As I’ve recently noted, Megyn Kelly’s attacks on the Duke lacrosse case (her skepticism totally absent with Tara Reade) helped make Kelly a Fox star. But a 2017 New York Magazine article makes a compelling argument that the Duke case gave birth to the whole alt-right, including Miller’s career.

As the article notes, Miller, a senior at Duke at the time, became obsessed with the case. Right along with Fox News. Miller seems to have leveraged his Fox News appearance(s) into becoming the conservative student voice on the subject. From New York Magazine:

[Miller] published a column in the student newspaper titled “A Portrait of Radicalism,” just a few days after he appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show to chastise Duke’s faculty.
...

Miller devoted more of his column to the lacrosse scandal than any other topic. … “If you find yourself in the presence of a student who insists the lacrosse players are a bunch of racist criminals and that the players are guilty no matter what the evidence says — put them in their place,” Miller wrote. “If you don’t, I will.”

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Miller also recognized the value of taking cues from Fox News. “You know what you and your paper should do?” Bill O’Reilly told him, at the end of one appearance. “You get your own petition against [the faculty], and we’ll see how many students sign it. And we’ll have your back.” Miller returned to campus and started a petition.

The article doesn’t mention whether Miller returned to The O’Reilly Factor with the petition (though I’ll bet he did) but it does say he became a “sought-after guest for cable-news bookers desperate for a conservative campus voice. … At one point, he appeared during prime time five nights in a single week, and regularly went on Nancy Grace’s show, where he displayed no fear of getting into fights.”

The problem was that while the players may have been innocent of the rape (the prosecutor was later disbarred), “everyone could see there was something wrong with a group of 40 white college students hiring a black stripper, only to greet her arrival with one of the players saying, ‘We asked for whites, not n*ggers,’” as New York noted.

But not Miller. He claimed to care about due process, "and yet, when he condemned the lack of faculty outrage about the alleged rape of a white Duke student by a black man that happened after the lacrosse scandal, he did so two years before that case was properly adjudicated." He doesn’t seem to have had a problem with the “lock her up” chants at Trump rallies about Hillary Clinton, either.