Live at YAF! Day Two

Former Virginia Republican Party chairwoman Kate Obenshain is the banquet speaker tonight at the Young America's Foundation National Conservative Student Conference. The dinner entree is filet of salmon.

UPDATE: Ms. Obenshain has apparently been cautioned not to get into campaign mode, so she refers to a "very prominent liberal" who lectures Americans that "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK."

Ms. Obenshain also quotes the Huffington Post's Steven Posner's denunciation of patriotism as "crude flag-waving fanaticism." She responds to Posner by quoting such famous "fanatics" as Nathan Hale, Patrick Henry and John Paul Jones.

PREVIOUSLY:
Last night, I had the opportunity to speak to a conservative student superstar, Rebecca Beach. As a community college freshman three years ago, Rebecca decided to bring Iraq war hero Lt. Col. Scott Rutter as a campus speaker. When she sent an e-mail to faculty asking them to help promote the speech in their classes, she got an incredibly nasty (and ungrammatical) reply from an adjunct English instructor John Daly. Rebecca forwarded the e-mail to YAF and, next thing she knows, she's being interviewed by Sean Hannity -- sparking a national controversy that ended with Daly's resignation.

The atmosphere of repression on campuses includes lots of incidents you never hear about in the media, however. I just spoke to another student superstar, Jessica Austin, who told me about the controversy that erupted last year when she scheduled Tammy Bruce as a speaker at the University of Redlands. This resulted in death threats that police traced to the president of a gay student group, who was prosecuted. University administrators agreed to provide extra security for the event.

This kind of stuff never happens to liberal speakers. You can bring Al Gore or Michael Moore to campus, and there are never death threats or security hassles or faculty denunciations.