(NAME-MCE) Black Hats on Campus

[KispokoT at aol.com]

            Black Hats on  Campus
Student Hate Group Roils  Michigan State
By David  Holthouse

            
Neo-Nazi Preston Wiginton is just one  of the Young Americans for Freedom 
supporters who favor black  cowboy hats. 
_http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=869_ 
(http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=869)  (http://www.splcenter.org/blog/)   
Preston Wiginton is one busy neo-Nazi.  
In October 2005, he won the "Strongest Skinhead" contest at  Hammerfest, a 
racist skinhead festival in Draketown, Ga., where he  announced that he was 
organizing secret paramilitary training in  preparation for the coming race war. 
In the following days, Wiginton  posted more than 300 messages to the white 
nationalist online forum  Stormfront, writing in one that "beating down a mud," 
or non-white,  is a "righteous act of collective preservation." 
Since then, Wiginton has continued to appear at white supremacist  events 
across the United States — and abroad, too. Just this Nov. 4,  Wiginton spoke to 
a crowd of 5,000 Russian ultranationalists at a  Moscow rally against 
non-white immigration that included calls for  Serbian-style ethnic cleansing. Waving 
his black cowboy hat, the  Victoria, Texas, resident said, "I'm taking my hat 
off as a sign of  respect for your strong identity in ethnicity, nation and 
race." The  audience responded with Nazi salutes and chants of "White power!" in 
 English. 
But Wiginton, ever the activist, has not neglected smaller  venues. A mere 10 
days before the Moscow rally, Wiginton served as  master of ceremonies at an 
appearance in East Lansing, Mich., by  British Holocaust denier Nick Griffin, 
the national chairman of the  white supremacist British National Party. 
This time, Wiginton's venue was not a skinhead keg party,  backwoods cross 
burning or neo-Nazi rally on foreign soil. It was a  lecture hall on the campus 
of Michigan State University. 
Wiginton, 43, is not a Michigan State University student. He's  not an 
alumnus or a faculty member, either. But he is chummy with  MSU junior Kyle Bristow, 
the 21-year-old chairman of the Michigan  State University chapter of Young 
Americans for Freedom, or MSU-YAF  — the only university student organization 
in the country listed as  a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center 
(SPLC). 
Acting in collusion with elder white supremacists like Wiginton,  and with 
the financial and logistical support of a major  conservative foundation, 
Bristow and a handful of cronies have  roiled their campus and the surrounding 
community by hosting  speakers like Griffin, issuing vicious homophobic and racist  
insults, and staging publicity stunts masked as political  demonstrations 
that seem inspired in equal parts by the movie  "Animal House" and the Hitler 
Youth.    
Kyle Bristow displays his sense of  humor on a mocked-up Web page.  
"He's become a divisive force," former MSU-YAF member Kari Lynn  Jaksa, an 
MSU junior who describes herself as a Republican with  strong libertarian 
leanings, says of Bristow. "Frankly, he's  embarrassing."A YAF a Minute
In November  2006, MSU-YAF organized a "Straight Power" demonstration in 
downtown  Lansing to protest a proposed local civil rights ordinance  protecting 
gays, lesbians, and bisexuals from discrimination on the  basis of their sexual 
orientation. YAF members carried signs that  read "End Faggotry" and "Go Back 
in the Closet."  
Also last year, Bristow and Wiginton co-administered two racist  online 
groups — "True American Patriot" and "Jobs a White Man Won't  Do" — within the 
Facebook social network. (The pair also share a  fondness for black cowboy hats. 
Bristow wore his while anti-racist  protesters outside the MSU building where 
Griffin spoke on Oct. 26  beat a piñata effigy of Griffin with sticks.) 
MSU-YAF has since cosponsored a "Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day"  contest, 
held a "Koran Desecration" competition, jokingly threatened  to distribute 
smallpox-infested blankets to Native American  students, and posted "Gays Spread 
AIDS" fliers across campus. 
