How to Make a Coup

Lie and cheat.

These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.

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For those who are interested: The Doomsday Clock in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been moved one second closer to midnight, now 85 seconds from annihilation. “The Doomsday Clock is about global risks, and what we have seen is a global failure in leadership,” said the Bulletin’s president.

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It’s easy to be shocked into silence by the corruption, brutality and squalor of the Trumpian regime, its constant threats of war, of people being shot on the streets and corruption reaching to every corner of the state but it’s important not to miss the broader view of what’s actually going on. What is going on is that none of this is new. There hasn’t been a day of peace for the past 125 years; nobody knows how many people are shot by US police because the government doesn’t keep a record but it’s well in excess of 1,200 a year; and as the Epstein saga shows [1], corruption at the highest levels of the transnational plutocracy is not just so normal as to be banal, but de rigueur: that’s how they got there.

None of this mayhem makes sense. The mean standard of living in the world has been rising steadily for decades; standards of health are higher and life span is much longer; levels of education are far higher than ever before; the sum total of human knowledge is doubling every few years; yet morally, we are no better than the most corrupt, the most wantonly violent and decadent of the late imperial Roman courts. Wars abound yet on practically every parameter, we are hurtling toward climate catastrophe, lulled by the blizzard of platitudes on sustainability streaming from our leaders’ mouths and other orifices. We need to keep asking: How did this come about? Where is it heading and, above all, how will it end? What will make our leaders come to their senses? These are critically important questions; to answer them, let’s have a look at a major but underrated influence in everything going on in the US today, one Stephen Miller.

Miller, born in 1985 and now 40, is deputy chief of staff in the White House, meaning he was not elected and doesn’t need Congressional approval to get his key to the gold-plated crappers. He comes from an upper middle class family (mother a social worker, father a lawyer) in the wealthy suburb of Santa Monica in LA; as a child, he was considered “contrarian,” given to racial taunts and self-publicity. There are videos of him at age 17 showing signs of the nasty person he was shaping himself to be (a longer history here). He has a basic university degree but has never worked in the real world, only ever in politics. He is a total political animal, obsessed with power and domination, who prefers working behind the scenes, possibly because he knows he couldn’t win election as council dog catcher (one of the dogs would surely beat him). His political stance is ultra-right wing/fascist, nativist and xenophobic/racist, and he has duly taken control of the administration’s immigration policy, which he dictates in minute detail. Miller is fully responsible for the swarms of thuggish enforcement officers (ICE) terrorising people on the streets and in their homes, and the vast, expanding network of “detention centres,” aka concentration camps, springing up around the country. He plays a major part in actions like blowing up boats in the Caribbean and would have been up to his ears in the Maduro kidnapping. His role in the US today is evocative of Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. Müller, said the historian Richard Evans, was:

… a stickler for duty and discipline, and approached the tasks he was set as if they were military commands. A true workaholic who never took a vacation, Müller was determined to serve the German state, irrespective of what political form it took, and believed it was everyone’s duty, including his own, to obey its dictates without question.

In his role, and through choice, he was a major figure in planning and implementing the Final Solution, the program to exterminate Jews and other populations. Even though he has the same surname, it’s unlikely Miller has anything like Müller’s self-discipline. Note that Stephen Miller is a Jew, confirming the opinion of Nobel Prize-winning neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek that Hitler was a fool for alienating the Jews as many of them would have been totally supportive of his policies:

We should never forget that the anti-semitism of Hitler has driven from his country, or turned into his enemies, many people who in every respect are confirmed totalitarians of the German type [2, p189-90; most of them went to then-Palestine or the US].

Miller is commonly described as reptilian but that’s insulting to reptiles. You only have to look at his photo and you can see him in an SS uniform. To me, he embodies precisely the core concepts of Narcisso-Fascism: the lascivious lust for unbridled power to dominate and control people; the hatred that flows toward anybody who dares oppose that lust; misogyny and overt homoeroticism; the grandiosity and contempt for lesser humans; a ferocious hostility toward any rules or customs that stand in his way; contemptuous anti-intellectualism; intense narcissism and self-indulgence … People of this type are inherently dangerous, as these quotes show:

1. ...the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure. He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.

2. The Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical... Fascism sees in the imperialistic spirit — i.e., in the tendency of nations to expand — a manifestation of their vitality.

3. We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.

(Quote 1, Mein Kampf, p182; Quote 2 Benito Mussolini in The Doctrine of Fascism; Quote 3 Stephen Miller interviewed by Jake Tapper on CNN, Jan. 5, 2026).

We are forced to ask: how did such an egregiously vile person gain such power over people’s lives? The short answer is that’s what power-hungry people do. They are drawn to power like flies to a sewage works to make themselves feel better: every one of those features conceals an inner void, a black hole in the psyche that holding power over others promises to fill. The fact that Miller is a Jew confirms that history does not automatically protect any human against holding the most extreme and odious fascist views. The fact that historically, people he identifies with were grievously mistreated has not inclined him to favour the underdog. He identifies with the persecutors, not with their victims.

