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Steven Miller

Gentle readers, do you remember third grade, when you were 8 years old?  Do you remember the odd, 8 year-old things you thought and did?  Aren’t you glad no one remembers them or at the least, no one will use them against you now.  Well, there’s a chance someone, like your third grade teacher, remembers.  There is also a chance your third grade teacher is willing to tell the world all about it, particularly if, decades later, they dislike your adult politics.  Not only that, Democrats absolutely and gleefully will use it against you. Legal Insurrection explains:

Now The Hollywood Reporter has jumped on the bandwagon, running a column by Miller’s 3rd grade teacher Nikki Fiske badmouthing Miller’s 3rd grade conduct, focusing on glue again, Stephen Miller’s Third-Grade Teacher: He Was a “Loner” and Ate Glue:

In 1993, Donald Trump’s senior political adviser attended Santa  Monica’s Franklin  Elementary, where he was ‘off by himself all the time.’

I can still picture him sitting in my classroom.

Do you remember that character in Peanuts, the one called Pig Pen, with the dust cloud and crumbs flying all around him? That was Stephen Miller at 8. I was always trying to get him to clean up his desk — he always had stuff mashed up in there. He was a strange dude. I remember he would take a bottle of glue — we didn’t have glue sticks in those days — and he would pour the glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it.

I remember being concerned about him — not academically. He was OK with that, though I could never read his handwriting. But he had such strange personal habits. He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time.

At the end of the year, I wrote all my concerns — and I had a lot of them — in his school record. When the school principal had a conference with Stephen’s parents, the parents were horrified. So the principal took some white-out and blanked out all my comments. I wish I could remember what I wrote, but this was 25 years ago. I’ve taught a lot of third-graders since then….

I wonder if Mrs. Fiske and her employers understand their liability under student privacy laws? Were I Stephen Miller, I’d be suing them up one side and down the other.  All educators have an ethical obligation never to reveal such things to anyone without a lawfully defined educational need to know.  This is not only the law, it’s common sense and common decency.  All parents need to know teacher’s interactions with their children are confidential.  Without that promise, public education is impossible and societal upheaval, assured.

But of course, when leftists have a narrative—their own “truth”–to tell, common decency and ethics no longer apply.  After all, any tactic is legitimate against ultimate evil like Stephen Miller, an advisor to President Trump, who is even eviler-er.  Such people must be terrorized wherever they are, and destroyed.

As one might imagine, protestors have besieged the condo where Miller lives, and The New York Times dug into Miller’s high school and college life.  Why?  To demonize him:

These formative years supplied the template for the life Mr. Miller has carved out for himself in Washington, where he remains the hard-line jouster many of Mr. Trump’s most zealous supporters trust most in the White House — and many former peers fear.

Politico even found a classmate of Miller’s—a third grade classmate—who was more than willing—in reference to the idea that Miller is solely responsible for President Trump’s desire to build a border wall (Mr. Trump is apparently at once an evil mastermind and an easily manipulated dolt without an original idea)– to reveal the horror that was 8 year-old Stephen Miller–“I Sat on the Other Side of Stephen Miller’s First Wall”:

It was difficult to make Stephen laugh. I found him difficult to reach at all, and so, it seemed, did most everyone else. He was frequently distracted, vacillating between total disinterest in everything around him—my stories, of course, included—and complete obsession with highly specific tasks that could only be performed alone.

He especially was obsessed with tape and glue. Along the midpoint of our desk, Stephen laid down a piece of white masking tape, explaining that it marked the boundary of our sides and that I was not to cross it. The formality of this struck me as odd. I was a fairly neat kid, at least at school, and I had never spread my things to his side of the desk. Stephen, meanwhile, could not have been much messier: His side of the desk was sticky and peeling, littered with scraps of paper, misshapen erasers and pencil nubs.

The horror! Is there no end to the depravity of the 8 year-old Stephen Miller?  What normal child would ever behave like that?  But most importantly, what have these vital and telling formative experiences wrought?  How have they turned Stephen Miller into the obviously trumpified monster he is?  Who might be able to make these connections?

Last month, Miller’s former rabbi, Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels, condemned the ‘zero-tolerance’ immigration policy Miller helped to craft, saying it was ‘completely antithetical to everything I know about Judaism, Jewish law and Jewish values.

Let me see if I understand this: preventing potential terrorists from immigrating, and enforcing our lawfully enacted immigration laws is anti-Jewish?  Barack Obama did some of that, including cruelly separating children from their loving parents/slave traders/sex traffickers.  I don’t recall the Rabbi, or any other notable Jew, complaining about that.  I also don’t recall anyone in the Trump Administration advocating preventing legal immigration, so I’m a bit confused about what “zero tolerance” in this context might mean.  Surely Miller’s detractors can do better than that?

In August, Miller’s uncle, retired neuropsychologist David S. Glosser, said his nephew ‘has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.’

His uncle told HuffPost that Miller likely views certain ethnicities as ‘unworthy or inherently unsuited to life’ in America.