Last spring, when the MSU leftist group Students for Economic  Justice hosted 
a lecture by a Columbian labor organizer detailing  allegations of union 
busting and murder by the owners of Coca-Cola  bottling plants in South America, 
Bristow and his minions jeered,  waved American flags and conspicuously guzzled 
from large bottles of  Coke while the speaker tearfully described witnessing 
his best  friend being gunned down by paramilitary thugs. 
"YAF's ridiculous tactics are making all conservatives at MSU  look bad," 
Jaksa, an international relations major, told the  Intelligence Report. "It's 
gotten to the point where I hate to even  say I'm a conservative anymore in class 
discussions or private  conversations, because people automatically assume 
that I'm with  Kyle Bristow. It's important to me that people know there are 
sane  conservatives on this campus. We're not all racists and  fascists." 
Jaksa said that when she joined MSU-YAF her freshman year, "It  was basically 
just the action wing of the College Republicans." Now,  according to Jaksa 
and other sources, the College Republicans at MSU  have asked Bristow to stop 
attending their meetings.  

Michigan State University's YAF chapter  has veered from hardnosed 
conservatism to aggressive  name-calling and an embrace of the racist right under Kyle  
Bristow. It has also shrunk to a handful of students.   
"We protested in favor of fiscal and social conservatism. We held  
demonstrations against liberal senators who voted a way on a bill  that we didn't agree 
with. But our agenda was very much what I could  categorize as mainstream 
Republican," Jaksa said. "That was before  Kyle took it over [in spring 2006] and 
YAF went off the deep  end."Friends in High Places
Despite its  notoriety, MSU-YAF is widely supported by mainstream 
conservative  politicians and power brokers in Michigan. The group was influential  
enough in rallying support for the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative  — the 
deceptively named affirmative action ban that Michigan voters  approved in 2006 — that 
MCRI Executive Director Jennifer Granz  thanked MSU-YAF by name in her 
election night victory speech.  
Last May 2, a few days after the SPLC named MSU-YAF a hate group  — a move 
that received a great deal of public attention in the state  — Michigan 
Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis endorsed MSU-YAF  and defended Bristow on a talk 
radio show. "This [Bristow] is  exactly the type of young kid we want out 
there," Anuzis said. "I've  known Kyle for years and I can tell you I have never 
heard him say a  racist or bigoted or sexist thing, ever."    
Kari Lynn Jaksa considers herself a  Republican conservative, but quit 
MSU-YAF because it gained a  reputation as a home for "racists and fascists" under 
Kyle  Bristow. "Frankly," she said, "he's embarrassing."   
In fact, Bristow and his minions frequently single out and  ridicule 
individual MSU gay, lesbian, and non-white students online,  posting their photos and 
calling them "freaks," "scum" and  "savages." Last September, Bristow 
criticized MSU's decision to  establish a Chicano/Latino Studies doctoral program in a 
news  release headlined, "MSU Offers Doctorate in Savagery."  
And last March 31, roughly one month before Anuzis defended  Bristow against 
accusations of bigotry, Bristow posted this comment  on the MSU-YAF website: 
"If Christopher Columbus didn't bring  civilization to the Americas, the 
Indians would still be running  through forests in loincloths, scalping each other, 
shoving bones  through their noses, worshipping pagan gods, and spreading 
syphilis.  Thank God Christopher Columbus put an end to this backward  culture." 
Bristow politely refused a request to be interviewed for this  article, 
saying that his "legal counsel" had advised him against  such an interview because 
he's considering legal action against the  SPLC, which publishes the 
Intelligence Report, for  defamation. 
But there are some clues to his personality. 
In a recent online dating profile, Bristow wrote that he plans to  enroll in 
law school after he graduates from MSU in the fall of 2008  with a degree in 
international relations. Among his hobbies are  "conservative politics," 
"watching the History or Court TV  channels," "shooting my pellet gun" and "looking 
at my coin  collection." 
Several MSU students who've been in classes with Bristow  described him as a 
classmate who participated infrequently in  seminar discussions, rarely asked 
questions and generally kept his  political views to himself. 
