Yesterday, woke went to Florida and died. Like Conquistador Ponce de León after failing to find immortality, DEI darling Dr. Santa Ono departed the Sunshine State without locating the highest-paid public university contract in history. The Alachua Chronicle ran the story headlined, “
SUS Board of Governors rejects Dr. Santa Ono as president of the University of Florida.” (SUS means State University System, but
nice one, Chronicle.)
In what can best be described as the academic equivalent of a hostage video, Dr. Ono disavowed nearly every statement, program, and position he’d previously endorsed— blaming them on
other people,
old data, or the fact that he’s “an immunologist” and therefore not responsible for understanding, believing in, or explaining anything outside a petri dish.
Pressed on why he once praised a task force that declared
“whiteness is an obstacle to inclusive excellence,” Ono clarified that he no longer stands by those words. Or those ideas. Or that task force. Or apparently
anything he said prior to about 18 months ago. It was the same for vaccine mandates (“hard to say”), anti-racism (“not my specific area”), and the climate crisis (“I didn’t have the data back then”).
At one point, he even backed off
his own field of study, claiming he never reviewed the clinical data on covid mandates, despite being
—get this— an immunologist.
Ono reversed more often than a 17-year-old cheerleader while parallel parking.
By the end of the hearing, some alert viewers wondered whether the Board of Governors had sniffed out not just ideological incoherence, but possibly a legitimate, Biden-like medical problem. Ono repeatedly claimed
he couldn’t recall the context of his own public statements,
couldn’t remember what “renewed adversity” referred to, and
couldn’t explain why he signed, then un-signed, a national letter denouncing “government overreach.”
He
couldn’t even recall the values he once called
core. To be honest, it sounded less like a job interview and more like a cognitive screening.
CLIP: Dr. Oh-No tells how to find the fountain of implicit bias in you (0:36).
Did he, perhaps, suffer from an ideological infection? Or maybe jab-induced, early-onset dementia? Or had Dr. Ono, somewhere between Vancouver and Gainesville, gotten amnesia sitcom-style, by walking into a low doorway, and now he can’t even remember
that? Whichever, Ono experienced a convenient flare-up of memory-itis.
At one point, when pressed about a quote from
last October, he conveniently replied, “I don’t remember what I was saying at that time.” When pressed on whether he would mandate vaccines again, immunologist Ono said he “doesn’t have enough data” to make that decision.
You almost felt bad for the guy. Almost. Then you remembered he was about to be handed $3 million a year to lead Florida’s flagship university and steer its students through the minefields of science, speech, and social values— armed, apparently, with an empty pipette, a DEI-induced blind spot, and a memory card corrupted by progressive firmware.
Comment glitch explained; Dr. Oh No! denied UF throne and DEI spoils; new “scarient” debuts as jab noise spikes; Palantir panic unpacked; NC teen wins vocabulary war; and more.
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