The white nationalist exigence: Stephen Miller and the rhetoric of racial replacement

This essay examines Stephen Miller’s address at the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) memorial for its murdered founder Charlie Kirk, to illustrate how contemporary white nationalists defiantly manipulate nearly every rhetorical exigence to cajole white audiences with apocalyptic dread of impending extinction. I demonstrate how white nationalist speech exploits recurring rhetorical exigences to enact “death worlds,” or fantasies of sovereignty’s boundless power to control reality and nourish life through the power of death. This essay’s contribution to rhetorical theory is to demonstrate that the fundamental challenge of confronting resurgent white nationalism is that their advocates insist on defiantly manipulating nearly every rhetorical exigence to surreptitiously steer all public deliberation toward prioritizing their own apocalyptic anxieties of racial replacement and fantasies of regenerative violence.