A White House Troll ‘Owning the Libs’

and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

A new generation of political activists have grown up more interested in provoking outrage from their fellow citizens than in winning them over.

Among the most influential exemplars of the genre is Stephen Miller, a senior policy advisor to President Trump.

What happens when the trolls run politics?

What happens when they run the White House?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

Coming from New York is my esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner.

Hello, Alex.

Hi, Matt.

Good to hear you, my friend.

Great to have you, as always.

And I am delighted to say that joining us this week are our delightful colleagues, our inestimable colleagues, McKay Coppins and Rosie Gray, staff writers for The Atlantic.

McKay and Rosie, welcome.

Hey, Matt.

Hello.

Good to be here.

Awesome to have you.

And Rosie is joining us from California.

McKay is right across from me here in D.C.

And we are convened to discuss Stephen Miller, who works for President Trump officially as a senior policy advisor and speechwriter, but may be at this very moment printing business cards with his new unofficial title, Trump's Right Hand Troll.

That is the headline that we went with for McKay's stellar profile of the guy.

This is a man who has occasionally burst out into the forefront of American politics, but he's probably been most influential behind the scenes of Trump's White House, I think it's fair to say, crafting policies like the notorious travel ban on immigration from several Muslim-majority countries.

McKay, what led you to focus on Stephen Miller?

Why do you think he's an important person for us and our listeners to pay attention to at this time?

Yeah, so the idea to kind kind of dive deep on this guy actually first came to us here at the Atlantic back in January during the government shutdown.

Remember when there were these big high-stakes negotiations on Capitol Hill over immigration and DACA?

It was

only a few months ago.

It seems like four or five years ago.

I was so much younger.

But, you know, there's this,

the talks blew up.

There's a government shutdown.

It was a very dramatic moment.

And kind of standing in the middle of all of it was Stephen Miller,

who is this 32-year-old aide to the president, has been with Trump since the campaign, arguably has his ear and is closer to the president than almost anyone else in the president's inner circle, and has tremendous influence over domestic policy, particularly around issues like immigration, which is kind of his specialty.

Is also the president's speechwriter and kind of crafts the messages and big addresses that the president gives.

So, even if you don't know Stephen Miller by name or by face, he really is, his fingerprints are all over

this presidency and this administration.

Aaron Powell,

really interesting.

I think part of what emerged from your story for me is that he's kind of a type of person who seems to be increasingly common in politics.

Right.

Well, I got that, you know, I had a sense of this just as I started to do research on him.

you know,

that he had this kind of trollish streak

that dated back to his years in high school and college.

But sitting across from him, he gave me, you know, a pretty lengthy sit-down interview.

And as I was sitting across from him

in his office, it really was on full display just how much he loves to try to get a rise out of people.

His whole kind of personal incentive structure is built around saying or doing things that are outlandish or obnoxious or outrageous or offensive

calibrated to kind of

you know rile you up or rile up his critics or his opponents and that extends throughout his life and it also extends into his work in the White House and that's actually what ended up making him so interesting to me and what I ended up focusing a lot in the piece is because he really answers this

question that I think will grow increasingly urgent in the years to come, which is what happens when the young right-wing trolls who are

on college campuses kicking up controversy or on social media, what happens when those people grow up and have really influential, important jobs?

And I think Stephen Miller gives us an answer to that.

Can I ask, just in terms of Stephen Miller and these questions we've just asked you, McKay, the trolling impulse works really well on cable news.

And Stephen Miller had an amazing interview with Jake Tapper that went viral.

I understand.

You have 24 hours a day of anti-Seven material.

You're not going to give three minutes for the American people to get it.

The real excuse is

that there's one viewer that you care about right now, and you're being obsequious.

You're being a factum in order to please him.

Okay.

And I think I've wasted it.

I care about wasted enough of my viewers quickly.

You know who I am.

As Republicans lawmakers call for a character

sessions to resign.

This is the question that one of my first questions that I had when I read the story.

Why sit down with an interview?

Why do a sit-down with The Atlantic?

Why?

That's a great question.

You can't troll.

Well, I mean, you can't troll a reporter in print the way that you can troll a reporter or an anchor on television.

And you certainly can't troll McKay Coppins in print.

You can't.

And you even talk about it.

And you talkable.

Well, you talk about it in the piece, which is a great character study of a person.

And

it's incredibly revealing in a way that I don't know if Stephen Miller actually benefits from the reveals at the end of the story, right?

I think it's what, why do you think he said yes?

You know, it's a really good question.

I don't know the answer, and I tend to not second-guess people when they tell me yes, I'll sit down with you.

I'm going to say, okay, great, I'm coming over.

Sure, but did you get a sense while you were talking to him?

I think that he has been behind the scenes for so much of this presidency.