Fascism is a form of political movement, not a form of government as capitalism or socialism are. Naturally enough, it is influenced by social and political factors but individually, it is a reaction to personal psychopathology, not a product of one’s historical background. The people who thrust themselves into leadership roles are normally at once capable, disciplined, determined and seriously discommoded in their lives (Trump is not the last of those but he’s just a figurehead for the fascists who are propping him up). It breeds in dissatisfaction but it only becomes a movement, a political force, when enough people in the community are disenchanted with the status quo. If you have a comfortable citizenry who feel well-supplied and well-supported, who do not feel threatened, then fascism doesn’t get off the ground. Hitler and Mussolini didn’t appeal to the comfortable middle class; in turn, they loathed him. Somewhere, I have a photo of a street poster from the 1933 election shrieking: Wer kann uns von Hitler retten? Nur Hindenburg. Who can save us from Hitler? Only General Hindenburg, the then-president. The middle classes knew what Hitler was about but, as they found out, Hindenburg did nothing to save them.

The critical factor in a fascist takeover is not the presence of a few malevolent individuals because by themselves, they’re nothing, just malcontents yelling into the wind. They become dangerous only in the setting of but widespread and serious discontent. When the fascists in Italy and Germany took control, their countries were basket cases, their economies broken, under threat from godless Bolshevism and in danger of splintering. The fascist agitators built on this until they could take control but, on the face of it, nobody would say that the US is in anything like that sort of state. Conditions were far, far worse during the Great Depression – just look at Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath from 1939 – but, in politics, perceptions count, not mere facts. One of the most important factors in any fascist movement is the perception that the nation is under threat, from without and, crucially, from within. If nothing is done, the country will implode, demonic forces will take control and the people will be plunged into a living hell roughly modelled on Stalinist Russia. Somehow, somebody has managed to convince enough voters that the US is a whisker away from damnation for them to vote for a convicted cheat, philanderer, liar and quite possibly paedophile. Oh, and bumbling, dementing fool as well. Why? Because he said: “Trust me, I’ll save you.” Save them from what? Now that’s a very good question: who or what is threatening the US to the extent that they should hand power to a person who said he would be a dictator? This is where the plot thickens, because a plot it is, a fifty year plot to change the entire social and economic structure of this enormous but seriously flawed country.

The 1950s and 60s in the US were a golden age for the ordinary Joe (as long as he wasn’t Black Joe, that wasn’t real flash). There was plenty of work, housing was cheap, education was cheap, health care was cheap, taxes on the rich were high, managers earned about 20 times as much as their median worker, technology was racing ahead and the US dominated the world in practically every field. Sure, there were idiots like the alcoholic Sen. Joe McCarthy screeching his tits off about the communist menace but in the main, that happened somewhere far, far away. Ordinary people had very comfortable lives, especially compared with their parents who had survived the Depression, Starting in the late 1960s, a small group of very wealthy people decided this wasn’t good enough, that the direction of the country was down and to the left. Too many young people in tertiary education were getting dangerously radical ideas, threatening the status quo of home, country, religion and prosperity. Where would it end, they asked but they had an answer to that: in the gulag.

To them, you were either 110% in favour of God, Starsnstripes, motherhood, apple pie and Pat Boone or you were Trosky in disguise. No half measures. Godless monolithic international communism was poised and waiting, ever on the brink of hurling its robotic masses across the oceans to rape and strangle America’s mothers and daughters in their beds. Or something, it was never quite clear. The only defence was to give more power to the corporations that were building America’s vast military industries. More military meant raising more tax, which could only come from having more people in work but raising taxes on workers usually doesn’t guarantee reelection. Enter the small group of marginalised and rather eccentric economists called neoliberals centred around the Austrian theorists Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and others at the University of Chicago, aka the Austrian school. Government was the problem, they warned, government is inherently inefficient and repressive; the only way society can race ahead is to move capital and responsibility from government to the community. They advocated lowering taxes, severely restricting government, and allowing the market to decide where and how capital should be invested. Lowering taxes? As rates of taxation had been high to very high since World War II, ears pricked and chops were licked all round.

For the wealthy, this doctrine (because that’s what it is) had immediate appeal but first, it was necessary to convince legislators that they had it all wrong, that “tax and spend” had to be replaced by something entirely new called “trickle-down economics.” In this bold vision, low taxes on the wealthy would allow them to accumulate capital which then had to be reinvested, creating jobs and building a virtuous circle of expanding work for more employees paying more tax to make up for the lowered taxes on the wealthy. Everybody is a winner, they preached, but first they needed a few influential pollies on side so, armed with bottomless pockets, they began spreading their message around to sympathetic members of Congress. At the same time, they began financing “think tanks” to develop and spread the new gospel of neoliberalism, to influence editors and TV presenters and, above all, universities.

