Stephen, Bari, and David

A trio reminds us how seemingly intelligent people can believe the worst possible dreck.

The White House deputy chief of staff offers his holiday dream for America.

I’ve never met Stephen Miller, but I’ve met people I believe are like him: intelligent in an IQ-test way, maybe with impressive degrees, and able to make nouns and verbs smugly agree in number. But they are often missing something important, and that can mean woe unto others. They are reminders that intellect is not morality.

I’ve never met Bari Weiss either. But her insincere suggestion for saving the “60 Minutes” CECOT piece from her corporate spike hinted that she had detected a soul-deficit in the West Wing’s resident ghoul: She was sure Miller would be happy to explain how state-sponsored torture is a good thing. Weiss apparently saw the criminal atrocities in the story as reasonably debatable policy points instead of horrors demanding exposure under a moral imperative. That may signal something about her too.

I have met David Duke. I interviewed him while he was a minor media darling in the late 1970s. He got me started wondering how ostensibly functioning adults can swallow, spread—and thus become—the worst poison about race, culture, and humanity.

Many things I had read or watched about Duke had a setup something like this: He’s a leader of the notorious Ku Klux Klan, but with a difference: He’s young, rejects violence, smiles, wears a suit instead of a robe and a hood, and doesn’t spit tobacco or say the n-word, at least not in public. He’s college-educated and uses correct syntax. He says his Klan organization is just another racial interest group, like the NAACP but for whites, and that no race needs to apologize for itself. (Note: Touchy and resentful white people saying they’re done apologizing is shopworn stuff but apparently back in vogue these days.)

Then the story would try to justify itself by sounding important: Could this fresh 20-something be the face of a new, nonviolent movement for whites frustrated with blah, blah—you get the picture. Although the only right answer was No, assignment editors and talk-show bookers ate this stuff up.

All this struck me as grievous journalistic malpractice: image-massaging on the subject's terms, and what a loathsome subject. Stories would quote Duke at length saying rehearsed lines to the effect of I don’t hate any race—I just love my own and then, taking a swing and a miss at balance, they would toss in a couple of civil-rights responses. It’s like putting “Jews, however, disagreed” at the bottom of a 1933 story about a Goebbels speech. I expected to find in Duke someone reasonably intelligent and articulate, media-savvy, probably able to quote some memorized scraps of history or literature. I also expected to find a con man trying to monetize racism (that’s an old, old industry) by promoting the novelty of his “modern, nonviolent Klan.” That would be more effective marketing than trying to sell just another typical Nazi.

But I had learned enough about Duke to expect exactly that: just another typical Nazi, not the lobbyist for benign “white interests” that he claimed and gullible media amplified. I expected just another true believer in the whole program. Someone with only a secondary interest in oppressing Blacks but obsessed first and foremost with Jews—hating Jews, seeing the hidden hand of Jews in everything, driven and motivated by fear of Jews, his sleep haunted by visions of Jews.

And that’s what I found. In the front room of Duke’s place in suburban New Orleans there were books for sale. A couple of titles have stuck with me: The Six Million Reconsidered and The Hitler We Loved and Why. The former argued that the Holocaust never happened. The latter was a thank-you note for it.

When Duke’s media allure passed its sell-by date, he dropped the pretense and went full and out Euro-American Nazi. He also did a federal stretch for fraud, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Back in his Klan days, one on one in his little office, with no lights or camera or audience except me, Duke was unimpressive. He repeated the same racist nonsense I had heard growing up from cranks and hacks. The difference was that I thought it was evil gibberish. He apparently took it as revelation and opportunity.

This got me thinking. Duke was no intellectual, but neither was he stupid in any college-admissions sense. If he was smart enough to launch a profitable race racket, I wondered, why wasn’t he smart enough to analyze and reject something as idiotic as thinking that Jews secretly run the world? Did he really believe it, or was it part of the con? Both, I concluded, and both comfortably cohabitated in his head.

I started considering, as had many before, the remarkable ability of people who otherwise might have been reasonable to believe the sorriest, most dangerous dreck, especially about race and people. Maybe they missed some stage of development—definitely a lack of empathy. But there also seemed to be a broken wire between some parts of the processor.

We’ve seen people who did well enough in law school—which is supposed to be a boot camp for logic, proof, and cause/effect—but also accepted the most delusional nonsense about race. Scientists aren’t immune either, as the late DNA pioneer James Watson proved. Or consider the odd and deadly case of the late William Luther Pierce III.

Pierce earned a Ph.D. in physics and in 1963 co-authored a paper entitled “Electrically Induced Nuclear Quadrupole Spin Transitions in a GaAs Single Crystal.” But he also had serious personality issues that bring us to look for some chicken-and-egg clues to understand his new career.

