Written by Devon Mitchell
Roanoke’s Center for Economic Freedom had its inaugural David L. Guy Lecture Series event with speaker Stephen Moore in a talk entitled, “Is Socialism Coming To America”. In case you don’t know who Stephen Moore is, he is an economic and political analyst who wrote for the Wall Street Journal and recently was an economic advisor for Donald Trump. Of course, I thought this would be a fantastic talk to attend being a left-leaning individual. =
I’m going to be upfront. I was not a fan of Moore’s talk. Not because he is conservative or worked for Donald Trump. What really irked me is a) he didn’t actually discuss socialism; b) he began the talk bragging about his rich friends, riding on private jets, and his bestie Trump; c) he didn’t substantiate his claims; and d) he was kind of offensive. I expected to be exposed to another viewpoint to better understand other perspectives. Instead, I left feeling annoyed I listened to a man claim America is not systematically racist while using derogatory terms concerning indigenous people.
Moore would put up a slide with a graph on it, not fully explaining what the graph was and where the data came from, then move on saying, “and that’s why I don’t believe this is good for America,” but wouldn’t actually explain what he didn’t think was good for America. I truly didn’t learn anything except confirmation bias is a very real thing.
I would have been happier to hear Stephen Moore speak had it not been clear that he couldn’t take the bias out of his lecture. I would like to hear a conservative speaker at one of these talks not mention how great Trump policy is and how tragic any democrat’s policy is. When Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke to Roanoke College, she was careful not to dump on Trump. She was tactful whereas Moore seemed to care more about his agenda than challenging the minds of college students.