This was not random, they were working to a script known as the Powell Memo, written in 1971 by a lawyer named Lewis Powell (he was rewarded with a seat on the Supreme Court). Powell named the danger (squishy godless young lefties egged on by academic ideologues having an easy life at the taxpayer’s expense while spreading their poison in cahoots with said monolithic international communism blah blah) and the antidote. Powell’s remedy has been followed to this day. Insidiously, right wing capital took over the US and controls it to this day but the masses are getting restive. One of the central principles of neoliberalism, “trickle-down economics,” hasn’t quite worked out the way they said it would. It began with “trickle-up economics,” so yes, starting with the ever-pliable Reagan, there were massive reductions of taxation for the wealthy, to the point where many now pay hardly any tax at all. Yes, the wealthy became wealthy beyond any level of sanity and, crucially, gained political power to match, so yes, they had to reinvest their loot. Sorry, their hard-earned rewards. And yes, acting strictly according to the neoliberal rulebook, they looked around for the best returns on their money. Where was that? Well, it certainly wasn’t where the newly poor workers thought it would be, in their existing factories or down the road at a new site. It was, of course, precisely where neoliberalism dictated profits were greatest: overseas. So the jobs just disappeared and, Trump notwithstanding, will never come back. But you can’t blame neoliberalism, after all, it’s a rational doctrine, a science free of wishy-washy moral stuff like workers’ rights and fair play and a level playing field and all that shit. Hidden under the measured and dispassionate academic language of Hayek and Co. is the crudest social Darwinism of all: get it while you can and screw the effing underdog.

A skilled worker who, 25yrs ago, worked as a machinist earning about $28 an hour plus health insurance now works sealing basements for $10 an hour in debased modern money – if he’s lucky. You can drive through what were the great industrial cities of the north and see enormous swathes of weed-infested ground where factories once stood, or devastated housing tracts which the city council can’t even afford to wreck. While the owners of capital are toasting each other in their yachts in the offshore tax havens, the steel belt became the rust belt whose workers are dying of “diseases of despair,” alcohol, drugs, suicide – the despair belt, you could say. Over 900,000 Americans have died of opiate overdoses in the cruelly misnamed opioid epidemic but its architects, the filthy rich Sackler family, are untouchable (for them, $7.4billion over 15yrs is chickenfeed). Not for nothing the US has the largest prison population in the world but only for the poor, mind you. Suicide is at an all-time high, people die of preventable diseases, on and on, because neoliberal capitalism. Needless to say, people see the inequality and they are angry. Very angry. They see their jobs disappearing, their schools collapsing, their hospitals closing but they can’t afford health care anyway. Once-free education now costs a fortune and cripples them for life; aged care is prohibitive; and even dying costs more than many can afford.

But instead of putting the blame where it should be, squarely on the heads of the wealthy and their neoliberal academic toadies who, through giant corporations bleeding the treasury and endless webs of Epsteinian corruption and decadence, have deliberately engineered Byzantine levels of inequality, the poor and dispossessed are told by State Propaganda Services such as Fox, Murdoch, Bezos and Co. that it’s all due to them immigrants. And Moslems, and foreigners and Russians and Chinese who are undermining the country and destroying it from within, so get ‘em. Round ‘em up and expel ‘em and then there’ll be jobs for all and we will Make America Great Again, perchance to start the whole cycle over again. Except it won’t be. Greatness is like the beauty of youth. It fades, and once it’s gone, there’s no coming back, as old Omar knew:

The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on:

not all thy piety nor wit

shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

nor all thy tears erase a word of it.

The jobs have gone forever. Also according to neoliberal doctrine, the bit they didn’t tell anybody, American wages must drop to the level of overseas workers before capitalists will reinvest in factories down the road. Trump thinks he can reverse the flow by ordering companies to relocate to the US but he’s a fool, King Donald Canute. He’s doing it not for economic reasons but because he hates the idea of foreigners doing things better than Americans (and he just hates foreigners anyway). Which of course they do as they’re desperate. This is the neoliberal ploy: keep the workers desperate, fighting each other for jobs and don’t let anybody draw attention to the real cause of their immiseration, neoliberal capitalism. And when the anger threatens to spill over, divert attention, yell “Look, there’s a wog sneaking over our border, get him!” Once that mood takes hold, people like Stephen Miller and the execrable Steve Bannon slither out of the woodwork and soon take control, carefully stage-managing the anger to their advantage while eliminating their enemies. So the slide into autocracy accelerates but, as the Greeks knew, the most important point of all is that Fascism. Never Does. Make. Anybody. Great Again. It has to end in Ekpyrosis, the cleansing fire that burns wickedness and greed out of the soul of the nation, like Germany in 1945. But, as Miller and all the other fascist Zionists show, the same old cycle of domination starts again. It’s human, you see. The cure for fascism starts with a long look in the mirror.

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Just so you understand the extent to which State Propaganda Services are deliberately misleading the public, please read this article by Craig Murray, it doesn’t take long. He has just been to Venezuela to see for himself what is going on. Craig is a former British diplomat who works tirelessly for human rights, and for nothing. I believe his work is beyond reproach, e.g. he was a very effective supporter of Julian Assange throughout his trials.

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References:

1. Webb WA (2023) One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (two volumes). New York: Trine Day.

2. Hayek FA von (1944). The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.