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Anti-Immigrant Youth

Posted April 14, 2009 by Patrick Young, Esq.

Youth for Western Civilization is not a scholarly book group where young people study the classics. Nor is it an organization where students discuss the evolution of philosophy or art in Europe and the Americas. It is a small, but growing network of anti-immigrant college students sponsored by folks like Tom Tancredo and the Buchanan Brigade.
The group is sponsoring a program at the University of North Carolina and recently held a program at Vanderbilt University. It has also organized actions at the University of Connecticutt and American University. Youth for Western Civilization calls itself a “right-wing youth movement” founded in 2008 to “create a subculture that will promote the survival of Western Civilization and pride in Western heritage” at universities. According to student journalists at the University of North Carolina, the spokesman for the group said that “he started the UNC chapter in February to counter the campus’ celebration of diversity, as well as the university’s “deep mistrust and hatred of Western heritage. If we look at most college campuses, UNC especially, diversity is celebrated,” he said. “You’re told from the second you get here for orientation that diversity is a strength. And we believe that that makes absolutely no sense.”
The group has emerged on seven campuses around the country and had its coming-out party at the notorious CPAC convention right after the Obama inauguration. Its members describe both legal and illegal immigration as subverting Western values.
The group attempts to put a miltant face on college Republicanism with a statement of goals which includes language like this: “The end goal of Youth for Western Civilization is an awakening of young Westerners that will fight for their heritage and their liberties against leftist occupation and restore sanity to American universities…”. Its symbol is a forearm with a battle ax in its hand. And lest you think this is the work of just a few misguided students, the group’s web site offers students funding in setting up chapters and provides nationally known far-right speakers like former Republican Presidential candidate Tom Tancredo and Bay Buchanan for local chapter programs.
While the organizers of this group claim not to be racist, their web site says of the organization “This is for people who are proud to be members of the West and want to work in defense of their people”.
And while conservatives are often critical of whay they call “identity politics”, the group says it wants to “Inspire Western youth to organize on the basis of identity”. Presumably “Western ideas” are less important than a “Western identity”.
Youth for Western Culture announces rather grand “medium term” goals: “In the medium term, we want these groups to take over student governments, defend against left wing organizations and create new right wing groups. We also want to change the social atmosphere of the school, with YWC becoming the focus of social life at the school as well as political activism.” So you will not just go to YWC for political guidance and miltant activism. No, it will be the center of your entire life!
The goals conclude with a rather odd call to arms: “In the long term, we want the majority of students to leave college more right wing than when they arrived. Eventually, we would like to start changing curriculums on campus to restore an emphasis on real education and classical learning”. Strangely, they appear to want to shut down the B-schools and engineering programs that so dominate 21st Century American universities and restore the humanities to the sort of central position they have not occupied here since the end of the 19th Century! No more univerities as trade schools serving corporate America, apparently!
Now I was a philosophy major and most of my electives were in the Classics Department focusing on ancient Greece and Rome, so I might feel right at home in their retro-university, but I’m guessing that a lot of parents would balk at paying $30,000 per year for such a gentlemanly course of study.
UPDATE on Youth for Western Civilization