Episode 1

Step into the inaugural episode of The Reagan Faulkner Show, where young voices lead the discussion on the future of American conservatism. Hosted by Reagan Faulkner—a junior at UNC Wilmington, president of the College Republicans, and a rising leader in the Gen Z conservative movement—this debut episode introduces listeners to the challenges, triumphs, and tactics of young right-leaning students navigating today’s college campuses.

Reagan draws from her extensive involvement with Turning Point USA, the Network of Enlightened Women, and national media appearances to spotlight the evolving cultural and political divides defining her generation. Listeners are taken on a journey through the history and mission of higher education, evolving campus funding dynamics, the bureaucratic roadblocks faced by conservative student organizations, and practical strategies for building community in a progressive-leaning academic world.

With practical advice, book and media recommendations, and a call to respectful discourse, Reagan empowers students across the country to take initiative, build support systems, and stand up for free expression and traditional values. Whether you're a student, parent, or simply interested in the pulse of Gen Z conservatism, this episode sets the tone for a bold, outspoken podcast series dedicated to the next generation of American leadership.

Tune in each week for new episodes and real conversations bridging the ideological gap, hosted by Reagan Faulkner—on campus, online, and across the conservative movement.

Transcript

Speaker1: 0:05

Hi everyone, and welcome to The Reagan Faulkner Show, where we explore the young Christian conservative movement, hot takes and cultural divides that are defining a generation. My name is Reagan Faulkner, and I'm your host. A little bit about me. I'm a junior at UNCW, University of North Carolina Wilmington, and I'm president of our chapter's College Republicans. I'm also the regional director for the East Coast, for the North Carolina Federation of College Republicans, and am actively involved in Turning Point USA and trying to implement a chapter of the network of enlightened women here on campus. I've been on The Ingraham Angle to discuss the silencing of conservative voices on college campuses, and I've been on our local Wilmington news to talk about the assassination of Charlie Kirk and current tensions rising at UNSW. I've been interviewed for Fox News digital articles, as well as articles published by The New York Times and our local Wilmington news. Ww A-y. Now, how did I get into this? Well, my parents always said that I talk a lot. Maybe a little bit too much. My boyfriend is pronounced me a D1 yapper. So when the opportunity arose to host the show, it was an offer I couldn't refuse. I've always been passionate about the future of the United States, and I've been politically involved from a very young age. I love American history, US and foreign politics, and exploring the psychology of what motivates young Americans to take a stand for what they believe in. Before we get into our topic for today, I want to discuss a little bit about the concept of the original premise behind colleges and university institutions. Historically, these places of education were meant to teach discourse, philosophy, law, medicine, and mathematics to advance the human condition. Men had to leave their rural hometowns in the United States and go to huge cities with major academic institutions. Here they would learn the art of debate from philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. By creating competent thinkers, these institutions would produce young individuals who could engage with perspectives that were different from their own and come to conclusions about how these different worldviews fit into their own perspectives on the universe. Through this method of education, humans were able to grow mentally, academically, and create advancements for the betterment of all society. Today, however, we see a drastic shift. One of the most important changes is that every city or town has at least one community college or learning institution for higher secondary education. This allows students to live at home and go to school, do school online, or go somewhere just a short drive away. Many students may travel to other states or far away from home, but instead of learning about the new dynamics and coming to appreciate them in their new homes, they want to judge them and talk about the way that things should be or how things were back home. In addition, colleges are famous for the feedback loop of progressivism, where liberal students, faculty, and research constantly reaffirms itself with one another and disavows any other perspectives. This constant affirmation process continues, reaffirming the idea that progressivism prevails and that conservatism is incorrect and or outdated. The university system today pushes progressive ideologies in and out of the classrooms. Courses focus on one sided teachings of many subjects, including, but not limited to, economics, history, and business. Typically, this one sided view tends to be more liberal, and the conservative side is either ignored or taught to be archaic and backwoods. The first disadvantage for social and organizational conservative groups are funding disparities. Namely, the federal government offers grants for ideas that are more progressive in nature, such as cultural groups and minority groups. The Department of Education Actually offers grants for improvements to post-secondary higher education. Two of these grants include the Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program, and the Transitioning Gang involved Youth to Higher Education program. Another