D’Souza’s Frost

Dinesh D’Souza spoke at Dartmouth College on Monday, February 11th, 2019. It was a relatively tame event—that is, put in contrast with the violent clashes that occurred at Berkeley, Middlebury, and other campuses in recent times. D’Souza was eloquent, tempered, sincere—he spoke with a measured tone that only rose at occasional moments to reiterate his impassioned thesis that the Democratic party is heartless and wants to keep people down. While this message often came across a bit too on the nose, the rest of D’Souza’s talk covered critical contemporary political issues in a creative manner. It was in many ways a genuine surprise to hear protestors outside the auditorium chanting “racist go home” among other epithets, as D’Souza’s talk was for the most part only mildly right-of-center on the spectrum. D’Souza himself remarked on this: when two student protestors stood up with a sign that read “OUTING YOU AS A BIGOT,” D’Souza said to the crowd that one would think he was hurling insults from the podium (he was quoting Robert Frost).

Frost’s poetry, for D’Souza, embodies the harshness of New England, a certain solitary—even hermetic—pioneering attitude. A do-it-yourself mentality, if you will. This outlook translates, at least for D’Souza, into the attitudes of the Republican party—what he calls “the party of the ladder.” Republicans will hold up the ladder for you to climb, but they won’t push or pull you up— that you’ll have to do yourself. It is this realism, even an ascetic coldness in the case of Frost, that the Democratic party has lost to unchecked universalism and cultural relativism. The knee-jerk negative reaction to the Wall is fundamentally based a rhetoric that suggests the United States has resources to offer anyone who would like to come here, which everyone knows is abhorrently untrue. Lines, borders, a certain semblance of rigidity—this is what the Republican party should, and for the most part does, stand for today. What D’Souza brought back to Dartmouth on Monday night was this antiquated, yet vibrantly useful, way of seeing the world—as existing, there, for whomever can take it.

Towards the end of the evening, as D’Souza was responding to questions during the Q&A, two female students stood up, moved into the aisle and began intensely kissing one another, which prompted an ocean of face-palms in the audience. Eventually they were pointed toward the exit, to which they walked, carrying a sign that read: “STILL HERE/ STILL QUEER/ YOUR HATE WILL NOT FILL ME WITH FEAR.” It was strikingly unclear to what this sign was referring, as D’Souza wasn’t speaking about gay rights, or any issue related to the LGBT demographic for that matter. On the sheets that were handed out by student protestors before the event, which collected some of D’Souza’s more offensive quotes from his previous writings, there wasn’t even a quote related to gay issues. It compelled one to reflect on what these students thought their homoerotic transgressive insurrection was a response to: are all conservative ideas one and the same? Does being pro-Wall make you anti-gay? Does being pro-Wall make you transphobic? The mind reels trying to make the logical leaps the student protestors did when preparing their material.

Since Trump’s election, the Left’s response to any idea on the Right has been a radical flattening of difference. Nuance is often left behind in the pre-2016 Golden Age. There is no meaning distinction, for some of them, between someone who believes in borders and supports Trump’s political agenda and someone who hates immigrants and/or minorities. It is a binary mindset, one violently opposed to critical thinking. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the students who could have most used D’Souza’s ideas to bring nuance into their lives were unwilling to hear him.