In a cliff lined with palm trees overlooking the Pacific Ocean, thousands of people gathered against the Trump administration in one of the many protests of the “No Kings Day” throughout the country last month.
Here in Santa Monica, wealthy protesters and beach also had a localized message: America, we felt it.
“Santa Monica apologizes to Stephen Miller”, a bearded man with a straw hat proclaimed through a poster board with hand song.
“Stephen Miller, who raised you?” Another protester asked with purple purple paint. Others matched the name of the White House Cabinet Chief with expletives.
Amid the false accusations and the acre clashes of the intimate circle of President Trump, few acolytes have survived more time than Miller.
The 39 -year -old has remained essential through Trump's second mandate, piloting an immigration platform that has sown fear in broad stripes of the country, nowhere in Los Angeles, where federal agents have mounted an implacable assault on immigrants, sweeping thousands in deportation raids.
In the long run of their policies, both local and national observers are paying renewed attention to Miller's education in the famous liberal enclave once called “the Popular Republic of Santa Monica”.
“I think people are sad that the words 'Santa Monica' and 'Stephen Miller' are synonyms, because nobody wants that connection,” said Santa Monica Mayor, Lana Negrete.
Although it is often seen as a liberal enclave, Santa Monica is also where the conservative strategist Stephen Miller grew.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
How the same city of 8.3 square miles that helped be pioneers in recycling recycling and strict rental control laws responsible for Trump's most draconian policies?
Some also question whether the administration approach in Los Angeles is a form of revenge in Miller's despised hometown.
When the rumors that the ice agents took babysitters in a park in Santa Mónica flashed frantically on social networks, Justin Gordon, who went to the Hebrew school and high school with Miller, immediately thought that her classmate must have personally directed the raid in her local park.
The reports proved to be spurious, but Gordon still saw an emotional truth.
“At the bottom of my mind, I have always thought: 'This is Stephen Miller returning to the city of Los Angeles,” Gordon said.
In the eight years since Miller jumped to fame and became a huge antagonist in the American left, his history of origin of Villano de Santa Monica has been documented, chosen and resumed.
At the furthest extreme of the American west, a shameless teenager reached the age of majority in a coastal community where the establishment was proud to be anti -stating. What option would have a young reactionary iconoclast that would have more to divert us?
Santa Monica was a flow of flow when Miller was in high school in the early millennium: a Berkeley meets Beverly Hills, where haughty wealth was quickly eclipssing the birkestocks and the counteracting bumper stickers. It was also a history of two cities, with magnates and the upper middle class in northern Montana, and poverty pockets and gang violence at the southern end of the city.
Nowhere was this more evident than in Santa Monica High School, where academics were recognized nationally, students looked like an ad of Benetton Ad and a strain of the 90s of “Free to Be … You and me” reigned supreme.
The parade of cultural affinity clubs, diversity events and policies that sought to make the school more equitable Nauseated Miller.
And the teenage provocative did not hide that repulsion, belittling his teammates aloud. His bitter Shick offered a prior view of the complaints policy that would drive his future chief to power.
Miller has said that his years at high school were the most difficult of his life, full of recoil for his “vitory points of view,” according to Jean Guerrero, a former Times columnist and author of the biography of 2020 Miller “Hatemonger.”
“And for any reason, he has had this complaint about that since then, and has been trying by various media, having what I see as a form of revenge on the communities that rejected him in Los Angeles,” Guerrero said.
Stephen Miller when I was a student in Santa Monica High.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Through the White House, Miller did not respond to a request for comments. But the anecdotes of the mischief of Miller's Trollish High School have narrated thoroughly in the media.
There was the fight to restore the recitation of the promise of loyalty in its cardiac hemorrhage. Its frequent railing against “Unbridled political correction” Multiculturalism and the perceived failures of their Latin classmates. Supposedly abandoning your best friendly school friend for being Latino.
Perhaps the most infamous is a campaign speech, chamuscado in the brain of thousands of Samohi classmates, in which students apparently acquitted their responsibility to clean themselves after themselves.
