How Ron DeSantis Joined the ‘Ruling Class’ — and Turned Against It
Over the years, Mr. DeSantis embraced and exploited his Ivy League credentials. Now he is reframing his experiences at Yale and Harvard to wage a vengeful political war.Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis nestled into his chair onstage in Naples, Fla., to explain to an audience of the would-be conservative elite his journey through the reigning liberal one they hoped to destroy. His host was Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has become an academic hub of the Trump-era right. His subject was Yale University, where Mr. DeSantis was educated and where, as he tells it, he first met the enemy.“I’m a public school kid,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience, unspooling a story that he has shared in recent years with aides, friendly interviewers, donors, voters and readers of his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free.” “My mom was a nurse, my dad worked for a TV ratings company, installing the metering devices back then. And I show up in jean shorts and a T-shirt.” The outfit “did not go over well with the Andover and Groton kids” — sometimes it is Andover and Groton, sometimes it is Andover and Exeter, sometimes all three — who mocked his lack of polish.Worse than Yale’s snobbery was its politics: College was “the first time that I saw unadulterated leftism,” he told the Republican Jewish Coalition this March. “We’re basically being told the Soviet Union was the victim in the Cold War.” Teachers and students alike “rejected God, and they hated our country,” he assured the audience in Naples. “When I get people that submit résumés,” he said, “quite frankly, if I got one from Yale I would be negatively disposed.”Then there are the parts of the story he doesn’t tell: How his new baseball teammates at Yale — mostly fellow athletic recruits from the South and West who likewise viewed themselves as Yale outsiders — were among those who teased him about his clothes, and how he would nevertheless adopt their insular culture as his own. How he joined one of Yale’s storied “secret societies,” those breeding grounds of future senators and presidents, but left other members with the impression that he would have preferred to be tapped by a more prestigious one. How he shared with friends his dream of going to Harvard Law School — not law school, Harvard Law School — and successfully applied there, stacking one elite credential neatly onto another, and co-founded a tutoring firm that touted “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.” How his Yale connections helped him out-raise rivals as a first-time candidate for Congress, and how he featured his Ivy credentials — “a political scarlet letter as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” Mr. DeSantis likes to say — on his campaign websites, sometimes down to the precise degree of honors earned. And how that C.V. helped sell him to an Ivy-obsessed President Donald J. Trump, whose 2018 endorsement helped propel Mr. DeSantis to the governor’s office in Florida, where his Yale baseball jersey is displayed prominently on the wall next to his desk.Mr. DeSantis signing the Parental Rights in Education bill, a law last year that banned classroom discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation deemed as not being age-appropriate.Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times, via Associated PressMr. DeSantis, 44, is not the first Republican politician of his generation to rail against his own Ivy League degrees while milking them for access and campaign cash. But now, as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination, he is molding his entire campaign and political persona around a vengeful war against what he calls the country’s “ruling class”: an incompetent, unaccountable elite of bureaucrats, journalists, educators and other supposed “experts” whose pernicious and unearned authority the governor has vowed to vanquish.For Mr. DeSantis and his allies, the culture wars are the central struggle of American public life, and schools are the most important battleground where they will be fought. “Education is our sword,” Mr. DeSantis’s then education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, explained to a Hillsdale audience in 2021. And Mr. DeSantis is the man to wield it — a self-made striver who was “given nothing,” as he told the audience attending his campaign kickoff in Iowa in May. “These elites are not enacting an agenda to represent us. They’re imposing their agenda on us, via the federal government, via corporate America and via our own education system.” Even as he struggles to displace Mr. Trump as the Republican Party’s pre-eminent figure — he has spent heavily since May without denting the former president’s polling lead, and is under extraordinary pressure to make his mark at the first Republican debate on Wednesday, which Mr. Trump plans to skip — Mr. DeSantis has become captain of a new conservative vanguard, positioning it to influence American politics for years to come.Yet his emergence as his party’s chief culture warrior was anything but preordained. Genuinely embittered by his experiences at elite institutions, he also astutely grasped how they could be useful to him as he climbed the political ladder, according to dozens of friends and classmates from college and law school, as well as former aides and associates. For much of his political career, including his early years as Florida governor, he was neither closely identified with education policy nor deeply engaged in the debates over race and gender identity that have come to engulf American politics. It took the Covid epidemic to awaken Mr. DeSantis to the political potency of classrooms and fully mobilize him against what he now calls the “bureaucratic ‘expert’ class.” Now, pursuing the presidency, Mr. DeSantis has fully weaponized his resentments, offering voters a revisionist history of his own encounters with the ruling class to buttress his arguments for razing it.But Mr. DeSantis and his ideological allies — among them a group of conservative intellectuals clustered