Texas State Conservatives Learn How to Win

With campaign season in full swing TSU conservatives will do what ever it takes

Austin, TX --  After a weekend of intense training 20 conservative students at Texas State returned to campus with a passion to counter the left. While most students spent their weekend at the bars or watching football the dedicated group gave up their weekend engaged in training for over 24 hours. 

The two-day Youth Leadership School was organized by the Washington D.C. based Leadership Institute and held at the University of Texas.

The school is the Institute’s largest training so far this year with 43 student leaders from across the state of Texas in attendance.  While several Texas State student have been affiliated with LI and have attended the YLS in the past, this was their largest delegation to ever attend the Youth Leadership School.

 “The conservative coalition of Texas State is becoming more and more impressive by the day, and I cannot wait to see how these new activists will add to that revolution on campus. Joe De La Cerda, President of the Bobcat Conservative Coalition said. “I was glad to see such enthusiasm in the largely young class that attended.”

Several student organizations represented Texas State at the conference including College Republicans, The Bobcat Conservative Coalition, Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, Freedom Works, National Rifle Association, and the Campaign for Liberty.

The training, aimed at training students political technology covered topics like electioneering, literature layout and design, recruiting, fundraising, get out the vote drives, and organization building strategy.

 Some students like Bethany DeAngelo a member of the College Republications said she will use her newly learned skills to rev up efforts for John McCain.

“The school really fired me up for the last month of campaigning for McCain. I came away with a lot of new ideas for campaigning,” she said.

Other students will be using their knowledge to schedule activism events to campaign for issues.

“The school pumped me up and gave me great ideas to promote our small government and liberty based ideals,” said Dillon Jones a member of the Ron Paul inspired group, Campaign for Liberty

Notable graduates of the program include U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, U.S. Congressman Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, and former Deputy Chief of Staff for President Bush, Karl Rove.

The Leadership Institute was founded in 1979 by Morton C. Blackwell to train the next generation of conservative leaders.

 Since the organizations founding, the Leadership Institute has trained over 59,000 conservatives.

Amanda Shell, a member of College Republicans remarked, “I enjoyed the chance to network with other conservative leaders across Texas.”

Jean Claude Moughanni, President of Students for Concealed Carry on Texas said, “The school gave me a lot of ideas about how to grow and organize Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. I look forward to applying many of the concepts and theories in the future.”

I can’t believe I’m being charged tuition for Indoctrination 101. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 AM, I sit in a stiff classroom on the outskirts of campus and wait for my professor, an au-natural hippie aged approximately one half-century, to arrive. She enters alongside her pet student, candidly engaged in a merciless bash session of our current U.S. government and throws out some violent fantasy about a bloody decapitation in the oval office (even though she grimaces whenever a novel discusses animal slaughter or non-human blood of any kind). I can deal with the idea that she has opinions, and I truly don’t mind that we disagree. It is when her politics interfere with my learning environment that we develop a problem.

Although I could conjecture as to my professor’s political stance after just a first glance (sometimes surface judgments are spot-on), I figured, “hey, we’re in British Literature. How often will US politics be relevant?” Well, the answer is never, but somehow it’s still shown up daily. It’s as though my teacher has set out on a mission to bend every student she encounters against conservatism. She makes an effort to connect the evils of the Republican Party to everything.

For example, when on the subject of King Henry VI, the professor commented on his young age and poor political judgment. “It’s like electing a baby George Bush and having a hundred Dick Cheneys running around,” she laughed. I decided not to point out that if Bush and Cheney are in fact the blood-thirsty, war-loving men she thinks they are, they may have actually done quite well for themselves in Medieval England. She went on to discuss how dreadful life was during this Henry’s reign, all the while making correlations to Bush’s incompetence. She then said, “really, would you elect a baby to be president of the United States?” I also decided not to point out that the biggest political baby we’ve ever seen up for high public election is Barack Obama, her Messiah. Later, when commenting on author Sir Thomas Malory, she poignantly stated, “one group of people might call him a criminal, and another group might call him a great guerilla fighter, a soldier.” I made a final decision not to point out the argument that Bush the Evil is in the same reputational limbo.

I made the decisions to bite my tongue for fear that my opinions could jeopardize my grade. I thought college was supposed to encourage free thought and provide a backboard off of which to bounce uncommon ideas. This professor quickly extinguished my hopeful, intellectual flame.