Pierce abandoned science and became a full-time professional promoter of a brand of American Nazism that commanded white people to murder random nonwhite people along with any whites who objected to racial murder. His race war fantasies inspired the Oklahoma City bombers.

For answers, some have delved into the amygdala, a little, almond-shaped thing in the brain, and the bigger limbic system that it’s part of. This bundle of nuclei pumps out emotions, fear, fight-or-flight, stress reactions, and sex.

Evolutionary psychology suggests that a useful labeling of things as threats (lions = danger) or benefits (lambs = lunch) may have slopped over into human culture, leading to the David Duke/William Pierce/Donald Trump/JD Vance/Stephen Miller view of humans: Northern Europeans = good, everyone else = dirty, disgusting.

But our shared biology doesn’t explain it all. Everyone has biases, but that doesn’t tell us why some people turn their lives into shrines to racism. Scientists who study personality have found that being authoritarian—a bully—goes well with an urge to create in-groups and out-groups. This is where we separate the amateurs from the pros.

A typical schoolyard tough might be satisfied with bespoke, kid-by-kid bullying for lunch money. The dedicated, professional racist prefers dealing wholesale. He/she knows that mass-producing bigger out-groups—not just that one vulnerable new kid in school, but all the vulnerable new immigrants in the country—is more efficient and, no coincidence, more profitable. Calling whole groups bad also cuts down on the need for paperwork such as individual warrants.

And here’s the professional racist’s secret sauce: You must turn your in-group—which by definition is already on top because, after all, you’re the head bully—into an out-group. You have to be threatened. You’re the vic, never the perp.

In the 1950s, white Southern senators rose to declare that little Black kids and their parents who wanted decent schools were denying white people their God-given rights (to deny Black kids decent schools). Strom Thurmond declared in 1957—when Montgomery and Little Rock were all over national TV news—that Southern whites were the oppressed minority, suffering under the “persecution of twisted propaganda.” (Note to Bari Weiss: It was often CBS News leading the coverage.)

Just like in 1957, some today sell the idea that, although you hold the economic and social advantage, somebody with less or no power is oppressing you.

Some worry that the Jews (2.4 percent of the U.S. population, 0.2 percent in the world) dominate them. Or that the 1.3 percent of Americans who are Muslim are on the verge of imposing religious law on the 98.7 percent who are not.

Or that trans people (fewer than 1 percent of the U.S. population) are ruining women’s sports, public restrooms, and men’s chances of getting a date. Or that they’re in danger from someone else’s fill-in-the-blank—pronouns, surname, religion, complexion, accent, partner. It should sound familiar: It’s David Duke’s both-crazy-and-con all over again.

The mind can compartmentalize like nobody’s business to accommodate sense and nonsense. It seems the two can exist without conflict or even communication.

And given the right circumstances, the nonsense can go mainstream.

The head of CBS News can say one day that the CECOT story can’t air because it doesn’t advance the ball, yet on another day can give a culture warrior free time to say tired things that actually lose yardage. In a clear and honest mind, those two things would see each other, stop, and seek sense. But that’s no longer the news division’s policy.

Meanwhile, the White House deputy chief of staff can be constitutionally required to provide equal protection under law but also can publicly brand whole classes of people as racially and culturally inferior. This leaves no doubt about their treatment at the government’s hands. It’s the official policy of the government.

“Watched the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Family Christmas with my kids,” Miller wrote the other day. “Imagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.”

Miller probably thought it was funny; people who post such stuff usually do. He probably also thought he was making an important point. He was, but not his intended one. He used the classic, standard-issue rhetoric that white supremacists use in public. It always comes with a wink about how they would say it in private.

I heard the same public version in David Duke’s office long ago. Duke said it in the snow job he pulled on Phil Donahue. This vile and ancient nonsense is stated anew routinely in the current administration’s social media. I’ve also encountered the private version thousands of times too. I’ve read it in white nationalist publications and seen it in their crackpot videos. I’ve heard it from makeshift stages at cow-pasture Klan rallies. I’ve read it in the online fever swamps, where creeps dwell. Anyone with the stomach for it can find it. I don’t recommend it.

Miller’s post also shares another attribute with its philosophical predecessors: It’s weak-minded, so easily knocked down that doing so hardly seems like sport. Martin, born Crocetti. Sinatra, born Sinatra. Two sons of immigrants.

But accuracy isn’t the point. It’s that we’re still, after all the insults, entitled to expect decency regarding human beings as a minimum for public office. Here’s a small dose of it, free of charge. If Miller hasn’t watched Sinatra’s short film “The House I Live In,” that’s bad, but here’s his chance.

If he has watched it but rejected its message despite his intelligence, good upbringing, good education, and vast opportunity, preferring to clutch racism, fear, and ignorance to his bosom like a poisonous blanket, that’s worse.

And way more revealing.