around Hillsdale and the California-based Claremont Institute who acquired new prominence during the Trump administration — are not aiming to abolish the ruling class. Instead, emboldened by the broader Covid-era backlash over school closures and diversity programs, they hope to replace it with a distinctly conservative one, trained in schools recaptured from liberals and reshaped by “classical” principles — a more traditionalist, Christian-inflected approach to education. “School choice may allow a small number of highly informed and committed parents to insulate their children” from liberal ideas about social justice, the authors of a recent paper from the Manhattan Institute argued, “but it will make little difference to the level of indoctrination in the American school-age population.”A student protest at New College of Florida, a left-leaning public liberal arts school that Mr. DeSantis took over this year and filled with conservative leadership.Todd Anderson for The New York TimesIn a written response to questions for this article, a DeSantis spokesman, Bryan Griffin, described The New York Times’s reporting as a “hit piece likely manufactured and seeded by political opponents designed to smear Ron DeSantis ahead of the debate,” and defended the governor’s record. “In the Covid era, the world went mad with radical gender ideology and began pushing it harder than ever into school curriculum,” Mr. Griffin said. “DeSantis stepped up to the moment and stopped the indoctrination despite the left and the media’s best efforts to cover for it.”To uproot what he considers liberal political activism from public schools and universities, Mr. DeSantis has stripped power from teachers and administrators and transferred it to himself and his appointees. But even as he calls to dismantle “woke” orthodoxy, he has sought to impose another, with a sweeping ban on the teaching of “identity politics” or “systemic racism” in required classes at Florida’s public colleges and universities and new civics training for high school teachers that plays down the role of slavery in early American history. Under the banner of “parental rights,” DeSantis-backed policies have given conservative Floridians a kind of veto power over books and curriculums favored by their more liberal neighbors, even in politically mixed or predominantly left-leaning Florida counties.“Where local communities create conservative culture and conservative school districts, DeSantis doesn’t touch them,” said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida who served alongside the Mr. DeSantis in Congress. “Where communities confront his conservative ideologies, the state steps in.”Earlier this year, in what amounted to a proof of concept, the governor seized control of New College of Florida, a left-leaning public liberal arts school in Sarasota. He appointed a conservative majority to the board of trustees; the college’s new overseers then fired the school’s leadership, installed Mr. Corcoran as president and announced plans to turn New College into a Florida version of Hillsdale. “The goal of the university is not free inquiry,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and one of the new trustees, said during a recent appearance in California. Instead, he argued, conservatives need to deploy state power to retake public institutions wherever they can.“The universities are not overly politicized. The universities are overly ideologized and insufficiently politicized,” Mr. Rufo said. “We should repoliticize the universities and understand that education is at heart a political question.”As an undergrad at Yale, Mr. DeSantis found his tribe on the baseball team, where he was known to all as “D.”Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times‘Hell Week,’ Baseball and St. ElmoMr. DeSantis had never been to New England when he arrived at Yale in the late 1990s, an honor student and baseball standout from the middle-class suburban Gulf Coast city of Dunedin. He was far from the only public school graduate in Yale’s freshman class, but he already carried a chip on his shoulder, caught between a powerful confidence in his own gifts — his “superiority complex,” as one classmate described it — and his discomfort with Yale’s more cosmopolitan milieu. He majored in history, taking classes in the culture and politics of the Founders, and closely studied the work of Gordon Wood, whose books emphasized the political radicalness of the American Revolution. He loved “A Few Good Men” and “Scent of a Woman,” especially the rousing speech at the end, in which Al Pacino’s character rails against the rich snobs tormenting a scholarship student at a New England prep school. Though Yale had a thriving conservative political scene, Mr. DeSantis shied away from it. He rarely talked about politics at all.Instead, he found his tribe on the baseball team, where he was known to all as “D,” the name he preferred to his given one. Like every other freshman player, he was hazed by his new teammates, and not just for his jean shorts. The baseball players segregated themselves from the rest of Yale and cultivated a hostility toward their peers, their latent status anxiety sharpened by a realization that some of their fellow students did not take them or their sport seriously. Some recalled being told by classmates, and even professors, that they did not belong at Yale. As athletes, they perceived themselves to be the school’s true meritocrats, admitted on the strength of their own sweat and discipline. “We set ourselves up against the most privileged students at Yale, who, in truth, we did not actually know very well,” Jonathan Levy, a baseball teammate who is now a professor at the University of Chicago, said in an email. “In hindsight, our mid-1990s admission to Yale was our opportunity to join this elite. Every member of the team was handed that same ticket.”As a senior, Mr. DeSantis was elected captain, which his closest Yale friends have sometimes presented as a testament to his leadership qualities. According to other former teammates, however, there were no other contenders: The team had few seniors that year, and Mr. DeSantis