I think that he sees himself as both a provocateur and a troll, but also a serious ideologue.

And in a way, I think he feels like there hasn't been enough attention paid to to that side of him.

He, you know, make no mistake, for all the amount of time he spends behind closed doors, he cares deeply about how he's seen and that he's given enough credit for the work that he does.

And my sense as I was talking to him was that he was trying to walk this line where he was, you know, part of him wanted to troll me.

He was, you know,

several different times was saying things that I just felt like there was no way he really meant them.

He was trying to kind of get a rise out of me or get me to print those words and get a rise out of our readers.

But even beyond that, he was trying to walk this line between

coming off as very

subservient and obsequious toward the president, because that's kind of one of the most important tips for survival in this White House, while also kind of telegraphing or communicating just how important he is.

And that was kind of this interesting line I kept seeing him walk throughout our conversation.

Tell us a little bit about Stephen Miller.

Where did this guy come from?

What led him to the White House?

Yeah, so he grew up in

Santa Monica, in a very liberal community, kind of this bubble of liberal affluence.

He went to Santa Monica High School, which is within Southern California, kind of famous for being this bastion of diversity and multiculturalism.

And his whole kind of shtick in high school was trying to challenge the liberal consensus at his school.

So, you know, he would write op-eds comparing students who were opposed to U.S.

military invention in the Middle East

to terrorists.

And he wrote an op-ed saying that Osama bin Laden would be very comfortable at Santa Monica High School.

He gave a speech famously running for student government in which his main platform plank before he was forcibly dragged off stage was that the janitors should be doing more work and that they should be picking up the garbage for the other students and he was kind of booed off stage.

But by all accounts, you know, he, he, everything he did in high school and then later at Duke in college where he went to school was kind of calibrated to offend his the sensibilities and kind of social niceties of his progressive peers.

And that that kind of platform that he created for himself, especially later in college at Duke,

is what kind of propelled him into national conservative politics.

McKay,

in your piece, you link back to this vice video of Stephen Miller in high school, and he's in the back of a bus coming back from a tennis match.

And what's striking about the video is

the trolly behavior is on full display.

He's talking about torture.

I don't think it's necessary to kill them entirely.

We're not a barbaric people.

We respect life.

Therefore, torture is the way to go.

Because torture, people can live.

Torture is a celebration of life and human dignity.

And then there's another clip where he talks about his receding hairline.

Yeah.

And it's like kind of a humiliating topic for someone who's 17 years old.

And he sort of makes a joke about it.

And I guess I'm asking you about it because so much of Stephen Miller's political persuasion seems to be rooted in his curious psychology.

And when you saw that clip and you saw both the sort of outwardly aggressive troll-like behavior and the self-effacing, sort of self-flagellating behavior that's in that clip, what did you make of it?

You know, it was interesting watching that to a certain degree, I kind of felt like that was typical teenage insecurity, which he masked with this kind of trolling bravado.

And that's something that I think has carried on into adulthood.

But I also think that

the people around him, even in the White House who I talk to now,

and people who've known him throughout his life, say he's always more self-aware than he lets on, right?

His kind of

his shtick, his persona, if you take it at face value, is very combative, very arrogant, very

kind of obnoxious.

But beneath it, just beneath the surface, was always this kind of smirk, right?

And you knew that

he was kind of self-aware about how people perceived him.

And he can be really funny.

I mean, even when I was talking to him, there were moments where he would make these kind of offhand comments that I couldn't help but you know crack up at.

He has this weird, I describe it in the piece as a charisma-like substance because

it's not quite charisma.

Yeah, you wouldn't come away from a conversation with him being like, oh, I was so charmed by that guy, but you're compelled, you're almost mesmerized by his whole kind of, his whole performance.

And I think that that comes through in that video.

The coinage charisma-like substance must outlive

even this profile of this man, I think.

Rosie, I had a question for you.

You have done a good amount of reporting on a guy who describes himself as a mentor to Stephen Miller, although Miller himself, and this is Richard Spencer, Miller himself diminishes the extent of their relationship and disavows, he says, Spencer's views.

Give us a sense of

what is the milieu that these two men are embedded in?

And what is this web of relationships?

How do these two figures relate to each other?

Aaron Powell, I wouldn't necessarily say that those two are embedded in the same milieu at this point.

Fair enough.

But from what I recall, they may have crossed paths at Duke.

And I think that Duke is like a really interesting part of both of those guys' development.

If you look at Stephen Miller,

you know, the Duke lacrosse case was a big formative event for him when he sort of started getting, started doing national TV hits and started bringing his

sort of conservative trolling that McKay so brilliantly describes in his piece, started sort of like bringing it national kind of.

