On a palm tree-lined bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of individuals rallied in opposition to the Trump administration in one among many “No Kings Day” protests across the nation final month.
Right here in Santa Monica, the well-heeled and beachy protesters additionally had a localized message: America, we’re sorry.
“Santa Monica apologies for Stephen Miller,” a bearded man in a straw hat proclaimed through hand-scrawled poster board.
“Stephen Miller, who raised you?” one other protester inquired in purple puff paint. Others paired the White Home deputy chief of employees’s title with expletives.
Amid the false accusations and acrid clashes of President Trump’s interior circle, few acolytes have survived longer than Miller.
The 39-year-old has remained important by means of Trump’s second time period, piloting an immigration platform that has sowed worry throughout huge swaths of the nation — nowhere extra so than better Los Angeles, the place federal brokers have mounted a relentless assault on immigrants, sweeping up hundreds in deportation raids.
Within the lengthy shadow of his insurance policies, native and nationwide observers alike are paying renewed consideration to Miller’s upbringing within the famously liberal enclave as soon as dubbed “the Folks’s Republic of Santa Monica.”
“I feel persons are unhappy that the phrases ‘Santa Monica’ and ‘Stephen Miller’ are synonymous, as a result of nobody desires that connection,” mentioned Santa Monica Mayor Lana Negrete.
Although usually seen as a liberal enclave, Santa Monica can be the place conservative strategist Stephen Miller grew up.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Occasions)
How did the identical 8.3-square-mile metropolis that helped pioneer curbside recycling and strict lease management legal guidelines produce a person chargeable for Trump’s most draconian insurance policies?
Some are additionally questioning whether or not the administration’s deal with Los Angeles is a type of revenge on Miller’s spurned hometown.
When rumors of ICE brokers seizing nannies at a Santa Monica park frantically flashed throughout social networks, Justin Gordon, who went to Hebrew college and highschool with Miller, instantly thought his classmate should have personally directed the raid on their native park.
The studies proved spurious, however Gordon nonetheless noticed an emotional reality.
“At the back of my thoughts, I’ve at all times thought, ‘That is Stephen Miller getting again on the metropolis of Los Angeles,’ ” Gordon mentioned.
Within the eight years since Miller rose to fame and have become an outsized antagonist on the American left, his Santa Monica villain origin story has been exhaustively documented, picked over and reanalyzed.
On the far fringe of the American west, a brash adolescent got here of age in a coastal group the place the institution prided itself on being antiestablishment. What alternative would a younger reactionary iconoclast have however to veer proper?
Santa Monica was a city in flux when Miller was in highschool on the flip of the millennium: a Berkeley meets Beverly Hills the place haughty affluence was quickly eclipsing the Birkenstocks and counterculture bumper stickers. It was additionally a story of two cities, with moguls and the higher center class north of Montana, and pockets of poverty and gang violence within the southern finish of city.
Nowhere was this extra evident than at Santa Monica Excessive Faculty, the place the teachers have been nationally famend, the coed physique resembled a United Colours of Benetton advert and a ’90s pressure of “Free to Be … You and Me” liberalism reigned supreme.
The parade of cultural affinity golf equipment, range occasions and insurance policies that sought to make the varsity extra equitable nauseated Miller.
And the teenage provocateur made no secret of that revulsion, loudly belittling his fellow college students. His bitter shtick supplied a prescient preview of the grievance politics that may gasoline his future boss into energy.
Miller has mentioned his years in highschool have been the toughest of his life, crammed with pushback for his “vitriolic viewpoints,” based on Jean Guerrero, a former Occasions columnist and creator of the 2020 Miller biography “Hatemonger.”
“And for no matter cause, he’s had this grievance about that ever since, and he’s been attempting by means of numerous means, to have what I see as a type of revenge on the communities that rejected him in Los Angeles,” Guerrero mentioned.
Stephen Miller when he was a scholar at Santa Monica Excessive.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Occasions)
By the White Home, Miller didn’t reply to a request for remark. However anecdotes of Miller’s trollish highschool antics have been exhaustively chronicled within the media.
There was the battle to revive the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance on his bleeding coronary heart campus. His frequent railing in opposition to “rampant political correctness,” multiculturalism and the perceived failings of his Latino classmates. Allegedly dumping his center college greatest pal for being Latino.
Maybe most notorious is a marketing campaign speech, seared into the brains of hundreds of Samohi classmates, wherein he seemingly absolved college students of their accountability to scrub up after themselves.