was a starting outfielder. His arrogance could startle. At a “captain’s practice” that fall, the team’s revered coach, John Stuper, delivered a brief pep talk to the freshmen. After he left, Mr. DeSantis told the team that their coach, a former major league pitcher, didn’t know what he was doing. Through his spokesman, Mr. DeSantis denied making the remark. In an interview, Mr. Stuper, who described the governor as “like a son” to him, said: “I just can’t imagine that happening. He had a lot of respect for me, still does, has asked me to campaign for him.” Mr. Stuper added, “There’s just no way that he would undermine my authority by doing that.” Mr. DeSantis was elected captain of the baseball team as a senior.Yale AthleticsAlong with many of his teammates, he joined Delta Kappa Epsilon, a fraternity composed largely of athletes, many from working-class backgrounds. “We all kind of bonded through our athletics, and through our fraternity,” said Nick Sinatra, a Buffalo native and Yale friend who played football there. At Yale, D.K.E. was known as boorish even by fraternity standards, with a reputation for over-the-top hazing of pledges. When Mr. DeSantis was a senior, according to former brothers and pledges, a large group of pledges quit after one hazing episode turned violent. On another night, pledges were ordered to a frat house room, two of them recalled. After entering one at a time, each was blindfolded and ordered to drop his pants, with Mr. DeSantis, other brothers, and at least one female guest on hand to mock their genitalia. One of the pledges recalled that a blender was placed between his legs and abruptly turned on to scare him, splashing water on his groin.During the fraternity’s “hell week,” pledges wore costumes smeared with rotten food and condiments. They might be ordered to simulate sex with one another or do outdoor calisthenics in the winter air. According to four former pledges and brothers, Mr. DeSantis required one pledge, for whom he served as “father,” to wear a pair of baseball pants with the back and thighs cut out, exposing his buttocks and genitals.Another D.K.E. brother, Scott Wagner, a friend of Mr. DeSantis who served on the governor’s Florida transition team, said none of the pledges’ costumes involved nudity. Reached by The Times, the former pledge, who asked not to be identified, confirmed that he was made to wear the revealing costume but declined to discuss the experience further. Today, some of the former brothers and pledges regard Mr. DeSantis’s behavior as foreshadowing a comfort with power — and with using it to bully others.Mr. DeSantis denied these accounts through his spokesman, who called them “ridiculous assertions and completely false.”Mr. DeSantis also joined one of the school’s secret societies, St. Elmo. The societies, though swathed in mystery and arcane symbolism, mostly functioned to introduce Yale seniors to classmates they might not know. His St. Elmo class was a diverse group that met weekly for a family-style dinner in a comfortable, run-down townhouse near campus. At meetings, the members took turns delivering their “bios,” or life stories, in the living room, in speeches that could last hours. Mr. DeSantis often showed up in his baseball uniform; his own bio leaned heavily on baseball, his Florida roots and his journey to Yale. But when it came time for others to tell their stories, Mr. DeSantis tuned out, according to former St. Elmo members. He rolled his eyes as one member, Cristina Sosa Noriega, talked about growing up as a Hispanic public schoolgirl in San Antonio, Ms. Sosa Noriega and two other members recalled. “He seemed bored and disinterested,” Ms. Sosa Noriega said. “It was like I wasn’t worth listening to. I had the feeling that he assumed that I didn’t deserve to be there.” (Mr. DeSantis’s spokesman denied that account and said it was “frankly absurd” to suggest that anyone would remember “such a detail from decades ago.”)In “The Courage to Be Free,” Mr. DeSantis’s Yale education is tidily repackaged as a prologue to his future battles with the ruling class. “In retrospect, Yale allowed me to see the future,” he writes. “It just took me 20 years to realize it.” Yet the book is curiously vague, identifying no particular exchanges or classes where he encountered the fervent anti-Americanism that, in his telling, defined his education there. His spokesman declined to identify any.But other perspectives were easily available: According to Mr. Sinatra, Mr. DeSantis took Yale’s most popular undergraduate class about the Cold War, taught by the historian John Lewis Gaddis, whose work blamed the Soviet Union for the conflict, not the United States. (The governor’s spokesman said Mr. DeSantis “did not take issue with John Gaddis’s class.”) While the book paints turn-of-the-century Yale as cloyingly liberal, awash in Soviet flags and Che Guevara T-shirts, other classmates recall a left-leaning but generally apathetic campus of the pre-9/11 era, and a Che shirt worn by one particular roommate, with whom Mr. DeSantis seemed friendly enough.After graduation, some of his baseball teammates “punched their Yale ticket,” according to Dr. Levy, moving into banking, consulting or medicine. Others returned to their hometowns, starting careers that didn’t necessarily require the credentials they had acquired. And some, Dr. Levy observed, “wanted it both ways, to have a Yale-charged life but to reject Yale elitism.” He added: “I think this is what DeSantis is still doing, in the form of a political project — trying to reach the elite pinnacle of the American political establishment while railing against that same establishment.”Harvard Law School, where Mr. DeSantis was a graduate student. He has criticized it as both a bastion of left-wing ideology and a cold factory of corporate lawyers.Billy Hickey for The New York TimesA Short Climb to the EliteMr. DeSantis began fashioning a deeper critique of the ruling class even as he quietly climbed its ranks, already telling others that he imagined himself as a future president. Harvard Law was little different from Yale, he writes in “The Courage to Be Free,” with a stultifying careerism layered onto overtly liberal politics. The Harvard faculty of the early 2000s, Mr. DeSantis asserted, “was increasingly dominated by adherents of so-called critical legal studies” — a left-wing school of argument that seemingly neutral laws can be racist or discriminatory. At the same time, he wrote, Harvard offered an “assembly-line style of education” aimed chiefly at preparing students for “a lucrative career in business or law.” Mr. DeSantis instead joined the Navy, serving as a military prosecutor and combat adviser. Later, as the Tea Party movement arrived in Washington, he started writing his first book, about the Founders and President Barack Obama.