MAGA podcaster Katie Miller has offered a deranged explanation for why Melania Trump’s documentary has been pulled from theaters in South Africa.
Miller, the wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, responded to a Meidas News post on X reporting that the local distributor for Melania had withdrawn the film in South Africa amid concerns about its political context and timing.
“Of course—since they are biased against white people,” Miller wrote, referring to a country that was governed under a racist white-minority apartheid regime for decades.
There has been no official explanation for why distributor Filmfinity opted to pull Melania from theaters in South Africa ahead of its Jan. 30 worldwide release.
Meidas News cited sources who said there were concerns that the documentary about President Donald Trump’s wife could be perceived negatively in the current global political climate. There were also worries about the optics of screening a film closely tied to a political figure in a country with a fraught history of propaganda.
President Trump has launched a series of unhinged attacks on South Africa during his second term, including spreading false claims that white farmers are facing a “genocide” in the country.
Another potential red flag was controversy surrounding the film’s director, Brett Ratner, who was accused of sexual assault by multiple women in 2017 at the height of the MeToo movement.
“Based on recent developments, we’ve taken the decision not to go ahead with a theatrical release in the territory,” Thobashan Govindarajulu, Filmfinity’s head of sales and marketing, told The New York Times.
The big-budget documentary—costing an estimated $75 million to produce and promote—will still receive a worldwide theatrical release on Friday. The film follows the first lady during the 20 days leading up to the president’s second inauguration last January.
The film is not expected to recoup anywhere near its $75 million budget at the box office, with social media users gleefully sharing images of empty seats where the movie is being played across the U.S.
Mark Sardi, the chief executive of Ster-Kinekor, one of the two major cinema chains in South Africa that had secured bookings to show Melania, confirmed that the film met all local regulations and said he was unaware of why the distributor pulled it.
“Our basic position is that we’re not in the business of censorship,” Sardi told the Times. “I expect the decision would have been a commercial one, balanced against a whole lot of current issues.”
Katie Miller đã có một màn nổi cơn thịnh nộ trên podcast và đe dọa tước quốc tịch của một nhà phê bình.
Threatening to deport your critics, even those with US citizenship, seems to have become Maga policy
It’s Miller Meltdown Time
Some couples bond over shared hobbies; others over shared values. The Maga bigwigs Stephen and Katie Miller, on the other hand, appear to have connected over their shared love of terrorizing immigrant children.
The political power couple, who married in 2020, bonded during Donald Trump’s first term, when Stephen helped engineer a family-separation policy at the border that ripped more than 5,000 children, as young as four months old, from their immigrant parents. At the time, Miller (then going by her maiden name, Waldman) was an immigration spokesperson, and a big fan of Stephen’s hardline policies. “DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself – to try to make me more compassionate – but it didn’t work,” she told MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff in 2018, according to his book on the border policy, Separated. The book also quotes Miller saying she didn’t expect to change her mind: “My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I’ll think about family separation differently. But I don’t think so.”
Fast-forward to the present day and the married couple now share three young children. Stephen is White House deputy chief of staff and possibly the most dangerous man in the Trump administration. Miller, meanwhile, quit a mysterious role at Elon Musk’s private ventures back in May to start a podcast about motherhood as part of an apparent plan to recruit more women to Maga. Yep, the woman who couldn’t muster up any compassion for kids in cages is now a momfluencer.
Miller seems to have been correct in her earlier assessment: having kids hasn’t made her think differently about family separation, a practice that attorneys and former immigration officials allege has been revived. What has changed, however, is the fact that she’s now weaponizing her poor children against anyone who dares challenge her. And now that her husband is Trump’s right-hand man, she’s not just going after immigrants – she’s threatening to strip one of her critics of US citizenship.
This week, Miller appeared on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show, along with a panel that included the leftwing commentator Cenk Uygur, to discuss Islamophobic attacks on the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Miller kicked off the discussion with an incomprehensible point about the anti-Israel movement and then accused Uygur of “using coded language to attack American Jews and to say that we should not be here and we should not be in existence”.
Uygur retorted by saying she was lying, adding: “It’s very normal for a Miller to be completely and utterly lying.” An epic meltdown ensued.
“Piers, quite frankly, I’m really sick and tired of this racist bigoted rhetoric that can comes from people like you against my husband, against my family and my children,” Miller yelled. (Uygur had said nothing about Miller’s children.) “I am raising Jewish children in this country … ”
“Who brought your children into this?” Uygur then said. “What a weirdo.”
