellow Naziphile Elon Musk. Miller is the man behind mass deportations, masked ICE stormtroopers—and the budget that gave Kristi Noem and Tom Homan almost $200 billion to work with.
How does Miller’s ideology differ from Goebbels? How does his rhetoric compare? Are his actions materially different?
Here is what renowned scholar of fascism Jason Stanley said about Goebbels:
Nazis are the defenders of ‘the … achievements of Western Europe,’ religion, and indeed ‘human civilization itself’ … Goebbels’s narrative presupposes that culture, and even human civilization, are Aryan.”
Miller has managed to compartmentalize the fact that he’s Jewish behind his rage. Despite his ancestors, like mine, being forced out of Russia in the Jewish pogroms, he deliberately stokes neo-Nazi rage.
I posted the video of Miller’s speech to Twitter along with some of Goebbels quotes to gauge the reaction. It has gone viral, over 5 million views in under 24 hours.
The pushback from the political right to my comparison to Goebbels has been very interesting. The responses range from—“you’re crazy” to “you are correct to be afraid.” Regardless, the resonance is clear on all sides: Stephen Miller gave a Nazi speech.
If We Understand the Trajectory, It’s Easier to Deflect It
The purpose of this kind of analysis is not to frighten people, although it is frightening, but to show as clearly as possible what direction all of this is going—because the clearer we understand it, the easier it is to deflect it in a less deadly direction.
Stephen Miller is, in my opinion, fully dedicated to following through on Goebbels vision of an Aryan future, or as Nazi terrorist David Lane said in his infamous slogan the “14 words:”
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
For comparison, Stephen Miller said at the end of his speech:
“And we will achieve victory for our children, for our families, for our civilization, and for every patriot who stands with us.”
When a man who has the ear of the President of the United States stands in front of America and recreates a speech which helped push the Nazis into power, enabling the slaughter of millions, we shouldn’t just be concerned or alarmed, we should be confident. We can look at this and say clearly: “This is wrong. This is not America. This is evil. I reject this with everything in my being.”
It has happened here. There is power in getting that behind us. The Nazis have come back. Now we roll up our sleeves and beat them, once again.
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Doesn’t Miller realize that many if not most white supremacists do not consider him white because he is Jewish? If his propaganda succeeds, he may be causing his own demise. So strange and bizarre. This deranged hate monger may be looking at a bleak future whatever direction this goes. He must be held accountable for his crimes once this fascist cult has ended and its leaders are tried.
The first thing I thought of when I heard about Kirk's murder was "Horst Wessel" I knew that it was too good an opportunity for Miller to miss.
This country is in desperate peril.