DeSantis Slams 'Smear' of Appointee Amid Backlash Over Comments on Women, Education

Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted the media's "cherry-picking" criticisms of right-wing politicians, prompted by backlash over his new university appointee previously advocating against women delaying motherhood for higher education.

His comments fall in light of an AP News report, which found that new University of West Florida board appointee Scott Yenor had railed against the "evils" of feminism at a 2021 National Conservative Conference, where he claimed that a good society discourages women from putting off motherhood to attend higher education's "indoctrination camps."

Yenor, a political scientist, believed schools should slow efforts to recruit women into engineering, law, and medical fields, and instead "recruit and demand more" of men in those programs.

After swift backlash, a reporter asked Gov. DeSantis to comment on Yenor's appointment—though the Governor insisted he was "not familiar" with Yenor's supposed beliefs.

"If you look at the state of Florida, we probably have a higher percentage of women enrolled in our state universities than we do men, and that's probably grown under my tenure," the governor said at a Jacksonville press conference Friday morning. "But what I don't do, what I don't like, is cherry-picking somebody saying [something] and then trying to smear them."

DeSantis blasted the media for attacking right-wingers' backgrounds, but not doing the same for appointees with "flagrant left-wing backgrounds."

"That's just swept under the rug," he said. "You never hear legacy media trying to highlight any of that. 
So I don't play those games."

Yenor, 55, was one of five UWF appointments announced Tuesday. A member of the Society for American Civic Renewal, a men-only Christian nationalist organization, and an employee of the Claremont Institute's Center for the American Way of Life, he was invited to speak at the conservative conference in 2021.

Aside from blasting feminism, Yenor derided the "medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome" qualities denoting "independent women," earning him a fresh round of backlash from his school at the time—Boise State University—where he worked as a professor of political science.

A BSU student wrote an open letter condemning the teacher's "diminishing" and "radical" comments, lambasting his "insidious and dangerous" words.