“Dreams From Our Founding Fathers” came out in fall 2011, a dense tract packed with quotes from Madison and Hamilton and casting Mr. Obama as a European-style socialist bent on deconstructing the republic they imagined. As anti-Obama polemicist, Mr. DeSantis treated slavery as a kind of constitutional sideshow — an institution whose stubborn persistence in early America need not disturb a close adherence to the Founders’ vision, since it was “doomed to fail” in a nation guided by their universal truths. Mr. DeSantis attributed Mr. Obama’s purported radicalism to his education at Harvard Law, and to his years living in the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, where the future president taught law at the University of Chicago. It was in these places — “monolithically” far left, populated by the “credentialed elite” and isolated from the “broader political society” — that Mr. Obama absorbed the progressive tradition, with its attachment to “a large administrative state” and “ostensibly nonpartisan ‘solutions’ devised by experts.”Though many classmates shared Mr. DeSantis’s recollection of Harvard as heavily oriented toward corporate law careers, other aspects of his narrative do not hold up. Faculty battles over critical legal studies had unfolded vividly at Harvard Law in the 1970s and 1980s, but by the time Mr. DeSantis arrived a quarter-century later, the approach had reached a nadir. Harvard students of his era were more drawn to the discipline of law and economics, advanced by conservative legal scholars. (Mr. DeSantis’s spokesman noted that, nonetheless, “there were critical legal studies being taught at the time.”) In interviews, some of his conservative classmates recalled being reluctant to express their political views in class. But far more described Harvard as intellectually open and committed to ideological diversity. “The picture DeSantis gives is just not right — it’s kind of a cliché about Harvard, and it’s simply not true,” said Charles Fried, a longtime Harvard Law professor and a faculty sponsor of Harvard’s chapter of the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal organization. “He must have known it, because everyone knew it.”When Mr. DeSantis started at Harvard in 2002, the school had a conservative dean, Robert C. Clark, an early Federalist Society supporter whose appointment had been part of a deliberate effort to re-center the professoriate. A 2005 survey of The Harvard Law Review, published in the Federalist Society’s flagship publication, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, found that staff members “identifying themselves as left-of-center did not comprise even a majority.”Mr. DeSantis joined the Navy after attending Harvard, serving as a military prosecutor and combat adviserU.S. NavyMr. DeSantis’s own foray into big-firm corporate law — a stint as a litigator for the Miami-based Holland & Knight before he ran for Congress — goes unmentioned in his memoir. So does his involvement in Harvard’s Federalist Society chapter, where he served as a business manager for the journal, crossed paths with future judges and politicians and met Leonard Leo, the conservative power broker who years later would help him execute a right-wing takeover of Florida’s Supreme Court. Indeed, Mr. DeSantis showed scant public trace of bitterness about his elite education in the years before his political career.After leaving the Navy, he again put his elite educational bona fides forward, joining with two of his closest law school friends to found an Ivy-themed test-prep company, LSAT Freedom, headquartered at his home in Ponte Vedra Beach. In a series of brief YouTube seminars with his co-founders, Mr. DeSantis comes off as earnest and knowledgeable about the mechanisms of elite advancement. “If you’re in a fourth-tier school, versus, like, a school that’s maybe in the top 50,” he observed, “then there’s a world of difference in terms of your investment and the return on your investment.”His own credentials would yield a bounty when he finally entered politics. He was little-known to local Republican leaders and voters in the newly drawn congressional district he set out to win in early 2012, but he was a disciplined campaigner and proved a formidable fund-raiser. Supporters nicknamed him “the Résumé.” Yale friends around the country — baseball teammates, fraternity brothers, fellow secret-society members — sent checks, helping drive a flood of out-of-state money. A Yale friend put him in touch with a political adviser to Mr. Trump, who praised him on Twitter as “very impressive.” Law school classmates got him meetings with national Republican figures who went on to endorse his winning bid.When Mr. DeSantis decided to run for governor a few years later, he had even more help from the Yale world, tapping an older, more conservative generation of alumni, such as the former financial executive Joseph J. Fogg III. “He came to my attention because he’s a Yalie,” Mr. Fogg told The Miami Herald. A few months before announcing his campaign, Mr. DeSantis traveled to Cambridge, Mass., to join a panel of Harvard alumni serving in Congress. While some Republican voters might take a dim view of Harvard, he told them, the school “opens a lot of doors” for aspiring politicians. To the networks of ultrarich conservative donors whose money could help advance him to the next rung, his elite résumé was part of the appeal. “I had a good story,” he said, “an appealing biography to people that were