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Stephen Miller’s Old Teacher Suspended for Calling Him a ‘Loner’ Who Ate Glue

After saying he was a "strange dude" in third grade, the 72-year-old is on temporary "home assignment."
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Photo by Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Earlier this week, a woman who taught Trump's senior political advisor Stephen Miller in elementary school told the Hollywood Reporter he used to eat glue as a third grader, among a few other "strange personal habits": He was a "loner," she said, "isolated and off by himself all the time," a kid who reminded her of Pig Pen from Peanuts. About 25 years after she had Miller as a student, she's still teaching in the same California school district—but now the bizarre interview she gave might leave her out of a job.

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The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District just put 72-year-old Nikki Fiske on "home assignment" for telling the world how much of a weirdo Miller allegedly was at, like, eight years old, the Los Angeles Times reports. She's essentially been suspended while the district figures out what to do with her—as spokeswoman Gail Pinsker told the Times, it's concerned "about her release of student information, including allegations that the release may not have complied with applicable laws and district policies."

Sure, it's tempting to take a kind of perverse joy in hearing that the guy behind Trump's brutal anti-immigration policies used to eat glue, but—regardless of who he is now—back then, he was just some eight-year-old kid. And aside from the ethical implications of telling a national publication all about the humiliating shit he may or may not have done at that age, it might have been illegal: The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) prevents teachers from disclosing certain private information about students without their consent, which you'd have to assume Fiske never got here. Still, it's unclear if snacking on Elmer's or whatever would even qualify as "private information" in this case.

As the LA Times pointed out, Fiske appears to be an outspoken Democrat from the looks of her Facebook page, where she's been viciously attacked by folks on the right since the THR story went live. The 72-year-old has been called a "pathetic old hag" and worse; one particularly nasty stranger threatened to "hunt [her] down."

It's all very, very 2018: a teacher revealing embarrassing dirt on a former student and a mob of strangers saying terrible things about her online, all over an architect of human suffering who once made awful jokes about torture and still, somehow, managed to ascend into the upper echelons of the White House. Just bring on the apocalypse already.

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