The main attraction at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) each year is not just the speeches given by rank-and-file conservative politicians and celebrities, but rather with what goes on in the basement exhibition halls. From Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty to Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum to The John Birch Society (the parent organization of The New American) and to the highly controversial participation of GoProud, the exhibition halls this year were teeming with all sorts of participatory groups, each of which was trying to get its message across to as many like-minded people as possible.
One group that participated in this year’s CPAC was Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), founded by Kevin DeAnna in 2008. Intrigued by the organization’s message, The New American was fortunate to interview the organization’s founder.
According to its website, WesternYouth.Org, YCW defines itself as “a campus youth movement with a mission to organize, educate and train activists dedicated to the revival of Western Civilization.”
In the FAQ section of its website, the organization defines Western Civilization as follows:
The fact that we even have to answer this question shows why our group is necessary. It would be amusing to ask the multicultural groups on campus to “define their culture” and see what they say. Western culture is built on the foundation of the Greco-Roman, Christian, and indigenous folk traditions that created the social norms, values, practices, and high culture of Europe and those places settled predominantly by the peoples from that area. While in some sense this culture has become globalized (countries all around the world use Western concepts like the rule of law, democracy, and limited government), we agree with Samuel Huntington’s definition of the Western world as limited in scope, rather than encompassing the entire developed world.
With chapters now across the United States and one in Australia, YCW attributes its origins to “student [activists] from all around the country, who thought that the real strength of the left comes from multiculturalism and [from] a lot of these racial double standards that you see on college campuses,” DeAnna explained.
According to YWC’s full-page ad in the CPAC 2011 Resource Guide booklet, the organization declares itself to be fighting against illegal immigration, affirmative action, radical multiculturalism, and leftist curricula.
When asked to identify the main focus of YWC — such as what it considers to be the greater threat to the West — DeAnna explained: “I’d say combating multiculturalism on college campuses; that’s the core issue that we are mobilizing on right now.”
He elaborated, explaining why the group views multiculturalism on college campuses to be such an important concern:
Pat Buchanan was right — the death of the west is happening; what else matters?
Because if you cannot reverse that — if you do not have an actual United States of America that exists as a real entity any more — it’s irrelevant to talk about the Constitution … limited government … national sovereignty, because the thing you are defending is already gone. And especially on a college campus this would be an important point I would make ([particularly] for older readers), that [the] sense of American identify connected with … a real authentic American history has been totally removed.
So when you are appealing to the Constitution or … to limited government, these things have no resonance with a lot of young Americans, except for … being a vaguely “racist” remnant of a terrible past. So if you are not going to combat that, how are you going to get back to a constitutional government — how are you going to get back to limited government?
Pat Buchanan’s book The Death of the West is listed on the website’s recommended reading list, and DeAnna regards Buchanan as his main inspiration or role model, in addition to Tom Tancredo, whom YWC hosted in a CPAC event on immigration.
Although not primarily focused on foreign policy, DeAnna identified himself as a non-interventionist opposed to the war in Iraq. The problem as he sees it is “subversion at the top, by our national government,” especially when it comes to the issue of mass immigration.
“It seems very silly to me that we are supposedly fighting a war on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan, while our own borders are completely unguarded,” he observed.
The New American asked, with all the many other conservative youth groups — why then YWC? DeAnna replied,
One of the things that separates us from other conservative organizations is that we … already regard a lot of the established institutions out there [to be] if not lost, at least subverted or somewhat on the other side.
In providing an example of just one of the many main institutions that have been subverted or have gone to the other side, DeAnna pointed to the U.S. military:
…[Y]ou had military chiefs in this past round testifying in favor of the Dream Act. I believe it was a few years back when Bush was pushing for immigration reform, you had some of the top Marines advocating for this kind of thing. … One of the biggest dangers for conservatives is that they defend institutions that have already gone over to the other side. Conservatism can’t just be the militant defense of progressivism.
Much like Young Americans for Freedom has The New Guard and Young Americans for Liberty has its Young American Revolution, DeAnna announced that his organization would be coming out with its own quarterly publication in the spring.
Among the many other items discussed during the interview was former Congressman Larry McDonald’s Western Goals Foundation, a private intelligence network composed of former FBI and other intelligence personnel, high-ranking military officers, and other qualified experts, all sharing the goal of making impossible any merger of the United States and the free world with the totalitarian world.
In the same way that Young Americans for Liberty is essentially under the umbrella of Campaign for Liberty, DeAnna expressed his desire to be affiliated with a group such as Western Goals. “I would love to bring it back,” he commented of Congressman McDonald’s Foundation. While YWC is college-focused, DeAnna sees a resurrected Western Goals Foundation as “something that not just college students but everybody could participate in, and work on research and activism projects for — this would be something that could unite people of all age groups.”
Aside from having similar names, both Youth for Western Civilization and Western Goals Foundation have recognized the threat of internal subversion as one on the main problems confronting the West. Of the subversive leadership in the West, DeAnna stated:
Essentially we are ruled by people, in some sense, to the left of the Communists. You can’t imagine Vladimir Lenin [saying], “I have a great idea — this is what we are going to do: We are going to displace all our workers by bringing in all these people from another country through mass immigration, and then we’re going to send all our jobs overseas, and then we are going to legalize gay marriage.” [Neither Lenin nor] Stalin would have ever thought of anything as ridiculous as that.
Considering the longstanding history of internal subversion and the cultural decay of the United States and the West to the leftist concepts of multiculturalism and diversity at the expense of national history and heritage, Youth for Western Civilization is likely to be around for a long time spreading its message combating the subversive nature of the establishment.