Jaksa, the former MSU-YAF member, said that she and Bristow hung  out 
together quite a bit during their first year at MSU. "He was  just a relaxed, normal 
kid at the beginning of our freshman year,"  Jaksa said. "But then he 
underwent this odd transition. You know how  most people, when they get to college, 
either move to the center or  become more liberal in terms of their political 
beliefs? Well, Kyle  did the opposite. It was like he kept moving farther and 
farther to  the right to counterbalance all the people around him he saw moving  
to the left." 
Ted Madsen, another MSU international relations major who's now  in his 
junior year, said that he first met Bristow a few days after  their freshman year 
began in the fall of 2005. "He struck me as very  driven and very 
strait-laced," recalled Madsen. "He was quite vocal  about the fact that he was against 
drinking and smoking but, all in  all, he was a fairly likeable guy."Bristow in  
Power
In the spring of 2006, shortly after he assumed  control of MSU-YAF, Bristow 
ran unopposed and was elected to  represent James Madison College — the 
college attended by all  international relations majors — on the Associated Students 
of  Michigan State University, or ASMSU, the university's student  government 
body.  
Just before the academic year ended, Bristow posted his 13-point  agenda 
online. It included these goals: "Hunt down illegal  immigrants in the Lansing 
area and have them deported"; "Eliminate  funding for all non-heterosexual 
student organizations"; "Create a  Caucasian Caucus and give them representation on 
the ASMSU"; and  "Eliminate representation to ASMSU for all of the following 
groups:  Alliance of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] Students; the  
Arab Cultural Society; the Black Council; the International Students  
Association; the Women's Council; the North American Indigenous  Student 
Organization," and practically every other non-white,  non-heterosexual, or non-Christian 
student group at MSU. 
"I was outraged when I saw it," said Madsen. "I told him, 'Your  agenda of 
hate has got to stop, Kyle.' He's used that phrase  repeatedly in a mocking 
fashion since."  
Madsen gave Bristow a choice: "Either resign and apologize to the  James 
Madison community for fouling our name, or be removed from  office." Bristow did 
not resign and did not apologize. It took  Madsen and his supporters only two 
days to gather enough signatures  on a recall petition to force a vote, which 
took place in the fall  of 2006, at the beginning of Bristow's sophomore year. 
Ninety-six  percent of the James Madison students who cast ballots voted to  
recall Bristow. He was forced to relinquish his seat on the  ASMSU. 
"I don't regret it [leading the recall effort], although I do  realize that 
his being recalled only further marginalized and  radicalized Kyle to the point 
where he's become a joke to many  people," said Madsen. "YAF is routinely 
ridiculed and mocked on  campus, but what many people who refuse to take Kyle 
seriously may  not realize is that Kyle believes all press coverage is good  
coverage, and while 10,000 people who read what he has to say will  be disgusted, 
one or two will be intrigued. He's using the media  coverage to reach those 
one or two people at a time and that's what  concerns me about YAF, because what 
he's articulating is  dangerous."The University's Role
Whatever  its potential harm to society, MSU-YAF's offensive antics have  
pinned university administrators between the rock of protecting free  speech and 
the hard place of encouraging multiculturalism. For now  MSU-YAF remains a 
registered and officially sanctioned student  organization, meaning it's entitled 
to certain benefits, including  the free use of MSU facilities and university 
accounting services.   

After Kyle Bristow posted his 13-point  agenda online, Ted Madsen led a 
successful effort to recall  him from the student government. Ninety-six percent of 
 students voted against Bristow. MSU also  has to pay for security at YAF 
events, which invariably draw heated  protests. Last April, for example, the 
university shelled out $3,780  to rent metal detectors for one night to place at 
every entrance to  a YAF-sponsored lecture by nativist extremist leader Chris 
Simcox,  founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a border vigilante  
group.  
Simcox was introduced to an unruly crowd by Jason Van Dyke, a  
neo-Confederate lawyer based in Denton, Texas. Van Dyke once  attended MSU but did not 
graduate. By his own account, he was kicked  out in 2000 after being arrested for 
domestic violence, possession  of a banned weapon and firearm safety 
violations. (Van Dyke said he  was merely transporting a rifle across campus on the 
first day of  hunting season.) Also, according to Van Dyke, MSU police found  
extremist literature, including the race war fantasy novel The  Turner Diaries and 
the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders  of Zion, in his on-campus 
residence. 