Miller, who doesn’t appear to have much experience being challenged during an interview, then started ranting at Piers Morgan about how Uygur saying “the Millers lie” is coded language for them being Jewish. After some more screaming, she also told Uygur: “You better check your citizenship application and hope that everything was legal and correct … because you’ll be just like Ilhan Omar,” a frequent subject of Republican attacks.
You can watch the whole thing for yourself but the bottom line is this: the wife of the US homeland security adviser apparently threatened to denaturalize someone because she didn’t like the fact he criticized her.
This, to be clear, is hardly some one-off. Threatening to deport your critics, even those with American citizenship, seems to be Maga policy now. The representative Nancy Mace, a Trump loyalist, for example, has said she would “love to see” Omar, a progressive representative, “deported back to Somalia”.
Various Republicans are also threatening to deport Mamdani; indeed, Miller’s meltdown occurred during a discussion about how the representative Randy Fine of Florida and Andy Ogles of Tennessee have been pushing the federal justice department to investigate Mamdani’s citizenship. (Mamdani was born in Uganda, moved to the US at age seven and became a citizen in 2018.) Fine, who has suggested Omar is a “Muslim terrorist” and called for Gaza to be nuked, recently demanded the federal government “review every naturalization of the past 30 years – starting with Mamdani”.
Fine doesn’t really need to be demanding this, by the way, because the government is already on it. Back in June, the justice department announced plans to prioritize efforts to strip some naturalized Americans of their US citizenship. Barack Obama, I should note, also led a denaturalization push – but the difference between that and Trump 2.0 is the way in which the president is using deportation fears to chill political speech and intimidate his enemies.
While people of color are the main target of these attacks, even some privileged white people are being threatened with deportation or the loss of their citizenship because of their opinions – a terrifying throwback to McCarthyism. Back when Musk and Trump were feuding, for example, the president responded to a question on whether he’d deport the South African tech billionaire by saying: “I don’t know, we’ll have to take a look.” And, in July, Trump said he was thinking of revoking the citizenship of Rosie O’Donnell, an American-born comedian and actor who has repeatedly criticized the president. To be clear, Trump can’t legally take away the citizenship of someone born in the US. But as we all know by now, Trump rarely seems to look at the law as an impediment.
Expect more of this. The Trump administration has made it very clear to 24.5 million naturalized Americans in the US that they’d better keep their mouths shut to keep their passports. Ultimately, Miller’s threat on Piers Morgan’s show wasn’t just directed at Uygur, it was a warning to everyone in America: criticize Maga and there will be consequences.
Kat Abughazaleh, who is running for Congress, says she has been indicted by the DoJ for protesting ICE
Abughazaleh called the charges “yet another attempt by the Trump administration to criminalize protest and punish those who dare to speak up”.
A disgraced Andrew has been demoted to plain old Mr Mountbatten Windsor
Shortly after the publication of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous book, Nobody’s Girl, King Charles announced that Andrew’s titles were being removed. It’s not quite justice, but it’s something.
Kim Kardashian thinks the moon landing was fake
Oh dear.
Horrifying mass killings in Sudan after El Fasher seized
There is evidence of mass killings by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), after they took control of the city in Sudan’s western Darfur region last weekend. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), an ally of the UK and the US, has been repeatedly accused of supplying weapons to the paramilitary RSF in Sudan. According to the UN, the RSF is also using rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war. The US and the UK must end arms sales to the UAE. We have crept into a new dark age where genocide appears to have been normalized.
France adds consent to rape law in the wake of Gisèle Pelicot case
The country’s Senate has approved a bill defining rape and other sexual assault as any non-consensual sexual act. Previously, rape was defined as penetration or oral sex using “violence, coercion, threat or surprise”.
Ms Rachel is one of Glamour Magazine’s women of the year
Rachel Accurso has been one of the most vocal voices in the US for Gaza – and has been smeared and harassed because of this. Her “nursery school tenderness and moral clarity … explains why she’s not just a streaming juggernaut but a cultural flashpoint”, Glamour writes.
The week in pawtriarchy
Shoppers at a Spirit Halloween in Texas were spooked after a pet monkey wearing a diaper escaped from its owner and began swinging from the rafters. Eventually, the monkey’s owner offered it a cookie and it came down. While the video is cute, there’s been a disturbing trend of monkeys being trafficked into the US because people see them on TikTok and want to keep them as pets, which is often cruel and inappropriate. Weird how it seems easier to get hold of a pet primate in Texas than it is to get abortion care for a life-threatening pregnancy.
-
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
Katie Miller Thinks Classical Liberalism Is Woke Leftism. She’s Wrong.
How are the Millers going to defend Western civilization if they don’t know the name of its defining philosophy?