grant offered by the Department of Education is specifically for historically black colleges and universities, as well as predominantly black institutions. While these are wonderful programs and help many disadvantaged individuals, they are extremely niche in a small sector of the entire population, both in the United States and in universities themselves. Additionally, the Department of Education offers grants for foreign language education, including study abroad. This is extremely important for students who want to have a global understanding of the world or engage in international business, but this is also a very small sector of the entire student population, but it gets a huge amount of funding. Now, in 2025, the Trump administration actually announced grant opportunities through the Department of Education to promote patriotism with a, quote, unbiased approach. This is a wonderful turn of events, but it's the first time we've actually seen any dedicated ideals to American patriotism on college campuses in decades. Another issue that students have found is on campus funding for student organizations. Let me give you an example. According to the Columbia Spectator, a newspaper through Columbia University, they expanded their funding for student organizations by 19% in 2025, for a total sum of $395,000. This sounds great to see student organizations receiving more funding overall. However, $94,492 of that sum went to cultural groups including black, East Asian, South Asian and Pacific Islander, Latin, Maslama, Hawaii, and European and Middle Eastern groups. These are a really small portion of a diverse group of individuals across an entire college campus, yet they're receiving a little more than a quarter of the overall pot of funds for all student orgs. In comparison, Columbia University Fashion Society received $60 and the mock trials budget was reduced by 72%, or $7,268. Mock trial is an extremely important student club as it teaches students arts of public speaking, legal interpretation, and is a great resume builder for people who want to go to law school, something that Columbia University students often want to pursue. Now, in order to receive funding from this pot, the Activities Funding Board at Columbia explains that these organizations cannot be, quote, community service, political, religious, athletic, or activist and purpose. This cuts out almost every single group that conservatives would be involved in, as they're interested in the Maha movement and often want to do athletic events with friends and acquaintances, or get involved in College Republicans and Turning Point chapters where they can be activists for the conservative movement or be partizan involved with their local GOP. Yet they are actually barred from receiving any of this $395,000 that the Columbia University offers to student orgs. While these federal grants and school funding promote diverse programing and progressive, culturally themed diverse organizations, conservative students must turn to third party private organizations for financial and organizational support. These include organizations like the Leadership Institute, Young Americans for freedom, Turning Point USA, and the Federation of College Republicans. While these are extremely successful organizations, many are actually unable to help because they're classified as Nonpartizan for 500 1C3 tax exemption purposes. And because of this, they can't actually support partizan Organizations like College Republicans. Where does this leave conservative college students? One, they can work with their local GOP and try to fundraise through them. But typically, a local county's GOP is also vying for financial support and doesn't have much to offer to specific individual partizan groups on campus. Now, these clubs can also fundraise on their own, but many students don't have enough money for even rent and groceries, much less donating to a club that they're involved with to form friendships and share common ideologies. In fact, most students, unless they're involved in fraternity and sorority life, are really uninterested in paying to engage with groups of friends that just have like minded ideas. They they really don't want to pay for this. They want to go have fun. And if they want to pay for something, they want that to be part of their everyday serious life, not pay. In order to go have a good time and make friends. With all that being said, the fact of the matter is grants, funding and university expectations on cultural diversity catch conservative clubs with an inability to have funding put on great events like their progressive counterparts, and they have very little administrative support. They have administrative support, but not as much as their counterparts because of the inherent hierarchy within the cultural centers and all the supports from departments, uh, professional clubs, things like that, that conservative students don't necessarily have at every single university because conservatives don't generally participate in these cultural events. Clubs for minority students, cultural celebration, and each group activities involving mindfulness, meditation and safe space practices. We don't really benefit from any of these federally funded or school funded initiatives as much as our progressive counterparts. We don't really have an opportunity to engage specifically with like minded conservative peers, except through Partizan groups like College Republicans and nonpartisan groups like Turning Point USA, the Leadership Institute, and Young Americans for freedom, which have deep, deep, deep levels of bureaucracy and insane approval processes to even host events or host speakers, and many different levels of leadership that approvals have to