Higher education has become an institution for initiating government agendas and social change. No matter which party is pushing the agenda or what the intended changes are, this is wrong. The job of a teacher is to spark original and innovative thoughts. Students should be learning to develop their own logic, to become quality thinkers, not robots who regurgitate a professor’s policies on cue. The classroom should stimulate thoughts, not provide them.

Thankfully, my mother, a middle-school teacher well acquainted with such school-board intentions, raised me with immunity to these underhanded tactics. And I feel my thoughts have potential to be more organic because of this. All minds deserve a like opportunity. Education should not taint us. I have watched my mother forced to implement teachings that directly contradict her morality, such as bribery systems for mediocre deeds, over-testing her kids to meet standards (note that I do NOT agree with Bush’s NCLB legislation), and the elimination of failure.

Whether or not you agree with the current agendas being pushed, I think we can all see that pushing any agenda at all is detrimental to our nation’s future. If we want to continue to be a nation of bright inspirations and pioneering, we cannot allow our educational system to cut out an overlay of which thoughts are acceptable. Our generation is all about fighting against the mainstream, right? Let’s fight.

Purdue Students Demonstrate Cost of Extreme Environmentalism with Eco-BBQ

Conservative Purdue University students in West Lafayette, Indiana hosted an “eco-barbeque” during the university-sponsored “Green Week” in mid-September to expose the potential cost of extreme environmentalism to average Americans.

Purdue’s Conservative Coalition for American Values (CCAV), founded by student Brian Whittaker with help from the Arlington, Virginia-based Leadership Institute (LI), sold “regular” burgers for $1. “Eco-friendly” burgers were priced at $15, representing the estimated cost of “personal greenhouse gas emissions” created by eating a hamburger, according to a carbon calculator provided by Conservation International, an environmental activist group.

Whittaker, a junior political science major, attributed the significant price disparity between the burgers, which were identical in content, to price inflation added to “offset the cost of carbon emissions.”

The group sold 36 of the $1 burgers and zero eco-burgers.

Green Week was organized with the assistance of Purdue Climate Change Research Center, as well as the university’s College of Engineering and other tuition-funded departments, such as Centers for the Environment and Energy and the Office of the Provost.

Publications produced by the Purdue Climate Change Research Center rule out dissent regarding the origin and cause of global warming. They go so far as to claim that humans are primarily to blame. One document declares research has “confirmed that human activities are responsible for a large part of … observed climate change (e.g., global warming).” It goes on to urge “pursuit of carbon neutrality as an institutional goal….”

The university’s bias appears to have led them to ignore disagreement among scientists about global warming and about human involvement in it.

Naomi Whittaker, Brian’s wife and an active member of CCAV, said the student group wanted to present a viewpoint the Purdue administration ignored: “We were trying to show there is still a debate about global warming. Thirty thousand scientists agree global warming is not [primarily] caused by humans.”

“Excessive environmental regulation will bankrupt America,” she continued. “Citizens will have to sacrifice a lot financially to accommodate the outrageous demands of the environmental lobby, as demonstrated by the cost of the eco-burger.”

According to Conservation International’s website, the group “expresses greenhouse gas emissions figures in carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalents, [such that] one metric ton of carbon equals 3.67 metric tons of carbon dioxide.” The organization then offers a suggested monetary donation to compensate for one’s personal impact on the environment.

The Green Week BBQ drew mixed reactions from Purdue students who witnessed the event. “Most students gave us angry glares, as if we were doing something wrong,” explained Brian Whittaker. “But we were able to draw some interest to our group by providing an alternative perspective to the typical liberal orthodoxy.”

Fred Cooper, a Leadership Institute field representative for Indiana, applauded CCAV’s efforts: “Clearly, the university had a liberal agenda it was trying to push on the student body, but fortunately the Conservative Coalition for American Values was there, and will be there in the future, to provide Purdue students with an honest and balanced perspective.”

The CCAV, an active, independent, student group started in March 2008, illustrated to their campus the price of radical environmentalism with techniques they learned from activism training at the Leadership Institute.

Craig Burgers, a Campus Services Coordinator at the Leadership Institute, called the group “a beacon of hope for conservatism in the midst of academia’s leftist regime.”

A full agenda of Purdue University’s Green Week events is located at: http://www.purdue.edu/sustainability/. The carbon calculator mentioned in this article can be found at: http://www.conservation.org/act/live_green/carboncalc/Pages/default.aspx.

The full text of this press release is available here: http://www.leadershipinstitute.org/News/?NR=872.