YWC president Kevin DeAnna has summed up pretty much everything I had to say about Tom Tancredo's appearance at UNC Chapel Hill. The media exaggerated the number of walkouts, Tancredo's speech was well received by the audience, and the action taken by SDS didn't live up to the hype. When the event was over, I was amazed that it had went off without incident. I hadn't expected such a cakewalk.
A few dirty leftists showed up to protest our event. These crazy people exist on every college campus. According to Wikipedia, UNC Chapel Hill has 28,135 active students. I saw anywhere from 14 to 20 communist agitators outside the Student Union and maybe 100 gathered around in a semi-circle watching their little circus. The vast majority of students - in particular, natives of North Carolina - could not be persuaded to support their sanctimonious grandstanding.
YWC received messages of support from across the Tar Heel state. Locals repeatedly called to thank us for standing up to the Left's radical agenda on North Carolina campuses. Lots of good folks from North Carolina sent us inquiries asking what they could do to help. Like Virginia and Florida, North Carolina is another Southern state that trended blue in 2008, but has since dramatically reversed course in 2010. President Obama and the Democratic Party have lost a lot of their credibility there.
Outside the bastions of liberalism, North Carolina is still a relatively conservative Southern state. I've been told the Tea Party movement is especially active in the mountainous areas of Western North Carolina. These people look upon the communist scum of SDS with utter contempt. They don't represent North Carolina or its values. The typical voter in North Carolina rejects the SDS message that "no human being is illegal."
While Kevin was inside with Tancredo, I spent a fair amount of time outside watching the small protest. A lot of people stopped to watch for the same reason they look at car accidents. I took some photos and shot a few minutes of video with my digital camera. It was mostly uneventful bile about how YWC is a "white supremacist" organization and Tom Tancredo is a "racist." I laughed out loud at the dire warning that Arizona is now an apartheid state. Do mainstream voters in North Carolina believe that nonsense? I don't think so.
Inside the building, Tom Tancredo patiently explained over and over again that anyone can assimilate and become an American. I lost count of how many times emphasized that their was no racial barrier to American citizenship, but that Americans should at least share a common culture and set of political principles, which is more or less the mainstream view. His actual message was lost on the morons assembled outside in their ignorance convention.
Here are the facts:
1.) Tom Tancredo and YWC are not calling for the restoration of Jim Crow or anything resembling "white supremacy."
2.) Tom Tancredo and YWC do not support racial discrimination. As Tancredo pointed out, there is no racial barrier to becoming an American.
3.) Tom Tancredo and YWC do not believe that some races are "superior" and others are "inferior." There is literally nothing on this website about any of that.
Pretty simple, right? So simple a caveman could understand it. The charges of "racism" and "white supremacy" are spurious and false. Which opens up a whole new can of worms.
I can say without a shadow of doubt that "racist" and "fascist" are the most abused words in the English language. Originally, they had a discernible and objective meaning, but now they are just crude epithets that people use to attack and shout down groups they don't like.
The radical Left has been pushing the envelope: "racism," which used to be mean racial discrimination or the belief in the superiority and inferiority of races, has been broadened to include all angry white people, in particular those who support America and Western civilization, and who are suspicious of concentrations of power. The Tea Party movement has been tarred for over a year now with the racism brush.
The good news is that the Left has exhausted all the capital and good will it accumulated under George W. Bush in less than two years. Patriotic Americans are furious and pushing back against their maligners. YWC pushed back the radical Left at UNC Chapel Hill. They were unsuccessful in their attempt to disrupt our event this year.
I came away from UNC Chapel Hill with the impression that SDS and these other crazy groups are a small vocal minority - a mouse that roared - and that we could bury them if we only got our act together. YWC will be holding more of these events in the future.
Update: The photos we shot of the SDS protest are on Flickr. My two videos above are on YouTube. A longer video we shot will be uploaded to YouTube some time this afternoon or evening.
