No matter how many good things America does for the world, the “American left” won’t admit it, conservative
author and speaker Dan Flynn said Tuesday night during a lecture on his 2002 book, “Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation’s Greatness.”
Flynn met frequent verbal opposition from some of the roughly 250 people packed into 182 Lillis for the College Republicans-sponsored event. He said that Americans have contributed technological and medical advances to the world and that America is unique because of the freedoms it provides.
But he said “the main problem with the left” is that they compare America to an ideal when actually “we’re doing a little bit better than the rest of the world.”
“And when you compare anything to an ideal, it’s going to fall short,” he said. “There’s racism here, there’s sexism here, there’s environmental problems, not everyone has a job. … But next to the Candy Land you’ve got going on in your head, America falls short.”
He said diversity has become “almost like a mantra on most college campuses.” But he said it is diversity based on “superficial characteristics” and not based on “the type of diversity that is especially welcome in intellectual settings, and that is the diversity of viewpoint.”
Flynn said he estimated no more than 10 percent of the population is the “American left,” although “maybe
here in Eugene more like
90 percent.”
“Those small numbers belay mass cultural influence in the media and museums and libraries, but especially in higher education,” he said. “But I’m here because I’d like to start a debate, and where else to start a debate than in the belly of the beast?”
Flynn also said there are “real distinctions” between the “left” and liberals and
democrats.
“That’s not to say (Sen. Hillary Clinton) and George W. Bush are the same, but … you do a violence to the language when you jumble someone like Hillary Clinton with the Noam Chomskys of the world.”
Audience members interrupted Flynn several times during his lecture.
“That is campus tolerance,” he said. “I did not bring these people in as my props. They’re real people who came in from Eugene.”
Audience members took different stances on Flynn’s ideas.
Junior Zebula Hebert said Flynn’s presentation seemed to be more for
entertainment and didn’t provide
in-depth examples or attack specific
issues. Hebert also said Flynn overlooked American Indians when asserting that the United States
isn’t imperialistic.
“I felt overall that he had some kind of agenda he was trying to push here,” he said.
Junior Jonathan Irwin also said Flynn used selective, extreme examples to make his case.
“It is just as easy to do that with the extremes he acknowledged on the right,” he said.
Irwin said people interrupting Flynn was inappropriate, but he remembers a member of the College Republicans yelling during a Teresa Heinz Kerry
rally last year.
Sophomore Jeff Woods said many people targeted Flynn’s specific points without addressing the larger issues.
“People, they just nit pick,” he said. “It’s very frustrating when people just get stuck on these issues.”
Woods also emphasized Flynn’s point that America can’t be compared with an ideal.
“We’re comparing real things here and not ideas,” he said.
Junior Allie Senger said she disagreed with Flynn about his comments against the war in Iraq but said he made “a lot of really good points” despite glazing over others.

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