On Marc Maron’s WTF podcast this week, Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame revealed that when he was enrolled at New York’s Hunter College High School, his class bully was a student named Felipe Andres Coronel, better known now as Immortal Technique.
“He terrorized kids, he threw them in the garbage. I got thrown in the garbage by him,” Miranda told Maron.
Rightfully or not, Miranda and his beloved, expensive hip-hop musical have become punching bags this year for leftist critics, a cultural stand-in for the kind of moneyed, clueless liberalism that now seems powerless in the face of Donald Trump. (See Miranda’s reworking of Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments” as a pro-Hillary Clinton anthem for a prime example of this dynamic at work.)
Immortal Technique is a crusty socialist rapper who gives interviews about Hugo Chavez, and rails against the drug war and the Patriot Act in some of his best-known songs. The image of Immortal Tech literally throwing Lin-Manuel into the garbage is sort of a perfect crystallization of the fighting that consumed the Democratic Party and the left in 2016.
Eventually, the two students met onstage. “He got a part senior year [in the school play] and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m in a fucking play with the dude that scares the shit out of all my friends,'” Miranda told Maron. No word on whether they eventually bonded over their shared love of hip-hop.
