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Ivy League Incompetents and Reactionaries [1]

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Date: 2023-01-29

Grading the Ivy's based on their alums.

Conservative columnist William F. Buckley, a graduate of Yale University (1950), claimed he would “rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

David Halberstam (Harvard University, 1955) in The Best and the Brightest (1969), chronicled how supposed Ivy League intellectual all-stars in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations guided the United States into ill advised and unwinnable imperialist wars in South East Asia that cost more than 50,000 American lives. President John F. Kennedy graduated from Harvard College in 1940, his brother and United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1948, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was a graduate of Harvard Business School, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy graduated from Yale University before becoming a Harvard Fellow, and Special Advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who later documented the Kennedy administration in his Pulitzer Prize winning book A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965), graduated from Harvard in 1938.

The two Bush administrations and their disastrous military policies also relied heavily on Ivy Leaguers. George H. W. Bush graduated from Yale in 1948; his son graduated from Yale in 1968 and received an MBA from Harvard in 1975. The Secretary of State for the first President Bush during the push for war with Iraq was James Baker, who graduated from Princeton. The Secretary of Defense, Dick Chaney, was a Yale dropout. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh was a Yale graduate. He was succeeded as Attorney General by Columbia University graduate William Barr who was later Attorney General again in the Trump Administration.

In the administration of the younger Bush, Dick Chaney was Vice-President, Bush’s first Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld graduated from Princeton. Attorney Generals John Ashcroft graduated from Yale, Alberto Gonzales from Harvard Law School, and Michael Mukasey got his law degree at Yale. Homeland Security Czars Thomas Ridge and Michael Chertoff both graduated from Harvard.

Ivy League colleges, especially Harvard, are responsible for the education, or miseducation, of a number of the more prominent rightwing crazies in government today. They flock to these schools to make contacts and practice elitist arrogance, but don’t seem to have learned very much useful or humane.

Donald Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, but of course, refuses to release transcripts. The Trump White House staff included Yale graduates Steven Mnuchin (1985), Ben Carson (1973), Wilbur Ross (1959), Alex Azar (1991) and Stephen Schwarzman (1969) and Harvard alumni Jared Kushner (2003), Steve Bannon (1985), Kayleigh McEnany (2016), Mark Esper (1995), Alexander Acosta (1990, 1994), Elaine Chao (1979), and Mike Pompeo (1994). William Barr has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Columbia University.

Mega-MAGA Trumpist Representative Elise Stefanik (NY), the number three Republican leader in the House of Representatives, who called the January 6 hearings a “partisan witch-hunt” and voted to invalidate the 2020 election, graduated from Harvard (2006), as did mega-MAGA Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton (1998). Former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse (1994), who turned against Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial, was tapped by Ron DeSantis to eviscerate the Florida public college system as part of DeSantis’ war on “WOKE” education. Sasse also has a Ph.D. from Yale (2004).

Senator Ted Cruz (Texas) graduated from Princeton in 1992 and Harvard Law School in 1995. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who infamously raised a power fist salute in support of the January 6th insurrection at the Capital Building and then scurried away to find a secured room in case his supporters turned on him, has a law degree from Yale (2006). Hawley led Senate efforts to overturn the Electoral College vote count. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a leading candidate for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination graduated from Yale in 2001 and Harvard Law School in 2005. J.D. Vance, who was just elected to the Senate from Ohio, was a member of the Yale Law class of 2013.

These Ivy League alums remind of a quote from Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks. “Some there are who are nothing else than a passage for food and augmentors of excrement and fillers of privies, because through them no other things in the world, nor any good effects are produced, since nothing but full privies results from them.”

Harvard was recently embroiled in a new controversy when the dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government originally rejected a proposed fellowship for the longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch. The dean accused Kenneth Roth and Human Rights Watch of having an “anti-Israel” stance. Faculty members and free-speech organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union are condemned the denial as an assault on academic freedom and it was overturned. PEN America released a statement that the denial “raises serious questions about the credibility of the Harvard program itself.” Roth believes Dean Douglas Elmendorf blocked his appointment because of his organization’s “non-existent ‘bias’” and “fear of giving Harvard’s imprimatur to our impartial criticisms of Israel.” Hundreds of Harvard students and alumni are now calling for the dean’s resignation.

If fascism comes to the United States in the near future, many of its leaders are likely to have elitist Ivy League degrees. I graduated from the City College of New York in 1971 and earned a PhD from Rutgers University in 1982, both low cost public colleges attended by normal people.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/29/2149995/-Ivy-League-Incompetents-and-Reactionaries

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