“I will say and I will do things that no one else in his health Video obtained by Univision. “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of telling him to pick up our garbage when we have many janitors who are paid for doing so for us?”
The students made fun and booed when Miller was escorted off the stage, according to several attendees. He lost that election of the student government.
“The only fulfillment that I think came to me for Stephen is that there are many conservatives and theoretics of the conspiracy of extreme right wings and hate traffickers who throw what he threw behind a computer screen. I have not in my life before or after having seen someone who does it in an amphitheater full of his colleagues of the high school,” said the leader of the classification of the Kesha class. of the class of the majority of the class.
Santa Monica High was a concern of political commitment, where students, children of entertainment executives, bankers and lawyers, as well as nannies, day workers and waiting personnel, were finding their balance as activists.
Students arrive for a summer school session in Santa Monica High School in 2011.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
They had seen the proposition 187 pass in their early childhood, envive divisions and energizing a wave of Latin activists. (The measure of the 1994 electoral ballot, which aimed to block undocumented immigrants to access public education and other state services, was finally blocked by the courts).
They marched with Labor leader Dolores Huerta in support of the workers in a hotel in the neighborhood and protested against the growing threat of the war in Iraq.
Despite Kumbaya's vibrations, Santa Monica High was not a post-racial utopia. Students often self -segregated, and the academic brightness of the school was divided by the racial division.
Puckish, dressed in a demand and confidence in supernatural, a teenager Miller was a regular presence at the meetings of the school board. He argued for a school district only in English, denounced the board approach in equity and generally sought to pierce progressive ideals and press buttons.
“We all knew who he was and we knew him by name,” said representative Julia Brownley (D-Westlake Village), a member of the Santa Monica School Board from 1994 to 2006.
Miller was raised by Jewish Democrats several generations eliminated from his own history of immigrants seeking asylum. He enjoyed a comfortable childhood to northern Montana, until the family real estate company hesitated in the early 90s and the Millers finally moved to a smaller rental at the southern end of Santa Monica.
Reactionary conservatism did not become a defining aspect of Miller's personality until high school began, according to Jason Islands, one of his best friends in high school.
Friendship dissolved summer before they started in Samohi when, in revelation of islands, Miller called and announced that they would no longer be hanging out.
Miller delivered the news abruptly, citing the lack of confidence of islands, her teenage acne and her Latin heritage in a “commercial tone.”
“It was quite cruel, even for a teenager,” Islands recalled.
Through a spokesman, Miller He denied this account In 2017. But his mockery towards Latin classmates is well documented, in his own words.
“In general, there are very few Hispanic students in my honor classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students attending our school,” a 16 -year -old mill He wrote in a letter from 2002 a local newspaper.
The letter denounced the fact that school ads were made in English and Spanish, “avoiding Spanish speakers to stop alone” and make “a mockery of the American ideal of personal achievement.”
Miller, captivated by right -wing radio presenters such as Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder, was a frequent guest in Elder's show when he was a teenager, complaining about other liberal excesses perceived from his high school.
After graduating in 2003, Miller went to the University of Duke before landing in Capitol Hill, where he made his way through the extreme right scrub with the then repeated. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and then Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
Many of his fed Samohi conversation points to the complaint found their way in Trump's first campaign, where Miller had a kind of mind with the future leader of the free world.
In Trump's second mandate, Miller has moved faster and went beyond what during the first term, when he advocated unsuccessfully to use the military to boost the application of immigration. This time, the administration has deployed troops in an American city in an amazing sample of force, with masked agents that assault businesses and public spaces.
Ari Rosmarin, a civil rights lawyer who also attended Santa Monica High, said that Miller has always had a good eye to choose fights that would generate maximum hatred, outrage and attention. It is the line through its youth theater with the current assault on Los Angeles, Rosmarin said.
“He knows Los Angeles, he knows that he is the home of a super, super diverse and beautiful immigrant community, but also a home of tons of media, cultural capital, financial capital,” Rosmarin said. “I think in those forms, it is a particularly attractive site for a battle if its objective is not only a political result, but a political and cultural attack.”