“I’ll say and I’ll do issues that nobody else of their proper thoughts would say or do,” Miller advised the group, based on a video obtained by Univision. “Am I the one one who’s sick and uninterested in being advised to choose up our trash when we now have loads of janitors who’re paid to do it for us?”
College students jeered and booed as Miller was escorted off the stage, based on a number of attendees. He misplaced that scholar authorities election.
“The one praise I feel I’ve ever provide you with for Stephen is that there are many conservatives and far-right wing conspiracy theorists and hate mongers that spout what he spouted from behind a pc display screen. I’ve not in my life earlier than or after seen somebody do it in an amphitheater stuffed with their highschool colleagues,” mentioned Miller’s classmate Kesha Ram Hinsdale, now majority chief of the Vermont state Senate.
Santa Monica Excessive was a hothouse of political engagement, the place college students — the kids of leisure executives, bankers and legal professionals, in addition to nannies, day laborers and wait employees — have been discovering their footing as activists.
College students arrive for a summer time college session at Santa Monica Excessive Faculty in 2011.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Occasions)
They’d watched Proposition 187 move of their early childhoods, stoking divisions and energizing a wave of Latino activists. (The 1994 poll measure, which aimed to dam undocumented immigrants from accessing public schooling and different state providers, was finally blocked by the courts.)
They marched with labor chief Dolores Huerta in help of staff at a neighborhood lodge and protested in opposition to the rising menace of warfare in Iraq.
Regardless of the kumbaya vibes, Santa Monica Excessive was hardly a post-racial utopia. College students usually self-segregated, and the varsity’s educational sheen was riven by racial division.
Puckish, clad in a swimsuit and preternaturally assured, a teenage Miller was a daily presence at college board conferences. He argued for an English-only college district, decried the board’s deal with fairness and customarily sought to puncture progressive beliefs and push buttons.
“All of us knew who he was, and knew him by title,” mentioned Rep. Julia Brownley (D-Westlake Village), a Santa Monica-Malibu college board member from 1994 to 2006.
Miller was raised by Jewish Democrats a number of generations eliminated from their very own asylum-seeking immigrant story. He loved a cushty childhood north of Montana, till the household actual property firm faltered within the early ’90s and the Millers ultimately relocated to a smaller rental on Santa Monica’s shabbier southern finish.
Reactionary conservatism didn’t turn into a defining facet of Miller’s persona till he began highschool, based on Jason Islas, one among his greatest buddies in center college.
The friendship dissolved the summer time earlier than they began at Samohi when, in Islas’ telling, Miller known as and introduced that they’d not be hanging out.
Miller delivered the information brusquely, citing Islas’ insecurity, his teenage pimples and his Latino heritage in a “businesslike tone.”
“It was fairly merciless, even for a young person,” Islas recalled.
By a spokesperson, Miller denied this account in 2017. However his derision towards Latino classmates is well-documented — in his personal phrases.
“There are often only a few, if any, Hispanic college students in my honors lessons, regardless of the massive variety of Hispanic college students that attend our college,” a 16-year-old Miller wrote in a 2002 letter to a neighborhood paper.
The letter denounced the truth that college bulletins have been made in English and Spanish, “stopping Spanish audio system from standing on their very own” and making “a mockery of the American supreme of private accomplishment.”
Captivated by right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder, Miller was a frequent visitor on Elder’s present as a young person, complaining about different perceived liberal excesses of his highschool.
After graduating in 2003, Miller went to Duke College earlier than touchdown on Capitol Hill, the place he threaded his method up the far-right thicket with then-Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and then-Sen. Jeff Classes of Alabama.
Lots of his grievance-fueled Samohi speaking factors discovered their method into the primary Trump marketing campaign, the place Miller had a mind-meld of types with the longer term chief of the free world.
In Trump’s second time period, Miller has moved quicker and gone additional than through the first time period, when he advocated unsuccessfully for utilizing the army to push immigration enforcement. This time round, the administration has deployed troops to an American metropolis in a staggering present of drive, with masked brokers raiding companies and public areas.
Ari Rosmarin, a civil rights lawyer who additionally attended Santa Monica Excessive, mentioned Miller has at all times had a eager eye for selecting fights that may generate most hate, outrage and a spotlight. It’s the by means of line connecting his youthful theatrics with the present assault on Los Angeles, Rosmarin mentioned.
“He is aware of L.A. — is aware of that it’s residence to each a brilliant, tremendous various and exquisite immigrant group, but in addition residence to tons of media, cultural capital, monetary capital,” Rosmarin mentioned. “I feel in these methods, it’s a very engaging web site for a battle in case your purpose is not only a coverage final result, however a political and cultural assault.”
