"As a child, Stephen grew up in a $1 million, five-bedroom home in the North of Montana section of Santa Monica, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Greater Los Angeles. He had Latin American–born housekeepers who cooked family meals and cleaned up after him and his siblings.
This comfortable lifestyle was disrupted in 1994, when the Millers had a run of terrible luck: A major earthquake inflicted $20 billion in property damage in Southern California, including on a number of properties managed by the family firm. This came at a particularly inopportune moment, as Michael Miller was in the midst of an acrimonious legal battle with his former partners in the law firm he’d started, the upshot of which was that he found himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt."
~ David Klion
"The Cruel World According to Stephen Miller"
https://www.thenation.com/?post_type=article&p=543905
"If there is a sociological explanation for Miller’s politics, Guerrero implies, perhaps it lies in this period. In the aftermath of the 2008 housing crisis, many of Miller’s peers found themselves downwardly mobile, locked out of the housing market and denied opportunities that prior generations had taken for granted—experiences that have inclined many millennials toward a more socialistic politics than previous cohorts. But Miller’s brush with downward mobility came much earlier, with his affluent boomer parents experiencing the shock of material insecurity during the 1990s, a decade that is more typically remembered as a period of unprecedented economic prosperity. Though Miller was never anywhere close to working-class, and his family’s finances rebounded in time for him to enjoy the benefits of an elite university education and a parentally subsidized down payment on a DC condo (though recently his parents had another bit of bad luck, as their home was destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires in January), he did pass through a period of acute economic and status anxiety during a very impressionable age."
~ David Klion
"The Cruel World According to Stephen Miller"
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