The usual suspects don’t like it.
Contact the author, Jennifer Brooks, at 615-259-8892 or jabrooks@tennessean.com.
Meet the Youth for Western Civilization. Its members, 13 strong and counting on the campus of VanderbiltUniversity, are out to “promote the survival of Western civilizationand pride in Western heritage.”
Theclub has sprung up at seven colleges around the country in the past fewmonths, sounding a warning cry against “radical multiculturalism,””mass immigration” and the “leftist occupation” of America’s collegecampuses.
To its critics, it’s the new face of intolerance on America’s college campuses.
Ata YWC-sponsored event at Vanderbilt last week, protesters outnumberedclub members by a margin of 10-to-1. The Southern Poverty Law Centerhas the group’s national founders on a watch list, suspected of ties towhite nationalist groups.
Vanderbiltsophomores Trevor Williams and Devin Saucier, who founded the localchapter last fall, say it’s their critics who are intolerant.
A matter of perception
“We’re notracists,” Saucier said Friday, sitting on the steps of Nashville’sconcrete Parthenon, a monument to the kind of Western heritage hebelieves is vanishing from college textbooks today — squeezed out bylessons on non-Western cultures and non-Western heritage.
Inother circles, Youth for Western Civilization is being hailed as a boldnew right-wing youth movement, out to light a fire under fellowconservatives and wrench the national debate back to the topic ofimmigration.
The group had its coming-out party at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., in February.
“Thereare four policies on campuses that have led to the subversion ofWestern values,” Williams said, ticking them off one by one.
“Mass immigration without regards to assimilation. Illegal immigration. Affirmative action. And multicultural ideology.”