How Stephen Miller Rode White Rage From Duke's Campus to Trumpzsiism's West Wing
At the young age of 31, Stephen Miller has his own Trumpzi office in the West Wing and the President’s ear. He also has held a shocking worldview since he was a teenager. From his writings on the 2006 Duke lacrosse-team rape scandal, which gave the then–college junior national media exposure, to an alleged association with a white-nationalist advocate, William D. Cohan dives deep into Miller’s tumultuous past.
Around midnight on the evening of March 13, 2006, something untoward happened in the nondescript rental house at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard, right off Duke’s East Campus, where three of the university’s lacrosse team’s senior co-captains lived.
It was spring break, and Duke’s bucolic campus, in the heart of North Carolina’s Piedmont region, was quiet, maybe too quiet. The lacrosse team had practiced that morning and afterward had met with coach Mike Pressler. Since Duke’s cafeterias were closed for the week, Pressler doled out around $10,000 in cash to the 46 players to pay for their meals and other sundries. Afterward, most of them retired to the North Buchanan Boulevard house for an afternoon and evening of drinking and drinking games, such as beer pong and washers.
Also on the agenda, at 11 P.M. to be exact, were performances by two “exotic dancers.” That afternoon, co-captain Dan Flannery called the Allure Agency, in Durham, and hired the women for two hours. He specified that he wanted white women. They would be paid $400 each—money that the co-captains collected from some of their teammates, who put in $20 each.
Kim Roberts, then 31, who is half black and half Korean, arrived at the appointed hour. Crystal Gail Mangum, then 27, who is black, showed up about 30 minutes later. A friend had driven her there in his car and then left. There were some signs that she had been drinking and was already unsteady on her feet. Both women were single mothers and both had had previous run-ins with the law—Roberts for embezzling from an employer, Mangum for a variety of incidents, including a bizarre drunk-driving episode after stealing a taxi. (There was a warrant still out for Roberts’s arrest; after the taxi incident, Mangum had pleaded guilty to four misdemeanors, served a short time in jail, and was placed on two years’ probation.) The two women had never met before. For some reason, Roberts referred to Mangum as “Precious.”
After Roberts and Mangum arrived at the house, the players debated whether to proceed, because the dancers were not white, as Flannery had requested. But they decided to go ahead anyway. Just before midnight, it was showtime. “There were about 20 to 25 young guys there who were all sitting down,” Roberts recalled. “[Mangum] and I began our show, which, in my opinion, seemed to be going well.” Observed Flannery, “Guys were cheering and yelling.”
Things quickly got out of hand. David Evans, another of the senior co-captains who lived at the house, noted that Mangum “couldn’t talk or stand up straight, she was so high.” The girls were sloppily dancing and began to kiss. Evans said Mangum “went down” on Roberts, although later neither Roberts nor Mangum recalled having had oral sex. Roberts was increasingly nervous. “Things were said that made me concerned for my safety,” she recalled.
After the women got up off the floor, according to Flannery, Roberts asked the guys “who was going to step up and take their pants off. No one would.” Peter Lamade, then 21, from Chevy Chase, Maryland, asked Roberts “if she put objects up her vagina.” Her response, according to Flannery, was “something along the lines of ‘I would put your dick in me, but you’re not big enough.’ ”
Lamade then grabbed a broomstick, showed it to Roberts, and said, “Would this do?” (In another version of this incident, according to Matt Zash, the third co-captain who lived at the house, Roberts allegedly said, “What’s wrong, white boy, is your dick too small?” Lamade then grabbed a broomstick and told Roberts, “I’m going to shove this up you.”)
“That statement made me uncomfortable, and I felt like I wanted to leave,” Roberts later explained. “I raised my voice to the boys and said the show was over.” To decide what to do next, Roberts then grabbed Mangum, and together they headed into David Evans’s room, and then back into his bathroom. Some of the lacrosse players felt shortchanged. “Guys on the team were upset and wanted their money back,” Flannery recalled.
