Speaker: Stephen Miller
Venue: U.S. Department of State ministerial
Video: YouTube
Editorial note: This transcript has been lightly edited for punctuation, paragraph breaks, repeated words, and obvious speech-to-text errors. The substance and wording have otherwise been retained.
Distinguished leaders and guests, it’s good to see so many familiar faces. And thank you, of course, to Secretary of State Rubio for organizing this conference and for leading this initiative.
Here in the United States, we have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government.
President Trump issued a directive—in our parlance, it’s called a National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM. NSPM-7, to be exact—that directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists operating in our country.
It’s very important to understand that left-wing political terrorism seeks, as its ultimate end, the overthrow of our system and form of government. And we’ve seen this take place many times and in many places throughout the years, and Secretary Rubio has provided you many examples.
Left-wing terrorism always ends in bloodshed, misery, and suffering. It can only travel in one direction. There’s no point at which the left-wing terrorist is satisfied with his gains and ceases progressing.
Inevitably, left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag. It always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, and suffering in order to establish complete and total control—control through psychological, physical, and actual terror.
And we have to understand that that is the scope and the extent of the threat that we face.
As Secretary Rubio also pointed out, this is an international network. Antifa, as an example, operates in dozens of countries all throughout the world. They share common networks of funding, organization, and information-sharing. And so our intelligence agencies and law-enforcement entities should be collaborating, coordinating, and working together in order to root out these organizations.
One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence. This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment.
It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears.
When the leftist—who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordered notion of justice—protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him.
We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.
If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of violence to destabilize our institutions, then those institutions cannot and will not succeed.
Here in the United States, for example, we saw in the recent past clear threats of violence against our Supreme Court to try to shape how they rule on upcoming decisions. The leftist does this with the full desire, intent, and understanding that the threat of violence against a public figure or their family is meant to cow them into behaving, acting, or conducting themselves differently.
We had the combination of a violent left-wing organization threatening our nation’s highest court, and the federal government and the Department of Justice turning a blind eye to it.
Those are the conditions in which this kind of violence can fester as a cancer and ultimately destroy a society.
Nothing that we do works if the threat of violence and terror goes on unchecked. Our political systems don’t work. Our judicial systems don’t work. Our legal systems don’t work. Our jury trials don’t work.
At the same time, we have to understand there’s a real threat that those who are not themselves terrorists, but who support left-wing violence, will create the conditions that allow that violence to go on without any meaningful inhibition.
To be specific, we’ve seen in some of our nation’s cities in America, like Washington, D.C., and New York City, something—again, this is an American term—known as jury nullification.
This is when a person is obviously guilty of a crime, but the juror, because they’re ideologically sympathetic to the perpetrator, will not convict them of the crime they have obviously committed.
We’ve seen in the United States, again and again, individuals who are part of left-wing organizations who have committed assaults against ICE officers or federal law enforcement, who have been brought to court where clear evidence has been presented against them, and the jury has refused to convict for purely political reasons.
When you’ve reached that point, it demonstrates how deeply the cancer has begun to infest your society, where people have created an internal rationalization structure to justify unsanctioned violence against the state and state actors to achieve a political end.
We have to use every lawful and legitimate tool that we have to demonstrate that justice will be served and delivered, and to prove that these kinds of tactics and techniques will ultimately fail.
If the leftist learns and observes that their violence and criminal activity helps—and ultimately succeeds in achieving—their desired political end, they will be endlessly emboldened.
Here in the United States, we’ve seen a growing and deeply alarming increase in attempted assassinations against public figures. Most notably, of course, the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump, the successful assassination attempt against Charlie Kirk, and many others.
This is a fatal cancer to civilization.
And the greatest risk that we have is that our institutions have grown too soft and too cowardly to be able to defend themselves against a mortal threat.
If your civilization is your home, you must defend it with the same passion and force as if an enemy intruder is inside your own house where your family lives. That is the level of dedication and urgency that is required.
And the greatest threat is that, even though there are far more of us—far more people who believe in order and civilization and liberty and the rule of law—if we are softer than those who seek to end us, then the smaller but more radical minority will succeed.
It is easy to dismiss what I’m saying and to say, surely it cannot be that bad. It cannot be that dire.
But again, I point to the examples in our own country where, for example, our Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been duly statutorily authorized to carry out routine enforcement of immigration law, has been subjected to an over 8,000 percent increase in violent assaults.
These are not one-off episodes. This is repeated, systemic, organized, funded insurrection and armed resistance against the federal government.
There was a sniper, from a sniper’s nest, who used an assault rifle to try to shoot ICE officers in Dallas, Texas.
These are the episodes that we’re talking about, where we have had repeated, direct, violent attacks on federal law enforcement in order to veto the ballot box with violence.
And the leftist justifies this violence to himself by saying that they alone are the arbiters of what is right or wrong—not the law, not history, not civilization, not public opinion, certainly not God.
The leftist assumes for himself judge, jury, and executioner.
