Saying Farewell to America's Most Shiteating Grin

In A Sea of Dead-Eyed and Soulless Bureaucrats, Matthew Miller Stands Out as The Most Hatable of All. I Hope He Falls Into An Open Manhole.

You have to assume that anyone who takes any kind of “press secretary” type job in the federal government is already a pretty spiritually-damaged individual. Their day is laser-focused on how to best spin the evil and destructive decisions our leaders make, and they have little real agency in the whole thing beyond some feigned emotionality. If a reporter asks a good question - to which an honest answer would embarrass their bosses - the press representatives’s job is to lie, spin, and writhe their way out of actually giving one. We have seen so many video clips where this happens - a reporter asks a legitimate and fact-based question, the press rep will lie - they know it’s a lie, we know it is a lie, they know that we know it’s a lie…but that’s all there is. The absolute worst kind of theater conceivable. I cannot for the life of me imagine the type of human who would see this sort of role and think “that’s the job for me” - working for decades as an underpaid civil servant hoping to one day reach such horrible heights - but somehow dozens of people leap at the opportunity with each successive administration.

With these kinds of government flaks being a dime a dozen, it’s pretty rare to have one that is particularly memorable. I personally can recall Anthony Scaramucci a little bit (for purely clownish reasons), and there was that redheaded lady that Biden had for a minute but who quickly moved onto CNN or MSNBC or some similar cable news shithole. For the most part they are the definition of “out of sight, out of mind”, shambling drones who are easily replaced and easily forgotten - and this is where Matthew Miller stands out from the rest. He isn’t memorable because he is particularly charismatic or good at his job - he has the personal presence of a soggy napkin and his answers aren’t noticeably different from those of his rotating cast of awful peers - Miller is distinct in his position simply because he is deeply, uniquely hatable.

“The devil is stupid, the devil is obtuse, but it has one exceptional quality—it can lie.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamozov)

For as long as I have been alive, America has been involved in some kind of high-profile international fuckery. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya, the US State Department has always been in a constant state of feverish ass-covering, and the front line soldiers in this operation have always been the department’s PR representatives. The current conflict in Gaza, however, has thrown this dynamic into a new light - for starters, I’m an adult now and clips of government press briefings are served up to me a lot more than when I was eight and the US invaded Iraq. But it’s more than that - with the advent of social media over the past decade or so, people are able to actually see these unspeakably terrible actions unfold in a way they couldn’t before. The state and the media used to work hand-in-hand, helping to sell our chosen conflicts to the general population, and mostly keeping the worst parts of our actions overseas from ever making it to our television screens or major news sites (consider all of the post-mortems on Afghanistan that revealed the utter incompetence displayed by the Obama administration there, and how the public was never told about it). But now that system is crumbling, as the drone of “Israel has the right to defend itself” runs headlong into endless Tiktok and Twitter videos of burning hospital patients, toddlers with their heads blown off by Israeli snipers, and a steady stream of horrifying content from the IDF soldiers themselves as they gleefully document their many, many war crimes. This understandably makes the job of whomever is tasked to “spin” these crimes significantly more difficult, and therefore requires a person who is even more sadistic and morally-vacuous than normal. Enter Matthew Miller.

The first, and most notable quality of Matthew Miller, is his shit-eating grin. It is the sort of grin that would strike a normal person in the wrong way even if deployed in its proper setting, like learning that your friend’s baby did something cute or hearing a pretty funny joke. But it what makes it so disturbing is that Miller seems to reserve his smirks and grins for only the most inconceivably evil topics - subjects and facts that would cause anyone with an actual soul to cast their eyes up to the heavens and become overwhelmed with grief. We have seen it time and time again from this guy - when asked in July about the Lancet report that estimated the number of civilian deaths in Gaza to be upwards of 180,000 people (mostly women and children), Miller was called out by the gathered journalists for visibly grinning while saying the words “this has been a horrific human tragedy for some time”. Last week, while addressing reports that Israel has once again ignored one of the Biden administrations powerless and fake “red lines” and is in fact *reducing* the amount of aid going to the starving civilians of Gaza, Miller cracked a joke about the Israelis still having time left until “the end of the semester” - smiling and laughing at his own words before quickly receiving another harsh rebuke from the room.

Miller’s reactions belie a person who is so morally untethered from the reality around him that he genuinely seems confused/surprised when the journalists and diplomats he regularly interacts with are horrified by his words and behavior. He just cannot seem to calibrate his face to respond to the topics in question like a regular fucking person, and quickly tries to adjust when it becomes clear that he has just said or done something that has left his audience truly aghast (watch how quickly he goes from “just told a funny joke” face to “no no, this is a serious matter” face on the previously-linked clip). I would call it sociopathic, but sociopaths are generally better at approximating normal human emotions, so I don’t really know what to call Miller’s affliction. Satanic autism? Perhaps he’s a skinwalker from another planet, representing an alien race’s early attempts to colonize earth? The mind reels.

The average base salary for a press rep at the State Department is around $108,000 a year - a decent living for sure, but hardly approaching the amount of cash that white collar workers can rake in at other high-profile and evil jobs. An elite college-educated yet deeply talentless person could easily make over a million a year by the time they are 30 by going into consulting at Bain or McKinsey or the like, so what is the “talent” that draws people like Matthew Miller to civil service? In my view, the answer is simple: they have no shame whatsoever, and that is of deep value to their bosses. After a long day of sending 2000lb bombs to Bibi Netanyahu, Anthony Blinken can slither off to his pickup soccer games and funk-band practices while his fucked up little minions stand behind the press podium and chortle at the deaths of tens of thousands of children on his behalf. You can tell Blinken is capable of *a little bit* of shame himself, as he avoids direct questioning from the press whenever possible. For that, he sends out his most disgusting mutant, his most slender and wet-looking lanyard orc - Matthew.

With Biden only having two months left in his so-lame-it-might-be-actually-dead-duck presidency, I would imagine Miller’s job has gotten a bit easier. Nobody is expecting the Democrats to do anything to block or hamper the incoming administration’s goals, and I think the press and public have stopped trying to extract any kernel of honesty or moral clarity from the current State Department leaders and spokespeople. It’s a slow slump toward January, dogmatically giving Netanyahu whatever he wants while covering for his crimes whenever and wherever possible. While I imagine that Trump’s team will clean house in many ways, I actually think they may keep Miller around. All of the things about him that made him such a useful tool for the evil perpetrated by the Biden administration will make him just as useful for the evils perpetrated by the upcoming Trump administration. He has no visible personal politics or beliefs. He is a fleshtube in a suit. The Donald has famously always loved to surround himself with America’s most servile and submissive freaks, and in that respect, Miller is a perfect fit.