Meanwhile, Roberts went to her car and changed clothes. She wanted to drive away but didn’t want to leave Mangum by herself in the house. Flannery told Roberts he thought Mangum was still in Evans’s bathroom. “However, she was passed out on the back stoop of the house, half naked,” Flannery said. (How she ended up there is not known.) “At this time I went to the back of the house with Kevin Coleman”—another teammate—“who photographed her passed out there and picked her up. I put her arms around my shoulder and walked her to the other girl’s car.”
Where the Truth Lies
As the women were getting ready to leave in Roberts’s blue Honda, and then as they were driving off, racial epithets started flying. A next-door neighbor later said he heard one of the players yell, “Hey, bitch, thank your grandpa for your nice cotton shirt!” Roberts said the verbal assaults were even more offensive: “They just hollered it out, ‘Nigger,’ ‘Nigger,’ ‘Nigger.’ They were hollering it for all to hear. They didn’t care who heard it.” Flannery remembered that some of his teammates were on top of the stone wall surrounding East Campus, yelling at the Honda as it pulled away. He saw that Roberts had stopped the car, gotten out, and yelled something back, along the lines of “You limp-dick white boys, you’re not real men. You had to pay for us.” At that point, Flannery said, the guys on the wall screamed, “Go home and feed your kids.”
For his part, co-captain Zash remembered overhearing one of his teammates say, “Well, we asked for whites, not niggers,” to which Roberts replied, “That’s a hate crime—I’m calling the police.” As she drove away, Roberts kept thinking, “It was almost unbelievable. All I kept going back to was ‘I can’t believe these are Duke students.’ ”
And then things got much worse. Within hours, Mangum claimed she had been kidnapped, and raped and sexually assaulted in Evans’s bathroom by an ever changing number of white Duke lacrosse players at the party. She told that story in the early hours of March 14 to a counselor at Durham Access, a social-services center, and then again to a nurse at the Duke University Hospital. The nurse examined her and concluded she had been sexually assaulted. Mangum also told several Durham police detectives that three white Duke lacrosse players had raped her in the bathroom at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard. They believed her, setting in motion a series of extraordinary events that would shock the nation as law-enforcement officials in North Carolina tried to figure out what, if anything, the lacrosse players had done to Mangum in David Evans’s bathroom after the dancing had stopped so abruptly.
On March 23, at the detectives’ request, a local judge issued a non-testimonial order, or NTO, requiring the white lacrosse players to submit DNA samples to the Durham police. (The players’ attorneys had previously blocked the police’s request to provide the DNA voluntarily.)
That’s when Michael Nifong, the acting Durham district attorney, caught a glimpse of the NTO, a copy of which had been left on a copier machine outside his office, and first learned about what had allegedly occurred at the rental house 10 days earlier. After Nifong read the NTO, in all its gory detail, he knew all hell would break loose at Duke and in Durham. He figured, correctly, that the accusation of rape and sexual assault by a poor black stripper against three white, presumably well-to-do Duke lacrosse players would attract national media attention. Based on Mangum’s allegations and her subsequent absolute identification of her alleged assailants after reviewing their photographs on a computer, a Durham County grand jury indicted the three—David Evans, one of the senior co-captains, and two sophomores, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty—on criminal charges of first-degree rape, sexual assault, and kidnapping. The scandal would engulf Duke’s campus for the next 13 months.
Into this conflagration of economic, racial, and sexual politics came Stephen Miller, a 20-year-old Duke junior from Santa Monica, California, who wouldn’t have known a lacrosse stick if he were hit over the head with one. A columnist for The Chronicle, the Duke student newspaper, Miller defended the lacrosse players in print, despite nearly universal condemnation of them by others on campus and in the media. His outspoken support for the players—even before the indictments were handed up—got him plenty of national media attention, which he enthusiastically embraced. As he expounded nightly on CNN and on The O’Reilly Factor, among other television shows, it became apparent that the sordid allegations surrounding the case gave Miller the perfect opportunity to hone the right-wing political views he had espoused since adolescence.
