Count Clorox and the Beige Crusade

Stephen Miller is a walking joke with the power (and intention) to ruin lives.

If it feels like the country is being run by something that crawled out of a drainage ditch behind a slaughterhouse, that’s because it is.

The air smells like panic and melted plastic. The lights flicker like they’re afraid of what they might reveal. You can almost hear democracy wheezing like a smoker in spin class while some unholy thing in a government badge rearranges the furniture in hell.

From a fetid pool of factory runoff behind a meatpacking plant, something climbed out. It slithered through the steam, kicked a puppy, flipped off a nun, told three small children they’re adopted, stole a gas station burrito, stared into a Waffle House bathroom mirror, and croaked, I will run the country.

That wasn’t birth. That was an environmental hazard with a press credential. A clerical error with teeth.

Enter Stephen “Sleeps-in-a-Coffin-Lined-with-ICE-Detention-Center-Blankets” Miller, the only man alive who could make a morgue feel overdressed.

Nobody wanted this. Not even the most hardcore MAGA front-row scream-singers asked for this bureaucratic crypt keeper. They wanted chandeliers, fake gold leaf, and the applause of the easily fooled. Instead they got the discount vampire of governance, the guy who treats empathy like a tax write-off. Trump wanted revenge and marble bathrooms; this one wanted fascism with footnotes. One paints the ceiling gold, the other writes eviction notices in blood.

Look at him. Skin the color of microwaved oatmeal. Eyes like two marbles that lost faith. A smile that could curdle skim milk. He’s the human embodiment of “non-refundable.” He walks like a hangover trying to remember where it parked. Every blink feels like a fern dying somewhere. He’s sinister, but in the way the guy who never got picked at square dancing is, sweaty, bitter, and plotting vengeance to the sound of a fiddle.

He just got told by a judge to stop treating the Oregon National Guard like his personal militia, and he’s been throwing tantrums ever since. His idea of leadership is a middle-school hall monitor with a persecution complex. His memos sound like “Mein Kampf” rewritten by a man who just discovered spreadsheets.

When he’s not busy cosplaying as a dictator in a bargain suit, he’s online crying about how unfair it is to be called a fascist. Usually it’s in the same breath he’s spitting bile at judges and daring someone to stop him. It’s the kind of deranged irony you couldn’t script. The man weaponizes government like a toddler with scissors and then sobs that you called him dangerous.

And as the temperature rises, this just happened. A liberal South Carolina judge named Diane Goodstein had her home explode and burn to the ground. Her husband, a former state senator, is in the hospital. State investigators are treating it as arson and calling it an attack. She had been receiving threats. She ruled against the Trump administration and the Department of Justice not long ago. We don’t know for sure what happened, so we won’t say for sure. But holy shit, the timing feels like a scream.

That is what happens when fascism stops pretending it’s theater and starts sending smoke signals. When men like this play with fire long enough, eventually someone lights the match.

And yet this pale little dungeon spawn still wants you to believe Portland is the problem. Portland, a city so gentle it probably writes thank you notes to the rain. In his mind it is a war zone. In reality it is a flannel and coffee utopia where people compost aggressively and apologize for sneezing too loud. He sees a guy juggling kale on a unicycle and calls it urban warfare. He hears a barista ask, “oat or almond” and hears coded insurrection. He spots a food truck named Senor Tofu and calls for backup. He would interrogate a compost bin. He would put a curfew on a corgi parade. He thinks a Pride flag is a tactical banner. The man once saw a knitting circle and muttered “domestic terror.”

He skulks through the Pearl District clutching a binder like it is scripture, whispering “subversion” at chalkboard menus. A barista writes “Pumpkin Spice”, and he flinches like he is under sniper fire. He spots a mural of a whale in sunglasses and calls it psychological warfare. A toddler blows bubbles and he hits the deck.

Portland is not a battlefield. It is a city that makes its own f’ng soap.

You want to keep laughing, but then you remember what he’s actually done. While he plays Goebbels for clicks, his orders are tearing through homes like storms.

He’s the architect. Ripping children from their beds was the amuse-bouche. Family separation was rehearsal. The main course is here. Raids that zip-tie toddlers and pack terrified parents into rental trucks and roll through Chicago before sunrise for propaganda footage. The echoes of those boots will outlive the men who wore them. This isn’t theater. It’s terror. The cruelty is deliberate. The fear is the point. The terror is the feature, not the bug. But peel back the horror for one second and look at what’s underneath. It’s not strength. It’s not strategy.

