Last week, a few members of the University at Buffalo Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter attended an open meeting hosted by the newly founded UB chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), which advances views that run opposite those described in YAF’s founding document, the Sharon Statement. As intelligent activists, the YAFers saw this open meeting as a good opportunity to conduct some opposition research to see what YDSA was planning for the rest of the school year. At the beginning of the meeting, the leaders of YDSA went around the room and had everyone introduce themselves by name, major, and preferred gender pronoun. It was then that YDSA realized they weren’t in a winter wonderland full of snowflakes. The presence of the conservative YAF activists was enough to catch the leftists off guard. YDSA abruptly cut the meeting short because “many felt uncomfortable with the atmosphere in the room,” according to the University at Buffalo newspaper. Clearly YDSA is not a group secure in its own ideology or confident of its ability to debate conservatives. Conservative students can often feel powerless on campus and worry that there’s nothing they can do to turn the tide of liberal indoctrination. Yet this is just one of the many examples we see where YAF’s mere presence was enough to give pause to the leftists in YDSA. The battle for ideas on the University at Buffalo’s campus doesn’t end there, but it’s important for freedom-loving students to understand how much of an impact that they can have by just being an active and visible presence of the Conservative Movement at their schools.