Miller's evil passion for American exceptionalism and racial superiority eventually led him to jobs in Washington, D.C., first as a spokesperson for two right-wing members of Congress, Michele Bachmann and John Shadegg, and then as a policy adviser and communications director for conservative Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general. Sessions, with Miller at his side, almost single-handedly killed the 2013 bipartisan immigration-reform bill that would have created a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Now, at 31, the still-single Miller is President Trump’s youngest senior policy adviser, with his own office in the West Wing and a seat at the table during crucial decisions. His most visible act in that job so far was helping his friend Steve Bannon, for the moment Trump’s chief strategist, to craft and roll out the Trump administration’s first try at instituting a travel ban on the citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries. In the wake of a federal judge’s decision to strike down the ban, Miller was ubiquitous on television news shows. In one astonishing interview, dressed in his trademark dark suit and skinny tie, Miller told CBS’s John Dickerson, without irony, “Our opponents, the media and the whole world, will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
It was a jaw-dropping statement, even by Trumpian standards. “Horrendous” and “embarrassing” was how Joe Scarborough, the co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, described Miller’s claims, adding for good measure, “[The president’s decisions] will be questioned, my young, little Miller. They will be questioned by the court. It’s called judicial review. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote about it in the Federalist Papers. It was enshrined in Madison’s Constitution.”
Since then, despite winning Trump’s approval for his bravura performance—“?Great job!- (ugh!)” the president tweeted—Miller has been kept under wraps, more seen than heard, although he was in the Mar-a-Lago photo of Trump and his advisers authorizing the April missile strike on an air base in Syria.
People who know Miller personally are not surprised by his unflinching support for Trump or his recent exclusionary antics. Growing up in a wealthy, liberal Southern California enclave, he delighted in challenging political convention and social niceties, even as a high-school student. “I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would do,” he admitted in a 2002, speech to his Santa Monica High School classmates. In the same speech, to a chorus of boos, he said, “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?” Miller now claims his speech was “satire” and a “Colbert-style routine,” according to what his high-school friend Chris Moritz told The Washington Post. (Moritz did not respond to requests to be interviewed, and the White House declined to make Miller available to speak with V.F.)
Despite Miller’s penchant for outrageous provocation, his family was very much like others in Santa Monica. His mother, Miriam, from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, came from a well-known Jewish family that had made a fortune in retailing. His father, Michael, a Stanford graduate, was a lawyer and real-estate mini-mogul. These days, the Millers together own Cordary Inc., a real-estate investment company, of which Michael is the president and Miriam is executive vice president. (Miller himself was a vice president of the family business for a few years, according to disclosure forms.) The company owns and manages three multi-family residential “communities” in the Los Angeles area comprised of 471 rental units.
Ironically, the family would not have made it to the United States had someone like Stephen Miller been in the White House a century ago. Facing religious persecution, Miriam’s family—the Glossers—fled Belarus, arriving in New York in 1903. “Imagine living in a place where armed Cossacks ride through the streets, looking to cripple or kill you,” wrote Robert Jeschonek, in Long Live Glosser’s, a 2014, book about the family.
"Do not take these stories about Stephen Miller Lightly. They sound like exaggerations......they are not. Miller has been radicalized."
In America, the Glossers turned a small tailoring business into a beloved Johnstown department store and a chain of 75 Gee Bee discount stores. In 1985, the family and Bear Stearns took the company private in a $45 million leveraged buyout; four years later, it filed for bankruptcy and was eventually liquidated, its stores sold off in pieces or shuttered.
As a youngster, Stephen was obsessed with Star Trek. He watched the show for hours. And he and his younger brother, Jacob, used to dress up in Captain Kirk uniforms. “He really liked this kind of macho alpha-male thing that was going on with Kirk,” remembers Jason Islas, a friend of Miller’s in middle school. “I think he was really attracted to that as a model for his own behavior.” Miller also was fixated on Las Vegas-style gangsters, “like the Bugsy Siegel types,” explains Islas. In one yearbook picture, Miller is dressed as a mobster, with a wad of cash in his hand.
Miller attended a variety of different synagogues in and around Santa Monica. A friend at Beth Shir Shalom, a progressive reform synagogue, remembered that Miller was “a budding provocateur” and “was not very concerned with being well liked,” according to an article about him in The Jewish Journal. Another Beth Shir friend, Sophie Goldstein, told the Journal about an incident in which a small group of students were deciding how to divide up a last piece of pizza in a fair way. “We’re all talking and talking about it,” she said. “In the middle of this discussion, Stephen slaps his open hand down on the middle of the slice of pizza. And of course nobody would touch this pizza slice after he put his greasy 13-year-old paw on it.”
