Nov
14
2007
It’s common knowledge that Santa Barbara is home to a huge non-profit industry. In fact, the county has more of these non-governmental organizations (NGOs) per capita than any other, and Santa Barbara NGOs have the highest assets per capita in the US.The region’s non-profits are incredibly rich and powerful, not just within our backyard, but also nationally and globally. Santa Barbara is a center of finance for NGOs where much money is raised for locally based groups as well as national organizations. Many of these organizations are politically oriented. Whereas the majority of nonprofits are service, educational, or healthcare related, Santa Barbara’s nonprofit sector includes a large array of NGOs that aim to influence political life.
It’s no fluke that among the richest and most powerful NGOs in Santa Barbara are some ultra-conservative organizations. Perhaps the biggest of these is the Young America’s Foundation (YAF). With a slice of the most prominent real estate in the city of Santa Barbara and a large presence in local and national media, YAF is an ultra-conservative institution that carries forward a political legacy of racism, imperialism and militarism.
Although many NGOs in Santa Barbara have liberal missions such as environmental defense, economic justice, and peace making, organizations on the right promoting euphemistically couched concepts such as private property, neoliberal economics, national defense, family values, and so forth, are many in numbers and power. Far from being a “Left coast city,” of liberals, Santa Barbara is actually a home base to many powerful conservative social forces. The region’s wealthy elite who reside in posh seclusion in Hope Ranch, Montecito, the Riviera and other exclusive enclaves have built up a power-base of organizations that seek to steer politics rightward while containing and co-opting more radical social movements through foundation money.
The Young America’s Foundation is emblematic of this important right-wing powerbase in the city. The organization has had a presence in Santa Barbara for quite some time, but with the addition of its Reagan Ranch Center at 217 State Street in downtown Santa Barbara the extremist right has established itself in a very visible way. YAF’s website boasts of the 4 story edifice that it is, “a unique, history-rich building in Santa Barbara. According to the City’s Planning Commission, 217 State is a ‘centerpiece’ building.” More than a centerpiece, it’s a huge complex of offices and meeting spaces without parallel among SB’s other nonprofits. The big pane glass windows sport images of Ronald Reagan and conservative youth (looking rather Aryan and proud) with flags waving and inspirational phrases touting free markets, democracy, and family values. In the lobby of the Center one is greeted first with a massive portion of the Berlin Wall. Above the concrete relic written on a spiraling staircase reads a famous Reagan quote, “Mr. Gorbechav, tear down this wall.”
Young America’s Foundation is based out of Herndon, Virginia. In 2005 the organization reported revenues in excess of $20 million. YAF supports numerous programs as part of its mission to ensure “that increasing numbers of young Americans understand and are inspired by the ideas of individual freedom, a strong national defense, free enterprise, and traditional values.”
Founded in the early 1970s and initially named University Information Services (UIS) the formative years of YAF reflects the organization’s ongoing emphasis on attacking the Left on college campuses while promoting right-wing ideas through publications, speaking tours and conferences. YAF’s efforts to battle the Left on university terrain was largely a reaction to the burgeoning student movements, all inspired by the black freedom movement. As a means of resisting changes resulting from the Civil Rights Movement, and as an attack on the anti-war and feminists currents on college campuses, YAF and other conservative groups raised funds from powerful business leaders, wealthy conservative foundations and generally garnered the support of the government and university administrators. YAF has since cobbled together many conferences, speaking tours and propaganda campaigns aimed at denouncing anything they oppose, which means pretty much anything to the left of Reagan and the neoconservative movement.
Two recent propaganda campaigns of YAF included a coordinated smear of Che Guevara – calling him a mass murderer – on the 30th anniversary of his murder by the CIA, and another campaign, “Celebrate Freedom Week,” November 5-10 in which YAF links the contemporary peace movement and “progressive ideas” [a vague notion if there ever was one] with the mass murder of 100,000,000 by Stalin and Mao. The Islamofascism Awareness Week hosted by UCSB’s College Republicans and American Students for Israel was facilitated by YAF with the ideological content and speakers for the week furnished by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, another extreme right-wing think tank based in Los Angeles.
YAF’s Santa Barbara operations include the downtown Ranch Center, but also Ronald Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo, a sky-high 477-acre retreat home high atop the Santa Ynez Mountains, somewhere along Refugio Road. Calling it his “western White House,” the organization treats Rancho del Cielo as a museum but also useful gathering site and hosts many events there. In fact, YAF’s reverence for these grounds borders on a desire to enshrine the place as holy ground of quasi-religious importance. Promotion of the Ranch on YAF’s website describes the place in the following terms:
“Visitors to the Ranch have been deeply moved by the property. After a private tour, Pat Perrot of Northridge, California, wrote, ‘All five of us in our party have traveled widely throughout the world but none of us remember visiting any place that had such an enormous impact on our hearts and spirits as President Reagan’s beloved ranch. . . From the time [we] spotted his home nestled in that magnificent valley, we were overwhelmed by the sense of presence of that great man.’”
This reverence of Rancho del Cielo extends from YAF’s apostle-like adoration of Ronald Reagan himself. Reagan’s legend looms large in all YAF activities (as he does in much of the contemporary conservative movement). One young YAF guest to visit the Reagan Ranch told a Los Angeles Times reporter that, “It [was] a dream come true…. It’s where he signed the big tax cut. It’s where he chopped wood and cleared brush.” The tax cut referred to was the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 which reduced taxes by 25%, a huge handout to the wealthiest Americans that resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from the working class into the hands of the elite. It also resulted in massive cuts in social spending, education and welfare when combined wit Reagan’s penchent for increases in military spending.