And then as far as Richard Spencer, you know, that was one of the sort of kind of elite environments in which he was

stewing and forming this racist ideology that

he sort of repackaged later as the alt-right.

What's interesting to me about their connection, and again,

you know, Richard Spencer claims mentorship for Miller.

Miller has forcefully denied that for a lot of reasons,

you know, some of them political, some of them may be rooted in fact.

But he's, you know, Miller has said, I condemn his views.

But it is interesting that both of them kind of

came out of this same environment

and that they were, they at least crossed paths in the Duke Conservative Union where they were kind of working together to disrupt the liberal consensus on this college campus.

And in particular,

you can't overstate how important the Duke lacrosse scandal was to

both Stephen Miller's worldview and I think also Richard Spencer's.

But, you know, the Duke La Crosse case, for those who don't know, is this case where three white lacrosse players were accused by a local black woman in Durham, North Carolina, of rape.

And it became this instant national news story.

Reporters kind of swarmed the campus.

Protesters marched through the streets of Durham, banging

pots and pans.

And while most Duke students kind of tried to shy away from the whole controversy.

They didn't want to be associated with it.

It was kind of a nightmare for them, just trying to go through class and go through their student lives.

Stephen Miller seized it as an opportunity and started popping up on Fox News and

HLN and sparring with Nancy Grace.

And

he really did use it as an opportunity to kind of thrust himself into the national spotlight.

Richard Spencer, meanwhile, took the politics of that case and

particularly the fact that those three students were eventually exonerated.

The case unraveled.

The Durham District Attorney who was prosecuting was subsequently disbarred.

And the politics of that case kind of informed this white supremacist worldview that Spencer would go on to championing, where he kind of makes the case that

the forces of political correctness and American liberalism are arrayed against the persecuted white man.

And that kind of case informs his whole worldview.

It's really interesting to see how these two people who started out probably around the same place on that issue, in that case, took these kind of diverging paths.

Rosie, you know, as we talk about the campus, the sort of formative campus years for figures like Spencer and Miller, obviously there's a fair share of indignation in moments like the Duke La Crosse case.

But what comes through, and especially in McKay's piece, is the joy and the sort of meriness that all of this stoking of outrage

has for these guys.

Have you, in your reporting on this kind of like alt-right world, have you sensed the kind of glee that appears to be a motivating factor in Miller world?

Well, I mean, not just the alt-right, but I would say that on the right these days, and particularly sort of the Trump-supporting MAGA right,

you know,

this sort of trolling that Stephen Miller has brought into the White House is like a kind of, you know, a very essential sort of credo to them, you know, owning the libs and winning these sort of cultural fights and not just policy fights.

And, you know, Andrew Breitbart, the late Andrew Breitbart used to talk about politics being downstream from culture.

And he was kind of an early example of this sort of attitude of like just of winning on rhetoric and on media attention

and sort of like winning in the public arena as a way of winning politically and sort of winning people's hearts and minds culturally and also just winning in general.

And, you know, sort of this glee and kind of

the highs of winning the argument and of confrontation.

Right, exactly.

And I think that,

you know, it's clear that for some of these people, it is sort of fun.

And it is sort of, they do see themselves as kind of happy warriors.

Yeah.

And I think that what's interesting about it is that for a lot of the people in this kind of conservative trolling culture, the goal really isn't to win the argument in the traditional sense.

They're not trying to persuade anyone or win people over to their

ideology.

A lot of them are actually, they view winning the argument as eliciting the strongest, most hysterical reaction in their opponents.

And that's what this whole trolling culture is about.

I cannot tell you how sort of revelatory the things that you're saying are.

You know,

I went to the RNC convention.

I just came back from Indiana and Dallas.

And you go to these Trump rallies and you see the shirts that are on display.

Like there's an old favorite that people keep bringing out at events that I've seen that says, you know, Hillary sucks, but not like Monica.

And it is like abhorrent to people who are feminists and people who, I mean, or, and generally Americans who just think it's a particularly like violent and like semi-gruesome way of, you know, talking about women.

But

in the context of trolling and like pranking the libs, as you say, Rosie, what did you say?

Like

owning the libs, right?

Like it, it totally, it's all part of like this like very specific playbook.

And that's exactly what's happening at like merchandise tables all over the country.

Give me an example of McKay, of

his trolliest move in the White House.

You could make the argument, perhaps, that, you know, he was on campus, he was doing a lot of provocative things as a student that didn't really have that much of an impact.

But what is an example of a move that he's made in the White House that would deserve that label?

Yeah, so there are a few examples.

I think the most serious and substantive one

would be the implementation of the travel ban just in the first week of the Trump presidency.

Stephen Miller was, along with Steve Bannon and some others in the White House,

an architect of this travel ban.

And the way it was implemented seemed at the time to be just evidence of complete incompetence, right?