Katie Miller is a conservative podcaster and former spokesperson for the Trump administration. She was briefly involved with the Department of Government Efficiency, but left government employment to work for Elon Musk full time. In August 2025, she quit that job too, and launched her own podcast, The Katie Miller Podcast. She is married to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
One would hope that an individual who has spent so much time in close proximity to high-ranking conservative political figures—and who is married to the avatar of a very particular brand of conservatism, New Right populism/nativism—might be able to properly define classical liberalism, an extremely well-known philosophy that undergirds the entire American project.
Alas, Katie Miller recently issued a warning on X that betrayed a fundamental ignorance about classical liberalism: She is conflating it with leftism, and for good measure, wokeness.
The post in question was an attack on Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, an AI company. Miller expressed concern about Olah’s stated commitment to “the principles of classical liberal democracy.”
“If this is what they say publicly, this is how their AI model is programmed,” she wrote. “Woke and deeply leftist ideology is what they want you to rely upon.”
She is clearly saying that “classical liberal democracy” and “woke and deeply leftist ideology” are one and the same. They are not.
Classical liberalism is the forerunner of modern libertarianism: It is a philosophy that emphasizes individual rights, including civil rights and property rights. Classically liberal thinkers such as John Locke helped establish the notion that government should be accountable to the people. Economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo used classical liberalism as a guiding principle when arguing in favor of free markets and free trade. In the realm of government, the political leaders associated with classical liberalism and laissez faire economic policies are people such as former President Calvin Coolidge, former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Argentinian President Javier Milei. Note that these figures are not exactly defined by their love of wokeness. To the extent that “wokeness” is even a coherent set of views, it emphasizes collective rights for various identity groups instead of the individual-rights framework of classical liberalism.
Leftists tend to agree with classical liberals and even most conservatives on some broad principles, like the notion that people should elect their leaders. But modern liberals, progressives, and leftists tend to disagree sharply with classical liberals and libertarians on economics: They want much more government regulation, taxation, and centralized government control of the economy. On these issues, leftism bears a closer resemblance to the version of conservatism advocated by Stephen Miller—who supports tariffs and extreme restrictions on immigrant labor—than it does to classical liberalism.
Katie Miller’s former boss, Musk, seems to understand this much better than she does. In a reply on X on March 8, 2024, he wrote: “I believe in liberalism in the sense [of] supporting freedom of thought and action, but modern liberalism is the opposite of that.” In other words, he was drawing a distinction between the classical liberalism of, say, America’s Founding Fathers and the modern liberalism of former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Stephen Miller frequently talks in apocalyptic terms about threats to Western civilization. Given this, one might hope that the Miller household could easily provide the name of Western civilization’s defining political philosophy. Hint: It’s classical liberal democracy.
Melania Trump’s Documentary Film Pulled From Theaters in South Africa Days Before Its Release
Melania, the documentary film produced by Amazon MGM Studios and directed by Brett Ratner about President Donald Trump’s wife, was pulled from theaters in South Africa ahead of its Friday, January 30, U.S. release.
“Based on recent developments, we’ve taken the decision to not go ahead with a theatrical release in territory,” Thobashan Govindarajulu, the head of sales and marketing for distributor Filmfinity, told the New York Times on Wednesday.
The publication noted that Govindarajulu declined to define the “recent developments,” but said that the South African distributor was not pressured to pull it.
“That was our decision,” he said.
The 79-year-old president has been critical of South Africa since he took office for his second term last January. The doc follows the former model, 55, in the weeks before the 2025 inauguration.
The Times reports that the decision to pull the documentary was sudden as a chief executive of a major South Africa movie theater chain shared a message earlier this week that the film would be released.
He told the Times that he didn’t know why it was pulled by the distributor.
The first lady and her husband are scheduled to attend the January 29 premiere at the Trump Kennedy Center.
“History is set in motion during the 20 days of my life prior to the U.S. Presidential Inauguration,” Melania previously told Fox News Digital of the film.
“For the first time, global audiences are invited into theaters to witness this pivotal chapter unfold — a private, unfiltered look as I navigate family, business, and philanthropy on my remarkable journey to becoming first lady of the United States of America,” she added.
In the film’s trailer, Melania is seen at her husband’s swearing-in ceremony, where she looks at the camera and says, “Here we go again.”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(739x261:741x263):format(webp)/paris-hilton-091925-f66fa0ea6b2d417bb03c9e1d63a97538.jpg?w=1200&resize=1200,0&ssl=1 "Paris Hilton’s Kids Phoenix and London Have the Most Adorable Reaction to Family’s New ‘Fur Baby’")
