The crest of Youth for Western Civilization.
Vanderbilt University recently approved the registration of Youth for Western Civilization as an official student organization entitled to usage of university facilities and services. Generally speaking, the registration of a new student organization is not unusual or surprising. What is shocking, however, is the fact that the national YWC organization, which debuted at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, was founded by unabashed white nationalists.
At least one national YWC officer, Vice President Marcus Epstein,* is a regular columnist for VDARE, named for Virginia Dare, the first white baby born in the English colonies, and has also invited members of American Renaissance and the European far-right to speak at functions Epstein organized for his Robert Taft Club. The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies both VDARE and American Renaissance as hate groups.
The YWC national website defines their mission as “focused on the support of Western history, identity, high culture, and pride and opposition to radical multiculturalism, political correctness, racial preferences, mass immigration, and socialism.” This is doublespeak for, “Diversity can be good in moderation — if what is being brought in is desirable. Most Americans don’t mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers — as long as these trends do not overwhelm the dominant culture,” as Epstein explained in a December 2006 blog post.
Railing against the diversity and multiculturalism of Miami, Epstein noted in the same blog post, “Even the Cuban immigrants, still preponderantly white, law-abiding, Republican-voting, affable people are not desirable if they don’t assimilate. Perhaps a few Little Havanas are manageable in a huge country, just as many Americans may see a few isolated Chinatowns as an exotic novelty. The problem is when the Little Havanas become Big Havanas and the Chinatowns become Chinacities or even Chinastates.”
According to the SPLC, YWC founder Kevin DeAnna posted several times on the Michigan State University Chapter of Young Americans for Freedom' s website, the Spartan Spectator; over the phone on March 24, DeAnna stated to Orbis that he never wrote for the Spartan Spectator blog. The SPLC “identified MSU-YAF as a hate group after it sponsored a ‘Koran desecration contest,’ jokingly threatened to distribute small-pox infected blankets to Native American students, posted 'Gays spread AIDS' fliers, called Latino students and faculty members ‘savages,’ and invited Nick Griffin, the chairman of the neofascist British National Party, to speak on the MSU campus.” Other YWC co-founders have ties to MSU-YAF, but did not necessarily participate in the activities identified by the SPLC.** Browsing through some of the articles and statements that this group of racists and xenophobes has published, one gets the impression that they have dreams of a segregated United States that has eliminated all persons who are of non-white (white being Western European) or who are of mixed ethnic backgrounds.
Free speech is a constitutional right and is regarded as a fundamental American value. This means that making idiotic and hateful statements is generally protected, as is criticism of those making idiotic and hateful statements. That said, all Vanderbilt student organizations must pledge to uphold a nondiscrimination policy and cannot discriminate based on race, sex, religion, color, national or ethnic origin, age, disability, military service, or sexual orientation. It would seem that such a policy is diametrically opposed to the goals of Vanderbilt's YWC chapter, co-founded by sophomores Trevor Williams and Devin Saucier. On an InsideVandy article, Saucier commented, "Simply spoken, multiple cultures cannot be advocated side-by-side."
Clarifications, March 24, 2009:
*The original article misidentified Marcus Epstein as one of the founders of the YWC. According to national YWC founder and Director/Chairman Kevin DeAnna, Marcus Epstein is a vice president of the national YWC. Epstein also identifies himself as vice president of YWC on the American Cause website. (Source: http://www.theamericancause.org/index.php?page=reports)
Also, according to an “About the Author” section published by Epstein on the American Cause website, Epstein “is the executive director of The American Cause and Team America, an immigration control Political Action Committee founded by Congressman Tom Tancredo. A regular columnist for VDARE.com <http://VDARE.com/> and Taki's Mag, he has also written for The American Consevervative (sic), Human Events, The Washington Examiner, and The Independent Review. He is the president of The Robert Taft Club and vice president of Youth for Western Civilization.” According to Kevin DeAnna, Epstein was not involved with YWC in its initial stages but helped the group bring Tom Tancredo to speak at American University. At CPAC 2009, the YWC Inaugural Reception was cosponsored by The American Cause. (Source: http://www.cpac.org/agenda_20708.html).
**The original article stated that, according to the SPLC, other founders of YWC participated in these events organized by the MSU-YAF. The SPLC claimed DeAnna posted on the MSU-YAF website, and that the MSU-YAF chapter was classified as a hate group after it organized these events, but the SPLC article did not specifically identify YWC founders as participants. Over the phone on March 24, Kevin DeAnna stated that he did not write for the MSU-YAF's blog, the Spartan Spectator.
According to the YWC's 2008 Annual Report filed with the Commonwealth of Virgina's State Corporation Commission, Kevin DeAnna incorporated the YWC with Craig Burgers and Luke Pelican. Both Craig Burgers and Luke Pelican were identified as former chairmen of the MSU-YAF by Kyle Bristow, then-outgoing-chairman of MSU-YAF, in a post on the Spartan Spectator (spartanspectator.com). While the original Spartan Spectator blog is now defunct, a number of other websites have archival copies of the post, including the New Century Foundation’s American Renaissance website. (Source: http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2008/02/kyle_bristow_re.php// )
Orbis did not find definitive evidence to suggest that Burgers or Pelican directly participated in the activities attributed to the MSU-YAF by the SPLC or definitive evidence that they were still members of the group when the SPLC classified MSU-YAF as a hate group in 2007. According to DeAnna, neither Burger nor Pelican are heavily involved with YWC in recent times.