By now, it’s clear that Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller is a proud member of the alt-right — a group described in a recent New Yorker profile as “a loose affiliation of white nationalists, neo-monarchists, masculinists, conspiracists, belligerent nihilists, and social-media trolls.”

This is troubling but not surprising.

Along with Donald Trump, for whom he enthusiastically stumps, Miller is a manifestation of the alt-right mentality: openly disdainful of women, presumptuous on the right of free speech, enamored of racist invective, and often offensive just for the puerile joy of it.

Consider the “c—t” tweet.

On Tuesday, Miller copied and slightly edited a tweet calling Hillary Clinton the c-word that was posted earlier by Ricky Vaughn. That’s a psuedonym for an anonymous, anti-Semitic and racist alt-right presence on the Internet.

In January, Vaughn spoke to the white nationalist journal Radix about his belief in “the Jewish role in subversion, homosexuality, et cetera” and desire for “all-White communities and shunning mixed-marriages … because we need racial separatism in order to maintain our unique culture and racial heritage.”

As Jonathan Tilove reported in the Austin American-Statesman, Miller loves Vaughn; he’s constantly giving him shout-outs on Twitter.

Miller is also a fan of Mike Cernovich, another alt-right icon and aggrieved male whose bone-deep wounds are salved only by grinding women to submissive dust.

A typical post on his blog, Danger & Play, purports to tell us what women want: “There are tens of millions of good — which is to say, neutered — guys in America, and yet the best women consistently end up with dominant, strong, violent men.

“The question isn’t whether women want to be dominated,” Cernovich continued. “The question is whether you are man enough to dominate them. … Women want to feel real desire. They want a man who grabs them and makes them feel small, vulnerable, and feminine.”

Is it any wonder the alt-right worships Trump, the most infamous woman-grabber in politics?

Supremacists such as Cernovich and Vaughn (and Miller and Trump) feed off the outrage they elicit. Yet they are outraged themselves at this outrage, decrying their own Twitter bans and denunciations by pundits as assaults on free speech.

This is an arrogant misreading of the First Amendment, as Andrew Marantz pointed out in a New Yorker profile of Cernovich.

“Censure is not censorship,” Marantz wrote. “The Constitution guarantees that the government won’t restrict what you can say; it does not guarantee that you can shout obscenities on CNN, or that you can harass co-workers, or that you can make racist arguments without being made to feel like a racist.”

And then there’s the question — for those of us in the maligned “mainstream media” — of whether to report the musings of the alt-right at all.

In June, I interviewed Steven Billingsley, a resident who brought a sign that read “God Hates Fags” to a vigil for victims of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Reached later on Facebook, he offered a rant that echoed Miller’s pals on Twitter.

“We must preserve the purity of our race, oppose the intrusion of foreign religions and do away with homosexuality for good,” Billingsley told me. “Heil Hitler!”

The San Antonio Current swiftly took my column to task: “Perhaps Billingsley doesn't deserve the megaphone, an audience, or our fear,” Michael Barajas wrote, arguing that I should’ve ignored the local white supremacist.

The open embrace by Republican leaders of the alt-right suggests the risks of that posture.

“There are some things, the more people know, the less comfortable they are,” said Cal Jillson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University. “To the extent that someone like Trump can rally people to a broad and indistinct version of (alt-right) views, it’s certainly helpful to have them speak for themselves and to show how narrow and vile and unacceptable their views are.”

Let’s hope Miller’s tweet has that effect.

bchasnoff@express-news.net