The mythology being built around Reagan tells a story that he was one of America’s greatest presidents who embodied all of the great ideas and courage of conservative political philosophy. His great achievements are being cast as winning the cold war, aiding freedom fighters across the world, dismantling the social welfare state, and fostering free enterprise and markets.
Scrubbed from this mythology are any references to Reagan’s early career as a rabid anti-union speaker employed by corporations to fight the labor movement and block Congressional action against monopolistic price fixing by companies like GE. As an actor Reagan was an anti-communist informant in Hollywood, an active agent in the FBI’s attacks against socialists and liberals during the McCarthy era. His racist politics are far too deep to summarize here, but it’s worth remembering that he opposed the Civil Rights Act during its passage, was an apologist for the South African apartheid state and opposed sanctions against them, and that he even launched his 1980 bid for the presidency in the small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, a place only famous for being the site of a triple murder of civil rights workers in 1964. During this first presidential campaign rally he repeatedly invoked the theme of “states’ rights,” a coded but clear message to his racist white supporters that his administration would do much to roll back any and every gain made by people of color through the past decade and a half of struggle. When he was elected he did just this. Interrogating the glowing eulogies given to Reagan in the mass media after his death, Bob Fitrakis summarizes Reagan’s legacy in the following terms:
“As the New Republic pointed out during his 1966 campaign for Governor of California, “Reagan is anti-labor, anti-Negro, anti-intellectual, anti-planning, anti-20th century.” Reagan campaigned against the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the student rights movement and the Great Society. In his fantasy world, Reagan equated giant price-fixing corporations with small town entrepreneurs. As every long-hair in the late 60s knew, Ronald Reagan was “the drugstore truck-drivin’ man, the head of the Ku Klux Klan.” He said if the students at Berkeley wanted a bloodbath, he would give them one. James Rector was shot dead soon after.”
Indeed, four years later Reagan would call out the National Guard on students at UCSB who he called “cowardly little bums.” His response to the student movement at UCSB was nearly identical to UC Berkeley: troops, guns and a total disregard for the reasons behind the student’s frustration.
It is of major significance that YAF embraces Ronald Reagan. Conservative foundations like YAF explain their idolization of the man in terms of his commitment to abstract ideals like freedom, democracy, justice and security. However, a concrete appraisal of his legacy is much more complex and damning. Reagan’s political regime was responsible for a simultaneous expansion of the warfare state and shrinking of the welfare state. Domestically, the poor and people of color were harshly penalized by his racially revanchist and anti-worker policies. His militaristic expansion of the US empire caused much pain, suffering and death from Guatemala to Afghanistan.
Young America’s Foundation’s West Coast Leadership Conference is now one of the organization’s largest annual events. Billed as the biggest of its kind within the conservative movement, the event draws in hundreds of high school and college students to Santa Barbara for several days of lectures and workshops on everything from the political-philosophies of Milton Freedman to learning the practical skills necessary for campus activism. For 2007 YAF is hosting speakers such as John Ashcroft and Joel Surnow, the producer of the television show “24.” Taking over Fess Parker’s beachfront Doubletree Resort, YAF’s conference is a chance for young conservatives to learn about their political legacy and network with one another.
YAF has undertaken other local initiatives in the past several years. One particular function of YAF that impacts Santa Barbara is its links to student groups at UCSB and SBCC. At UCSB, Young America’s Foundation has supported organizing efforts of the Campus Republicans, American Students for Israel and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. In 2005 YAF interjected into the campus debate over the presence of the ROTC program at UCSB, even going so far as to send Floyd Brown, YAF’s executive director to speak at a campus forum on ROTC. Brown denounced professors and students who were attempting to enforce UCSB’s nondiscrimination policy (the military openly discriminates against queers) and invoked much patriotic rhetoric in his defense of military institutions on the UCSB campus.
As powerful and prominent as Young America’s Foundation is, the organization is only one of many right-wing foundations and NGOs based in Santa Barbara or supported by the region’s power elite. Far from being a “Left Coast” bastion of liberalism, Santa Barbara is more a home to the super wealthy, the majority of whom support a politics somewhere in between Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. The hyper-wealth, whiteness and elitists character of the city has made it fertile grounds for fundraisers of all stripes seeking money to support political work across the spectrum, including ultra-right, racist and militarist organizations like YAF.
1 Comment so far
Muslims Against Sharia congratulate David Horowitz FREEDOM CENTER and Mike Adams, Tammy Bruce, Phyllis Chesler, Ann Coulter, Nonie Darwish, Greg Davis, Stephen Gale, David Horowitz, Joe Kaufman, Michael Ledeen, Michael Medved, Alan Nathan, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Daphne Patai, Daniel Pipes, Dennis Prager, Luana Saghieh, Rick Santorum, Jonathan Schanzer, Christina Sommers, Robert Spencer, Brian Sussman, Ed Turzanski, Ibn Warraq and other speakers on the success of the Islamofascism Awareness Week.
Islamofascism (or Islamism) is the main threat facing modern civilization and ignorance about this threat is astounding. We hope that this event becomes regular and reaches every campus.
A great many Westerners do not see the clear distinction between Islam and Islamism (Islamofascism). They need to understand that the difference between Islam and Islamism (Islamofascism) is the same as the difference between Christianity and Christian Identity Movement (White Supremacy Movement).
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