"But sociology can only explain so much; it is hard to escape the sense that there was something fundamentally malevolent about Miller from the start. Another person in his shoes might have grasped that this anxiety was the product of his parents’ business difficulties and sheer geological misfortune, but the adolescent Miller sought out other culprits. With his economic privilege in seeming jeopardy, he leaned much harder into his privilege as a white, native-born American.
Guerrero spoke with Jason Islas, a working-class Mexican American who was Miller’s friend in middle school and attended his lavish bar mitzvah. Though the two initially bonded over Star Trek, Miller abruptly ditched Islas as a friend the summer after middle school, citing his Latino heritage as a justification. 'The conversation was remarkably calm,' Islas told Guerrero. 'He expressed hatred for me in a calm, cool, matter-of-fact way.'
In middle school, Miller was already drawn to right-wing subcultures that distinguished him from his peers, purchasing a subscription to Guns & Ammo magazine and finding himself inspired by the writings of Charlton Heston and Wayne LaPierre on the Second Amendment. His father was also moving right, alienated by bad relationships and burned bridges with his liberal Santa Monica cohort, and Stephen seems to have inherited his father’s contrarian streak. By the time he enrolled in the public Santa Monica High School, which Guerrero portrays as neatly internally segregated between professional-class, college-bound whites and working-class Hispanics, he was a full-fledged conservative provocateur."
~ David Klion
"The cruel world according to Stephen Miller"
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