Budget Held Hostage — Part 2

LANSING – Leon Drolet and the group he heads, the Michigan Taxpayer Alliance, played key roles in the Michigan budget stalemate that nearly brought the state to its knees this week, by threatening to seek recalls against legislators who voted for tax increases. A key to Drolet’s efforts are two college students on the fringes of a campus “hate group” and right-wing politics.

The students have filed paperwork seeking recalls, the first stage in creating a recall campaign. One is Andrew Boyd, a 20-year-old from Muskegon; the other is Tyler Whitney, a 19-year-old from East Lansing.

Whitney filed to recall Republican State Representative Richard Ball (R-Shiawassee County), while Boyd filed recall paperwork against State Representative Mary Valentine (D-Muskegon). Whitney has said he was prepared to follow through with a recall effort if Ball voted for tax increases — which Ball did not.

But Boyd said he would go no further. “If I wanted to do one of the recall campaigns, I would have to take a semester off,” he said in an interview. “I don’t think I am willing to do that. The filing told Mary Valentine where I stand. What her constituents feel.” Whitney declined to be interviewed for this article. Neither Ball nor Valentine could be reached for comment.

Continued -Both students arrived in the Drolet camp by very different routes. Boyd was home schooled, then went to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Whitney attended East Lansing High School, started at Western Michigan University and transferred this year to Michigan State University.

What the two have in common are ties to the Young Americans for Freedom, a national conservative youth organization founded in the 1960s, and which has long supported conservative causes and politicians like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Last spring the Michigan State University chapter of YAF was listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, widely considered the nation’s leading expert on hate groups and which compiles an annual listing of hate groups in the country. The listing is published in its quarterly magazine, Intelligence Report, which is distributed to over 50,000 law enforcement personnel worldwide.

The MSU chapter is the only one to be listed as a hate group. The Law Center cited the chapter for issuing a 13-point memo that advocated the elimination of minority student group representation on college campuses, elimination of funding for all non-heterosexual organizations, the creation of a straight club, a man’s council and the creation of a Caucasian council, as well as providing representation to the student government for those groups.

“I am involved with helping out college Republicans, YAFers and college libertarians,” Drolet said in an interview, “because I want young people at a time when they are asking a lot of questions to hear the free-market perspective I am trying to advance. Each group attracts young individualists for different reasons. The great thing about YAF is that it does not attract party hacks.”

But Bill Ballenger, a former Republican elected official and editor of Inside Michigan Politics, said any Michigan Taxpayer Alliance tie to YAF “would hurt” Drolet. “Any press that would happen if YAF were connected with Drolet would be, ‘Oh, he’s tied to a hate group,’ because the press is pretty much brain dead when it comes to coverage of these groups.”

While neither Boyd nor Whitney are members of MSU’s YAF chapter, Boyd has been at MSU YAF events, including a speech April 19 by Minutemen Civilian Defense Corps leader Chris Simcox, an opponent of immigration. And Whitney participated in a protest in Lansing sponsored by MSU’s YAF chapter against a proposed human rights ordinance.

Boyd, co-chair of YAF at U-M in Ann Arbor, also helped host a controversial “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” event at the Ann Arbor campus, which some critics said demeaned Hispanics. But the campus paper, the Michigan Daily, reported that the “Illegal Immigrant” was supposed to be Christopher Columbus.

“My goal was to bring up legitimate debate about the issue,” Boyd said. “I wanted to ask why this insensitive game was getting attention, and put a twist on it-that being Christopher Columbus being caught by an American Indian. We are all immigrants.”

“I regret it in the sense in what the actual result ended up being,” Boyd continued. “In my mind, it played out in a different way.”

Boyd said he does not support much of what MSU YAF and its chairman, Kyle Bristow, do. “It makes me frustrated we have to deal with these mis-perceptions that we are a hate group because of Kyle,” Boyd said.

However, Boyd is still allowing his image to be used prominently in a recent recruitment video created by YAF MSU and featured on its blog and on YouTube. “I don’t know if I could stop him [Bristow] from using my image,” Boyd said.

Whitney, former chair of Western Michigan University’s YAF chapter, came to the attention of the blogosphere in June when Between the Lines reported the conservative activist was gay. He had been photographed at an anti-gay protest lead by Bristow and other MSU and Olivet College YAF members at Lansing City Hall last Nov. 18. Whitney stood in front of city hall with a sign reading “Go Back in the Closet.” Other signs included “End Faggotry” and “Straight Power.”

Whitney, who was webmaster for the long-shot presidential bid this year by Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo, is now a student at Michigan State. He has since apologized for participating in the anti-gay protest in Lansing.

Calls and emails to the national YAF were not returned. Bristow would not answer questions about the YAF.