When Miller celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at Beth Shir Shalom, Islas was a close enough friend to be invited. But Miller abruptly ended their friendship that summer, before they both went off to Santa Monica’s huge, 3,400-student public high school.
According to Islas, one day Miller telephoned him and told him he didn’t want to be friends anymore. Not content to just let their interactions fade as they moved from one school to another, Miller wanted to make a point. “He gave me a whole list of reasons why we couldn’t be friends and almost all of them were personal, but the one that stuck out was because of my Latino heritage,” Islas recalls. “It was the one that wasn’t directly personal. It was very strange.”
Soon enough, though, Miller was embracing a white-nationalist agenda. His high-school yearbook quotation came from Teddy Roosevelt: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are American and nothing else.”
Miller’s evolving political views could not have been more at odds with those of progressive, inclusive Santa Monica, a fact in which he delighted. When he was 16, he wrote an op-ed in a local newspaper about the “rampant political correctness” that had “consumed” the high school and the school district. From ninth grade on, he wrote, a number of his classmates “lacked basic English skills” and there were “very few, if any,” Latino students in his honors classes, “despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school.” He decried the school’s policy of making announcements in both English and Spanish. Miller seemed particularly peeved by liberal regrets over the killing of Native Americans. “We could have lived with the Indians, learning how to finger paint and make tepees, excusing their scalping of frontiersmen as part of their culture. Forget about being the nation that stopped Hitler, brought communism to its knees, and feeds more hungry people around the world than any other country—forget all of that, and let us just agree that we’re a horrible nation.”
He thought that the school’s policy of providing condoms to students promoted sexual promiscuity. And if his classmates happened to have figured out “at their tender age” that they were gay? “We have a club on campus that will gladly help foster their homosexuality,” Miller complained. “Do they notify parents if their teenagers have chosen an alternate lifestyle? Of course not.” His classmates have no recollection of Miller dating. “I would be shocked if he’s ever had a relationship,” says Nick Silverman, a former high-school classmate.
Miller played tennis in high school. One of the team’s matches against a rival school coincided with a track-and-field competition. During a girls’ track event, Miller decided to jump into the race toward the end, Rosie Ruiz-style, and then boasted, back at school, about how he had beaten the girls and “wasn’t even warmed up or anything,” recalls Silverman, now a writer in Los Angeles. “Everyone was pissed at him.”
By many accounts, Miller’s proudest achievement in high school was forcing the school to comply with the California Education Code’s requirement that a “patriotic exercise” be conducted daily, which Santa Monica High School had failed to do. Miller brought the violation to the attention of Mark Kelly, who was then a co-principal at the high school. Kelly says he did not find it particularly odd that Miller would call the school out for not following the state code. “Students at the time would come up with all kinds of stuff,” he says, “and actually I liked that. A lot of fun in my job was to interact with students when they had issues or things that they felt strongly about and wanted to interact with us about.”
Miller wrote a letter about the school’s code violation to Larry Elder, then, as now, a California-based conservative radio talk-show host. Elder invited Miller to come on his radio show, and Miller quickly took a shine to the media spotlight. “He was incredibly bright, incredibly articulate, incredibly focused, and that started a friendship that continues to this day,” Elder says. He had Miller on his show more than 70 times. “The reason I know this is because he counted them,” Elder adds.
Stephen Miller, right, and his brother, Jacob, in Star Trek costumes. From Seth Poppel/Yearbook Library
Miller came to the attention of Ari Rosmarin, the editor of the high-school newspaper, after Miller complained that a teacher had given him a low grade because of his conservative political views. “He was all about this victimhood idea, that he was this lonely soldier crusading,” says Rosmarin, who is a civil-rights attorney.
Elder says Miller’s confrontational approach shocked the community. “It is extremely left-wing,” he says about Santa Monica, “and for somebody like Stephen Miller to talk about how racism is no longer a major issue in America [or throwing] water on this issue of the glass ceiling [or] things like minimum wage, he was very, very unpopular.”
