Yale dragged into ’24 presidential contest — and not in a good way
Satire is falling into disuse of late, having increasingly become one with reality.
Witness this statement from a leading candidate for the U.S. presidency about his alma mater, Yale University; he was class of 2001 and captain of the baseball team.
This Eli grad recently told a conservative audience in Naples, Florida that his Blue experience in New Haven was “the first time that I saw unadulterated leftism … We’re basically being told the Soviet Union was the victim in the Cold War.” He added that when he was on campus professors and fellow students alike “rejected God, and they hated our country.”
You can listen to it online. Can you guess his name?
He’s Ron Desantis, the governor of Florida and current candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Except for the environs of Yale University, Desantis says he loves his country. He defends his elite credentials (all Ivied-up candidates nowadays flee from them in wild-eyed panic) by stressing that he graduated from a public high school, not an exclusive private academy like Andover. He makes it sound like he was beset on all sides by penny-loafing preppies.
In fact, public school graduates made up the majority of his roughly 1,300 classmates — 54 percent to be precise. That sure is a lot of virulent nation-hating atheists. Desantis would have had more than 700 public schoolers to commiserate with and convert to believing in the Hereafter. Based on his statement above, they all hated the Almighty regardless of their academic pedigree.
Desantis apparently didn’t fully grasp the pernicious influence of a Yale education right away. He also stated recently:
“In retrospect, Yale allowed me to see the future. It just took me 20 years to realize it.” I don’t think clairvoyance counts if it takes 20 years to come into focus, right around the time you are considering a presidential run.
Indeed, right after Yale, Desantis made a beeline for Harvard Law School, another Ivy redoubt not known for its conservative bent. He wasn’t through sleeping with the enemy.
What is beyond dispute is that many graduates of Mother Yale (full disclosure, this writer is Yale College, 1971), have, like Desantis, become embedded in the ruling class — but far from all have been left of center. For example, our biggest president (over 300 pounds) was William Howard Taft, a Yalie and a Republican. Ditto for the much trimmer and right-leaning Bushes, Georges H.W. and W.
Three of the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court are Yale University grads: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh, all decidedly conservative and appointed by Republican presidents.
Like Desantis, Clarence Thomas also found his Yale experience (Yale Law, 1974) disappointing and felt he was overlooked in his post-graduation job hunt because he was perceived as having benefited from affirmative action. As a result, he believed that he didn’t get the expected Yale career bump after graduation.
In his memoir Thomas wrote: “After graduating from Yale, I met a black alumnus of the University of Michigan Law School who told me that he’d made a point of not mentioning his race on his application. I wished with all my heart that I’d done the same. By then I knew I’d made a mistake in going to Yale. I felt as though I’d been tricked, that some of the people who claimed to be helping me were in fact hurting me.”
It should be noted here that Thomas eventually received a succession of prestigious federal appointments from fellow Yalies: former Missouri Senator John Danforth and President George H.W.
Bush, culminating on his ascension to the highest court in the land.
Bumpety bump at last!
Furthermore, four members of the previous president’s Republican cabinet, at one point, hailed from Yale, among them John Bolton, Ben Carson, and Steven Mnuchin.
So if Yale’s aim is to be a bastion of unadulterated liberal libel against God and our nation, as Desantis alleges, it clearly deserves an F.