looking to help young leaders.”Katie Stallings setting up her second-grade classroom at MacFarlane Park Elementary School in Tampa in August 2020. Mr. DeSantis ordered all Florida schools to reopen for in-person instruction when the academic year began.Octavio Jones for The New York TimesThe OutbreakAfter being elected governor by a hair’s breadth, Mr. DeSantis at first seemed mindful of the political center. He committed billions of dollars to protect the Everglades. Appearing at his alma mater Dunedin High School, he announced a proposal to raise teachers’ minimum salaries. In the face of efforts by liberal students and activists to shut down conservative speakers on college campuses, Mr. DeSantis, like many other Republican officials in the pre-Covid era, urged Florida universities to adopt a version of the “Chicago principles” favoring academic free expression.Building on the work of his Republican predecessors, he signed legislation creating a small voucher program for low-income students. Though school-choice advocates view the program as a pivotal early step toward taxpayer-funded vouchers in Florida, Mr. DeSantis resisted advisers who wanted him to move even more aggressively on choice in his first year, fearing it would crowd out other priorities, according to two former aides. (His spokesman said Mr. DeSantis “has always been a fervent supporter of expanding school choice, and it was one of his first-term campaign platforms.”) When the Florida House speaker at the time proposed to him abolishing New College entirely, Mr. DeSantis recalled recently, he replied, “What is New College?”Then came Covid. At first, Mr. DeSantis reluctantly heeded Trump administration health officials like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. He imposed a state lockdown in April 2020; he sometimes appeared masked at public events. But amid shifting federal guidance and growing worry about the social and economic impacts of lockdowns, he began doing his own research. He consulted experts who departed from the emerging medical consensus around Covid restrictions, and he moved quickly to relax them. That summer, embracing data showing that children were at low risk for severe illness or death from Covid, Mr. DeSantis took perhaps his biggest gamble: His administration ordered all Florida schools to reopen for in-person instruction when the school year began.He was widely attacked, even mocked, for his decisions — criticism that would galvanize Mr. DeSantis, according to former aides, and cement his nascent suspicion of bureaucrats and supposed experts. Florida schools did not become superspreaders; research later showed that students in open schools around the country tended to lose less ground during the pandemic than students in closed schools. Mr. DeSantis doubled down. In early 2021, as conservative activists and outlets fanned suspicion of the new Covid vaccines, he effectively stopped promoting them — a turn that contributed to overwhelmed Florida hospitals, public health experts later said, and thousands of deaths that the state’s own former surgeon general would deem “preventable.” But by then, the governor had already claimed victory over the experts. “The Covid-19 pandemic represented a test of elites in the U.S., from public-health experts to the corporate media,” Mr. DeSantis wrote in The Wall Street Journal in March 2021. “Policymakers who bucked the elites and challenged the narrative have been proven right to do so.”Mr. DeSantis greeted local officials at Dunedin High School, his alma mater, in 2019 to announce his plan to raise teacher pay.Megan Reeves/Tampa Bay Times, via TNS, via Abacapress.comThe pandemic had also changed the political contours of education. In blue and purple states around the country, a swath of otherwise middle-of-the-road parents erupted against Democrats and teachers’ unions over continued school closures. There was a rising backlash against mask mandates and the spread, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, of “anti-racist” and “equity” curriculums. Mr. Rufo, previously a little-known documentarian and activist, had introduced millions of people to the academic doctrine known as critical race theory, saying it had infiltrated public school classrooms and workplaces around the country. New groups quickly formed to channel this swell of parental anger into political action, notably in Florida, where three mothers, one with ties to the state Republican Party, formed a group called Moms for Liberty and quickly built it into a national force. After years of playing defense on schools, Republicans now had a fight that could simultaneously energize their base, win more independents and peel off skeptical Democrats — defending “parental rights” against the left-wing teachers, administrators and diversity consultants they argued were indoctrinating their children.For Mr. DeSantis, education officials represented yet another set of “experts” who were getting it wrong. “Ron bet big against the grain on one thing, which was reopening schools,” said one former aide. “It paid off, and he was right. He learned that lesson at the same time that education became more political. And he cared more about education because Moms for Liberty suddenly existed.”Florida, already shifting rapidly to the right, would have a starring role in the country’s new culture wars, and Mr. DeSantis was quick to grasp the political opportunity. In 2022, Florida lawmakers began drafting what its detractors would label the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Though Mr. DeSantis is now indelibly linked to the legislation, at first, “I was not fully versed in the intricacies of the Parental Rights in Education bill,” he recalled in his memoir. “Yet I saw the corporate media and the political left colluding to create and repeat a false narrative about the bill.” For critics, the bill — a complex piece of legislation banning classroom discussion or instruction about “sexual orientation or gender identity” in ways that were not “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate” — seemed designed to force gay students and teachers into the closet. Mr. DeSantis