DeKALB – For campuses like NIU, right leaning student groups can be hard to find.
A new group on NIU’s campus hopes to change that.
Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) is a libertarian group with the mission of “building the youth army for liberty” by establishing chapters at NIU and other university campuses across the country.
Cruz Marquis is a senior economics major minoring in history and political science and is the state chair for YAL at NIU.
“Libertarianism is essentially the philosophy that minimizes coercion, coercion being defined as basically an imposition with force threatened behind it,” Marquis said. “The biggest coercer in society is the state – that’s by no means the only coercer – so libertarians therefore seek to minimize the scope of state coercion.”
Parts of libertarianism align with right leaning ideologies, but it encompasses a broader spectrum of ideologies than some may think.
“Libertarianism is a very big tent,” explained Marquis. “There’s a lot of room for people to disagree.”
Marquis identifies as an anarchist and traces the origins of that ideology to when he graduated boot camp in 2021 as a marine at Camp Pendleton in San Diego.
“I was absolutely on top of the world,” Marquis said. “Happy as a clam.”
Marquis said when the government mandated that they had to take the COVID vaccine, he and other marines objected.
“About one week before I transferred for some infantry training that every marine goes through, the federal COVID vaccine mandate came down,” Marquis said. “I along with about 20 other marines found ourselves to, on philosophical grounds, decline that.”
Marquis said he was demoted and his crew was terminated.
“They took my pay, took my phone, and put me in military prison for six months,” Marquis said. “Technically it wasn’t military prison, the real name is legal and separations platoon, b. But it’s low-key a minimum security prison.”
In line with what he saw as government overreach, libertarian groups like YAL stress less government involvement.
This also means that there is plenty of room for agreement.
Speaking about tabling for YAL at NIU, Marquis said, “Throughout the entire time our table was set up, I only encountered less than five people who said they were explicitly against what YAL stands for, but probably two to three dozen people that I personally talked to who said that one aspect of what we were doing was cool.”
Marquis insisted that anyone should attend YAL meetings, whether they are on the fence about joining or even ideologically opposite from the group.
“If somebody is on the fence [about joining YAL] and there are policies on their campus that seem to infringe on their liberties, well, this is the group that has a very strong track record of overturning those and expanding civil liberties,” Marquis said.
The group’s main goal at NIU is to expand their membership base from the less than a dozen members they currently have.
“YAL does a lot of really big stuff,” Marquis said. “But to do all that stuff, you need to network. You need to first build that community; so far, we do not have that community at NIU.”
YAL has been associated with controversy in the past such as when a chapter at Iowa State University invited white nationalist Nick Fuentes to speak at an event.
“YAL’s brand has sometimes been co-opted who have only somewhat been associated with us,” Marquis said. “Occasionally some bad actors have infiltrated the organization and used the branding to do something that’s just not us. That’s not something we support. We have shut down those people down over time.”