Miller’s education in trolling

Stephen Miller is President Trump’s right-hand troll, said McKay Coppins in The Atlantic. The 32-year-old White House aide has delighted in provocation from a young age—what he calls “constructive controversy with the purpose of enlightenment.” He grew up among wealthy liberals in Santa Monica, Calif. In high school, he complained about announcements being read in Spanish over the PA system, and once ran down to join the homestretch of a girls’ track race in order to demonstrate his gender’s superior athleticism. While campaigning for student government, he said in a speech, “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?” Students booed him off the stage. As an undergrad at Duke, he was no less antagonistic. He organized an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” to educate students about “the holy war being waged against us,” and his column for the campus newspaper railed against feminism and the “War on Christmas.” These provocations were quite deliberate. “I knew that expressing [my views] meekly or apologetically in that kind of environment would be totally ineffective,” Miller says. Maybe, he says, he was just ahead of his time. “You’d have a lot more fun being a campus conservative in a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat.”