Dan Proft Commentary

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I’m old enough to remember when the notion of a kid who didn’t come from money and wasn’t part of a legacy family getting into an Ivy League school was an accomplishment to be celebrated.

In the America Field Marshal Walz envisions, it’s an object of derision.

The Ivy League does not have the prestige it once enjoyed. Frankly, William F. Buckley had it sussed out pretty well in his book, “God and Man at Yale,” which was published in 1951. I doubt Walz read it.

But, of course, Walz is not being critical of what Yale is today and has been for some time, a totalitarian re-education camp that incubates anti-Semitism and all sorts of other hateful ideologies.

Instead, Yale is used as a proxy for East Coast elitism that putatively stands in stark contrast to the Midwest everyman. Walz is happy to put on his costume and prance around stage as the New Bolsheviks’ latest mascot while the Ivy-League-educated Barack Obama spins yarns about the flannel shirts in Walz’s closet.

To know the New Bolsheviks is to listen to their descriptions of their opposition.

Building on this revealing line of attack on Vance, Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty added the Silicon Valley piece:

One might wonder, Rep. Beatty, did Bill Clinton also “run away” when he left rural Arkansas for Georgetown and then Yale Law?

Well, wonder no more. It is okay to escape an area with a scarcity of opportunity so long as you blow the bridge behind you and join the ranks of the Vanguard–you know, the set that protects democracy from the people. You’ll find them in places like the Ivy League, Silicon Valley, Congress and anywhere else that presents the chance to lord over others.

However, the hypocrisy is the least offensive aspect of this ridicule.

The message is you have two options: If you are poor, stay put. They have a program for you and it comes with a lifetime guarantee. All you have to do is sign away your individual agency.

Alternatively, if you do get out of a place like Appalachia, you overcame what most do not and cannot because you are smarter, stronger, better. Welcome to the Vanguard.

These competing pathologies where one is either a ward of the state or a messiah have two common characteristics: force and entitlement. The Vanguard is entitled to take what it wants from whom it wants and the wards are entitled to what they’ve been promised.

This is a philosophy that subjects the entirety of civil society to the state.

Another illustration of what I’m describing comes from something my friend Bob Woodson reminded me recently, while only 2 in 10 college-educated whites work for the government, 6 in 10 college-educated blacks do. This makes government the repository of opportunity and those who would shrink it the enemy.

Against this backdrop, what have the Harris-Walz messiahs proposed previously and concurrently: an end to private health insurance, government price-setting on prescription drugs and groceries, government housing subsidies to complement the socialization of student loan debt, and the taxation of unrealized investment gains.

Therefore, yes, the criticism of Vance’s matriculation at Yale is cheap class envy politics but it is more pernicious than that. It is an attack on initiative and individual work product which is fundamental and potentially unrecoverable assault on individual liberty.

To know where the New Bolsheviks would take us is to pay attention to the destinations they criticize, places like Yale that represent the state of our culture and states of being like general servitude.