VerStandig grew up in Bethesda and attended Georgetown Day School, where he was a “chubby kid with not a lot of friends,” he says. A sense of alienation turned him into a teenage right-winger, an ideology reflected in his opinion pieces for one of the University of Wisconsin’s student newspapers. As an undergraduate, he railed against abortion and gun control in writing that now makes him “blush pretty hard,” he says.
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