go through in order to even get accepted, to host an event that might be nine or 10 or 11 weeks out. In our club, we actually have a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, communications director and digital media director, and all of us spend 5 to 10 hours a week individually just trying to do basic organizational things and navigating red tape and bureaucracy. This includes reserving tables for tabling events, trying to reserve rooms for everyday weekly events that we host for our members, and trying to contract speakers through the university and get funding or even acquiring materials to distribute a tabling events. The red tape and bureaucracy inherent within third party organizations and the university system is insane. And typically, conservative students are pursuing degrees that take up a lot of time and a lot of credit hours, and they don't necessarily have the time to navigate all of this red tape. While it is in fact systemically harder to be a conservative on college campuses rather than nonpartizan progressive or apolitical altogether, that doesn't mean that conservative students need to stop and give up. One of the first things that you can do is engage with your peers, not necessarily through a partizan or nonpartizan club. Just find like minded friends, make a group chat and try to hang out a little bit, have debates and group chats, or just talk about things that y'all are passionate and interested in. Another thing that you can do is participate in the organizations mentioned above. Regardless of the red tape and bureaucracy, they are wonderful organizations that make direct impacts on hundreds of students of lives on campus. So if you want to make a big impact at your school, accept the fact that there's bureaucracy and red tape. Put your big girl pants on and go ahead and jump in. Head first and see what you can do to make a big difference on your campus. You can also partner with nonpartisan sort of kind of political organizations like Braver Angels. This group specifically looks to reduce the political divide across the two political spectrums, the liberals and the Republicans. And they host moderated debates where you can talk about many hot topics affecting not only our generation, but our country as a whole. Because these are moderated, they actually help people be more respectful, and they go through a question and answer perspective instead of a direct attack perspective. So that's something really cool to look into. Now the next here are my personal favorites. First of all, listening to YouTube videos from established voices like Brett Cooper, decoy voice, and past Charlie Kirk debates. These help you learn conservative ideals straight from the horse's mouth, so that when you end up in a situation where you're debating or having respectful discourse with somebody who thinks differently than your own, you have an arsenal of things that you can talk about straight from many different perspectives. Another thing that you can do on this topic is read books or listen to audiobooks. My personal favorites are The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, which kind of describes how colleges went from what we were talking about before, places of discourse and debate and learning to this place where, conservative or not, conservative liberal ideas are coddled and progressed and and this feedback loop of constantly reaffirming themselves while conservative ideals are silenced. Additionally, the College Scam by Charlie Kirk and the Right Wing Revolution by Charlie Kirk are extremely fascinating books. And finally, One Generation Away by Brian Holahan, which explores how conservative Gen Z students today are going to make or break the entire freedom process of the United States of America. It goes off the premise of a Ronald Reagan quote that I'll get to in a few minutes. But basically, our generation has the opportunity to save democracy as we know it, or the opportunity to stay quiet, keep our head down, get the degree, go get our 9 to 5 job, retire at 65, and maybe, maybe not. America will be here when we're done. Finally, like I said before, hang out with students who think like you, but don't do it in a political setting. If you have friends that are politically involved and think the same as you, you'll probably have a lot more in common than you think. So go out and grab a drink, get some coffee, or join a Bible study and try to grow those relationships outside of politics. The key to surviving college is ensuring that you have a strong support system that you can lean back on when things get rough. This can include friends, family members, advisors, and faculty on campus, but personally, I recommend that your support system physically be on campus because if you're involved in one of these organizations with insane levels of red tape and bureaucracy, you're going to find yourself upset and frustrated at some point, and you're going to need advice, or you're going to need to vent, or you're going to just need to go crazy and talk about what's going on in your life and why you're upset, and why it's so hard to be a conservative on campus. And while you can do this with people who might live far away or might be family members, having a group of people in your generation with your understanding is a lot more beneficial. Now, what you can't do is sit back on the sidelines and pray and hope that things are going to get better. I hate to break it to you, but they're not. We keep seeing a radical growth in an inability to talk to each other, in a constant silencing of conservative voices that, again, we'll get into more in depth next week. But thinking that things are going to get better is a hopeless hope. It's going to take real change. And