Young Americans for Foolishness
David
Franke February 15th,
2011
This has been a sad time for me, considering how important a role Young
Americans for Freedom (YAF) played in my life at a young age. The faux
paper organization that pretends to be YAF this weekend expelled Rep. Ron
Paul from its National Advisory Board, a move that will hurt them far
more than the Congressman.
It’s easy to figure out why they did this. At this past week’s
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., Ron
Paul won the presidential straw poll for the second consecutive year. The
energy and organization behind this victory was Young Americans for
Liberty (YAL), the Ron Paul youth group. YAL was leaving YAF in its dust,
not that there ever was a contest. In desperation, YAF had to do
something to try and make itself still seem relevant and newsworthy, so
it hit upon the idea of expelling Ron Paul from its National Advisory
Board.
The ploy worked well in that it gave YAF more publicity than it has
received in years. But the ploy also spotlighted the severe limitations
of a paper organization. The big headlines in the media were about Ron
Paul winning the CPAC presidential poll. The YAF ploy was just a
sour-grapes asterisk to that story.
What made the situation worse for YAF was the intemperance and
incoherence of the YAF statement, and these additional temper tantrums by
YAF National Director Jordan Marks:
“Rep. Paul’s refusal to support our nation’s military and national
security interests border on treason (emphasis added), aside from his
failure to uphold his oath to the United States Constitution…”
“Rep. Paul is clearly off his meds and must be purged from public office.
YAF is starting the process by removing him from our national advisory
board.”
Whoa! It’s obvious who is off his meds, and it ain’t Dr. Paul.
Statements like these severely limited the support YAF might have hoped
to get. I am on a list serve of vintage YAFfers (we now fondly call
ourselves OAFs, or Old Americans for Freedom), and even the most hawkish
YAF alumni have been embarrassed by this episode.
The only ones who are crowing about this are, of course, the leftist
media. You know, another “split” in the Right to rejoice over. Except
that today’s YAF represents virtually nobody, so this is a “split”
without meaning. Today’s YAF represents itself as the “nation’s oldest
conservative-libertarian activist group.” They know that the media will
not do any homework and will simply believe that this is the same genuine
conservative student movement that helped pave the way for Goldwater and
Reagan in the early days of the conservative movement. The leftist media
have no self-interest in pointing out that YAF died as an organization
decades ago. Today’s group has assumed the old name for obvious publicity
and fundraising purposes, but it represents…what?
I challenge today’s “Young Americans for Freedom” to open its books and
show us how many dues-paying members they have. I have enough insider
experience in the way these things work, I say they don’t have more than
200 dues-paying national members. And that makes them nothing more than a
paper tiger compared to the more than 100 chapters and tens of thousands
of members of Ron Paul’s Young Americans for Liberty.
They think I am out of my mind? Let them open their books.
David Franke was one of the key founders of Young Americans for
Freedom, before and during the Sharon Conference. He was most responsible
for the name of the organization. He founded and organized the Greater
New York Council of Young Americans for Freedom, comprised of 35 or more
chapters in that metropolitan areato this day, the largest grassroots
YAF grouping ever. He spearheaded the drive to put YAF in the forefront
of the drive to end the draft and create a volunteer military. And for
three years he was editor of The New Guard, YAF’s national magazine. With
all this background, he feels he has every right to be pissed off at the
people who are posing as YAF today.
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2011/02/15/young-americans-for-foolishness/
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