By Steve Sailer
07/13/2024
With many smart people arguing that due to President Biden’s worsening cognitive problems and Vice President Harris’ cognitive ceiling, the smart play for the Democrats is to instead nominate California Governor Gavin Newsom. You can tell from how he combs his hair backwards like Patrick Bateman, Pat Riley, Gordon Gekko, Steve Sailer, and Draco Malfoy that he must be really smart.
Evil, but smart.
From the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity:
Gavin Newsom, Governor of California
… Gavin Newsom was diagnosed with dyslexia at age five, but his mother didn’t tell him, for fear he would use his disability as a crutch. So while he labored to read, spell, and work with numbers, his little sister sailed through school effortlessly. “As an older brother,” he says, “that was more difficult than you can imagine. I was always wondering why she would get done with her homework quickly and I was still struggling to work through it, and why my parents were so demanding with me and so easy on her as it related to academics.”
When Newsom was in fifth grade, he discovered in his mother’s office a stash of papers reporting on his dismal academic performance and describing something called dyslexia. “That really hit home, and it explained why everyone else was running into their parents’ arms after school and I was stuck in that shack behind the school every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with four or five other students.”
Of all the learning difficulties he endured, Newsom says that reading aloud was “the most humiliating.” He can still recall his fifth-grade classroom and the row he sat in, “with my heart just sinking and pounding, hoping that that period would end and we’d get the hell out of there, and then getting up and starting to read and having everybody in the class laugh. That’s when I basically gave up on any reading. I did book reports by literally reading the back of the book and just copying the text, thinking the teacher would never find out.”
High school was even worse. “The grades were bad, my self-esteem started to collapse, and I remember faking being sick all the time to avoid math class, which I just couldn’t handle.” But because he was expected to attend college, Newsom began to take summer classes to catch up, knowing that he would never get into “a serious university. I took the SAT and it was a complete disaster, and they didn’t even argue for me to take it again, because it was just beyond stressful. And I’ll be honest: had it not been for my mother and some remedial training, I never would have gotten into college.”
Thanks to those and his outstanding abilities in baseball, Newsom began to receive scholarship offers from a number of colleges and attended Santa Clara University in California on a partial baseball scholarship.
“Baseball gave me some self-esteem and confidence, and then I found my bliss and my passion in politics,” he says. Newsom declared a major in political science and turned his life around. “All of a sudden I got good grades, because I loved the subject matter. What I found was that there was a contemporary nature to politics, not political theory necessarily, but what was going on in real life, and as difficult as it was to learn about it, I actually cared enough about it to work a little harder. So I started looking at newspapers like textbooks, and to this day, I’ll still underline newspapers because, otherwise, I can read five pages and not remember one thing I read.”
Though he has never read a novel, Newsom devours nonfiction and has a library of countless “Cliff’s Note versions” of articles and books he has read on politics and political science. “Because of overcompensation and the things you learn because you’re struggling, I have remarkable retention. In a political frame, there’s no greater gift, because you can really think on your feet.” …
As I wrote in 2017:
There’s a funny story about the five Rockefeller brothers. The oldest John III. was given a superb traditional education and earned a Ph.D. in economics,
Actually, he majored as an undergraduate in economics and graduated with honors.
but maintained a relatively low profile in life.
John D. III engaged in highly respectable philanthropy like population control and building Lincoln Center for the performing arts in Manhattan.
The four younger brothers — Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David — were educated according to the progressive principles of John Dewey and all grew up dyslexic.
Nelson won three terms as governor of New York and President Ford appointed him Vice President.
Laurance was a venture capitalist who invested early in tech firms like Intel and Apple. He developed several of the finest tropical resorts of his era such as the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel. Lady Bird Johnson called him America’s leading conservationist. He got into UFOs early.
Winthrop was elected to two terms as the first Republican governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction.
David became America’s most famous banker and lived to 101.
But they had more fun in life because they seldom read anything and instead insisted on face to face communications. If you had something to tell VP Rockefeller, you didn’t send him a memo, you had to go and get barraged with his questions.
So having an oral learning style can work out swell … if you are a Rockefeller.
One Rockefeller adviser who naturally would have liked sending him long memos got so good at explaining things in person to Rocky that he got hired by Rocky’s victorious rival Dick Nixon to talk to him about foreign policy, and wound up having a real kick-ass life: Henry Kissinger.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.