On the bluff of a palm tree lining overlooking the Pacific Ocean, thousands of people opposed the Trump administration last month in one of the many “No Kings Day” protests across the country.
Here in Santa Monica, wealthy beach protesters also have a local message: United States, we are sorry.
“Santa Monica apologizes for Stephen Miller,” a bearded man in a straw hat announced through a poster committee of hand-crawling.
“Stephen Miller, who raised you?” another protester asked in purple puff paint. Others paired the White House vice president's name with the commissioner.
In the false accusations and stimulating clashes in President Trump’s inner circle, few aides survived longer than Miller.
The 39-year-old remains essential in Trump’s second term, driving an immigration platform that sows widespread fears throughout the country – nothing more important than Greater Los Angeles, where federal agents carried out ruthless attacks on immigrants, sweeping thousands of deportation attacks.
In the long shadow of his policies, local and national observers will refocus Miller on the growth of the famous liberal enclave, once known as the “People's Republic of Santa Monica.”
“I think people feel bad about the words 'Santa Monica' and 'stephen Miller' because no one wants that connection,” said Santa Monica Mayor Lana Negrete.
Although often seen as a liberal enclave, Santa Monica is also where conservative strategist Stephen Miller grew up.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
How does the same 8.3 square mile city help pioneering curbside recycling and strict rent control laws generate those responsible for Trump’s toughest policies?
Some are also questioning whether the government’s focus on Los Angeles is a form of retaliation against Miller’s rejected hometown.
When the rumor that hockey agents caught Nannies at Santa Monica Park flickered wildly on social networks, Justin Gordon attended Hebrew school and high school with Miller, he immediately thought his classmates must have directed themselves in their local park.
The reports proved false, but Gordon still saw the emotional truth.
“In my mind, I kept thinking, 'This is Stephen Miller back to Los Angeles City,” Gordon said.
In the eight years since Miller became famous and became a big rival to the American left, his Santa Monica villain origin story has been well documented, selected and reanalysed.
On the far edge of the American West, in a coastal community, savage adolescence, the institution takes pride in anti-favorites. What options can young reactionary idol behavior be taken?
Miller was a small town in Santa Monica at the Millennium High School: Berkeley met Beverly Hills, where Heughty Affrellence quickly eclipses the Birkenstocks and counterculture bumpers. It's also a two-city story with tycoons and the middle class north of Montana, as well as poverty and gang violence at the southern end of the town.
Nothing is more obvious than at Santa Monica High School, where scholars are nationally renowned, student groups resemble the unified color of Benetton, and the 1990s liberalism that “freedom becomes…you and me” ruled supreme.
Cultural Affinity Club parades, diversity activities and policies, attempt to make the school even more abominable Miller.
The teenage provocateur did not hide this frustration and yelled to his classmates. His painful pain provides a prescient preview of appeal politics that will put his future boss in power.
Miller said his high school years were the hardest of his life and he was full of backs on his “sulfuric acid view,” according to Jean Guerrero, author of the 2020 biography of Miller, “Hatemonger.”
“For whatever reason, he's been upset with it ever since and he's been trying various means to make me think of a form of revenge for rejecting his community in Los Angeles,” Guerrero said.
Stephen Miller is a Santa Monica High School student.
(Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times)
Through the White House, Miller did not respond to a request for comment. But anecdotes of Miller’s Troll High School antics are recorded in detail in the media.
Working to restore the recitation of a commitment to his bleeding heart to campus allegiance. He often objected “Rampant political correctness” Multiculturalism and the failure of Latino classmates. His best friend in middle school is allegedly Latino.
Perhaps most notorious is a campaign speech that has been tucked into the brains of thousands of Samosi classmates, who seem to relieve students of their responsibility to clean up on their own.
“I'll say, I'll do anything other people will say or do,” Miller said. Videos obtained by Univision. “I’m the only one tired of being told to pick up our trash when we have a lot of gatekeepers who pay for us?”
Several attendees said the students laughed and booed when Miller was escorted out of the stage. He lost the student government 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 monks that spout what he spouted from behind a computer screen. I have not in my life before or after seeing someone do it in an amphitheater full of their high school colleagues,” said Miller's classmate Kesha Ram Hinsdale, now majority leader of the Vermont state Senate.
Santa Monica High is the former guard house for political engagement, where students (children of entertainment executives, bankers and lawyers) as well as nurses, day workers and waiters – are all looking for their foothold.
Students attended the summer school at Santa Monica High School in 2011.
(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)
They watched the traversal of Proposition 187 in their childhood, violently splitting and inspiring a wave of Latino activists. (The 1994 vote measure, designed to prevent undocumented immigrants from accessing public education and other state services, was eventually blocked by the court.)
They joined Labor leader Dolores Huerta to support workers in nearby hotels and protest against Iraq's growing threat of war.
Despite the Kumbaya atmosphere, Santa Monica High School is hardly a post-racial utopia. Students often analyze themselves and the school’s academic luster is responsible for apartheid.
Puckish, wearing a suit and confident, a teenage Miller often attends school board meetings. He advocated English-speaking school districts alone, condemned the board’s concerns about equity and a widespread attempt to pierce the ideals and buttons of progress.
“We all know who he is and know him by name,” said Rep. Julia Brownley, a member of the Santa Monica-Malibu School Board from 1994 to 2006.
Miller was raised by Jewish Democrats, and generations evacuated from their own stories of asylum seeking. He enjoyed a comfortable childhood north of Montana until the family real estate company faltered in the early 1990s, and Millers eventually moved to a smaller rent in the Shabbier Southern End in Santa Monica.
According to Jason Islas, one of his best friends in high school, reactionary conservatism was not the decisive aspect of Miller’s role until he started high school.
The friendship disappeared before they began in Samohi when Miller called Islas and announced that they would not hang out any more.
Miller made the news, which was made in the absence of confidence in Islas, his teenage acne and the “business tone” of his Latino legacy.
“It's cruel even for a teenager,” Islas recalls.
By spokesperson Miller Rejected this account In 2017. But in his own words, his ridicule of Latino classmates is well documented.
“Although there are a large number of Hispanic students attending our school, there are usually very few Hispanic students in my honors courses,” said Miller, 16, a 16-year-old. In a letter to local newspapers in 2002, it was written.
The letter condemned the school announcements, published in English and Spanish, “stop Spanish speakers from standing up alone” and “drumbling the ideal of individual American achievement.”
Miller was fascinated by right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder, a regular on teenager shows, complaining about his other surplus of freedom in high school.
After graduating in 2003, Miller went to Duke University and landed on Capitol Hill, where he drove his right-wing bush with his then-Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Sen at the time. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
His many complaint-driven Samoy's speech points entered the first Trump campaign, and Miller had a variety of ideas with future leaders of the free world.
During Trump's second term, Miller moved faster and further than the first semester, when he advocated the unsuccessful use of the military to promote immigration enforcement. This time, the government showed its troops to American cities with amazing force, and masked agents raided businesses and public places.
Ari Rosmarin, a civil rights lawyer who also participated in Santa Monica High School, said Miller has been eager to pick the battle, which will bring about the greatest hatred, anger and attention. Rosemary said it was through his young drama that was linked to the current attack on Los Angeles.
“He knows Los Angeles – knows it’s home to a super diverse and beautiful immigrant community and home to a lot of media, cultural capital, financial capital,” Rosmalin said. “I think it’s a particularly attractive place to fight if your goal is not just a policy outcome, but a political and cultural attack.”
