Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Conservative group aimed at future leaders
BUFFALO, N.Y. — The Young America’s Foundation has a mission of grooming future conservative leaders.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, a White House adviser, are among its alumni — and its long list of donors has included television game show host Pat Sajak, novelist Tom Clancy, billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, and Amway billionaires Richard and Helen DeVos, who gave $10 million to endow the Reagan Ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif., which the foundation runs as a preserve. (Their daughter-in-law, Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, is not a donor, the group says.)
Over the past two years, armed with a $16 million infusion from the estate of an orthodontist in California, Robert Ruhe, the organization has doubled its programming, including campus speeches. In 2016 that meant 111 speakers on 77 campuses. On the group’s website, it boasted of “dispatching” 31 speakers to colleges last month alone.
In that time, the speakers have gotten edgier, more inyour-face and sometimes even mean-spirited. Among them is Ann Coulter, whose canceled speech last month at the University of California, Berkeley, led the foundation, which was covering most of her $20,000 fee, to sue the college, arguing that it had violated the First Amendment in its failure to provide a suitable time and place for the event.
The resulting clashes on university campuses, including protests and efforts to block speeches, have raised free speech questions. And at Berkeley, even liberals who oppose Coulter’s viewpoints said her speech should have been allowed to proceed.
In the meantime, protesters have questioned whether such events are cynically intended to provoke reactions.
“It’s part of a larger systematic and extremely well-funded effort to disrupt public universities and create tension among student groups on campus,” said Alexandra Prince, a doctoral student at University at Buffalo who circulated a petition to block a speech there by Robert Spencer, a conservative author and blogger backed by the group.
But Ron Robinson, who has served as Young America’s president for more than three decades, said the group’s goal is simply “to increase appreciation and support of conservative ideas, not to stir up leftists or Muslims.”
The foundation has more than 250 high school and college campus chapters, known as Young Americans for Freedom, which was originally a separate organization. One of that group’s founders was publisher and television host William F. Buckley Jr., who reveled in poking fun at and holes in liberalism in higher education.
Students can attend training seminars at the group’s Reston, Va., headquarters as well as off-site conferences, including those held at a center in Santa Barbara, which is also open to the public as a museum.
The foundation teaches essentials such as when it is legal to record a conversation with a college administrator; how to press schools to cover some security costs; regulations on sidewalk chalking, fliers and other forms of promotion and whether they can be challenged; and when to call the foundation’s legal staff for help.
“Conservative students have to learn how to negotiate through their school’s bureaucracy, which is often put in place to prevent or control student events,” Robinson said in an email.
The group also provides kits of what it calls “conservative swag,” such as a giant dorm-room poster of Ronald Reagan on horseback, instructions for staging a funeral for the death of Halloween (buy a lawn decoration coffin or make one yourself) — a swipe at university efforts to discourage offensive costumes — and posters to distribute on Sept. 11 featuring depictions of the World Trade Center attacks and terrorist beheadings.
In addition to its fiery speakers and marquee names like Newt Gingrich, the organization’s roster includes many low-fuss speakers like publisher Steve Forbes and author Ben Stein. It was not associated with the campus appearances recently made by right-wing writer Milo Yiannopoulos.