It is an honor to be here with you today. As you all realize, Hillsdale is beautiful and a very special, necessary place.
How necessary?
I’m thinking of that wonderful book by Thomas Cahill, “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” and his description of Ireland as an “island of saints and scholars” preserving the Western tradition.
That’s the role I see Hillsdale College playing in today’s America.
But we’re not on some rocky island in the corner of Europe. We’re in the center of a Western civilization that is in trouble.
Today, I stand before you as something of an oddity worthy of exhibition by PT Barnum, perhaps in a cage:
An old newspaperman, and even worse, a conservative newspaperman.
My good friend Prof. Charles Lipson, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and a frequent guest on my podcast, the Chicago Way, offered some advice on this talk.
“You’re not a professor, so don’t act like one at Hillsdale. You’re a reporter. Talk like a reporter on the ground. Not from 30,000 feet.”
So here I am on the sidewalk. A gumshoe reporter without a Camel filter.
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