On a palm tree-lined bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, 1000’s of individuals rallied in opposition to the Trump administration in certainly one of 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 by way of 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 identify with expletives.
Amid the false accusations and acrid clashes of President Trump’s internal 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 concern 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 1000’s 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 People’s Republic of Santa Monica.”
“I think people are sad that the words ‘Santa Monica’ and ‘Stephen Miller’ are synonymous, because no one wants 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 answerable for Trump’s most draconian insurance policies?
Some are additionally questioning whether or not the administration’s give attention to 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 faculty and highschool with Miller, instantly thought his classmate should have personally directed the raid on their native park.
The stories proved spurious, however Gordon nonetheless noticed an emotional fact.
“In the back of my mind, I’ve always thought, ‘This is Stephen Miller getting back at the city 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 had been nationally famend, the scholar 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, variety occasions and insurance policies that sought to make the college extra equitable nauseated Miller.
And the teenage provocateur made no secret of that revulsion, loudly belittling his fellow college students. His bitter shtick provided a prescient preview of the grievance politics that might gas his future boss into energy.
Miller has mentioned his years in highschool had been the toughest of his life, full of pushback for his “vitriolic viewpoints,” in accordance with Jean Guerrero, a former Occasions columnist and creator of the 2020 Miller biography “Hatemonger.”
“And for whatever reason, he’s had this grievance about that ever since, and he’s been trying through various means, to have what I see as a form 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 way of 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 faculty finest buddy for being Latino.
Maybe most notorious is a marketing campaign speech, seared into the brains of 1000’s of Samohi classmates, wherein he seemingly absolved college students of their duty to wash up after themselves.
“I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would say or do,” Miller informed the group, in accordance with a video obtained by Univision. “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up our trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?”
College students jeered and booed as Miller was escorted off the stage, in accordance with a number of attendees. He misplaced that scholar authorities election.
“The only compliment I think I’ve ever come up with for Stephen is that there are plenty of conservatives and far-right wing conspiracy theorists and hate mongers that spout what he spouted from behind a computer screen. I have not in my life before or after seen someone do it in an amphitheater full of their high school 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 attorneys, in addition to nannies, day laborers and wait employees — had been discovering their footing as activists.
College students arrive for a summer season faculty session at Santa Monica Excessive Faculty in 2011.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Occasions)
That they had 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 in the end blocked by the courts.)
They marched with labor chief Dolores Huerta in assist of staff at a neighborhood resort and protested in opposition to the rising menace of conflict in Iraq.
Regardless of the kumbaya vibes, Santa Monica Excessive was hardly a post-racial utopia. College students usually self-segregated, and the college’s tutorial sheen was riven by racial division.
Puckish, clad in a swimsuit and preternaturally assured, a teenage Miller was an everyday presence at college board conferences. He argued for an English-only faculty district, decried the board’s give attention to fairness and customarily sought to puncture progressive beliefs and push buttons.
“We all knew who he was, and knew him by name,” mentioned Rep. Julia Brownley (D-Westlake Village), a Santa Monica-Malibu faculty board member from 1994 to 2006.
Miller was raised by Jewish Democrats a number of generations faraway from their very own asylum-seeking immigrant story. He loved a snug 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 develop into a defining facet of Miller’s persona till he began highschool, in accordance with Jason Islas, certainly one of his finest buddies in center faculty.
The friendship dissolved the summer season earlier than they began at Samohi when, in Islas’ telling, Miller known as and introduced that they might not be hanging out.
“It was pretty cruel, even for a teenager,” Islas recalled.
By way of a spokesperson, Miller denied this account in 2017. However his derision towards Latino classmates is well-documented — in his personal phrases.
“There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school,” a 16-year-old Miller wrote in a 2002 letter to an area paper.
The letter denounced the truth that faculty bulletins had been made in English and Spanish, “preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own” and making “a mockery of the American ideal of personal accomplishment.”
Captivated by right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder, Miller was a frequent visitor on Elder’s present as a youngster, 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 manner up the far-right thicket with then-Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and then-Sen. Jeff Periods of Alabama.
Lots of his grievance-fueled Samohi speaking factors discovered their manner into the primary Trump marketing campaign, the place Miller had a mind-meld of types with the long run chief of the free world.
In Trump’s second time period, Miller has moved quicker and gone additional than throughout 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 pressure, with masked brokers raiding companies and public areas.
Ari Rosmarin, a civil rights lawyer who additionally attended Santa Monica Excessive, mentioned Miller has all the time had a eager eye for choosing fights that might 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 knows L.A. — knows that it’s home to both a super, super diverse and beautiful immigrant community, but also home to tons of media, cultural capital, financial capital,” Rosmarin mentioned. “I think in those ways, it’s a particularly attractive site for a battle if your goal is not just a policy outcome, but a political and cultural attack.”
