There’s an old joke that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor even an empire. The right-wing student group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), founded in William F. Buckley Jr.’s house in 1960, is similarly misnamed. It’s not young; the current head, Scott Walker, is 55. It’s definition of American is very narrowly partisan and reactionary in ways that most Americans would reject. And as for freedom, it has a long history of aligning with administrators and government authorities to suppress its political foes– something I wrote about [in a recent column](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/young-americans-freedom/). Most recently, YAF launched a vexatious lawsuit designed to cripple ***Dissent*** magazine and its affiliated podcast, ***Know Your Enemy***.  
To talk about YAF, I spoke with historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, author of the forthcoming book [***Resistance from the Right***](https://uncpress.org/book/9781469674490/resistance-from-the-right/)***: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America***. In that book, Lauren documents how groups like YAF groomed the ideological extremists who have taken the GOP into authoritarianism. In our talk, Lauren and I look at the group’s ties to powerful plutocrats and politicians as well as their strategy of using legal power as a political tool.  
   
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Young Americans for Freedom Hates Freedom