Dana Perino tells Utah State students America will ‘get it right in the end’

Dana Perino was at the United Nations in New York City in September to cover Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech. Before he even started to speak, diplomats from countries around the world stood up and left the room.
This was before news had spread about Israel’s targeting of Hezbollah leaders by blowing up their pagers and walkie-talkies.
Perino, a Fox News anchor and former White House spokeswoman under President George W. Bush, was at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, on Friday to speak about free speech and civility on college campuses, at the invitation of the Orrin G. Hatch Foundation.
“And what really bothered me,” she said, recalling that day at the U.N., “was how many of these diplomats — whose whole point is to talk about things, to communicate, to use their words and to listen and to be civil to one another, to avoid war — walk out of the room before his speech.”
“So how are we as adults going to do that and then expect college students to be any better? We have to do better,” she said.
Perino’s visit to USU was a homecoming of sorts. She was born in Evanston, Wyoming, and her dad took some classes at Utah State. She got her undergraduate degree at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo.
“Part of coming here for me is not just about coming home to a physical place, but to one in which I feel like my character is rooted in this place, and it gets me back to my roots,” she said, listing the values she associates with the Mountain West — honesty, modesty, humility, strength, courage, character, bravery and individualism.
“The best compliment that you can get is that you went to Washington or New York and you didn’t change,” she said.
That isn’t to say she did not get frustrated at times during her time in the White House. When journalists would get under her skin during White House press briefings, Perino said she had a specific way she’d blow off steam.
“There were times when I would be at the podium, and a lot of reporters can be jerks, and they can … peacock around and they want to be on television, so they’re going to just try to grill me, and I would never let them see me sweat, right? … And sometimes, under the podium, if they were really, really giving me a hard time, I would just take a deep breath and underneath the podium, flip them off,” she said, to audience laughter.
Perino told students her plan wasn’t to end up in the White House, she initially wanted to be a TV news reporter.
“I had all these plans, and none of those plans worked out,” she said. “But the … good news is I didn’t have to have a plan, because God had the plan, and everything worked out.”
Perino said she got to know the late Sen. Orrin Hatch well while she was in Washington. She recounted advice he gave her, to not be afraid to stand out.
She was working in the White House press office at the time, and had to fill in for then-press secretary Tony Snow at an event. She felt like an “imposter,” she said, and only gave a half-wave from the dais when her name was called.
After the event, Hatch made a beeline for her.
“Orrin Hatch, the senator‚ is coming right for me, and I thought maybe he needed me to pass on something to President Bush, or something,” she said. “He said, ‘Dana, Dana, I want to tell you something. You’re here for a reason. You earned this spot. They want to cheer for you. So when your name is called, stand up and wave.’”
Perino said she’s going to take that to heart in her latest endeavor — learning to ballroom dance. She said she’d rather give an extemporaneous speech about the Middle East for two hours than “raise my arm in this gesture,” but said after recalling Hatch’s advice to her, she was going to try to embrace her new hobby.
At the end of her White House tenure, Perino recalled being at a luncheon held for newly elected President Barack Obama, hosted by her boss. Bush had invited all the living former presidents to the luncheon — his father, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
Despite all the unpleasant things the men had said about each other, “there we were showing the world that every single time — and it might be arduous, it might be ugly at times — but we get it right in the end.”
After Perino was finished speaking, she joined Joseph Ward, dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at USU, and Matt Whitlock, a communications strategist and former Hatch staffer, in a conversation moderated by Matt Sandgren, executive director of the Hatch Foundation.
Sandgren started out the conversation by reading from a 2023 nationwide survey of college students by the Buckley Institute at Yale.
“Listen to these stats — 61% of students said they often felt intimidated when sharing their ideas, opinions or beliefs in class because they were different from those of their professors, 46% cited politics as a topic they were uncomfortable in discussing or felt was off limits for discussion. 51% favored a speech code to regulate speech for students and faculty, and 46% agreed it is sometimes appropriate to shout down or disrupt a speaker on their campus,” Sandgren said.
Ward said the findings were “troubling.”
“I want to assert clearly that as faculty members, our goal should be every student feeling comfortable in every class setting they find themselves,” Ward said. “That’s how growth happens. We want to encourage students to take chances, not to shrink back.”
Over the past 20 years, there’s been a shift in how people disagree, Whitlock said. “It used to be we could disagree agreeably on politics and still acknowledge that other people had good intentions,” he said. “This has shifted — I think this is exacerbated by social media and other forces — but it shifted to, if you disagree with me, you are a bad person.
Whitlock said his experience as sometimes being the only conservative in the classroom in his San Francisco Bay area high school helped him sharpen his views. In order for college students to have that experience, he said, the temperature needs to be turned down on campus.
Perino said she thinks political polarization could be happening even earlier, in the elementary school classroom, which is why parents are pushing for school choice.
Utah State embraces viewpoint neutrality, Ward said, meaning the university itself is neutral on political issues, while faculty, staff and students hold diverse beliefs.
That doesn’t mean professors are shying away from discussing difficult or controversial subjects, he said. But the goal is for students to engage with the material and develop their own perspectives.
After spending a number of years as the spokesperson for Bush, Perino said at Fox News she had to find her own voice and untangle her opinions from those of her former boss.
One of the ways she did that was by speaking freely about her faith and her relationship with God.
“It’s always surprised me how many people will come to me and say, ‘Thank you for being brave enough to talk about your faith. Thank you for being willing to talk about God and the role he plays in your life,’” she said.
“And what’s so interesting is that, I guess that is brave, but it’s an interesting thing that people are maybe afraid to say, ‘I’m for Israel to have its own country and defend its borders,’” she said. “Why should that be so scary to say?
“But talking about your faith and religion, that’s like another thing again, right? There’s those things that you don’t talk about in certain places. So I have had to figure out a way to do that.”
Later, in an interview with the Deseret News, Perino said she understands it can be hard to “have this faith and to live it.”
“I take a lot of heart in my Jewish friends, I’m very close with many including Dan Senor, he has a podcast called ‘Call Me Back.’ He worked in the Bush administration with us (as a senior adviser), and I did a podcast with him after Oct. 7,” she said. “And one of the things he told me is that for the first time in his life, he felt vulnerable as an American.
“And that really shook me, and he got tears in his eyes, and so did I, and there’s a solidarity there. So I do think that sometimes religious conservatives could maybe look to our Jewish friends for advice and follow their lead a little bit.”
Perino advised Americans who find themselves worried about the state of the world to build bridges in their homes and in their communities.
In an interview with the Deseret News after her remarks, Perino said she’s “not sure yet” why things have changed in the way people treat one another in politics from the time she left the White House in 2009 to today.
“I think it’s very interesting to live through a political realignment,” she said, pointing out she was too young to understand the phenomenon of “Reagan Democrats” who became conservative Republicans.
“When I was first starting out, college educated people were definitely always in the Republican camp. Now they’re definitely in the Democratic camp,” she said. “So I think it’s too soon to say what happened, because we’re in the middle of it.”
Perino gave college students three suggestions on how to learn to engage civilly.
First, she suggested they watch the series of debates between William Buckley and Gore Vidal from the 1960s.
Second, she recommended they listen to the podcast “Honestly,” hosted by Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, which Perino recommended the students get a subscription to.
The third thing she recommended was that they learn a few specific phrases: “I see where you’re coming from,” “You make a great point, I look at it a little bit differently,” and, “I just want to make two points.”