The September 11, attacks exacerbated Miller’s penchant for nationalistic thinking. In a December 2001 column for the high-school newspaper, he wrote, “Blaming America for the problems of countries whose citizens would rather spend time sewing blankets to cover women’s faces than improving the quality of life is utterly ludicrous. And not to kill terrorists poses a serious threat to the security of the nation.”
Miller wrote about how he decided to “challenge the campus indoctrination machine” of liberal thinking and cited as a catalyst an incident that, if true, is particularly disturbing. “One teacher even dragged the American flag across the floor—as we were sending off brave young men to risk their lives for it,” he wrote. Miller’s assertion, written in 2003, remains controversial, if only because no one I spoke to about it seems to recall its happening. Kelly, the co-principal, doesn’t remember the incident. “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen necessarily,” he says.
“You’ve got to remember this for me is almost 20 years ago and thousands and thousands of students later.” Another high-school classmate, Kesha Ram, who recently ran an unsuccessful campaign to be lieutenant governor of Vermont, is skeptical. “I have a hard time believing it,” she says. “Rumors spread really fast on a high-school campus, and I don’t even remember hearing that as a rumor.” Islas has no recollection of the incident either and thinks it may be “overblown.”
Silverman also has no recollection of the flag incident. But he does remember one time when Miller lost his temper. They had gone together to Sacramento for a week-long stay at Boys State, an immersive program designed to educate high-school students in the ways of state and local government (and to counter the socialism-inspired Young Pioneer camps). Miller was determined to win an election to a mock city council “any way he could,” even using dirty tricks, Silverman recalls. Boys State was on the conservative side of the political spectrum. “I imagine Stephen felt he would be right at home,” Silverman wrote on a recent Facebook post. “But even here, among his seemingly ideological allies, he was ostracized. After being voted out of the mock city council, Miller threw a tantrum, flipping over a table and shouting ‘You can’t do this to me!!!’ ” Silverman says it was the only time he saw Miller upset. According to Silverman, he was usually “eerily calm,” the persona he effects to this day.
But Silverman says there was no mistaking Miller’s agenda, even then. “He believes multiculturalism is a weakness, that when we celebrate our differences we are ignoring our ‘American culture,’ ” Silverman wrote on Facebook. “He didn’t like someone from El Salvador celebrating their homeland, or someone from Vietnam bringing in food from their country of origin. He wanted everyone to celebrate one culture. One country. At 16, Stephen was an extreme nationalist.”
In their government class, Silverman recalled on Facebook, Miller bullied “the opposition with unverifiable statistics and figures, baseless claims launched with his articulate bravado. He would just bludgeon you with evidence he pulled from thin air, gun-death numbers or immigration statistics that were usually false or gross exaggerations. And in 2002 no one had a smartphone to quickly verify it. It was mostly met with eye-rolls or an unwillingness to continue to debate someone who had a casual relationship with truth . . . . I know this may come off as melodramatic, but Stephen’s views are very DANGEROUS. Do not take these anecdotes or stories about him lightly. They sound like exaggerations and embellishments. They are not. He is an extremist. He has been radicalized.”
Old-School Tie: One former Duke student remembers Miller’s behavior in class more than she does his political views. In a freshman history course about the American Revolution, she recalls, “Just right away, he’d just walk in, put his head down, and go to sleep.”
After giving Miller a few good-natured warnings, the professor kicked him out. “He’s got that sleepy-eyed, sloe-eyed look, but he’s just saying ‘Fuck you’ to the world,” she says.
On campus Miller joined the Duke Conservative Union and became head of the Duke chapter of Students for Academic Freedom.
As he had done at Santa Monica High School, Miller invited David Horowitz, the 1960s radical turned conservative ideologue, to speak. Horowitz had just written a book identifying 101 “dangerous” professors on college campuses—two of whom were at Duke—that “made me Public Enemy Number One in the universities,” Horowitz recalls. The campus erupted in protest against Horowitz.
But it was the lacrosse-team scandal—which occurred two months after Miller started writing his biweekly Chronicle column—that gave him the perfect opportunity to launch himself onto the national stage. The 24-hour cable networks pined to interview column—that gave him the perfect opportunity to launch himself onto the national stage. The 24-hour cable networks pined to interview a conservative Duke student about the scandal, and Miller happily obliged. After all, how many Duke students were eager to defend the lacrosse team’s behavior within a month of the off-campus party, especially after the coach had been fired and the lacrosse season canceled?
