Now we have Nannygate

I was struck by one throw-away detail included in The Daily Mail’s global exclusive.

The Daily Mail’s story said that the Second Gentleman’s former nanny landed a job with a big media company and lives in The Hamptons.

I must admit I was not terribly surprised to learn that Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband once had an affair with his children’s nanny and impregnated said nanny who may or may not have aborted this child.

By now, I just assume every ultra-rich and powerful person in Club Elite engages in extra-marital affairs and then, if needed, tries to cover up these relationships.

As recent polls show, this man, lawyer Doug Emhoff, might soon be the First Gentleman of the United States of America.

What did surprise me (or, actually, didn’t) was that this sexual affair was covered up for so long and never came up as Harris shot up the political charts. 

(From The Daily Mail story, one gets the impression every person in Culver City, California, or every family who had children who attended the “elite” private school where the nanny worked as a teacher’s aid, knew about this non-scandal.)

I also note that it was a UK newspaper, and not an American “watchdog” news organization, that finally broke this scandal - 15 years after all the beautiful people in Culver City knew about it.

Other alternative media pundits might have much to say about the “morals” of the country’s ruling classes. But I often try to pick out story details that receive little mention, but strike me as interesting  … and I found such a detail in this story.

How the 1 percent educate their children …

The Daily Mail journalists noted that “current tuition fees at the kindergarten-through-8th-grade school (The Willows) range from $32,525 to $41,535.”

This means average tuition is $37,030, which made me calculate how much California elites spend over 17 years to educate their children.

Assuming tuition for an elite private high school is at least as high as a K-8 school, this means such parents will spend at least $481,390 per child over the 13 years of their children’s pre-college education.

However, this is not the real education price tag as private school tuition will continue to outpace the government’s official CPI rate of about 3 percent/year.

So, being very conservative, we can add 20 percent to the price of tuition for a family whose kids have just started school.

Per my Macintosh computer calculator, an elite family in California will spend approximately $578,000 over 13 years to educate one child.

But children of elite parents don’t stop their education after 12th grade. They also attend at least four years of college (and they don’t attend a college like Troy University like I did). 

Assuming tuition at Stanford, USC, Cal-Berkley or an Ivy League college is at least $50,000/year, we can add at least $200,000 per child for the college education (again, this is a very conservative figure and doesn’t include room-and-board and miscellaneous, non-tuition expenses).

This means the cost of educating one elite child over 17 years is at least $778,000.

Of course, many parents have more than one child they feel like they have to let the professional educators indoctrinate.

How much will it cost to educate 3 elite children?

I’m the middle son of a family that had three kids. So I was curious how much I would have to spend if I lived in California and was a member of the elite class and wanted to get a first-class education for three children like my parents did.

This price tag - per basic math, which I learned for free in public schools - is $2.23 million.

And that doesn’t include all the miscellaneous extras. It would probably cost at least $2.5 million to get all three kids through this elite pipeline.

Good Gobbeldly Gook! I don’t even know where to start. From one throw-away detail provided in one newspaper article, a flood of inferences flow.

What does this price tag really tell us?

My first thought is the world’s elites - the “Top 1 percent” - are incredibly wealthy.

Where, or how, do they actually get all this money? 

Answer: They must get it from “somewhere” in “the system,” a Status Quo-system they probably want to perpetuate and protect - as this is the system that allowed them to become elites in the fist place.

They also probably want their own children to achieve the same benefits or results they’ve enjoyed … and they’ve, no doubt, concluded these results are not possible unless they write those tuition checks.

Personally, I don’t think the education the alumni of The Willows received is that superior to what I received in the K-12 public schools and colleges in Alabama (circa 1972-1988). 

This said, these students must make far-better “contacts” and the all-important networking benefits are far superior to what I received.

One has to be a multi-millionaire to cover

the cover-up expenses

It’s a guess, but I imagine the elites want their children to, one day, be considered as similar elites. This desire comes with a price tag only multi-millionaires can afford.