It was hastily written, signed on a Friday afternoon.

There was no guidance on how to implement it.

So immediately these airports all over the country were plunged in chaos.

Hundreds of people were detained.

Protesters showed up.

You know, TV cameras showed up.

And, you know, it seemed like this, oh, what a catastrophe for the Trump administration.

But there's been reporting,

and I've heard the same thing from sources, that the architects of the ban actually loved the reaction from the left and from liberals.

In fact, Steve Bannon is quoted in Michael Wolfe's book, Fire and Fury, saying that they enacted the disruptive ban on a weekend, quote, so the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.

And I mean,

you know, it's one thing for

campus conservatives to kind of pull off these stunts that anger the social justice-minded peers.

It's another action-bake sales, for example.

Right, exactly, where the white students are charged more than the other students.

That's one of the favorites of this culture.

But when it's translated into federal policymaking, the implications are real, the consequences are real,

and the stakes are just so high.

And that's what I think is so

kind of alarming to a lot of people about people like Stephen Stephen Miller having such influential roles in the administration.

Aaron Powell, but McKay, I guess I wonder if there's not like a, for lack of a better term, like a home alone syndrome that this White House is going through, which is like in the initial stage, it's like, we're creating havoc, we're eating dessert for breakfast, like

white chocolate on pancakes with marshmallows and like everything that's bad for you is good for you, you know, whatever, right?

You enjoy that for a period.

And then it's like, when are my parents coming home?

Right.

There's this, there's this, and I, and I kind of wonder you know you've you track Stephen Miller's sort of evolution um you know he's a merry prankster but at the same time he is now trying to convey a more button-up serious-minded approach to the conservative agenda isn't he oh no question and and that's one of the things about Miller's evolution is that Today, if you ask him, he won't admit that he's, you know, quote unquote trolling from the White House.

The closest I got him to admitting that was saying that he's always found value in generating constructive controversy for the sake of enlightenment, which is maybe just a pretty way of saying trolling.

But,

you know, he does try to at least put on this veneer of being the serious government official.

But even when, you know, you're right, that was in the first week of the presidency.

But fast forward a year later, during these immigration talks, I mean, Stephen Miller was appointed to be kind of one of the key point men from the White House in these immigration negotiations to spare the DACA recipients from deportation.

And by all accounts, not only was he not really working in good faith to make that happen, he was actively finding ways to undermine the negotiations by kind of doing things that he knew would, you know, kind of outrage and offend Democrats on Capitol Hill.

And even when I talked to him in March, he claimed that he was still working toward a deal

to help the Dreamers.

But then at the same time, he was telling me that Democrats have adopted a position of immigration nihilism and anarchy, which is, I'm sorry, just not the language you use if you're a negotiator working to usher a bipartisan bill to the president's desk.

Stick around.

In a moment, we'll discuss whether it's right to call Stephen Miller a troll and what his antics say about our political culture.

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To build on this line of questioning, I want to ask about the use of the word troll.

You write in your piece, McKay, that throughout the course of reporting the piece, you kept trying to poke at the question of, is this guy serious?

And I think that both supporters and detractors of the administration would say, why wouldn't you take this guy seriously?

Even if his most

extreme racist beliefs seem to have been consistent from a pretty early age, it doesn't seem like he's just ping-ponging around a kind of arbitrary bunch of ideological positions just to provoke people.

Even though he's Jewish, he seems to believe pretty consistently that white Christian English-speaking America is the true America and everyone else is kind of a guest.

And why not take that ideology seriously?

Yeah, to me, the question isn't

whether to take him seriously or his ideology seriously.

I think that there is no question that, given his role and given the influence he has to create policy,

we need to take him seriously, right?

And that's clear from the beginning of the piece.

To me, the question of

whether this ideology is rooted in this conservative trolling culture is important because Stephen Miller isn't the only one who's going to cycle through the White House or get to a position of prominence who comes from that culture.

You know, I write in the piece about how there is this trick that a lot of conservative trolls like to play, especially kind of online trolls, where they will say the most outlandishly racist things or misogynistic things

and they'll post memes and they'll, you know, pick bad faith fights on Twitter.

And then when you call them on it in some serious way where they feel like they have to seriously respond, they'll retreat to this kind of position of, oh, I'm just being ironic.

This is all in the name of free speech, right?

I did it for the laws.

I did it.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's a lot of what is happening on campuses, right?

These conservative student groups invite, you know, ridiculous speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos to come to their college campuses.

And they say, oh, we don't agree with everything he says, but we're standing up for free speech.

And if you can't handle it, then that's your problem.

But at the end of the day, you know, I write this in the piece.

It really doesn't matter whether you truly believe these racist things that you're saying, or you're just saying them ironically, or you're just saying them as a form of protest or rebellion.