Ah ha!  Now they have him.  A neuropsychologist, who has presumably never treated Miller, but is his uncle who has presumably spoken to him upon occasion over the years, knows Miller “likely” hates “certain ethnicities.”  Well, that’s certainly good enough for me.  That Miller, he’s a hater!

Prof. Jacobson suggests the Left’s fixation on a child eating glue is a means of implying this has somehow damaged Miller’s brain, because no sane person would ever advocate the enforcement of America’s immigration laws, or the removal of people that enter illegally.  I suspect the good professor is correct—about their motivations, I mean.  Suggesting legitimate laws should be enforced is, virtually by definition, sane.

Let us take another brief excursion into the mind of John F. Muller, who Politico bills thus: “John F. Muller writes and studies philosophy in Wisconsin. He was formerly a lecturer at Harvard Law School and an attorney in Los Angeles.”

It’s hard to say how much a kid’s behavior in third grade can really tell you about the inner workings of his soul. And surely the well-documented indicators of Miller’s alt-right beginnings in middle school, high school and college have less impressionistic connections to his current behavior. But here is what I remember.

This—the first sentence–at least, is accurate and reasonably rational.  Not so the rest of Muller’s pseudo-poetic screed:

Because of our last names, Stephen and I shared a desk. We were not friends, though we weren’t exactly enemies, either. Our teacher, Mrs. Fiske, had the class write stories each week with vocabulary words, and sometimes she let us read them aloud. I wrote a series of stories about a ‘mixed-up chicken’ named Jeremy. I felt proudest, that year, when I got to read my stories in class and they made the other kids laugh. [skip]

He especially was obsessed with tape and glue. Along the midpoint of our desk, Stephen laid down a piece of white masking tape, explaining that it marked the boundary of our sides and that I was not to cross it. The formality of this struck me as odd. I was a fairly neat kid, at least at school, and I had never spread my things to his side of the desk. Stephen, meanwhile, could not have been much messier: His side of the desk was sticky and peeling, littered with scraps of paper, misshapen erasers and pencil nubs.

If this adhesive division kept Stephen on his side of the desk, I was all for it, as unfriendly as it seemed. But instead, the tape became an attractive nuisance. Stephen picked at it with his fingernails, methodically, in a mixture of absentmindedness and what seemed like channeled hostility. This process of effacement left a thin layer of sticky grime, not altogether dissimilar from the rest of Stephen’s desk.

Stephen rubbed his fingers over this layer of grime, rolling it into little gray pellets until it, too, was gone. Then he applied a new piece of tape, along with a renewed warning that I was not to cross it. Don’t rinse, but do repeat—for months.

When Stephen wasn’t picking at the tape, he was playing with glue. He liked to pour it into his hands, forming grime-tinted glaciers in the valleys of his palms. Glue thusly in hand, he deployed his deepest powers of concentration to watch these pools harden. The first sign would be a rippling on the surface, as if from a winter gale. This would produce a precarious moment—as Stephen’s urge to stick a finger into the filmy layer became palpable, and his immobilized palm began to tire.

Presumably Miller did not engage in such bizarre and unfathomable behavior every minute he was in school, but one would not know that according to Muller:

Invariably, Stephen succumbed to this urge before the glue fully hardened, at which point the prior game transformed into a new one, the game of spreading still-viscous glue across the remainder of his hand. Then, once the glue dried, he picked it off in long strips, the glue pulling the skin on his palm outward as he tugged it with his other hand, the skin snapping back into place when each strip broke off.

Still, the sticky adhesive beneath the strips of glue remained on his palm. So Stephen rubbed his hands together to produce more little gray pellets, which he collected and rolled together into a mound. This, in turn, was used to blot at and thereby clean (or perhaps dirty) his portion of the desk.

What child has ever done anything like that?  This Miller was clearly a very, very troubled child, who must be an even more troubled adult.  After all, he works for Donald Trump!  What more evidence is necessary?

What to make of this 25 years later? We were all grimy kids at some point, of course, with sticky hands and short attention spans. But it is at least poetic that Stephen was bent on building a nonsensical wall even back then, a wall that had more to do with what lay inside him than with what lay beyond. He thought he was trying to keep out the chaos of the world, when really he was looking for a way to explain away the chaos on his own side of the desk. For that was where chaos had always been.

Well of course. Any kid who ever played with glue or tape is chaos personified.  That is a perfectly reasonable conclusion—if you’re a leftist trying to demonize a political opponent.  Rational people—media obviously excepted—understand that an unremarkable childhood transmogrified into a horror show, speaks loudly, but only about the transmogrifier.

Hillary Clinton is correct: t’s impossible to be civil with such people.

Pre-Posting Update:

Fiske has been suspended by her school district.  Various sources report she is a politically active registered Democrat.

The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District has placed veteran teacher Nikki Fiske on ‘home assignment’ while it decides what to do, if anything, about disclosures she made about a young Stephen Miller.

Perhaps there is a child, now a Democrat, she wants to reveal as a paste-eating monster?