Almost every single time I start checking out some flashy new Conservative organization, it ends up being a "Seven Degrees of Sarah Scaife" game. Which is one of the huge foundations that fund various right-wing "think-tanks" that peddle corporate misinformation, like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. In this case, it only takes about four degrees to connect the dots between these mega-funders and the new "student organization" that has plunged UNC Chapel Hill into controversy lately, the Youth for Western Civilization.
The middle dot in this connection is the Leadership Institute out of Arlington Virginia:
http://www.leadershipinstitute.org/...
The Leadership Institute's mission is to identify, recruit, train, and place conservatives in politics, government, and the media.
The head guru of this indoctrination facility (they actually have a dorm) is Morton Blackwell, who's been training future Conservative leaders like Karl Rove for decades. He was also a co-founder of Moral Majority, a close associate of the DeVos family, and is the Chairman of the Virginia Republican National Committee.
If there are any UNC administrators reading this, please pay close attention to this Salon article from 2005:
http://dir.salon.com/...
The structure of Blackwell's Campus Leadership Program is simple. The Leadership Institute trains promising conservative college graduates over the summer and dispatches them to campuses in the fall with a mandate to start conservative student organizations. Need $500 and some ideas to start a combative right-wing campus publication? The institute would love to help you. Is the campus administration discriminating against your Second Amendment club? The institute will help you take your cause to the Internet. No one on campus at your Christian college has ever heard of the institute? Staffers will be glad to drive down, take you to a steakhouse, and talk it up. Last year, the CLP doubled in size, to 418 clubs and counting. By the end of 2006, Blackwell is confident he will have created 1,000 conservative campus organizations.
Unlike chapter-based political organizations, CLP clubs are unaffiliated with either the Leadership Institute or each other. According to Blackwell, this trait offers a serious advantage: "No purges." The clubs' independence also comes with the benefit of plausible deniability. "You can get away with stuff that you would take a lot of flak for doing in the College Republicans," says CLP director Dan Flynn. "Because we're independent, we can do activities that push the envelope," agrees University of Miami senior Sarah Canale, whose CLP-organized Advocates for Conservative Thought threw an affirmative action bake sale last year in which the price of a cupcake varied according to the race of its buyer. That it was controversial, she believes, was a victory in itself.
The Leadership Institute teaches the same principle. Controlled controversy -- making your point in a manner so bombastic that your opponents blow their cool -- is a Blackwell specialty.
Sound familiar? Do you understand now, Chancellor Thorp? You're not dealing with a free speech issue, you're dealing with kids who have been recruited and trained by an organization to bring about exactly what happened.
** Nix previous self-righteous tirade. It appears the six who were arrested at the Virgil Goode speech were not students or faculty, they were adults living in the area who went there to protest/disrupt. There's already too much off-campus influence at play here, and the students need to be left alone so they can work this out in their own way.**
If you're still not convinced, let's look at the Leadership Institute's financial statement, which shows that, for last year alone, they spent $4,605,859 on their Campus Leadership Program:
http://www.leadershipinstitute.org/...
http://www.thecampusright.com/...
The National Field Program identifies and recruits conservative students on college campuses and helps them organize independent conservative groups and publications.
These independent groups and publications fight back against the radical leftists who dominate the faculty, administration, and campus life at the majority of American colleges.
Here's a few snippets from their blog, the Campus Right:
http://www.thecampusright.com/
The Leadership Institute's Deputy Field Director, Kevin DeAnna, is the founder of Youth for Western Civilization.
The Youth for Western Civilization (YWC) chapter at UNC Chapel Hill, a Campus Leadership Program group, brought Tom Tancredo to speak on campus on April 14, 2009.
And if you're still not convinced the Leadership Institute is directly responsible for your recent troubles, how about some proof that there was a financial incentive involved?
LI offers conservative groups a chance to showcase their campus activism skills as they compete with other groups for a Conservative Campus Activism Scholarship Award.
First Place is $2,000, Second Place is $1,000, and Third Place is $500. And if you look at a few of the questions asked on the application for said award, you'll get an idea of what they expect from the winners:
http://www.thecampusright.com/...
- Was their any opposition from other students, campus police or faculty? How did you respond?
- What did your group do to earn media coverage?
That pretty much sums it up. What happened at UNC was not a fluke or an aberration of student behavior, it was an event orchestrated from without by powerful people with an agenda. And I have a feeling this story is far from over.
Part II: While doing my research before posting this diary at BlueNC a few days ago, I came across some pretty strong hints that our resident right-wing stink-tank and astroturf conglomerate Civitas/John Locke Foundation (see Art Pope Puppetmaster) was somehow involved in this. I've learned that, when dealing with these folks in particular, there's no such thing as a coincidence:
http://www.indyweek.com/...
The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy says critics of a proposed "Studies in Western Cultures" minor at the University of North Carolina--to be funded by the center's benefactor, the John William Pope Foundation--are "fearful radicals." But faculty who wrote the proposal are among those asking university administrators to take a stronger stand against the Pope Center's attacks on UNC curriculum. Reid Barbour, chair of the committee that developed the "Studies in Western Cultures" proposal, says he is proud of his team's work, but is uncomfortable with the donors' ties to the Pope Center.
The Pope Center has also been outspoken about what it says is a lack of attention to the teaching of Western Civilization at UNC as compared to multiculturalism. Since word of the proposed Pope-funded curriculum in Western Cultures broke last month, faculty and students have voiced concerns that allowing a political critic of the university to pay for changes in the curriculum will harm the school's academic integrity.
"The Pope Center is attacking members of our faculty with hostility, and I want it to stop," he says. "I would like to see the administration go to the Popes and ask for the attacks to stop or for the Popes to distance themselves" from those attacks.
Now, this curriculum controversy has been ongoing for 4-5 years, and UNC Chapel Hill isn't the only university that Pope is trying to subvert. But the theme of elevating Western Studies while stifling multicultarism seems to be one of the main missions of the newly-formed Youth for Western Civilization:
http://www.westernyouth.org/...
Youth for Western Civilization will educate, organize and train activists on campuses across the nation to create a culture that will promote the survival of Western Civilization and pride in Western heritage. This movement is 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.
And thanks to my intrepid fellow BlueNC blogger Greg Flynn, we now know that the Pope Foundation has donated some $110,000 to the Leadership Institute over the last three years. Which could mean (I'm still not 100%) that the appearance of this borderline White Supremacist student group is part of this older battle between the Pope Foundation and the "radical leftist" faculty at UNC. If so, it was a pretty smart move by Art Pope. The school has been embarrassed and ridiculed, several students have been arrested for speaking their minds, and now speakers who are paid to spew their racist viewpoints on immigration, affirmative action and multiculturalism are on the verge of being granted unlimited access to the UNC campus.
Originally posted at BlueNC
http://bluenc.com/...