If you're saying them, there's no real difference, right?

And so that's on a smaller scale.

That's on, you know, internet message boards and

campus debates.

But the problem is when you then transport that ideology or that debate to an office in the West Wing down the hall from the Oval Office,

you get

the quote-unquote trolling that turns into the travel ban, that turns into a government shutdown, that turns into national policy.

And that's where I think it is important to interrogate where these people are coming from and to understand their ideology because

we need to know what's going to happen when this generation grows up to take over, for example, the Republican Party.

Rosie, does the term troll, is there any danger of it being euphemistic?

This is a criticism that's often made of the term alt-right, that

it is this ultimately white supremacist movement's description for itself, label for itself.

And is there a similar danger with a word like troll that it comes to seem like a merry prankster term when in fact it's describing something quite serious?

Aaron Ross Powell, well, you know, the impact of words is going to be the same whether the person saying them is, you know, quote-unquote trolling or not.

And, you know, I remember during the election, a lot of journalists were getting trolled on Twitter, right?

But the trolling was actually like people getting tweeted pictures of them photoshopped into gas chambers and stuff like that.

And so if that's meant in jest, okay, well, A, it's not funny.

B, the impact is still the same.

The impact is still just as sort of dark and disturbing as it would be if it were meant seriously.

And so I do think that the word trolling can be used to sort of excuse rhetoric that is more than just trolling.

But I also think that it is a useful term in and of itself because it does express a certain sort of a certain kind of rhetoric that's meant to, like McKay was saying, get a rise out of people just for the sake of it, cause hysteria just for the sake of it, which has become such an important part of our political discourse.

Aaron Powell, I also think that it's helpful for people who find themselves on the other end of this to understand if it's trolling, right?

Again, it's not to minimize what they're doing, but if you understand and fully internalize that these people, whether they're in the White House or just anonymous Twitter accounts, are not actually trying to persuade you of anything, that they're not actually trying to win an argument, that they're doing this to agitate you, that they're calibrating their arguments to offend and outrage you,

it can change the way that you kind of you re-interact with it.

Now, it's hard because

not even five, ten years ago,

the predominant kind of savvy consensus online was don't feed the trolls, right?

If somebody's trying to troll you, just ignore them.

And I think that that was pretty good advice for a long time on the internet.

The trolls have now grown up.

They've gotten, they've migrated off.

They're giants.

Someone fed them after midnight.

Yes, exactly.

They've turned into gremlins.

Yeah, Yeah, but wait, McKay,

you do quote a friend, a former friend who knew Stephen Miller from way back when, and she says, you know, in retrospect, maybe the best response would have been to basically ignore Stephen Miller as he was trying to rabble-rouse.

So you think that that kind of strategy is now outmoded?

I do.

And actually, a funny thing that we couldn't fit in the piece, but that Sayward Darby actually told me was that for years after Stephen Miller came on the political scene, she didn't want to be quoted on the record.

Sayward is actually an accomplished journalist herself.

And she just didn't want to talk about Stephen on the record.

And the reason was because she didn't want to, quote unquote, feed the troll.

But she finally decided to talk to me on the record because she said, it's no longer useful for me to try to ignore him.

Regardless of whether we ignore him or not, he is...

in the White House.

He has this powerful role.

And so we have to kind of try to understand who he is and what's motivating him.

So Sayward, and I think I agree with her,

has kind of changed her thinking on him.

It may have been useful to try to ignore him in college when he was trying to get a rise out of you, but now that he's in the West Wing, it's pretty useless.

You know, the strategy of ignoring the person who is acting as the troll is exactly what the Republican primary campaigns who were opposing Trump during the 2016 primaries,

that was kind of their theory of the case at first.

And, you know, look what happened.

And I think that oftentimes when the normies, so to speak, decide to just ignore

the North Laura.

Normies are like non-trolls.

Normies are like you and me.

Right.

We're normies.

As far as you know.

Yeah.

Unless McHay is doing stuff that I don't know about.

Wait, wait, but Rosie, I have a follow-up to that.

You talk about the, you know, the sort of alt-right, the right, the MAGA crowd as wanting to own the libs.

Do they ever feel like the libs own them?

Like, is there ever the concession that like, okay, we lost that battle?

And if so, what has that quote-unquote liberal strategy looked like?

I'm trying to think of a specific example.

I mean, I would say broadly,

there is the phenomenon of

like when conservatives often complain about their free speech being shut down, that is sometimes an effect of when they have been,

when an instance of owning has happened.

I'm struggling to come up with a specific example of that, but

it's hard to know how the cycle ends.

But part of it, I mean, but like

part of the ethos is sort of not admitting defeat, right?

Right.