and his aides were soon defending the bill vigorously; one claimed that anyone opposing the bill “is probably a groomer.” The conflict thrust Mr. DeSantis to the culture war’s front lines, and he would repeat the playbook over and over, with a blitz of hard-edge school and curriculum policies that outraged many liberals and endeared him to the grass-roots right.A discussion in April with Larry P. Arnn, president of the conservative Hillsdale College, which has partnered with Mr. DeSantis to establish classical charter schools in Florida.Chris Dumond/Getty ImagesAt the Heart of a MovementAs he battled against critical race theory and bureaucratic elites, Mr. DeSantis became entwined with a rising movement of conservative academics and activists outside Florida.Less known for technical policy advice than for sweeping polemics about the decay of American government and culture, Claremont scholars shared Mr. DeSantis’s belief that “American freedom required a recovering of the Founding ideals,” as Brian T. Kennedy, a former president of Claremont who remains a fellow there, put it. One of Claremont’s founders, Dr. Arnn, had taken over Hillsdale in 2000 and transformed it into both a fund-raising juggernaut and a redoubt of Christian, classically oriented liberal arts education. The upset win of Mr. Trump, whose rough brand of populism echoed Claremont’s more highbrow take on American decline, gave both institutions new prominence in Washington. His tumultuous defeat, in 2020, left the intellectuals and funders of Claremont and Hillsdale considering whether they ought to find a new horse to back.Mr. DeSantis had cultivated them even before becoming governor. As a congressman, he sent Dr. Arnn a copy of “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers.” “I read his book, and I went, ‘Wow, this is pretty good,’” Dr. Arnn recalled last year. “This guy can actually walk and chew gum.” Later, as Hillsdale looked to expand its network of classical charter schools, it found the DeSantis administration a willing partner. (Today, Florida has one of the largest concentrations of Hillsdale-affiliated charters in the country.) Mr. DeSantis was connected to Claremont in part through friends: Adam Laxalt, a Navy roommate and scion of a Nevada political dynasty, and Michael B. McClellan, a California lawyer, Yale classmate and former Claremont fellow. But the institute’s core political critique — that American constitutional ideals had been corrupted by the emergence of the so-called administrative state — also resonated with Mr. DeSantis. Among the only modern-day intellectual influences he has acknowledged in his recent book and public appearances is Angelo Codevilla, the late Claremont scholar and author of a seminal 2010 essay attacking what he called the American ruling class.Dr. Codevilla held that class was a matter of culture and ideology, not money. A foreign service officer turned academic, he was scathing about the ruling class’s credentialism and faith in scientific consensus, and critiqued the role of schools in perpetuating the American elite. “Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits,” he wrote. “These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment) and saints.” Usefully, Dr. Codevilla’s formulation placed traditionalist intellectuals and wealthy Middle American elites on the side of the common man. “An underpaid but well-connected blogger for The New York Times who graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and supports open borders would be considered part of the ruling class,” David Azerrad, a Hillsdale professor, wrote in The American Spectator in 2017. “A millionaire used-car dealer in Omaha who ‘clings to his guns and religion’ and is proudly patriotic would not.”As Mr. DeSantis’s profile rose amid the Covid battles, both Claremont and Hillsdale lavished him with attention and praise. In Naples last year, Dr. Arnn introduced Mr. DeSantis as “one of the most important people living.” Claremont scholars describe Florida as a test bed for the new right, and at its annual gala in 2021, Claremont awarded Mr. DeSantis its statesmanship award. “Governor DeSantis is a product of elite education and yet, wonderfully, rejects its core premises,” the institute’s president, Ryan P. Williams, said by way of introduction, and he “wields the prestige that he got from that elite education on behalf of normal America — a too-rare thing.” Accepting the award, Mr. DeSantis approvingly cited Dr. Codevilla and called for battle against the ruling class. “He saw this probably before anybody,” said Mr. DeSantis. “But he was right on the money.”Hillsdale College, a liberal arts school in Michigan, has become an academic hub of the Trump-era right.Sean Proctor for The New York TimesLecturing the LecturersAs his preparations for the presidential campaign accelerated this year, so did Mr. DeSantis’s crusade against the ruling class. In February, the governor and his wife, Casey, invited Mr. Williams, along with several other Claremont fellows and affiliates, to a private meeting at the Capitol in Tallahassee. The occasion was the opening of Claremont’s new Florida outpost, under the aegis of Scott Yenor, a professor at Boise State University and a Claremont fellow, now the institute’s new “senior director of state coalitions.” “Protecting Americans from infringing woke ideology is important work,” tweeted Ms. DeSantis, “and we are grateful Scott and the Claremont Institute picked Florida to continue their mission.” Later that day, the Claremont crowd joined the governor and his top aides for cocktails and dinner. Over a glass of Macallan at the Governor’s Mansion, he regaled them with the story of his takeover of New College the previous month and exchanged ideas about battling campus liberals.The red-carpet welcome underscored Claremont’s increasingly prominent role in Mr. DeSantis’s policy apparatus. Earlier that month, Mr. DeSantis had invited another Claremont fellow to join his “round table” on the need to pass new laws against “legacy media defamation.” (The setting was a mock television studio, with Mr. DeSantis playing the role of host.) A few