As George W. Bush’s divisive presidency enters its final year, hard-line conservatives fear they are losing a grip on the Republican Party to moderates like Rudolph Giuliani and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But Ross Lingenfelder, president of the UC-Berkeley College Republicans, has tipped the party’s balance to the right on the most liberal campus in the country.

The controversial leader, who won the presidency last spring by one vote, wants to move the club from being a simple meeting place for Berkeley Republicans to a full-fledged conservative activist group on campus. He believes the Republican Party in general is moving away from its ideals – fiscal responsibility, strong morals and protecting the constitution. And the college group was a social fraternity, where drinking and partying eclipsed politics. He has made it his mission to spread conservative ideology to the larger Berkeley campus because he fears the country will turn into an Orwellian society if Americans lose sight of what it means to live in a free civilization.

“My job as president of BCR is to educate. Person by person, day by day,” said Lingenfelder, 20, who often sports an “I Miss Reagan” button. “Maybe if we did that better, we would have a more sane nation.

When Lingenfelder first joined the Berkeley Republicans in 2005, many thought he was a Democrat sent to infiltrate the group because he had long and unruly hair. He looked like a hippy and never said a word. But after holding his thoughts in for more than two weeks, Lingenfelder stood up and broke his silence during a debate on illegal immigration.

Just because a woman’s vagina is on this side of the border shouldn’t make her child an American citizen, he said in a stern voice.

The air went out of the room.

Some in his own group say Lingenfelder is an extremist. He is pro-life, anti-amnesty to undocumented migrants working in the U.S., open to the possibility of using nuclear weapons in the Middle East and a proponent of dismantling public education in favor of a voucher system.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” said Lingenfelder, quoting the late Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Last year, Lingenfelder and a group of like-minded dissenters were frustrated that the club’s leadership didn’t spend more time promoting conservative values on campus. Opponents, including then President Josiah Prendergast, thought the group best served as a meeting place – a safe haven – for conservative students to meet, discuss issues, socialize and learn about campaigning at Berkeley. Politically, the club traditionally resembled the Orange County branch of the Republican Party, focused more on economics than the social conservatism associated with so-called “red states.”

The former College Republican leadership thought conflict with the broader liberal campus would only bring negative press and reinforce existing stereotypes about the Republican Party.

So Lingenfelder started to act independently of the group. He handed out Reagan fliers, and on the former president’s birthday, he constructed a mock Berlin Wall on campus inscribed with the famous words: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

The old leadership thought it was not effective, a waste of time,” he said. “But even if you get people to think about something for 10 minutes on the way to class, that’s what it’s all about.”

In Prendergast’s two-year tenure as president, the group was featured in The Wall Street Journal, on Fox News and CNBC as the token Republicans in Berkeley. Prendergast said events such as Dunk-a-Republican for Breast Cancer were effective in drawing more people who agree with the club’s principles but are turned of by extreme views. Direct confrontation with the liberal campus would only bring bad press.

Over the past four or five years, Berkeley College Republicans brought professional and constructive awareness because of its ability to frame its message in a way that is more substance-based than inflammatory,” he said.

When Prendergast’s term ended, Lingenfelder came to a crossroads with the Berkeley Republicans – run for president or form another group that would Lingenfelder’s first major work of activism as president was bringing Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week to the Berkeley campus this fall. UC-Berkeley was one of more than 90 campuses hosting the event sponsored by conservative writer and activist David Horowitz, who coined it as a terrorism awareness project. The week was met with resistance, divisiveness and even police arrests of leftist protestors.

College Republican President Ross Lingenfelder reads quotes from Muslim leaders he deems Fascists, while students
behind him protest Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week on campus.
Photo by Paul Gackle

Lingenfelder, originally from the San Diego suburb of Vista, Calif., comes from a diverse political household. His mother, brother, and sister are Democrats, but his beliefs are rooted in his father’s Libertarian ideology. Bill Lingenfelder talked politics with his son at breakfast, in front of the television and on long drives out to Arizona to visit his sister. 

“I can’t tell you how many conversations I had with my dad that started of with something about the government,” Lingenfelder said.

Bill Lingenfelder often told his son that with every law that is passed, the individual loses freedom.

Growing up, Lingenfelder had a variety of interests, learning Japanese, French and Arabic, European history, sailing, and math, a subject in which he received his high school’s highest award. But at Berkeley his views swung further to the right, and he devoted his once splintered passion to conservative activism.

“When Ross first went to Berkeley, I was worried,” said his mother, Mary Lingenfelder. “I said, ‘no drugs, no cults,’ but, of course, he became a Republican.”

Lingenfelder’s parents think the liberalism of the Berkeley campus may have pushed their son into the arms of the Republican Party. But he argues that it was learning about American history that pushed him away from libertarianism and into Republicanism. He started to think that protecting the national identity – as set forth by the Founding Fathers – is imperative to maintaining individual freedom.

“A nation is defined by its people. If we don’t maintain a sense of culture, language, history, we will die as a civilization,” he said.

Lingenfelder believes the American ideal can be restored through the Republican Party by recovering the vision of one man – Ronald Reagan.

“He’s the one who said, ‘All change starts at the dinner table,’ ” he said.

But Lingenfelder’s activism extends beyond simply promoting a conservative agenda. Earlier in the semester, he helped Berkeley College Democrat President Sarah Gold in a voter registration drive, knowing that Cal students are more likely to vote for the opposing party.

“I was very impressed,” Gold said. “I often forget he is conservative because we see eye-to-eye on so many things.”

Despite his convictions, Lingenfelder has no desire to seek a political office. He’d rather do math.  But he’ll continue to devote himself to educating anyone who walks into a campus GOP meeting about the issues facing a nation in distress.

“Politics annoy the hell out of me,” he said. “I like talking about issues – right and wrong – and that’s not politics.”

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