Yeah.

And, you know, and kind of continuing and, you know, maybe moving the goalposts an argument in order to keep it going or shifting to a different topic.

Yeah, there's this, there's this line that McKay quotes from Stephen Miller in the piece.

He referred to it earlier in the conversation, his memorable, most memorable act of teenage trolling, where he speaks to this theater of his peers saying, quote, 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?

McKay writes, the crowd erupted in booze and Miller, looking pleased with himself, was forcibly removed from the stage.

I dwelled on that quote because it reminded me so much of this passage from an interview that our managing editor Adrian Green did with a man named Mohamed Zakar, who is a janitor at Harvard.

Adrian asked him if the people that he cleaned up after respected his work and he said some do, but others don't seem to.

He named as an example when he would come across folks who just threw, had something just thrown on the floor next to the trash can.

And he said, you know, As an adult, you see the trash can.

You can just use the trash can.

If you throw a piece of cake and it falls out, even if you throw it in the the trash can afterwards, it's still a mess.

It's just causing more work in sleeping.

When you see a person do that, especially when they do it in front of you, you just feel useless.

They say, that's your job to clean up whatever I do.

I dwelled on that because there is the line between, on the one hand, I can totally imagine young Stephen Miller on the other side of that quote saying, but this is your job

to clean up whatever I do.

And yet to hear from Mohamed Zakar and to hear his voice in my head kind of follows the logical conclusion of how dehumanizing that can feel.

I'm glad you brought that up because I think it gets at an important dynamic of this whole kind of trolling effort, which is that Stephen Miller might have been aiming that speech at trolling his classmates, right?

His liberal classmates, his peers.

But in the crossfire, the people who actually often get hurt the the most in these

efforts to quote-unquote troll are the people that the jokes are about, right?

And so

we don't hear from, we hear the booze from his classmates, which is exactly what Stephen Miller wanted.

We see him get dragged off stage looking happy about the whole experience.

We don't see any of the janitors at the school who probably felt pretty bad about that.

whole spectacle if they heard it, right?

And that's just a small example of all of this, this whole culture, right?

Is that a lot of these trolls think that they think about the people,

whether it's the marginalized communities or minority groups or whoever that they're making jokes about or posting racist memes about, they think of them in such abstract terms that they don't even, you know, it's not even a real consideration about how their words could affect them.

them because they're just so obsessed with quote-unquote melting snowflakes or triggering the lips, right?

But I don't understand.

I mean, this is the fundamental thing I don't get.

I mean, so they're divorced from the humanity of

the sort of insults they're hurling, right?

Where did this come from in terms of Stephen Miller, who grew up with Democratic parents in the liberal enclave of Santa Monica?

Was it just all too much for him?

I mean,

was it sort of like forced down his throat to the degree that he reacted and boomeranged in the opposite direction?

Do you have any sense of what his relationship is with his family at this point, McKay?

I don't.

I mean, I know I quote in the piece, or I write in the piece that his parents helped pay for his million-dollar condo in Washington, D.C.

So I don't think he's a stranger.

No fake money is useful.

It's useful at times.

There also has been some reporting that his parents, after

Stephen went on to college, changed their party registrations to Republicans.

So they might have become more conservative over the years as well.

But I do think that part of what Miller was reacting to, and I think this is the case for a lot of these conservative trolls who come from kind of upper middle class elite backgrounds,

was what he viewed as kind of the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of the liberal authority figures in his life.

I quote in the piece Jason Islas, who was a progressive activist now in Southern California, who was friends with Stephen Miller when they were kids.

And he told me that the Santa Monica community that they were in was the kind of place where wealthy white liberals would conspicuously celebrate diversity in very self-congratulatory ways and then avert their eyes from kind of the inequalities of their community.

And so Miller Well, you know, I think that initially at least, and this is what at least his friends at the time say, he was inspired or kind of motivated to sort of puckishly rebel against those kind of wealthy white liberals more than he was thinking about Latino immigrants or

any of the other kind of marginalized groups that he would talk about.

He was really thinking about that class of people.

And then I think he over time internalized the things that he was saying and it's clear that he believes them.

But I think that that's part of where this comes from.

Yeah.

Reading your piece, I had this sense of

you mentioned at one point

the guidebook that Stephen Miller got from David Horowitz, an organization called Students for Academic Freedom, the guidebook for building an ideological controversy on your campus, the playbook for sort of stirring up a controversy, inviting a controversial speaker, getting press when that speaker is protested or disinvited and what have you.

And it reminded me a little bit, I think often we kind of stereotype both the PC and the anti-PC forces on campuses as being a little bit naive about the effects that their politics have.

But it seems that they are in fact on both sides, I would argue, of this

quite sophisticated about it,

that there are playbooks.