With the campus in an uproar over the rape allegations, Miller happily took the contrarian view. “Protesters and community leaders have claimed the alleged rape speaks to the larger ingrained prejudice of Duke students and the University’s administration,” he wrote in one early column. “But in reality, the only widespread prejudice we have seen is the prejudice that has allowed a single unproven allegation to condemn and defame an entire community.”
By fall 2006, far more information was known about what had happened on the night of March 13—although not everything—and the case against the three indicted players collapsed for a variety of reasons, including that Mangum kept changing her story, and that DNA samples taken from her that night, with one exception, did not match that of any of the lacrosse players. Miller published his final Chronicle column on the subject in April 2007, two weeks after Roy Cooper, the North Carolina state attorney general (and now its new governor), had, after a secret four-month investigation, declared the three lacrosse players not guilty of the criminal charges that a grand jury had brought against them a year earlier. Miller took a victory lap: “For many at Duke, the last year offered a horrifying tutorial in the moral bankruptcy of the left’s politically correct orthodoxy and the corruption of our culture at its hands,” he wrote. “Three of our peers faced a devastating year-long persecution because they were white and their accuser black.”
Miller then tried to imagine what would have happened had the scenario been flipped—if the three athletes had been black and their accuser white. He wondered what might have happened if the school president had fired the black coach. “You think that scenario would have lasted for a year?” he asked. “Try a week.”
As the author of The Price of Silence, a 2014 book about the Duke lacrosse scandal, I have wondered about that scenario, too. My conclusion was exactly the opposite of Miller’s: in my estimation, there is no way, had the indicted boys been black and their accuser white, that they ever would have been exonerated without a trial. There is no way a secret investigation by the state attorney general would have declared them innocent and no way that Duke would have paid them $20 million each—which is what the three accused white players received—as part of a legal settlement with the university.
Robert Steel, the chairman of the Duke board of trustees during the ordeal and a former partner at Goldman Sachs, agreed to speak with me for The Price of Silence, against the wishes of the Duke administration and his fellow trustees. (He is now C.E.O. of Perella Weinberg, the investment-banking boutique.) He remains unsure of exactly what happened in that bathroom that night. But he’s confident it was something of which none of us would be proud. He told me, “There was zero chance that there was a group activity, that thirty guys saw something that was incredibly unattractive or whatever . . . . Someone would’ve told their parents that ‘I saw this’ or whatever . . . . [But] we have no idea what happened in a bathroom with one person or two persons. I have no clue, no idea . . . . Today, what do I think? I just don’t know . . . . You can imagine seven clicks [of the dial], some of which you can go, ‘That’s not so great,’ or other clicks you can imagine, ‘That’s pretty unattractive.’ ”
At Duke, Miller was also the first national coordinator of the Terrorism Awareness Project, created in 2007, designed to make “students aware of the Islamic jihad and the terrorist threat, and to mobilize support for the defense of America and the civilization of the West,” according to the project’s Web site. The project, which originated with David Horowitz, sponsored “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on college campuses, including at Duke, and ran ads in college newspapers, including The Chronicle, with the headline WHAT AMERICANS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT JIHAD. The author of the jihad advertisement was Richard Spencer, then a Ph.D. candidate in Duke’s history department, who had arrived at the university in spring 2005. After graduating from the University of Virginia, Spencer had received a master’s in the humanities from the University of Chicago. He left Duke before completing his Ph.D. to become the founder of the National Policy Institute, a white-nationalist think tank and one of the intellectual leaders of the so-called alt-right movement, which gained potency during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Spencer says he “first became aware” of Miller at Duke after the start of the lacrosse scandal. “He certainly understood the media and how to get his message out there,” Spencer says. “I could only be impressed.” The two met at the Duke Conservative Union in 2006. Being a few years older and in graduate school, Spencer says, he mentored Miller. “But I do think that Stephen probably would’ve ended up exactly more or less where he is today whether he had met me or not,” he adds. “He is his own man . . . . He is a strong American nationalist, you could say. Certainly not a white nationalist, but he is an American nationalist and a civic nationalist or a public nationalist . . . . He was going on Fox News even as an undergraduate—really remarkable.”
