The Young Americans For Freedom Live To Piss People Off

Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) was formed in 1960 with the help of National Review publisher William F. Buckley. It was meant to be a youth organization for conservatives on college campuses. Over the years, YAF drifted further and further to the right, embrace a form of ultra-conservatism that alienated it from the Republican Party. By the mid-1990’s, the group had ceased to exist as an organized party, with surviving chapter operating independently. One of these chapters, at Michigan State University (MSU), has been stirring up considerable controversy on campus lately. They have invited speakers such as Chris Simcox (a leader in the anti-illegal immigrant Minutemen Project) and Nick Griffin (leader of the fascist British National Party) to speak on campus. Their website and blog are also designed to provoke, with lots of video clips from speeches by Pat Buchanan and Tom Tancredo, as well as links to the website of the Jewish Task Force, a terrorist organization. All of this has earned the MSU chapter of YAF the dubious distinction of being the only collegiate organization to be named as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. I myself am glad to know that if communism should raise its ugly head in Michigan, the YAF will be there (as the above illustration from their website shows) to smash the symbols of Marxism with big hammers.