It reminded me a little bit of Andrew England's playbook that was reported by Ashley Feinberg for the Huffington Post that he used for the Daily Stormer, a style guide to blurring the line between what's a joke and what's truly an offensive slur.

He talks about in this style guide, describing Anders Brevik, the man who committed mass murder in Norway, as a heroic freedom fighter, ironically, because

readers

will parse the irony immediately just because, how could you describe him that way straightforwardly?

But part of them will always wonder

whether you mean it.

Rosie,

how do you think humor, I mean, this

comedy is where these lines between what's acceptable and what's beyond the pale

is played with the most.

How do you think that we should grapple with the new and kind of important role of humor in our politics?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, this was one of the key insights of the alt-right when it first started getting a lot of attention and bubbling into the national consciousness in,

you know, as the so-called alt-right in the, you know, in 2015 and 2016, was was that if you use like funny memes, if you kind of speak the language of ironic internet humor, you are able to like really muddy the waters in terms of what's a joke, what's not, are they trolling, are they serious?

And it also makes the it also makes it much more sort of

kind of appealing to people who might be sort of willing to be kind of recruited into that ideology because it's not as sort of it doesn't seem at least at first as sort of aggressive and as in your face as as as it might actually be uh underneath the surface um but i yeah i mean i definitely think that the humor aspect of of the alt-right was huge in making it into a thing i think that more broadly in our politics um

but i think both sides do it right i mean like i think that american politics is like fun and crazy at times and you know and like politicians try to do funny tweets and stuff like that and like that is that is a feature of how things work here but definitely specifically when you're talking about the alt-right, it was a huge part of their strategy.

Well, let's just also be clear, the humor that we're talking about is not humor that's been, you know,

pictures of journalists in gas chambers and revisiting our Nazi history.

And that kind of humor has not been considered humor up until this point where we're categorizing sort of trollish behavior on the internet as a form of,

I guess, what they call comedy, right?

Yeah.

No, definitely not.

And I would say, like, you know, I don't think that most people would consider a lot of that stuff funny, but there was, I think, an element of like, you know, young alienated men who

thought that it was, thought that it was like so outside the box that it was funny.

And, you know, the content of these memes was often racist and disturbing, but sometimes they would sort of look like familiar memes in a way.

And so it was a way to,

you know, like I said, like use that language and use humor to sort of for ill.

Well, there's a lot to chew on here.

I think we could keep, I think we could keep wrestling with this for a while.

Oh, we and we will

be promoting public, as journalists.

Yes, I think this is our present and our future.

Thanks.

Thanks for that, Alex.

I'm cheered.

I'm encouraged by Devil.

You're welcome.

You're welcome.

Awesome.

Can I turn to something a little bit funnier?

And now for keepers.

And now for keepers.

I'm going to ask the question I ask at the end of every episode.

What do you not want to forget?

We're going to start, as usual, with a keeper from one of our listeners, Richard in Baltimore.

My keeper is I was visiting my cousins in New York City and went bird watching in Central Park, which is amazing this time of year.

And there's a tribe of birdwatchers that develop a certain bond immediately.

But the biggest keeper was an urban Zen encounter in which I was on the sixth floor of a Chinatown walk-up where my cousin's daughter was renting.

And a pair of American kestrels, which are beautiful small falcons that look like kind of miniature peregrine falcons, was sitting right outside the window about two feet away.

And I got a photo.

So urban bird watching and the tribe of birdwatchers, may they live live long and prosper.

Awesome.

Awesome.

It is great after an episode spent talking about the deadly seriousness

of trolling to hear the simple pleasures of urban bird watching.

Also,

after hearing the phrase miniature falcon, I definitely had to Google the American kestrel, and it's great.

I recommend it to all of our listeners.

I will do some Googling of my own.

Awesome.

Thank you, Richard.

Alex, what's your keeper?

Well, Matt, at the risk of

sounding like I'm cheating on my family at the Atlantic, I was in Chicago doing some stories for CBS, where I also work.

And it was a really interesting week to be interviewing Tomi Adeyemi, who is a 24-year-old literary sensation.

She is a Harvard graduate.

the daughter of two Nigerian immigrants, and she's written a blockbuster fiction novel that's set sort of in the future past.

It's another great example of Afro-futurism.

And it's about the protagonist is a teenage

girl of woman of color.

And the story combines elements of Yoruba, African mysticism, and,

you know, in the way that Black Panther both hearkened to African tradition and African future, so too does her book, with a little bit of Harry Potter thrown in.

And Tomi is an incredible interview subject and a very wise soul for someone so young.

Her book is already getting made into a movie, and it will surely be a trilogy, a la the Hunger Games, or Harry Potter, or ultimately Black Panther.

