I have a childhood friend — now an MD and the director of medicine at a prominent hospital — who is obviously very bright, but he is also a fully invested, over the top, leftist. My nephew, a gifted child, is now arguably one of the top applied mathematicians in the world. He works for a non-profit think tank at MIT which in turn works for the federal government. I’m not sure what he does. He, too, is a Prius-driving, vegan Leftist. These two men have active, fertile minds and yet they swing hard left.

My friend the MD had a difficult childhood. His father was a paranoid racist kook and an alcoholic; perhaps a schizophrenic as well. His self-inflicted problems were always the result of conspiracy. The old man abandoned his family, disappeared and was later discovered in rural Maine with a second family. My friend’s mother was so devastated she committed suicide, leaving my gifted friend in the care of his aged grandparents. His developed leftism has something of his father’s kooky paranoia to it.

My nephew had an idyllic childhood until high school, when he learned that his successful father — a master of the universe in the Detroit auto industry — was a serial adulterer. His parents divorce, messy and rancorous, took its toll on the boy. His gifts led him to Harvard, MIT, Doctorates and accolades, but also left him in Cambridge. He’s been marinating in Leftism for much of his young life and seems downright surprised when he hears humans expound opposing views. Conservatives without tobacco juice stains in their wife beater T-shirts? Who knew?