Nestled in the Catoctin Mountains, west of Washington DC:
PURCELLVILLE, Va. -- As one of 12 siblings taught at home by their parents in St. Croix Falls, Wis., Abram Olmstead knew he would fit right in at Patrick Henry College, the first college primarily for evangelical Christian home-schoolers. But what really sold him was the school's pipeline into conservative politics.
Of the nearly 100 interns working in the White House this semester, 7 are from the roughly 240 students enrolled in the four-year-old Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville. An eighth intern works for the president's re-election campaign. A former Patrick Henry intern now works on the paid staff of the president's top political adviser, Karl Rove. Over the last four years, 22 conservative members of Congress have employed one or more Patrick Henry interns in their offices or on their campaigns, according to the school's records.
College for the Home-Schooled Is Shaping Leaders for the Right (NYTimes.com registration required)
From a previously published article from October 2003, from WaPo:
Patrick Henry College students mix politics, prayer
Within five years, Farris (Michael Farris, home-schooling activist and founder/current president of Patrick Henry College) said, he expects to see a Patrick Henry student elected to local office in his or her hometown. In his lifetime, he said, he believes graduates will be elected to both houses of Congress and appointed to state and federal courts. Their agenda will be familiar: to abolish abortion, prevent gay marriage, shrink government and curb judicial activism.
further...
The eventual influence of Patrick Henry students can't be predicted, but they've chosen an apt strategy to start with, said Mark Rozell, professor of politics at Catholic University. Rozell wrote a book about the religious right in Virginia politics, including a chapter on Farris.
"The first step is to establish some credibility and then get a little bit of foothold," Rozell said.
Farris's oft-repeated dream, he said, is to see a Patrick Henry graduate win an Academy Award. As he's walking down the aisle to accept, his cell phone rings - it's his former Patrick Henry roommate, the president of the United States, calling to say congratulations.
It is going to be these people going head-to-head with the liberal arts, history, law, and public policy students graduating from GWU, Harvard, Yale, Columbia...
Farris also heads the Home School Legal Defense Association:
Home School Legal Defense Association
...that is starting a recruitment campaign for homeschooled teens called Generation Joshua, an effort to mobilize tens of thousands of homeschooled teens into being politically active:
Liberal politics has a reliable supply of grassroots workers. Primarily paid labor-union activists, they are demonstrably effective in voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts.
There is no equally-sized reliable, organized source of grassroots volunteers on the conservative side. But guess what? In some small experiments in the 2002 election, homeschool teens proved that they could match and exceed the effectiveness of any other grassroots effort. In a recent WORLD magazine editorial, publisher Joel Belz opined that homeschool teens could become one of the most powerful forces in American politics, rivaling the labor unions in effectiveness.
Belz had been given an advance look at the Generation Joshua program. He saw what happened in the 2002 elections, he heard about our plans, and he reached his own conclusions about the potential impact.
The best way to train the leaders of tomorrow is to have our young people help to elect the leaders of today.
That is why HSLDA is starting a PAC. It is not an external PAC designed to raise money from the whole world and give it to candidates so that we can have lobbying influence in Washington. Our PAC is limited to our members. And our core purpose is to provide the proper legal structure so that we can provide real-life opportunities for our students to work in campaigns.
Rest assured we are going to carefully screen the races in which we ask our teens to volunteer. Only candidates who are pro-homeschooling, favor the original intent of the Constitution, and possess a strong loyalty to liberty and self-government will receive our assistance. And yes, we will feel rewarded when the work of homeschooled young people helps to elect better leaders for today.
Progressives had better be sleeping under the wings of their rhetorical strategic bombers, on full alert, ready to strike, because it appears that the conservative fundies are gearing up for the cultural war in a major, major way.