Spencer praises Miller for having had the guts to support the lacrosse players when it was unpopular to do so. “It was racial politics at its heart,” he says. “And so whenever you touch on that case you’re playing with fire; you are willing to go someplace that most people aren’t. It was a racialized morality play from the first second that it hit campus. Stephen is not me. He is not coming from my identitarian perspective, but he is willing to go there. He’s willing to take on those issues, which shows a lot of bravery . . . . I think Stephen’s ballsy.”
Spencer’s public utterances about race and white nationalism are far less diplomatic than was our measured conversation. As he puts it, “The ideal I advocate is the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent.” To accomplish that he supports “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”
At a 2016 alt-right conference, he elaborated on his dream:
To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward. And we recognize a central lie of American race relations. We don’t exploit other groups—we don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around . . . . America was, until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.
Spencer’s audience often responds to him with the Nazi salute, and, on a number of occasions, he has refused to denounce Hitler. For instance, on April 23, he tweeted, “Whatever your opinion on Nazis, they were extremely interested in . . . space travel, rockets, public health.”
When, during the presidential campaign, the relationship between Spencer and Miller from their days together at Duke became public, Miller quickly disavowed knowing Spencer. “I have absolutely no relationship with Mr. Spencer,” Miller e-mailed Mother Jones last October. “I completely repudiate his views, and his claims are 100 percent false.”
Spencer says he was surprised by Miller’s renunciation of him. He could have spoken publicly about knowing Miller at Duke, he says, but chose not to because he did not want to “harm Stephen.” But, he adds, “the fact is I did know him, now 10 years previously, so I could’ve talked about this in 2015, I could’ve talked about this all through 2016, but I didn’t . . . . Stephen looked a little strange, kind of doing this outright denial. What he should’ve said is ‘Oh, yeah. I knew Richard Spencer 10 years ago. Who cares?’ ”
This past February, soon after Miller’s television appearances, nearly 3,500 Duke alumni signed an open letter to him, decrying his political views. “We . . . see nothing in your actions that furthers the values of intellectual honesty, tolerance, diversity, and respect that we seek to promote in the world,” the letter stated. Corey Sobel, a classmate of Miller’s at Duke and one of the co-authors of the letter, says, “You wouldn’t really believe the number of stories where he would offend—very suspiciously always a young woman—with whatever broad tirade against liberalism and free thought he had, and then, a couple of weeks later, ask that same woman who he had offended, usually publicly, out on a date.” The consensus seemed to be that Miller’s behavior was “really icky” and “very creepy.”
In his position of power within the Trump White House, Miller has done nothing to diminish the controversy that swirls around him. His fans, such as Elder and Horowitz, view him as a charming crusader. He now seems to be in the process of skillfully pivoting his allegiance from the increasingly tarnished Bannon to the administration’s rising stars, Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. “He doesn’t stick a stick in people’s eye just for the hell of it,” says Elder. “He’s trying to make the country work better, and trying to improve the lives of people and make them more productive.”
But Miller’s numerous detractors see other motives. “He was obviously a very driven, hardworking guy, so I knew that he would probably find a place somewhere,” says Silverman, Miller’s high-school classmate. “I had no idea that it would be this, at the right hand of the president at 31 years old.” He says he recognizes Miller’s voice coming loud and clear out of Trump’s mouth. “I can hear that kind of nationalistic, America-First American culture,” he continues. “That’s that same Stephen from junior year. He hasn’t gone anywhere. That’s still him.”
Does Silverman have any advice for people who are just learning about Stephen Miller for the first time? “Take him seriously and know that he is a dangerous person,” he says. “He has a dangerous mind and a dangerous way of thinking. He wants to shift what America is about . . . . You’ve got to stay vigilant. He’s not taking days off. If there’s one thing Miller is, and he’s a lot of things, he’s absolutely motivated. This is his entire life. This is everything for him. He’s not going to rest. He won’t rest. He won’t stop . . . . He’s not a Trump shill. He was this way before Trump, before Bannon. He was radicalized way before that.”