people like you and I to actually engage with other students who think differently and have that respectful discourse that Charlie Kirk was known for. This is what the university system wants, is for you to sit back and say nothing. They want you to not engage in this respectful discourse, and they want their feedback loop of progressivism to continue. Let's reference a subreddit from 14 years ago, where the author discusses how he followed the liberal ideologies of his professor. For three out of four papers on three out of four papers, he got A's. On one paper he got a C. I bet you can guess which one he got the C on. The one where he actually talked about his own conservative beliefs and how it related to the topics that they were covering in class. The author also discusses the idea that us college students are all too familiar with. Liberal students feel that everybody agrees with them, and that they can spew whatever ideologies they want without fear of disagreement. We see this from professors, too, who feel confident in saying anything because they're the experts on the topic and no one in class would dare discredit or disagree with them. And we see it in blatant opinions, camouflaged as facts on social media like Reddit and Yik Yak, the ability of professors to force an entire class to stay quiet despite their personal beliefs or the ability to downvote and make comments on social media disappear that you don't agree with, is in direct conflict with the original purpose of universities, that is, to explore discourse and learn how to debate in a reasonable, respectful and successful manner. Conservatives are forced into this with the pressure to attend these cultural events. I know I had to attend many cultural events for my university 101 class my freshman year, and they also are forced to accept the cultural centers on campus for minority groups that the schools spend tons and tons of money on. But other members outside of those minority groups aren't necessarily encouraged to take use of them. However, liberal students never have to contend with any ideas that conflict with their rhetoric, and if they do, they have safe spaces where they can go, or they have the ability and the encouragement to shut down that rhetoric that they disagree with. Like I said, safe spaces, these diversity centers, mindfulness labs, sensory zones and other areas allow liberal students to take a break and reflect from ideas that they don't agree with when they get intimidated and overstimulated. But conservative students are constantly bombarded with things that they don't agree with and that are morally and ethically wrong regarding their own worldview. But there's nowhere they can escape to. They have to leave their class. That's teaching liberal ideologies to go out into campus and face tables, like Planned Parenthood and the Democrats of the United States, clubs and all kinds of other liberal ideology groups. And they have no escape from that. By playing into this game of keeping quiet, keeping your head down and getting through the four years, the systemic advance of progressivism only grows and emboldens liberal students and faculty. This is why you must step up and step out. Found a chapter of College Republicans Young Americans for freedom, the Network of Enlightened Women, Turning Point USA, or even Ducks Unlimited on your own campus. Some of these are Partizan, some are nonpartisan, but they all have a conservative lean where you'll find students with common viewpoints, morals, and ethics of your own, even joining the leadership teams on one or more of these clubs if they're already established at your school, or just join as a member and try to go to every single event and see who you meet and try to form one of those friend groups that we talked about before. Join a church and find other students with similar morals, worldviews, and ideologies of your own. You'll find a lot more people who think like you in a church or a Christian religious setting. Then just hoping that you find somebody in a class or at school or in the library. Introduce respectful discourse into your classes and your friend groups, and combat the idea that all liberal rhetoric must go unchallenged. You can even do this respectfully in the comments section of social media platforms such as Reddit, Yik Yak and Instagram. By combating these liberal ideas that never go unchallenged, you have an opportunity to change the lives and ideas of your peers, one person at a time. Every college conservative has an opportunity to make an impact on their campus. It can be one club at a time, one class at a time. Or, like I said, one peer at a time. To all the college students listening today, please remember this quote from Ronald Reagan. Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on. Colleges are trying to reeducate an entire generation of Americans, and it's up to us, Gen Z, to stand up for what is right, what is moral, and what is just simple, basic old common sense. It's not easy. It's not popular, and it isn't always fun. But if you join the right club, it might just be quote unquote, the best party on campus. It's our college Republicans line. But at the end of the day, it's what will save America and create a country that's worthy of bringing your own children into one day. Thank you so much for joining me in this debut episode of The Reagan Faulkner Show. And be sure to tune in next Wednesday, where we talk about the silencing of conservative voices, both on college campuses and in the United States as a whole. Remember, go to Reagan faulkner.com for more information, or follow us on TikTok, Instagram and X at The Reagan Faulkner Show or the Wilmington Standard. Thank you all so much and tune in next week.