This caricature of Stephen Miller was adapted from a Creative Commons licensed photo from Gage Skidmore's Flickr photostream.
He built power in silence. This guide shows you how to take it apart systematically, publicly, and on your terms.
Critical Resistance -- Substack
May 3, 2025
(Author's Note: I realize I should be spacing these out but it weighs heavy on me to put something into the world that names danger without offering tools to confront it. Fear without strategy doesn’t lead to action. It leads to despair. This guide is meant to break that cycle. Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor, wields immense influence quietly, shaping policy through bureaucratic maneuvers and legal subversion. His power depends on invisibility; this guide exposes exactly why that invisibility is his greatest vulnerability. If you missed it, you can read the full profile here: Stephen Miller: The Shadow Architect of American Authoritarianism.)
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Authoritarianism is rarely held up by strength, but the performance of strength.
The leader appears decisive. The system appears unified. The strategy appears inevitable. But under the surface, these regimes depend on something far more fragile: ego, dependency, and fear of exposure.
Stephen Miller understands that. He has never needed mass appeal. He has never courted the public. What he built inside the Trump administration, through legal campaigns, and now across federal policy, is a model of authoritarian control through paperwork, loyalty, and avoidance. His power comes not from presence, but from placement: always close enough to influence, never close enough to blame.
But that model has a weakness: it can’t survive attention.
This strategy guide isn’t just about resisting Miller’s policies. It’s about understanding how he operates: how he stays in power, how he avoids scrutiny, and how those patterns create exploitable openings.
Because when systems like this are understood, they can be dismantled. Not just by protest, but by precision. Not just by outrage, but by strategy.
Miller built his career by staying out of the spotlight. This guide will show you what happens when you turn it on and what to do with the fractures that appear.
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