When he attended MSU, Van Dyke was a hotly controversial  columnist for the 
State News, an MSU student newspaper. Now, like a  former high school football 
star haunting his old campus, trying to  relive the glory days, Van Dyke posts 
daily rah-rah messages on the  MSU-YAF website and often travels to East 
Lansing for MSU-YAF  happenings. He and Bristow often wear matching black cowboy  
hats. 
When MSU-YAF held its "Koran Desecration" contest last August,  Van Dyke 
offered this entry: "I would catch Osama Bin Laden and then  take a power drill 
and hollow out a section of the Koran as he was  forced to watch. After doing 
this, I would cut Osama Bin Laden's  genitals off with a rusty hacksaw, place 
them in the hollowed-out  Koran, wrap it in an American flag infected with 
smallpox, and send  the whole package directly to Mecca." 
Van Dyke was equally statesmanlike at the Simcox lecture, which  was 
initially attended by about 40 Simcox supporters and about 100  anti-Simcox 
protesters, many if not most of them Latino MSU  students. Addressing the protesters, 
Van Dyke said: "Remember, the  First Amendment gives you the right to use 
four-letter words. So I  have two more words for you: 'work' and 'soap.'" 
Already tense, the situation in the lecture hall erupted.  Protesters banged 
on seats and shouted angrily, preventing Simcox  from speaking. MSU police 
arrested five demonstrators and cleared  the room of anyone they perceived to be 
anti-Simcox, which included  virtually all Latinos. This in turn led to 
allegations of racial  profiling, since the campus police officers allowed white 
protesters  to stay. 
One week after the Simcox event, a group of 11 students filed a  formal 
complaint with the MSU Office for Inclusion and Intercultural  Initiatives. They 
accused MSU-YAF of violating the university's  anti-discrimination policy, which 
prohibits the bias-motivated  harassment of any "University community member" 
but includes this  caveat: "These prohibitions are not intended to abridge 
University  community members' rights of free expression or other civil  
rights." 
The complaint filed against MSU-YAF accuses the group of  "systematically — 
as a matter of regular organization practice —  targeting groups and 
individuals for harassment, intimidation and  public ridicule."    
At a YAF lecture announced with "Gays  Spread AIDS" fliers, YAF chief Kyle 
Bristow was joined by  fewer than a dozen students.  
University officials declined to discuss the complaint with the  Intelligence 
Report, citing a pending  investigation.Behind the YAF Brand
Young  Americans for Freedom was originally a centralized organization of  
rabidly anti-communist university student groups created in 1960 by  National 
Review founder William F. Buckley. The original  incarnation of YAF was also 
strictly opposed to the civil rights             movement and, in 1962, gave its 
first annual Freedom Award to  segregationist South Carolina Sen. Strom 
Thurmond.  
YAF remained active nationwide through the 1980s, but is now  essentially 
moribund. The YAF national headquarters webpage consists  of a notice of sadness 
at the "recent news" of Ronald Reagan's  death, which occurred in June 2004. 
Now, "Young Americans for  Freedom" is basically just a brand name for radical 
right-wing  student activism, taking form as a loose and decentralized network 
 of campus chapters, each one appearing to act independently. 
In fact, the YAF brand is being co-opted and promoted by the  Leadership 
Institute, a hard-line conservative nonprofit  organization based in Arlington, 
Va., that is dedicated, according  to its mission statement, to "identifying, 
recruiting, training and  placing conservatives within the public policy process 
in the U.S.  and abroad." Republican National Committee executive committee  
member Morton Blackwell — who orchestrated a campaign against Anita  Hill at 
Oklahoma University after she came forward with sexual  harassment allegations 
against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence  Thomas — founded the Leadership 
Institute in 1979 and is still its  president. Major donors include the Coors 
Foundation and Rich DeVos,  founder of the troubled Amway multilevel marketing 
firm. 
Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed and disgraced lobbyist  Jack Abramoff 
were both trained by the Leadership Institute, as was  Jeff Gannon, the fake 
White House news correspondent who lobbed  softball questions for President 
Bush from 2003 until 2005. That's  when it was revealed that Gannon had been a 
gay prostitute before  attending the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of 
Journalism,  after which he somehow obtained White House press credentials as a  
reporter for "Talon News," Gannon's one-man operation. 
Bristow and Van Dyke both interned at the Leadership Institute  last summer. 
There are currently more than 20 YAF organizations on  campuses across the 
country, most of them started in the past five  years by Leadership 
Institute-trained activists. (The Campus  Leadership Program division of the Leadership 
Institute, according  to its website, "fosters permanent, effective, conservative 
student  organizations on college campuses across America.") MSU-YAF is by  
far the most radical. Its most recent event, the lecture by British  National 
Party Chairman Nick Griffin, was promoted by overtly white  supremacist 
organizations including the American Renaissance  newsletter, the Council of 
Conservative Citizens, and Stormfront.  Attending the Griffin lecture incognito were 
members of the  European-American Unity and Rights Organization, a white 
nationalist  group founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, as well as  
members of the Keystone State Skinheads and the National Alliance,  both neo-Nazi 
organizations that promote violence against  non-whites, non-heterosexuals 
and Jews. 
The only violence surrounding the Griffin event, however, was  directed at 
MSU-YAF when a handful of its members were chased by an  angry mob of 
anti-racist activists afterwards. Bristow claimed  members of the mob were carrying 
baseball bats and pieces of lumber.  No injuries were reported.Demeaning MSU?
MSU  President Lou Ann Simon has been fairly tight-lipped on the ongoing  
MSU-YAF controversy. Reacting to the MSU-YAF sponsored "Catch an  Illegal 
Immigrant Day" back in September 2006, Simon chided MSU-YAF  for sponsoring an event 
she described as "demeaning to individuals  and to the values of Michigan 
State University."  
But this Oct. 25, the day before Griffin's lecture, Simon issued  a statement 
making it clear that putting up with racist propaganda  is the price that a 
university must pay if it is committed to free  speech. 
"A university should be an open marketplace for the free exchange  of ideas," 
Simon said. "There are individuals who speak at campus  events whose rhetoric 
and ideas I find reprehensible, and although I  may not appreciate their 
positions, I do respect their right to  share their views. The more extreme the 
view, in either direction,  the more it tests us. 
"Although we may disagree with one another's positions, we must  respect the 
rights of individuals to express their positions without  fear of intimidation 
or physical harm. … Acts intended to prohibit  the free speech rights of any 
individual or group, such as  destroying informational materials, preventing 
access to an event,  or shouting down a speaker do not support this philosophy 
and  undermine our efforts to encourage robust intellectual  discourse." 
MSU student Claudia Gonzalez experienced Bristow's favorite mode  of 
discourse first-hand when she participated in a protest outside  an MSU-YAF event 
featuring anti-immigration hardliner Tom Tancredo,  a Republican congressman from 
Colorado. "He [Bristow] came up to me  and told me, 'The one thing I'm most 
proud of is that my granddaddy  stole Aztlan from your granddaddy,'" Gonzalez 
said.  
Shortly after that exchange, MSU-YAF named Gonzalez "Leftist  Freak of the 
Year" and posted her photo online. A few days later,  the San Bernardino, 
Calif.-based hate group Save Our State posted  her home address, phone number and 
parents' home address, along with  the message, "Please go and express your 
views." 
"I don't feel completely safe on campus or at my home anymore  because of 
YAF," Gonzalez said. "And neither do a lot of other  students of color and GLBT 
students, because YAF is clearly  networking with these other hate groups, and 
they're basically  issuing an open invitation to skinheads and 
[anti-immigration]  vigilantes and Nazis to come to MSU, who otherwise would never step  foot 
on campus. … If it weren't for YAF, MSU wouldn't be on the hate  group radar. 
But now it is." 

Intelligence Report
Winter  2007       



**************************************See AOL's top rated recipes 
(http://food.aol.com/top-rated-recipes?NCID=aoltop00030000000004)