The Right's New Wing

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VINCENT J. MUSI / AURORA FOR TIME

PAYING HOMAGE: Students participating in a Young Americas Foundation program stand on a hill overlooking the old Reagan ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif.

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So what binds the new young conservatives? What links the urban libertarians, the exurban social conservatives and the kids like Custer who can't easily be labeled? After interviewing dozens of young conservatives over the past five months, I think the glue is more cultural than political: paradoxically, these kids see themselves as campus rebels. They believe they are "the new counterculture," as YAF official Patrick Coyle says — ridiculed by liberal professors, shouted down by student leftists and betrayed by a Republican Party afraid of alienating moderates.

Listen to Martin Dawson, 22, who will be a senior this fall at Fordham University in New York: "The Republican Party is becoming what it criticized in 1994 — the party of Washington power, the party of Big Government, Big Spending and Big Business." Even those who support the party and the President sound like outsiders. Says Alexa Moutevelis, a 20-year-old Washington and Lee University student who has Bush stickers on her car: "I'm a conservative because I'm antiestablishment." Ohio University senior Clayton Henson, 22, uses similar language: "The left controls the campus ... They are the establishment now. They are the reactionary ones."

The well-funded national organizations backing the young right encourage campus conservatives to see themselves as oppressed minorities. "Young America's Foundation alleviates the isolation so many young conservatives face," says a brochure for the National Conservative Student Conference. Another YAF pamphlet says its speakers "energize students in the fight for freedom on campus against radically anti-American, leftist professors."

Small wonder, then, that the students have started to mimic the left's rhetoric of victimhood. A prominent student conservative — Charles Mitchell of Pennsylvania's Bucknell University — urged conference attendees to return to their campuses and create "safe zones" for conservatives, who are, he said, "constantly under attack." Antifeminist Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys, darkly warned that Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues — a collection of sketches about women's sexual experiences that was performed on more than 600 campuses last year — has inspired "an army" of campus feminists whom she called "very elitist." Sommers told the audience, "You have been marginalized. You have to begin to demand some kind of representation."

Conservatives have even joined the push for campus diversity. A young-right group called Students for Academic Freedom is pressing states to adopt its Academic Bill of Rights, which would require colleges to promote "intellectual diversity" among their faculties, guest speakers and assigned authors. (Practically speaking, of course, such diversity would mean hiring more conservatives.) After a version of the bill was introduced in the Colorado legislature this year, the state's four biggest universities agreed to examine whether political diversity is threatened on their campuses. Legislators in four other states have also introduced versions of the bill.

In the early '90s, conservatives called multiculturalism divisive and anti-intellectual. Now they use it to their advantage. "I tell [the students], 'Use the word diversity, but make it about diversity of ideas. Use their language against them,'" says Coyle. His organization even recommends that conservative students advertise lectures on race with flyers screeching "Where Are MY Reparations?"

Coyle defends YAF's to-the-barricades approach as the only way to combat a liberal advantage. "Conservatives don't control the faculty. They don't control the administration. They don't control the student government," he says. Among the conservative students I have met over the past few months, nearly every one has offered a tale of antiright bias: half a dozen kids at different schools in California and New York told me their professors had derided President Bush in class. Others complained about the proliferation of programs in women's studies, African-American studies — even labor studies — while conservative scholars such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (both Nobel laureates) are rarely assigned.

In a notorious example of left-wing intimidation, the Leadership Institute's Flynn spoke at a 2000 forum at the University of California, Berkeley, about his 38page pamphlet Cop Killer: How Mumia Abu-Jamal Conned Millions into Believing He Was Framed. Supporters of Abu-Jamal, a leftist writer on death row who has inspired an international movement seeking the reversal of his 1982 murder conviction, erupted in virulent protest. According to an article in Berkeley's student paper, some of the demonstrators actually burned copies of Flynn's booklet. The disruption got national news coverage, and an embarrassed student senate had to pass a bill declaring that Berkeley, home of the free-speech movement, still opposes book burning.

That protest was especially vicious, but conservatives say they are routinely heckled on campus. University of Michigan students shouted down Ward Connerly, a California businessman who has battled racial preferences, during a 1998 speech. (YAF often screens a tape of the event to "show students what they're up against," says Coyle.) Libertarian ABC journalist John Stossel, who regularly speaks at YAF events, was verbally attacked at Brown University in 1997 after raising questions about the legitimacy of a rape charge one student had leveled against another. "Get off this campus! We don't want you here!" a student yelled at Stossel.

Even more disturbing, a website calling itself "an online resource for those on the front lines fighting fascism" has printed Coyle's home address and phone number. "Pat is the one working diligently to divert your tuition and public tax money toward the radical, racist, right-wing club," charges the website. Another part of the site seeks further information on its targets, including "Social Security numbers, automobile plate numbers, names and birth dates of spouse(s), children and friends."

But YAF must also take some blame for coarsening campus dialogue. Coyle, an affable, prematurely graying 30-year-old who, like many of today's college conservatives, cites Rush Limbaugh as an influence, travels the nation leading seminars on how to bring to campus speakers who will rankle liberals. "You want an event that will be remembered for weeks," he told a group of students earlier this year in Santa Barbara. He then proffered some incendiary flyers that the foundation recommends as ads. "What does a woman REALLY want?" asks a flyer promoting a 2000 speech at the University of Delaware by conservative Michelle Easton. The answer: "Husband. Children. Picket Fence." A 2001 flyer for an Ann Coulter talk at Cornell depicts the Confederate battle flag (Coulter, the angular, clamorous polemicist, is one of YAF's most popular speakers). And a 1999 University of Nebraska flyer warns, "Man Hatin', Abortion-Lovin', Marriage-Despisin', Gay Agenda-Promotin', Biology-Loathin' FEMINAZIS: You best BEWARE. You're about to be exposed. BAY BUCHANAN is coming to town."

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