Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recounted the political culture shock of attending Ivy League schools as someone from a working-class, blue-collar background on "Life, Liberty & Levin."
DeSantis told host Mark Levin that although he grew up in Dunedin, Fla., his family hailed from steel country in Pennsylvania and Ohio, which he described as "blue collar," "salt-of-the-earth" communities.
A conservative, he said, is someone who understands that our rights as Americans come from God, and not from government, pointing to how the founders rejected the "divine right of Kings" to deign who had rights and who didn't.
"We have these God-given rights," he said. "We loan power to the government under a Constitution to protect those rights, and I think that what we've seen in more modern society is we've seen an un-mooring of those constitutional foundations."
"We have an administrative state which is totally out of control. It violates people's freedoms. It's really been weaponized against factions of the country that the ruling class doesn't like."
Nodding to his new book, "The Courage to Be Free," DeSantis recounted growing up largely apolitical in Dunedin, and how his father hailed from Pennsylvania and mother from Ohio, and how Rust Belt values were instilled in him as a young man.
Upon being accepted to Yale, DeSantis said he had "no idea" what he was getting into.
"I wasn't, like, a refined conservative in terms of politics, because I was mostly into sports and things like that, but you start sitting in some of these classrooms and even though one of Yale's mottos is ‘For God, For Country, For Yale’ — I sit in the classroom [and they are] attacking religion, attacking God, attacking the United States," DeSantis recounted.
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"I'm sitting in class, and they're saying that the U.S. was to blame for the Cold War, not Joseph Stalin."
He said the culture was totally different from that of his hometown, where one generally didn't know their neighbors' political persuasions.
"But everyone [in Dunedin] kind of believed in the core American principles."
The exposure to the radical left in Ivy League colleges led DeSantis to rebel "the other way," in his words.
"So by the time I got through college and law school, I was definitely set."
However, during his first run for Congress, DeSantis recalled grappling with how to prove to voters his Ivy League resume did not hide any left-wing persuasions, despite his accomplished military and other records.
"Well, listen, look at me. I got through Yale and Harvard and came out more conservative than when I went in," he said. "The Swamp's going to have nothing on that, and [voters] appreciated that."
