The present-day YAF is a shadow of its former self, in the glory days of conservative activism when the Red Menace was the one cause that united conservatives from coast to coast.
Even then, there were factions that just plain couldn't agree on what "freedom" -- as in the organization's last name -- really meant. Freedom to be conscripted into the nation's armed forces to fight an undeclared war? Or freedom to visit a country such as Cuba without having to obtain a foreign passport? Freedom to publicly denounce a Republican president when his economic policies are antithetical to accepted conservative wisdom?
Those and other sticky questions of national policy served to diminish the organization's cohesiveness until, in recent years, its leaders rediscovered local(and largely trivial) issues members could rally around with maximum effect, such as staging affirmative action bake sales and opposing politically-correct campus speech codes.
Who are the remaining members of YAF's Advisory Board? Anyone know? I can't find a list of officers or anyone else on their Web site. It invites me to contribute and/or join and has a concise history of the last 50 years but says absolutely nothing about who is in charge of the operation.
The same split between craven-libertarians and patriotic libertarians and conservatives occured in the 1960’s. The commie-loving libertarians left to form the Libertarian Party.