But let’s not pretend for a moment that these radical leftists, these terrorists, are operating from a place of sincere political conviction.
Sure, there are plenty of useful idiots that they use who may believe these discredited ideologies.
The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy.
The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural, and is filled with envy and hatred.
The leftist looks at a perfect family with the perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday, and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy. They covet, and they turn those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress, and to inflict pain and suffering.
It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations—when you see any photograph of those who are assembled—to be blunt, not one of the people demonstrating looks like a normal person.
Not one looks normal.
They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerisms.
Why is that?
If you look at two photographs, and you see a normal American street and you see an Antifa protest, why do the people who are violently demonstrating—why is there not one normal-looking person among them?
Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point at which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.
Trust your instincts.
To all people and across all civilizations, you know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is.
You know that families are right. You know that children are precious and beautiful and must be protected.
You know that the criminal and the junkie and the predator is a threat to normal, healthy living.
This is so much deeper than issues about taxation and regulation, although they’re incredibly important. It’s about normal, healthy, ordered living.
And the violent leftists, for these deep-seated reasons—going back to the earliest wisdom taught to us in the Bible about coveting—and I’m not talking about rich versus poor. I’m talking about a much deeper kind of coveting.
Coveting people who are morally superior, who are superior in the simple, truthful way they live their lives.
People they look at who are happy and ordered and peaceful and contributing to their communities—that burns an ember in them.
And that’s how you end up with the horrors we’ve seen throughout history, where good families are dragged out into the street and executed.
And you might say, again, you’re describing a future that seems impossible to conceive of.
When it comes to preventing these horrors, it is the burden and the duty of good people of all walks of life to understand that you will always be accused of raising the alarm too loudly.
If you wait until the point where the worst outcome is so obvious that no one can deny it, you’ve already lost the battle.
That’s the fundamental point.
If you say, “I will not raise this alarm until the threat is so present and so clear and so obvious and so imminent that none can deny it,” it’s already too late.
It’s already too late.
I would rather prevent a threat from occurring and be accused for the rest of my life of having falsely raised the alarm, knowing in myself that I was right, than—for fear of being judged—having waited too long, until the point of no return has been crossed.
The good news is that we are far away from the point of no return.
So all of us should organize together and work together for the good and the benefit of all the people in our societies, of all walks of life, of all persuasions, to deliver for them what they are justly entitled to: to live with safety, with fundamental human dignity, and with the ability to live in peace and harmony with their families and neighbors.
Thank you all, and God bless.
[Applause] Library / trump policy project / stephen_miller_state_department_speech_transcript.md
Speaker: Stephen Miller
Venue: U.S. Department of State ministerial
Video: YouTube
Editorial note: This transcript has been lightly edited for punctuation, paragraph breaks, repeated words, and obvious speech-to-text errors. The substance and wording have otherwise been retained.
Distinguished leaders and guests, it’s good to see so many familiar faces. And thank you, of course, to Secretary of State Rubio for organizing this conference and for leading this initiative.
Here in the United States, we have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government.
President Trump issued a directive—in our parlance, it’s called a National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM. NSPM-7, to be exact—that directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists operating in our country.
It’s very important to understand that left-wing political terrorism seeks, as its ultimate end, the overthrow of our system and form of government. And we’ve seen this take place many times and in many places throughout the years, and Secretary Rubio has provided you many examples.
Left-wing terrorism always ends in bloodshed, misery, and suffering. It can only travel in one direction. There’s no point at which the left-wing terrorist is satisfied with his gains and ceases progressing.
Inevitably, left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag. It always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, and suffering in order to establish complete and total control—control through psychological, physical, and actual terror.
And we have to understand that that is the scope and the extent of the threat that we face.
As Secretary Rubio also pointed out, this is an international network. Antifa, as an example, operates in dozens of countries all throughout the world. They share common networks of funding, organization, and information-sharing. And so our intelligence agencies and law-enforcement entities should be collaborating, coordinating, and working together in order to root out these organizations.
One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence. This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment.
It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears.
When the leftist—who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordered notion of justice—protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him.
We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.
If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of violence to destabilize our institutions, then those institutions cannot and will not succeed.
Here in the United States, for example, we saw in the recent past clear threats of violence against our Supreme Court to try to shape how they rule on upcoming decisions. The leftist does this with the full desire, intent, and understanding that the threat of violence against a public figure or their family is meant to cow them into behaving, acting, or conducting themselves differently.
We had the combination of a violent left-wing organization threatening our nation’s highest court, and the federal government and the Department of Justice turning a blind eye to it.
Those are the conditions in which this kind of violence can fester as a cancer and ultimately destroy a society.
Nothing that we do works if the threat of violence and terror goes on unchecked. Our political systems don’t work. Our judicial systems don’t work. Our legal systems don’t work. Our jury trials don’t work.
At the same time, we have to understand there’s a real threat that those who are not themselves terrorists, but who support left-wing violence, will create the conditions that allow that violence to go on without any meaningful inhibition.