It’s just a damp little man who moisturizes with grievance, exfoliates with jealousy, and perfumes himself with cheap authority. His aura smells like printer toner and self-loathing. He’s what happens when a PowerPoint gets tenure. He could suck the joy out of a parade float.

He doesn’t travel alone. Behind him shuffle the likes of Russell Vought and Scott Bessent, the beige apostles of boredom. Vought, the Budget Butcher, dreams of a country small enough to fit in his briefcase. He gets turned on by the phrase “block grant.” His complexion is “pre-owned alabaster.” His search history is layoff templates and “Buffalo Bill mood lighting.” Bessent, hedge-fund phantom and liquidity fetishist, believes empathy is a market inefficiency. His idea of a bedtime story is “S&P 500: The Reckoning.”

They’re the Talc Trio; three men so pale you could project a policy seminar on them and take notes. Ask what’s in their internet history and watch them twitch. It’s not recipes. It’s charts and cruelty and one poster of the bad guy from Silence of the Lambs.

They think they’re terrifying. They look like the IT department of the afterlife. And Miller still thinks he’s commanding armies when he’s really just mumbling into a binder that smells like fear.

He is Count Clorox, patron saint of spray-on confidence and unearned authority. The Pasty Prince of Panic, the Formaldehyde Freakshow who wakes up smelling like copier toner and cowardice. Baron Bleach-Face, breaker of morale. Mildew Maharajah, lord of the damp and joyless. Captain Cornstarch, a man who could make beige blush. Sir Bland-a-Lot, crusader of charisma deficits everywhere. The Gel-Gun Gargoyle, guardian of expired policy memos. The Mannequin of Malevolence, built entirely out of grievances and bad lighting. Every name fits like a straightjacket that smiles back.

Vought is the Ledger Lich, necromancer of numbers, Budget Butcher of the living wage. The Discount Dracula of Deficits who thinks compassion is a rounding error. Bessent is the Treasury Tapeworm, the Hedge-Fund Howler, the Coupon Cryptkeeper who gets horny for austerity. Together they make beige feel dangerous. They mistake fear for music and play it like a drunk hitting one key on a broken piano. But Stephen Miller isn’t some dark mastermind. He’s a coat hanger draped in menace, a rumor with letterhead, a hallway shadow that forgot how to disappear. Laugh, and he shrinks. Laugh, and the bat becomes a prop.

Laugh, and the whole act collapses into farce.

I’ve seen scarier people behind the counter at the DMV. More authority in the woman who says Next without looking up. More menace in the guy who guards the copier like it’s holding state secrets. Stephen Miller is a bureaucratic barnacle, a chalk skinned parasite with the charm of a clogged drain and the soul of a mall security guard who got rejected from Hell for being too uptight.

He’s a walking instruction manual for cruelty pretending to be competence. The kind of form that ruins lives while calling it policy. The kind that turns a pen stroke into a deportation order and a memo into a nightmare. He doesn’t lead. He just lurks.

He isn’t power. He’s the paperwork that power hides behind. The walking fine print that ruins lives while calling it policy. The kind of bureaucratic rot that turns signatures into sentences and office memos into weapons. He doesn’t lead. He just lingers, a stain with clearance, feeding off the system’s cowardice. Every cruel order has his fingerprints on it. Every silence keeps him alive.

So laugh at him. Laugh at the scalp paint, the mortuary pallor, the visible absence of charisma. Laugh at the idea that this lukewarm, joyless manila folder ever scared anyone. Laugh until the binder shakes and the toner runs. Laugh because it’s the one thing he can’t control. Laugh because it’s what he fears most. Laugh until the sound of it becomes a mirror and he finally sees what he is — a parasite with a podium. Then remember the joke is real and the damage is permanent.

He isn’t strength. He’s rot that somehow learned to hold a title. A petty haunted clerk who mistakes suffering for strategy and got the keys to a country he doesn’t even understand. And every minute he’s there, he’s feeding on it — on fear, on silence, on complicity. But the lights are coming on now. The cameras are rolling. The world is watching.

The only punchline that ends him is the one we write together in every voting booth, every protest, every act of refusal. Not this time, Nazferatu.

Not ever again.

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

Stay strong, stay sane(ish), and stay the fuck away from Stephen f’ng Miller!

💙 Jo