Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/12/trumps-pet-nazi-stephen-mill.html
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I don’t like the teacher in this article, but I’m probably biased having had some negative experiences as a kid.
Maybe if teachers didn’t treat kids like tiny adults (complete with judgement, bullying, and shaming), some of these “weird loners” would turn into happy mutants instead of angry fascists.
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I think it’s best to not engage in this kind of nonsense. I know it’s amusing but I’d rather focus on the fact that the Nosferatu cosplayer in the WH is effectively aiding in the permanent separation of immigrant children from their biological parents through adoption/abduction. Stuff that has substance now is more important than poking fun at childhood silliness.
Edit: Also I liked making a ‘second skin’ on my hands with Elmer’s white glue. Being a kid is weird.
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I don’t like the weird “everyone rapes in HS!” mentality some on the right have, but I do think all of us have done weird stuff as 3rd graders.
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I think the reporter who wrote this artice needs to interview Billy Madison’s former teachers next. “Miss Lippy’s car is green.”
I was a paste kid myself, but who cares. And there is no reason for dismissal. Isn’t it enough that Miller is a creepy adult who advocates seperating families and making children orphans? This is what is important.
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I remember in Kindergarden, Tommy Masters (Masterson?) got caught eating glue, and the little orange tip on the glue was destroyed, like gnawed on so the tip was opened up like a flower to get glue out easier.
No idea if he turned out ok or not.
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I admit that I’ve given it a taste once or twice as a kid. I can recall that Elmer’s paste had a slight minty flavor to it.
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Don’t flatter him. Stephen Miller would love to have an idiotic piggish police chief for a father. 
He’s got an idiotic piggish commander-in-chief as a surrogate.
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I’m not going read too much into the behaviour of a third grader in regard to the making of this as-yet unfulfilled Eichmann. The behaviour of his parents, on the other hand…
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.
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I mean, I was pretty bullied, and I’m not an angry fascist. At some point, people have to take responsibility for being a terrible person.
Not that eating paste is any indication of fascism or being a bad person in the future in 3rd grade… but Miller isn’t a terrible person because he got bullied in elementary school. He’s made choices in his life, and that includes choosing to be an asshole.
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It’s pretty pathetic that a reporter would think it’s appropriate to track down the third grade teacher to comment on what the guy was like as an eight year old. It’s even worse that the teacher thought it was acceptable to make these comments, regardless of politics. I would not want my elementary school life being a topic of discussion or a source of judgement of the adult me.
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I agree that the glue thing is of questionable relevance, but the news to me here is that this guy is 33!? A child of the 80’s? Some would probably even label him as a Milennial! I guess we can’t blame everything on the Boomers forever.
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Let’s not conflate an actual real-life monster who has done more damage to the world in his short 33 years than most people can manage in 70 with the general phenomenon of children doing strange things. All children are strange, they do strange things that seem creepy or unusual to us because we’re adults with lots of cultural baggage telling us what is or isn’t socially acceptable, but they don’t have that same understanding.
He also probably believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, shall we attack that as well? It’s one thing to look at his history and say, “there were signs” but it’s another thing entirely to mock him as a child.
Mocking children is the kind of thing that the likes of Fox News and Alex Jones do. We have to be better than them. It might not be nearly as much fun being better than them, but we have to. Pretty much everyone involved in the Trump regime needs to be put in prison, probably for the rest of their lives. They’re playing fast and loose with the fate of the entire human race, there isn’t actually much worse a person or group of people can do than willingly, if not willfully risking the very future of the entire planet to secure political power.
Let’s deal with that very real and serious problem, and refrain from mocking 8 year old children instead?
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Child Stephen Miller is not adult Stephen Miller. What I read is a story about a bullied kid, a kid that didn’t fit in, exhibiting signs of possible abuse, certainly a victim of bullying, from the teacher and students. What kind of adult forms those opinions of an 8-year-old child? He was “weird” and isolated – maybe he was isolated because other kids bullied him or excluded him? For the teacher to dish this out now, based on her perceptions of him as a child says more about her than it does Miller.
I think Stephen Miller is despicable, no question, but I separate that child from who he is now. It begs the question as to his current personality and how he arrived there. I don’t believe anyone is born evil, or even bad. Maybe Miller’s a sociopath, but maybe he was conditioned to become the creep he is now, based on how people treated him, at least in part.
To be clear, adult Stephen Miller is a bad person, with horrible, criminal ideas. The kid in that class photo is just a child who was clearly bullied by his peers and his teacher, and for that I sympathize and don’t think it’s “fun” to make light of this.
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Thank you.
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You’re one of those fun loving ones? Funny hat Wednesday types? 
Sometimes… not today, but sometimes.
Actually, I can’t remember the last time I wore a hat…
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Yeesh. I hate the guy too, but a teacher calling him out for behavior as a kid. Maybe that fuckwad wouldn’t be such a shit if this teacher had tried to help him instead of judging him. I was a pretty weird kid in 3rd grade and definitely a loner, I’m doing just fine now. Judge the guy on what he is, not who he was as a 3rd grader.
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