weeks later, in advance of his expected presidential bid, Mr. DeSantis treated his top donors and fund-raisers to a Claremont-only panel at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach. (The purpose of the panel, according to planning emails obtained by The Times, was to “define the ‘Regime’ which illegitimately rules us” and lay out a strategy to “make states more autonomous from the woke regime by ridding themselves of leftist interests.”) In March, Dr. Yenor joined Mr. DeSantis for yet another round table, this one focused on the evils of diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher education.Dr. Yenor was already a controversial figure. In a 2021 speech in Orlando, Fla., describing “the political and personal evils that flow from feminism,” he had claimed that feminist “careerism” made women “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.” Calling modern universities “citadels of our gynecocracy,” he argued that they should stop recruiting women to medical, law and trade schools and instead focus on recruiting more men. Boise State officials resisted calls to fire Dr. Yenor for his remarks, citing the principles of academic freedom and his First Amendment rights; though some students filed Title IX complaints, he was ultimately cleared.On the same day he appeared with the governor in March, Dr. Yenor unveiled a report, “Florida Universities: From Woke to Professionalism,” asserting that public colleges were “gripped by D.E.I. ideology” that threatened to “tear Florida apart.” Though released by Claremont, the report was first edited by a top DeSantis aide, according to emails obtained by The Times. And though it drew little notice outside Florida, the report echoed Dr. Yenor’s viral speech. The state should not only defund “D.E.I.-infused” programs and classes, he recommended, but ban the collection of “race-based data” entirely, in order to hobble federal investigations into discrimination at Florida institutions. The real victims of higher-education discrimination, Dr. Yenor wrote, were men: Florida should “order civil rights investigations of all university units in which women vastly outnumber men among the student body and/or faculty — especially colleges of nursing and education — for disparate impact” and root out “any anti-male elements of curriculum.” (At New College, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported in August, DeSantis allies have boosted male enrollment in part by doling out a disproportionate share of the school’s merit scholarships to a new crop of student-athlete applicants, though that group had lower-than-average grades and test scores.) Rather than defend academic free speech, Dr. Yenor advised, Mr. DeSantis and his appointees should adopt “a more ideological bent” to rein in administrators and teachers and cultivate love of country.Two months later, the governor signed a law banning the state’s public colleges and universities from spending money on diversity programs, setting off a now-familiar cycle of negative headlines and DeSantis counterattacks. Despite the coverage, however, only portions of the bill actually addressed D.E.I. administrators. Perhaps more consequentially, the legislation imposed a vague but expansive speech code on Florida public university campuses — prohibiting required courses “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.” (In an interview, Manny Diaz Jr., the state’s current education commissioner, said that “conversations about theories and the debates about these theories” should take place only in higher-level elective courses. “Why am I talking about that in a math class? In a literature class?”) In legal battles to defend Mr. DeSantis’s higher-education agenda, lawyers for his administration, far from defending academic freedom, have argued that the concept does not even apply to public university professors: College curriculums and in-class instruction are merely “government speech,” controllable by duly elected officials. The American Association of University Professors likened the state’s position to “authoritarian control of education similar to what exists in North Korea, Iran, or Russia.”In April 2022, the state’s Department of Education rejected dozens of math textbooks because, officials claimed, they “contained prohibited topics,” including critical race theory. A Times review of about half the textbooks found little reference to race at all, let alone the more abstruse academic topic of critical race theory. In fact, only three of 125 state-appointed reviewers had found objectionable content, The Herald reported. Two had ties to Hillsdale — a civics education specialist involved in the college’s “1776 Curriculum,” which emphasizes a patriotic, traditional view of the Founding, and a sophomore political science major who was secretary of the Hillsdale College Republicans.Mr. Corcoran, then the education commissioner, also tapped Hillsdale to join a small group of outside institutions helping to revise the state’s civics standards, another signature DeSantis initiative. Both Hillsdale and Claremont personnel feature disproportionately in a series of online teacher training courses subsequently created for the effort. (A Hillsdale spokeswoman said individuals involved in the training and in Florida’s textbook reviews had acted in their “private capacity,” not on behalf of the school.) In-person training last summer amounted to an indoctrination, according to some teachers who attended, into conservative views about constitutional “originalism” and the separation of church and state. Much as Mr. DeSantis had in his own writing, the training sessions sought to minimize the relevance of slavery to an understanding of the Founding: One slide stated that even those Founders “that held slaves did not defend the institution.” (Mr. DeSantis’s spokesman said it was “inane media propaganda” to suggest that the training slides minimized slavery or that the governor had ever done so.) Other slides criticized court rulings opposed by conservatives, such as a 1962 decision against school-sponsored prayer.In a statement last year about the training, the Florida Education