To be specific, we’ve seen in some of our nation’s cities in America, like Washington, D.C., and New York City, something—again, this is an American term—known as jury nullification.
This is when a person is obviously guilty of a crime, but the juror, because they’re ideologically sympathetic to the perpetrator, will not convict them of the crime they have obviously committed.
We’ve seen in the United States, again and again, individuals who are part of left-wing organizations who have committed assaults against ICE officers or federal law enforcement, who have been brought to court where clear evidence has been presented against them, and the jury has refused to convict for purely political reasons.
When you’ve reached that point, it demonstrates how deeply the cancer has begun to infest your society, where people have created an internal rationalization structure to justify unsanctioned violence against the state and state actors to achieve a political end.
We have to use every lawful and legitimate tool that we have to demonstrate that justice will be served and delivered, and to prove that these kinds of tactics and techniques will ultimately fail.
If the leftist learns and observes that their violence and criminal activity helps—and ultimately succeeds in achieving—their desired political end, they will be endlessly emboldened.
Here in the United States, we’ve seen a growing and deeply alarming increase in attempted assassinations against public figures. Most notably, of course, the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump, the successful assassination attempt against Charlie Kirk, and many others.
This is a fatal cancer to civilization.
And the greatest risk that we have is that our institutions have grown too soft and too cowardly to be able to defend themselves against a mortal threat.
If your civilization is your home, you must defend it with the same passion and force as if an enemy intruder is inside your own house where your family lives. That is the level of dedication and urgency that is required.
And the greatest threat is that, even though there are far more of us—far more people who believe in order and civilization and liberty and the rule of law—if we are softer than those who seek to end us, then the smaller but more radical minority will succeed.
It is easy to dismiss what I’m saying and to say, surely it cannot be that bad. It cannot be that dire.
But again, I point to the examples in our own country where, for example, our Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been duly statutorily authorized to carry out routine enforcement of immigration law, has been subjected to an over 8,000 percent increase in violent assaults.
These are not one-off episodes. This is repeated, systemic, organized, funded insurrection and armed resistance against the federal government.
There was a sniper, from a sniper’s nest, who used an assault rifle to try to shoot ICE officers in Dallas, Texas.
These are the episodes that we’re talking about, where we have had repeated, direct, violent attacks on federal law enforcement in order to veto the ballot box with violence.
And the leftist justifies this violence to himself by saying that they alone are the arbiters of what is right or wrong—not the law, not history, not civilization, not public opinion, certainly not God.
The leftist assumes for himself judge, jury, and executioner.
But let’s not pretend for a moment that these radical leftists, these terrorists, are operating from a place of sincere political conviction.
Sure, there are plenty of useful idiots that they use who may believe these discredited ideologies.
The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy.
The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural, and is filled with envy and hatred.
The leftist looks at a perfect family with the perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday, and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy. They covet, and they turn those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress, and to inflict pain and suffering.
It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations—when you see any photograph of those who are assembled—to be blunt, not one of the people demonstrating looks like a normal person.
Not one looks normal.
They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerisms.
Why is that?
If you look at two photographs, and you see a normal American street and you see an Antifa protest, why do the people who are violently demonstrating—why is there not one normal-looking person among them?
Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point at which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.
Trust your instincts.
To all people and across all civilizations, you know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is.
You know that families are right. You know that children are precious and beautiful and must be protected.
You know that the criminal and the junkie and the predator is a threat to normal, healthy living.
This is so much deeper than issues about taxation and regulation, although they’re incredibly important. It’s about normal, healthy, ordered living.
And the violent leftists, for these deep-seated reasons—going back to the earliest wisdom taught to us in the Bible about coveting—and I’m not talking about rich versus poor. I’m talking about a much deeper kind of coveting.
Coveting people who are morally superior, who are superior in the simple, truthful way they live their lives.
People they look at who are happy and ordered and peaceful and contributing to their communities—that burns an ember in them.
And that’s how you end up with the horrors we’ve seen throughout history, where good families are dragged out into the street and executed.
And you might say, again, you’re describing a future that seems impossible to conceive of.
When it comes to preventing these horrors, it is the burden and the duty of good people of all walks of life to understand that you will always be accused of raising the alarm too loudly.
If you wait until the point where the worst outcome is so obvious that no one can deny it, you’ve already lost the battle.
That’s the fundamental point.
If you say, “I will not raise this alarm until the threat is so present and so clear and so obvious and so imminent that none can deny it,” it’s already too late.
It’s already too late.
I would rather prevent a threat from occurring and be accused for the rest of my life of having falsely raised the alarm, knowing in myself that I was right, than—for fear of being judged—having waited too long, until the point of no return has been crossed.
The good news is that we are far away from the point of no return.
So all of us should organize together and work together for the good and the benefit of all the people in our societies, of all walks of life, of all persuasions, to deliver for them what they are justly entitled to: to live with safety, with fundamental human dignity, and with the ability to live in peace and harmony with their families and neighbors.
Thank you all, and God bless.
[Applause]