Michigan State professor William Penn landed in hot water after he was videotaped criticizing Republicans during a classroom lecture earlier this month. Among Penn’s claims was that the GOP wants to suppress minority-voting rights, essentially, to preserve white political power, as the nation’s population becomes increasingly diverse.
“This country still is full of closet racists,” Penn told his class. “What do you think is going on in South Carolina and North Carolina? Voter suppression. It’s about getting black people not to vote. Why? Because black people tend to vote Democratic. Why would Republicans want to do it? Because Republicans are not a majority in this country anymore. They are a bunch of dead white people. Or dying white people.”
Penn was reassigned by Michigan State and removed from that particular class. Karen Wurst, Dean of MSU College of Arts & Letters called Penn’s comments “inappropriate, disrespectful and offensive.”
But, however inappropriate Penn’s comments may have been, there is a delicious irony to this controversy: The people exposing Penn’s rant also make his case.
The website Campus Reform first posted video of Penn’s comments. Campus Reform is a program of the conservative non-profit Leadership Institute, headed by Republican National Committeeman Morton Blackwell. The Leadership Institute's political training courses count such GOP luminaries as Karl Rove and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell among their alumni.
The Leadership Institute is also the employer of Kevin DeAnna, the founder of a now-disbanded organization called Youth for Western Civilization.
Youth for Western Civilization wasn’t some Allan Bloom-like advocacy group seeking greater emphasis on the “great books” of western culture. For DeAnna and his followers, western civilization isn’t a theoretical worldview, it is an decidedly ethnic concern.
“We basically say [western civilization is] cultural compound of Christian, classical, and then the folk traditions of Europe . . . we don’t define it as just democracy, rule of law, and these universal institutions,” DeAnna explained during a video interview at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference. “We say it is a specific culture that comes from a specific historical experience.”
That sentiment was made even more explicit by Youth for Western Civilization’s honorary national chairperson, former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo.
“We are a product of the Judeo-Christian culture, a Judeo-Christian/Anglo culture” Tancredo is seen telling a crowd in this YouTube “tribute” to YWC. “All cultures are not the same. All political systems are not the same. Some are better than others.”
For this group, it seems, when it comes to western civilization, Richard Rodriguez and Francis Fukuyama (like the Irish, Jews, Italians, and Poles of yesteryear) need not apply.
Youth for Western Civilization and DeAnna’s connection to the ideas of white supremacy go even deeper.
Jared Taylor, the editor of the white supremacist “American Renaissance,” sent out a fundraising letter on behalf of Youth for Western Civilization, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Taylor is a self-styled white supremacist intellectual and, though David Duke apparently disagrees with Taylor about the threat of Judaism to white people, the former Klan leader has called Taylor "a courageous advocate of White rights and heritage." Taylor believes, among other things, that whites have higher IQs as a group than blacks.
“If whites permit themselves to be displaced, it is not just the high culture of the West that could disappear but such things as representative government, rule of law and freedom of speech, which whites usually get right and everyone else usually gets wrong,” Taylor once wrote, according to a 2005 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article.
On behalf of Youth for Western Civilization, Taylor praised DeAnna as “an eloquent and distinguished young man who knows how important our cultural identity is.”
Youth for Western Civilization’s chapter at Maryland’s Towson State was forced to disband after its faculty advisor withdrew support because members chalked “white power” messages around campus.
And while most political activists view the national debate as a discourse between the conservative and liberal wings of American political tradition, Youth for Western Civilizations envisioned a more far radical battle between left-wing and right-wing ideologues. In their minds, the U.S. today has become like Germany circa 1932.
“The only hope that Right-wing and for that matter even radical Left-wing citizens have, is to educated [sic] themselves, network, follow the advice of Michael Savage and buy guns and most importantly of all pray, for that is all that stands in between us and a total government takeover of our lives,” YWC Vice-President Taylor Rose wrote in 2012. “Do not fall for the lie that ‘it cannot happen here’ for in keeping with the numbers, we are far passed [sic] the horrors of pre-Nazi Germany.”
The horrors of Germany before the Nazis took power. Ponder that thought for a second.
Lest you think the white supremacy of Youth for Western Civilization was a youthful mistake of DeAnna’s past, his role as their founder is listed prominently in DeAnna’s Leadership Institute biography.
Campus Reform, the Leadership Institute project that first reported Penn’s anti-GOP rant, even published an interview with DeAnna in 2010, praising him as a “Profile in Leadership.”
DeAnna returned the favor, crediting the Leadership Institute with the creation of Youth for Western Organization: “I wouldn’t have had the concept for YWC had I not worked for the Leadership Institute so long; this directly came from my experiences at LI.”
Kind of makes you wonder how Professor Penn ever came up with the idea that Republicans might be guided by racist motivations?