But as we talk about what I think in this particular week and in this discussion too, has been

what has felt like a regressive week on issues of race and identity, it is, I think, a good reminder to pick up her book, Children of Blood and Bone, and remind yourself of what the future looks like.

Maybe not everybody's future, but certainly one part of our American future and one part of the conversation is moving quickly and inexorably into a completely different landscape as it concerns race and culture.

So anybody that needs something else

to feast on at the end of this week, check out Children of Blood and Bone.

Wonderful.

Rosie, let me turn to you next.

What do you not want to forget?

I am obsessed with the Anna Delvey story.

And that's.

I like the declarative nature of this, Rosie.

No, this is finally like I have like a keeper that I'm like, this is you want to keep

legitimately really, yeah.

So this was, this is a woman who is currently in Rikers Island, but she has been the subject of two long articles in the last few weeks, one in Vanity Fair and just this week in New York Magazine.

And she is a Russian who grew up partially in Germany and who reinvented herself as this kind of like international you know, rich kid art trust fund person

and managed to like scam a bunch of fancy hotels in New York and restaurants and stuff out of tons of money just kind of like living in hotels for free and like leeching all this money off her friends and her Instagram is all of you know like her you know in these luxury locations doing all this glamorous stuff but it was all like a complete fiction and eventually the the wall sort of came crashing down but it's a really fascinating story about how somebody was able to kind of scam New York society basically sounds like some pro tips are in that story

I'd like to watch it for some hustler advice.

Yeah, really, she's an anti-capitalist hero.

So

sign me up.

No, that just sounds nice to get free shit from hotels.

So just saying, not saying.

Except for when the bill finally comes for real, you know, then you tail it out.

Right.

McKay, how about you?

From anti-capitalist hero to capitalist shill, allow me to give maybe the most basic keeper in the history of keepers on this podcast.

Go for it.

Listen, I like money.

No, listen.

I'm a man of simple taste.

I'm a simple man.

I saw the Star Wars movie, the most recent Star Wars movie.

Solo.

The solo movie.

Look, I'm not a big Star Wars guy.

I don't know a lot about it, but I went and saw it with my family.

I really enjoyed it.

I think it didn't get like- Don't sound so apologetic, man.

No, I'm just.

Well, a lot of people are really mad about it, and Star Wars fans are mad about it.

Control them.

Troll them.

Listen, it is the greatest Star Wars movie in the franchise.

No, I particularly enjoyed Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian.

It's a fun movie.

If you're looking for like something to get out of the heat and eat some popcorn and spend two hours, go see Solo and I will get the check from Disney next week.

Thank you.

So McKay's piece touched off a pretty rich discussion in the forums of our membership program, The Masthead.

And one of the questions that it touched off concerned the description of Stephen Miller as being sort of a performance artist.

There were several good questions about

who is he performing for as a performance artist?

What does it mean to have a performance as outre as is exhibited in the White House, in a stage as August as the White House?

But

one of our members asked the question, is anti-politics politics,

which is interesting to us.

But it reminded me of this fantastic exhibit right now, which kind of grapples with many of these questions from a different perspective.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is hosting this exhibit of outsider art

in America that kind of knows about the essential problem of quote-unquote outsider art.

It's very aware of this question of who determines what is actually insider art, what what gets exhibited, what gets the grants,

what

should live on, what actually has meaning and beauty.

The exhibit includes, among other things, sculptures from this guy, William Edmondson, the first black artist to be exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who briefly enjoyed a moment of incandescence on the international stage and then was sort of kind of left by the wayside, forgotten, and now his work commands significant sums now that he's dead and buried in an unmarked grave, apparently.

He incidentally lived in a neighborhood in Nashville, Edge Hill,

which

he was able to afford a house in because it was segregated, but is now rapidly gentrifying and real estate prices are, as you might expect, quite high and on the rise.

But he

the whole exhibit is about folks like William Edmondson and what their work says about us, about the artistic establishment who makes the decision to let folks like us see these folks.

And it was a great, great avenue,

departing off of your piece.

Yeah, it sounds fascinating.

All right.

McKay, Rosie, my esteemed co-host.

Thank you very much.

Thank you guys.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

The Atlantic's executive producer for podcasts is Catherine Wells.

Thanks, as always, to my esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner, and to our colleagues, McKay Coppins and Rosie Gray.

Make sure to check out McKay's terrific story if you have not.

Thanks also, as always, to John Batiste for the immortal rendition of the battle hymn that plays us in and out every week.

Send us your keeper.

Call 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact info.

Let us know what you don't want to forget.

Check us out at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

But most importantly, thank you for listening.

Forgive the metaphor, but our world is filled with bridges guarded by trolls.

If you should come across one, may you find the inspiration to build another bridge.

We'll see you next week.