I spent a great afternoon with the students participating in Young America's Foundation's National Conservative Student Conference on Tuesday. My speech, which focused on the illusion of "newness" surrounding leftist ideas and the dangerous delusion that the millenium can be ushered in through human agency, was well received. It's difficult to successfully weave a narrative about past events into a discussion that has present-day relevance. I hope that is what my talk did. Following the lecture, there was a massive book signing. My hand hurt at the end, which, strangely, was a good feeling. Best of all, C-SPAN carried my message to a national television audience. My experience tracking sales on Amazon following my appearances on various television programs suggests that C-SPAN is the best for moving books. I sense that this is because people who watch C-SPAN are more likely to be readers and, rather than a five-minute drive-by interview, a C-SPAN lecture allows me to more fully discuss the themes within a book. Thank you for watching if you tuned in. If you didn't, C-SPAN generally rebroadcasts speeches, but because by necessity they schedule their programming on the fly I might not be able to announce the rebroadcast with much notice. That's the bad news. The good news is that Young America's Foundation also taped the speech, which can be viewed anytime on their website. Happy viewing!

It's difficult to successfully weave a narrative about past events into a discussion that has present-day relevance. I hope that is what my talk did.

Mission accomplished. It was a great speech.

First off, it's really nice to see a group of young men and women engaged with legitimate ideas and views at a stage in their lives where they will likely impact society positively from the get go.

My formative years were at the end of the Hippy Era, mid to post Viet Nam and the confusion that surrounded those times made it difficult for young people to get a bead on the political and social rights and wrongs.

So, for me, this was inspiring.

I haven't read the book yet but am sure it's in there, so I can't remember the name of the group, but I thought the 'new is old' theme was respresented quite well from the beginnning with the example of the radical org. who professed revolt, free love etc. that sounded like they could have come out of the 1960's but were in fact from the 1860's.

Thank you for the kind words, Doug, which are always appreciated. ASDF: the group you are referring to were the Bible Communists, led by John Humphrey Noyes, at the Oneida Community in upstate New York. Noyes was first cousin to Rutherford B. Hayes; one of Noyes's followers who lived at the Oneida Community for more than five years, Charles Guiteau, assassinated Hayes's sucessor, James Garfield.

Just wanted to tell you I saw the video last night. I talked about some of it a couple of times throughout the day. I still think something like socialism could perhaps be done: level-headed, non-immanentized. I would prefer it to include marriage, religion, and property. But it's important to know the hurdles before you.

I was thinking after I watched, that perhaps liberalism could have a lot to do with laziness or boredom. I think that some liberals are heartfelt honest when they believe that Hitler was basically a conservative. I don't know that the blaming is intentional as much as it is the convenience of a ready made narrative.

Part of what makes them embrace the new is the failure of the old, and they don't have the rigor to explore what all went wrong--they want action, motion. So fundamentalist Muslims that took power in Iran are kind of like fundamentalists of all religions, and point out what they don't like about either. Just the way that a earnest liberal once told me that Joseph Stalin went to seminary and so that puts the source of all of his crimes against humanity at the feet of religion.

Last thing I want to say about your speech is that I noted how much it wasn't a plee for the status quo or even traditional or paleo conservatism. I thought about that in light of people coming here and taking you to task for "Rove-like" propaganda, distracting from the "real issues", or even spreading poison. You were just cautioning people about how liberalism has acted in the past. It doesn't entail that because Margaret Sanger advocated concentration camps that pro-choice advocates invariably do.

But I can imagine that it's hard for them to avoid that as a possible implication, because guilt-by-association is almost a natural tendency for them: Bush -> Cheney -> Haliburton -> Oil Supplies -> Oil -> high prices => Bush -> high oil prices. Iraq -> Oil => war on Iraq -> war for oil.

I'll be picking your book up shortly.