Ethics

National YAF Cancels Racist Speaker at MSU

By Ed Brayton

As I've written about before, Michigan State University is home to a nasty group of bigot larvae in its Young Americans for Freedom chapter. Kyle Bristow, who just resigned as the leader of the group, has invited in to speak all sorts of loathsome people, including Nick Griffin, the racist scum who leads the British National Party. The YAF chapter had announced a few weeks ago that they were bringing in Jared Taylor, the white supremacist who leads American Renaissance, to speak.

But that speech has now been canceled, and as my colleague Todd Heywood reports at the Michigan Messenger, Bristow says it's because the national YAF leadership squashed the idea. Good for them. I'll fiercely defend the first amendment rights of such people to speak if they're invited by a student group, but it's a good thing that the national YAF leaders are recognizing what inviting such speakers are doing to their reputation and taking some control over the idiots that run some of their local chapters.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on March 07, 2008 (boomark / email).