My oldest daughter attends Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, which is not far from the Twin Cities. So, when we learned that Dinesh D’Souza would be giving a lecture there tonight, my wife, our youngest daughter and I decided to drive down to see it. The lecture is one of an annual series, endowed by an alumnus, for the purpose of diversifying the campus by bringing conservative speakers to the school.
Dinesh was very good–scholarly but accessible, fair-minded, often very funny. He got a warm reception from a good-sized crowd, and my daughters enjoyed his lecture. It was based loosely on his book What’s So Great About America. It is a measure of how far our culture has fallen, I suppose, that someone has to endow a lecture series to expose undergraduates to the novel idea that the United States is a good country.
Dinesh’s lecture was followed by a question-and-answer session that more than once gave me a sense of deja-vu. While most of the questions were friendly, several revealed that college radicals haven’t changed much in the last 40 years. Their voices quivered with anger as they recited well-worn litanies of alleged American misdeeds, much like those that were a fixture during the late 1960s. It is an odd thing: why would a young, healthy, intelligent American college student with a bright future before him become unhinged by the fact that the Reagan administration sold some Tomahawk missiles to Iran? I can’t explain it, but the mentality is identical to what many in my generation exhibited, quite a few years ago.
But those interjections didn’t detract from a fun evening. Along with his journalistic endeavors, Dinesh serves as President of The King’s College, an evangelical Christian institution located in the Empire State Building.
SCOTT adds: A number of readers have written in to point out that the Iran-Contra scandal involved the sale of Hawk antiaircraft missiles (maximum range of 25 miles) and TOW antitank missiles (maximum range of 3 miles), not Tomahawks. As bad as Iran-Contra was, it would have been far, far worse if the United States had sold Tomahawk ground attack missiles, Thanks to our readers for the correction.
JOHN adds: As I said in the comments, I was quoting the lefty student, not vouching for his information.
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