Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker spoke in Atlanta on Monday to a lunch meeting of supporters of Young America’s Foundation, an organization that specializes in outreach to college, high school, and even elementary school students, promoting, as he put it, “the truth about America and free enterprise capitalism.” Walker is the president of the Foundation.
The non-profit, tax-exempt Foundation is the direct successor to Young Americans for Freedom, founded by William F. Buckley Jr and sponsored by President Ronald Reagan. In 1998, the Foundation bought the Reagan Ranch at Santa Barbara, and uses it as a conference center and training venue. Currently, the Foundation is also in the process of acquiring President Reagan’s boyhood home in Dixon, IL.
The heart of the Foundation’s work is recruiting, training, deploying, and supporting conservative young people to speak to their peers on college campuses. Many of their most powerful young speakers, he said, are people who themselves, or their parents, escaped socialist countries. They say to their fellow students, “You’re being told all the time how bad America is, and how good socialism is; let me tell you what socialism is really like, and how good America looks to people like me who have really experienced it.”
The Foundation also sponsors high-profile conservative leaders as speakers for campus events, such as attorney Ben Shapiro, journalist Charlie Kirk, economist Art Laffer, and Walker himself. Sometimes hostile protestors turn up, but they are always outnumbered by students who come with academic curiosity, just to find out what is being said. “We don’t encourage the left to try to drown us out,” Walker said, “but every time they do, it helps us, because it makes more and more young people want to find out for themselves why what’s being said is so controversial.”
Not everybody is converted, of course, but hearing the truth makes an impact. Walker told the story of one of their young speakers who listened to Rush Limbaugh on the radio while driving his father’s truck around for several weeks, and who as a result became a convinced conservative. This was in spite of the counter-influence of his liberal parents, one of whom is Susan Rice, a very high-level policy advisor to Presidents Obama and Biden.
Walker emphasized the importance of reaching young voters, noting that by 2028, Millennials and Gen Z’ers will be 49% of the electorate, and that as of now they are overwhelmingly liberal. He said that the Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin lost this group by more than 30 points in the 2022 election (he himself lost the equivalent age group by 5 points when he ran for re-election in 2014). “You can’t win elections that way,” he said.
Among other comments, Walker urged state governors and legislators to enact laws guaranteeing an “enforceable right of free speech” in colleges and high schools. He also said, “If your alma mater is not allowing students to hear the truth about America and free enterprise capitalism, stop sending them money, and tell them that’s the reason.”
Atlanta businessman Bob Irvin served 15 years in the state House of Representatives,10 of them as House minority leader.
