Thousands of people opposed the Trump administration last month in one of many “King’s Day” protests, amid a gap between palm trees overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Here in Santa Monica, protesters like heeled beaches also had localized messages. America, sorry.
“Santa Monica apologizes to Stephen Miller,” said the bearded man in a straw hat declared via a hand-scrolled poster board.
“Stephen Miller, who raised you?” Another protester asked for purple puff paint. Others combined the name of the White House vice-Chief of Staff with expletives.
Few Acolites survived longer than Miller amid the false accusations and fierce clashes of President Trump.
The 39-year-old remains essential throughout Trump’s second term, piloting a fear-bearing immigration platform across the country.
In the long shadow of his policy, local observers have similarly paid new attention to the development of mirrors in the famous liberal enclave once known as the “Santa Monica People’s Republic.”
“People find it sad that the words ‘Santa Monica’ and ‘Stephen Miller’ are synonyms. Because no one wants that connection.”
Although often considered a liberal enclave, Santa Monica is also the place where conservative strategist Stephen Miller grew up.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
How did the same 8.3-square-mile city that supported pioneer curb recycling and strict rent control laws produce the men responsible for Trump’s toughest policies?
Others have questioned whether the administration’s focus on Los Angeles is a form of revenge against Miller’s derived homeland.
When rumors of ice agents seizing nannies at Santa Monica Park desperately flashed across social networks, Justin Gordon, who attended Hebrew school and high school with Miller, quickly assumed that his classmates must have personally directed an attack on the local park.
The report proved false, but Gordon still saw the emotional truth.
“Deep inside me, I always thought, ‘This is Stephen Miller’s coming back to the city of Los Angeles,'” Gordon said.
In the eight years since Miller gained fame and became an oversized antagonist of the American left, the story of the origins of his Santa Monica villain was thoroughly documented, picked up and reanalyzed.
On the far end of the American West, a pale young youth in a community behind the scenes, was aged, and there the facility was proud to be anti-established. What choices do young, reactionary iconoclasts make?
Santa Monica was the town of Flax when Miller was in high school at the turn of the Millennium. Berkeley met Beverly Hills, where a proud riches quickly clenched Birkenstock and the counterculture bumper sticker. It also tells the story of two cities, with pockets of poverty and gang violence in northern Montana, the upper middle class and the southern tip of the town.
This was nowhere more obvious than Santa Monica High School, where scholars were nationally renowned. The students’ bodies were the best ruled by the united colours of Benetton ads and the liberalism of the 90s, “free…you and me.”
A parade of cultural affinity clubs, diversity events, and policies that have tried to make schools more equitable and nauseating mirrors more equitable.
And the teenage provocateur yelled at fellow students for not keeping the asshole a secret. His bitter shtick provided a visionary preview of the dissatisfaction politics that drives his future boss to power.
Miller states that Jean Guerrero, author of the 2020 Miller biographer Hatmonger, is that his age is the most difficult of his life and is full of pushbacks to his “Vitrick’s perspective.”
“And for some reason, he’s been this complaining all along about it, and he’s tried out different ways what I see as a form of revenge against the community that rejected him in Los Angeles,” Guerrero said.
Stephen Miller when he was a student at Santa Monica High.
(Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times)
Through the White House, Miller did not respond to requests for comment. But Miller’s trollish high school anecdotes are thoroughly documented in the media.
There was a fight to restore the reading of his Pledge of Allegiance to the Bleeding Heart Campus. “Radiosing political correctness,” multiculturalism, his frequent railings against the perceived failures of Latino classmates. He reportedly abandoned his junior high school best friend because he was Latino.
Perhaps most notorious is the campaign speech, burnt into the brains of thousands of Samohi classmates.
According to a video obtained by Univision, Miller said, “I say. “Is I the only one who’s tired of being told to pick up our trash when there are a lot of custodians who are paid to do that for us?”
According to several participants, students were jeered and booed when Miller was escorted from the stage. He lost the election for that student government.
“The only compliment I think I’ve ever come up with for Stephen is that there are a lot of conservatives and far-right wing conspiracy theorists. I hate Monger, who spits out what he gushed out from behind a computer screen.
Santa Monica High was a greenhouse of political engagement, with children of students, entertainment executives, bankers, lawyers, nannies, Day workers and wait staff finding their position as activists.
Students arrive at a summer school session at Santa Monica High School in 2011.
(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)
They saw 187 Proposition 187 paths in their childhood, blowing away divisions and energizing the waves of Latino activists. (The 1994 voting measure aimed at blocking undocumented immigrants from accessing public education and other state services was ultimately blocked by the court.)
They marched with Labour leader Dolores Huerta to support workers at a nearby hotel, protesting the growing threat of war in Iraq.
Despite the kunbaya vibe, Santa Monica Hai was almost not a racial utopia. Students were often self-isolated, and the academic luster of the school was struck by the racial sector.
Dressed in suits, confident and confident, teenage Miller was a regular presence at school board meetings. He advocated an English-only school district, denounced the focus on board fairness, and attempted to drill holes in progressive ideals and push buttons in general.
“We all knew who he was and we knew him by name,” said Rep. Julia Brownlee, a member of the Santa Monica Malibu school board from 1994 to 2006.
Miller was raised by the Jewish Democrats. Generations have been removed from their own stories of asylum-seeking immigrants. He enjoyed a comfortable childhood north of Montana. The family’s real estate company slowly began to slow down in the early 90s, and Millers eventually moved to a small rental at Xavier Southern End in Santa Monica.
According to Jason Iras, one of his middle school best friends, it wasn’t a critical aspect of Miller’s persona until he started high school.
Friendship broke up summer before they began Samohi, and in Islas’ narration, Miller called and announced that they weren’t wandering around anymore.
Miller brought the news to his arms by quoting Islas’ lack of confidence, his teenage acne, and his Latino heritage in “business tones.”
“It was pretty cruel for teenagers too,” recalls Iras.
Through a spokesman, Miller rejected the account in 2017. However, his reasoning for Latino classmates is well documented in his own words.
“Even though there are a large number of Hispanic students attending our school, there are usually very few Hispanic students in my honorary class, if any, if any,” the 16-year-old Miller wrote in a 2002 letter to a local paper.
The letter condemned the fact that school announcements were made in English and Spanish, “preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own,” and created “the ideal ock ha ha ha.”
Enchanted by right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder, Miller was a frequent guest on the elders’ shows as a teenager, complaining about the other perceived liberal excesses of his high school.
After graduating in 2003, Miller went to Duke University before landing on Capitol Hill, where he passed far-right bushes upwards at the time rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Sen at the time. Jeff sessions in Alabama.
Many of the points of Samohi’s story, which burned fuel to his complaints, found a way to the first Trump campaign where Miller was engulfing his heart alongside future leaders in the free world.
In Trump’s second term, Miller moves faster and goes further than his first term, which failed to use the military to promote immigration enforcement. This time, the administration deployed troops to American cities with a show of incredible power, with masked agents raiding business and public spaces.
Ali Rosmarin, a civil rights lawyer who also attended Santa Monica High, said Miller has always been keen to choose a fight that sparks the greatest hatred, anger and attention. According to Rosamarine, it is a through line that links his youthful plays to his current assault on Los Angeles.
“He knows LA. He knows it is home to both the ultra-diverse and beautiful immigrant communities, but it is also home to a lot of media, cultural and financial capital,” Rossmarin said. “In these ways, I think it’s a particularly attractive site for the fight when the goal is not just a policy outcome, but a political and cultural attack.”
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