Department told The Herald that “every lesson we teach is based on history, not ideology or any form of indoctrination.” But Mr. Corcoran was more direct while speaking at Hillsdale. Education, he said then, is “100 percent ideological.”George Pierson placed signs before a town hall with Mr. DeSantis last month in Osceola, Iowa.Christopher Smith for The New York TimesDeepening InfluenceWhatever the fate of his presidential campaign, Mr. DeSantis’s influence over Florida schools seems likely to expand. Last summer, as he ramped up his re-election bid in Florida, he became the state’s first governor to campaign in local school board races, endorsing a slate of 30 candidates — many of them also backed by Moms for Liberty — “committed to the student-first principles of the DeSantis Education Agenda.” The normally sleepy, officially nonpartisan races became pitched ideological battles, awash in money. Most of his candidates won, placing new pro-DeSantis majorities in a half-dozen coastal boards previously controlled by more liberal members. Last spring, Republican lawmakers placed on next year’s ballot an amendment to the state constitution that would make such elections formally partisan. Mr. DeSantis, like Republicans elsewhere in the country, supports such efforts, though they defy a long American tradition of nonpartisan public education governance.One of the new Republican-majority boards is in Pinellas County, where Mr. DeSantis grew up and where he began his climb into the American elite. In January, Pinellas school district officials yanked Toni Morrison’s classic novel “The Bluest Eye” from high schools after a parent complained about a two-page rape scene. (In a YouTube video, the parent, who herself taught at a private Christian school, described Pinellas schools as “Marxist indoctrination camps.”) The officials cited new state guidelines, crafted with input from Moms for Liberty volunteers, to “err on the side of caution” when evaluating what books to make available to schoolchildren. Soon after, an administrator blocked one local elementary school from showing the Disney film “Ruby Bridges,” about the 6-year-old Black girl who integrated New Orleans schools in the 1960s. The removal came after a different mother, who had already declined permission for her daughter to see the movie in class, demanded that no one else’s children be allowed to see it.Both decisions were later reversed — months later, in the case of Ms. Morrison’s novel. “Activists file blanket complaints against hundreds of books, and in many school districts, that triggers the books’ automatic removal pending review. And very often, those reviews can take months to complete, effectively banning the book in the meanwhile,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a scholar at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who studies academic speech policies. Mr. Diaz disputed that the new state policy was to blame for such delays. “I think the onus is on the district to make that process speedy,” he said.Elements of Mr. DeSantis’s education policies have been blocked in court, and others remain under legal challenge as his presidential campaign unfolds. But in counties like Pinellas, his policies and rhetoric have already had what his critics believe is their intended effect. “Before the pandemic, I felt like what I call the ‘swirl of Tallahassee’ just lived up there,” said Laura Hine, a Pinellas school board member who is not registered with either party and is among the board candidates Mr. DeSantis’s operation has targeted for defeat in next year’s elections. “The weaponization of political rhetoric around education, and the associated policies, have now reached our classroom teachers.”Two years ago, a Pinellas parent named Renee Chiea — also warning of “Marxist indoctrination” in county schools — filed a complaint against Brandt Robinson, a teacher at Dunedin High School. She objected to parts of the syllabus Mr. Robinson had distributed to his class on African-American history, which her son had briefly enrolled in. In a written complaint, Ms. Chiea argued that one book Mr. Robinson planned to assign, “Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present,” by the Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter, distorted history by painting America as “inherently racist” — violating new state rules, passed earlier that year at Mr. DeSantis’s urging, banning from classrooms any material that espoused the idea “that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems.” In an email to The Times, Ms. Chiea, an activist with the Pinellas chapter of Moms for Liberty, also argued that the book was based on “the same theories” as “The 1619 Project,” a Times examination of the legacy of slavery, which Florida had also banned from classrooms.A review panel ultimately rejected her complaint. “I don’t stop my class and ask my white kids, ‘Hey, how are you feeling?’ What kind of teacher would do that?” Mr. Robinson said. “It’s not my job to tell you what to think. It’s to help you become a better thinker.” People identifying themselves as Moms for Liberty activists began leaving comments on Mr. Robinson’s TikTok account, where he posts daily videos about history. In January, someone reported Mr. Robinson for a TikTok mentioning that he had taught students in his Dunedin sociology class about the Black thinker W.E.B. Du Bois and the concept of “double consciousness” — how racism forced Black Americans to always imagine how they might appear through white people’s eyes.According to Mr. Robinson, whoever reported him claimed that he was indoctrinating his students. “Some of the people who make these assertions are just grossly undereducated. In their minds, critical race theory is all kinds of things,” he said.Ms. Chiea said she felt that the school district had mishandled her own complaint against his course, and believed that Mr. Robinson was still trying to circumvent Florida’s new rules. “I am positive he has not changed the content of what he teaches in his class,” she said. “And until there is some honesty and transparency in that, it will remain under scrutiny by me.” More
