April 2012

Brandon Cestrone's Tips for Running a Successful Chapter: It Starts from Within

Brandon Cestrone
Apr 16, 2012 at 4:00 PM
By Brandon Cestrone

Running a successful chapter requires many things. For one, you need to know what characteristics good chapters possess so you can build upon their success. Second, you should understand the principles of leadership and apply them to running your chapter. Not only will this increase your ability to take your chapter from point A to point B, having the right skill set will make you much better at spreading the message of liberty on campus, thereby fulfilling your ultimate goal.

If you are running a chapter, or are on a leadership team, I have compiled a list of tips and principles that can help you in your activist adventures. These are the important recommendations I can give you after having the great opportunity and privilege of being the founder/president of the Slippery Rock chapter and Pennsylvania State Chair. I want to clarify that though I've practiced some of these principles well, I could have done a better job of following others. I am writing this so that you don’t make the same mistakes and blunders I committed. There are a ton of other handbooks and tips on how to run a chapter, but these are the principles I believe have allowed my chapter to flourish and will hopefully help yours prosper as well.

This is going to be a series of blogs over the next couple months; this is the second installment.  Click HERE to read the first installment. 

Before going any further, please read and commit to memory the Guide to Build an Effective YAL Chapter to fully understand how to represent your organization on campus. This blog is designed to supplement your master guide, not replace it.

PART TWO: IT STARTS FROM WITHIN

"The person who gets the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore." ~Dale Carnegie

These suggestions are things that you, as a leadership team member, should practice on a daily bases. The following laws of success can help you not just in running a chapter, but in whatever you decide to do in life. 

Passing the Liberty Torch

Joshua Parrish
Apr 11, 2012 at 7:03 PM
By Joshua Parrish

torch

As the school year winds down, many of you will be graduating and moving on to bigger and better things.  I applaud you and wish you nothing but the best in your future endeavors. That being said, I hope you will take the time to make sure your YAL chapter continues to flourish in your abscence.  It is never too soon to start grooming future leaders for your chapter.  

The following is a segment from our Guide to Build an Effective YAL Chapter.

FFF Pizza, Lecture, & Social Hour in Fairfax VA on April 23rd

Joseph Brown
Apr 11, 2012 at 7:03 PM
By Joseph Brown

On Monday, April 23rd as part of their Economic Liberty Lecture series, the Future of Freedom Foundation will be hosting economics professor Benjamin Powell, who will be speaking about how sweatshops improve lives and economic growth. 

powell

The event will start off in Student Union Building II, Rooms 3 & 4 of George Mason University at 5:30 with pizza, followed by the lecture and Q&A at 6pm and a social hour at Brion's Grille at 8pm.  Check out the event details on the YAL calendar here.

YAL in the News

Bonnie Kristian
Apr 11, 2012 at 6:17 PM
By Bonnie Kristian

YAL chapters around the country have been turning up in all kinds of local and campus news reports!  Here's a small selection of recent articles:

Here at YAL National, we've been getting a little news attention of our own!

Free Speech Week Comes to the University of Chicago

Charles Vidal
Apr 11, 2012 at 6:17 PM
By Charles Vidal

Young Americans for Liberty brought the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE) Free Speech Week to campus last week to highlight the restraints on free speech on their campus.

Last Monday, YAL hosted Azhar Majeed from FIRE to discuss the campus’s restrictive speech code. The University of Chicago has a Red Light rating, the worst possible, from FIRE. This is due in large part to two policies which allow administrators broad authority to discipline students. The first red light policy is the school’s “Bias Code,” which calls for an investigation towards any student displaying “a pre-formed negative opinion or attitude toward a group of persons who posses common characteristics.”

The University has an overly broad definition of what should be reported. During orientation seminars and in the student handbook, the University encourages students to report any comments they consider derogatory. Such policies place large amounts of discretionary power in the hands of administrators, who may permanently mark a student’s transcripts over an innocuous comment or joke. Even those students who are eventually found innocent of any disciplinary charges are still forced to take time to deal with bias allegations, not to mention the stress inherent in any disciplinary process.

Chapter leaders Bryant Jackson-Green (Students for Liberty Campus Coordinator) and Charlie Vidal (Young Americans for Liberty Illinois State Chair) erected a free speech wall in the Reynolds Club (student union) on Tuesday morning. Students expressed a variety of views on politics, the campus administration and other subjects in a respectful manner throughout the week. Thanks in part to the lack of controversy, the wall remained in place without incident for four days.

Charlie Vidal is an Illinois State Chair for Young Americans for Liberty and the Executive Director of YAL at UChicago. Follow him on twitter @CharlieVidal.