I don’t know how much money Doug Emhoff and his ex-wife (who apparently divorced him when she learned of the affair with the nanny) make, but this amount certainly is not a pittance. (While Ernhoff’s net worth came from being an entertainment litigator, his ex-wife is a movie producer.)

Being a member of the ultra-wealthy elite came in handy for our nation’s Second Gentleman as he, apparently, had to spend vast amounts of money to buy the silence of his former nanny girlfriend.

From The Daily Mail, we learned that the nanny received a settlement which allowed her to buy a home in the Hamptons, which, I gather, is a popular enclave for the ultra wealthy.

The nanny, who perhaps is still working as a nanny,  “bought a waterfront house in the Hamptons in 2021 for $855,000 … The four-bed, three-bath, refurbished barn is set away from the main road in Hampton Bays, far from prying eyes, and is currently worth an estimated $1.4 million.”

I was surprised to learn the nanny actually attended college in my state of Alabama (at Auburn), but the story didn’t say she graduated from college. Instead, she took a leap of faith and headed to California, not to become an actress but to become a nanny - and a part-time teacher’s aide at the exclusive private school where Emhoff’s two children attended.

After she got pregnant - and probably had an abortion (or perhaps put her child up for adoption?) - “someone” helped her get a job as ‘Director of New Business Development’ at production company Broadway Video in 2011, and got her current job as ‘Senior Director, Original Entertainment Acquisition & Development’ at audiobook company Audible’s New York offices in 2018.

“Audible is owned by Amazon and based in Newark, New Jersey."

I shared this story with my wife …

When I shared this story with my wife, her first comment was, “I wish someone would buy me a home in The Hamptons.”

My reply was, “Well, if you’d gone to work as a nanny for a connected liberal California attorney and had an affair with him, you’d be enjoying your ocean-side view right now.”

Instead, my wife hooked her wagon to a maverick, conservative freelance journalist whose yearly income from Substack would cover three months of tuition at The Willows.

One of my favorite lines from “Pulp Fiction” is when John Travolta’s character talks about the differences between living in Europe and the USA.

“It’s just the little differences,” he tells Samuel L. Jackson’s character.

When expounding on the differences between the elite and Bill and Carrie, I repeated this line.

See, anyone can become president …

I also note that nobody would care about Doug Emhoff’s affair with a nanny unless he later married a woman who might become the most powerful leader in the world (or, more accurately, be handled by the most powerful people in the world).

As everyone knows (but is not supposed to say), Kamala Harris achieved this position because she had a long-running affair and relationship with one of the most powerful figures in California, Willie Brown, the king/queen maker in politics in the Golden State.

Brown was Harris’s first political sugar daddy, with an assist (probably) from George Soros and his myriad elite organizations which helped finance her rapid ascension from local prosecutor to, perhaps, future president of the United States.

Once she and Brown ended their relationship, Harris found another wealthy benefactor in Mr. Emhoff.

Once Joe Biden was selected to be the next president, he needed a minority vice president to fulfill a campaign promise. A new Senator from California, famous only for her cackle and “word salad” sentence construction, nabbed the No. 2 spot in the global organizational pyramid.

It remains to be seen if Doug Emhoff’s philandering - and cover-up of same - will harpoon Harris’s presidential ambitions. (Prediction: They won’t.)

Back to the value of a great education …

It also remains to be seen if Emhoff’s children will grow up to be masters of the universe due to the “elite” education their parents secured for them.

Of course, there’s no guarantee lofty tuition checks ensure a distinguished work career.

For example, Joe Biden’s son grew up to be a dope head, serial philanderer, grafter extraordinaire as well as the father of at least one out-of-wedlock child that we know about.

However, elite connections do come in handy if you’d like your children to remain out of prison.

I’m confident with this prediction: The elite will continue to send their children to elite academic institutions.

Maggie and Jack Rice are just going to have to make their way in the world with their Troy, Alabama public school education. Personally, their Daddy doesn’t want them to be around “elites” like Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

Note: 1,000 paid subscription at my Substack newsletter would pay for one year of tuition for one child at an elite private school. This level of support would also allow us to get a nanny to help raise our kids.

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