More War Crimes in a Criminal War

Jayel Aheram
Apr 11, 2012 at 6:17 PM
By Jayel Aheram

NB:  View this video with caution; it includes graphic and disturbing imagery.

Harper's Magazine releases video purportedly showing Blackwater thugs firing into civilians and running over Iraqi woman:

Videos posted by Harper's Magazine show the private contractor formerly known as Blackwater in Iraq running over a woman with a car, smashing into Iraqis' cars to move them out of the way and firing a rifle into traffic.

The behavior by Blackwater seen in the videos adds even more fuel to evidence that the company "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

Does wearing an empty holster make you a threat?

Joseph Brown
Apr 11, 2012 at 6:17 PM
By Joseph Brown

(This post is brought to you by Shane McGonagil from the Leadership Institute.)

For students at Ohio State University, this seems to be the case.

After a series of standoffs between Ohio State University officials and Buckeyes for Concealed Carry on Campus over whether or not concealed carry should be implemented as a safety feature at Ohio State University, comments by President Gordon Gee have led to an inevitable hostility towards the student group and its leader Mike Newbern.

asdf1

On Wednesday April 3rd OSU President Gee held a public safety forum, and when asked why he wouldn't allow concealed carry he replied:  "You and I can debate that all day long and you have clear arguments," Gee said, addressing his remarks to Newbern. "But, I am in charge and we are not going to do it."

Why conservatives should be against tort reform

Elliot Engstrom
Apr 11, 2012 at 6:17 PM
By Elliot Engstrom

While it has not received the same attention in recent years that it used to garner, “tort reform” has traditionally been an idea that has been espoused by the political right.  The argument usually is that there is an excessive amount of frivolous litigation that is clogging up our legal system and hurting American businesses.  My goals in this post are threefold.  First, I will explain the basics of the tort system to give a background to readers who are not familiar with this topic.  Second, I will argue that tort reform as it is currently debated is not in the least a conservative idea.  Finally, I will explain why, if tort reform is not a conservative idea, so many conservatives nonetheless argue for it.

What are torts, and why/how would we reform them?

The most basic definition of a tort is a civil wrong.  However, this simple definition belies the breadth of just how many things are encompassed within the word “tort.”  Torts include things from simple battery to professional malpractice, from wrongful death to infliction of emotional distress.  For the most part, any wrong committed between two people that you cannot neatly fit into some other legal category like property or contract probably falls within tort, and sometimes actions that fall within other legal frameworks also have tort applications.  For example, if I were to murder someone, I probably would have charges brought against me by the state in a criminal proceeding, but I also could have a wrongful death action brought against me by the victim’s family – hence the famous distinction between the criminal and civil trials of O.J. Simpson.

The TSA comes to UIUC's Main Quad!

Cole Gleason
Apr 10, 2012 at 2:14 PM
By Cole Gleason
YAL at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign held a TSA: Gone Wild event on the Main Quad last Thursday. "Free Freedom Frisks! Patriotic Patdowns!" I chanted as hordes of students power-walked across the quad.  Most people got a laugh out of it, and we had plenty of double takes.  
 
I was just really amazed at how many people just didn't get understand that we were a parody of the TSA. Dressed in the classic "Airport Strip Search Unit" uniform, I was mistaken for a police officer, a pilot, and a security guard. Many international students had no idea what the TSA was, so we had quite the experience trying to explain why we were protesting. Other students actually thought we were the TSA for a good 10 seconds and took their backpacks off.
 
The YAL TSA crew at their post.
 
We had a few students stop and ask some in-depth questions, and several fellow liberty-lovers were happy to find out that our group existed on campus. We're always happy to find new members! While many undergrads were used to groups tabling on the quad, the prospective student tour groups had a blast with our table.  I was handing out the colored beads, and I could attract whole crowds with a single cry of "Get searched and get beads!"

YAL at UCF Protest the TSA

Lauren Evans
Apr 10, 2012 at 2:09 PM
By Lauren Evans

Our activism video: 

On February 29th the Young Americans for Liberty at UCF held our first activism event of the semester, Government Gone Wild. In less than a week, we built a 7' x 3' faux body scanner and made 300 4th Amendment luggage tags.

We set up our activism event in front of the Student Union and placed the scanner in a high traffic area to generate discussion. We also used freezer pops to get attention from students on a hot Florida day. Once students were  at our tent, we informed them about their constitutional rights while traveling and steps they can take to preserve those rights. Then we invited the students to a screening of "10 Rules with Dealing with the Police."