Episode 2

In Episode 2, Reagan Faulkner dives into the challenges conservative students face on a modern college campus, discussing issues like free speech, campus activism, and the tension between traditional values and evolving campus culture. She offers commentary on current news, highlighting key topics affecting the student body and the broader Wilmington area, and encourages her audience to critically engage with mainstream narratives. Faulkner’s approach blends personal experience with interviews and analysis, creating a space for open discussion on contentious issues and giving a voice to perspectives that are often underrepresented in campus media.

Throughout Episode 2, The Reagan Faulkner Show maintains a tone that is both relatable and informative. Faulkner’s youthful energy and commitment to conservative principles inspire her listeners to get involved, ask tough questions, and advocate for their beliefs. By focusing on authentic dialogue and the unique viewpoint of a young conservative leader, the show aims to empower students and local residents alike to engage more deeply with the cultural and political issues that matter most to them

Transcript

0:06

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Reagan Faulkner Show. I'm your host, Reagan Faulkner. Last episode, we talked a little bit about conservative students on college campuses and some of the challenges that they face like organizational structure, bureaucratic challenges, red tape and funding. In today's episode, we're going to talk more about the silencing of conservative voices across the United States and on college campuses. So when we talk about silencing conservatives, what does that look like? What particularly does that mean? Um, just really like what are we getting into with that? So the first thing that I want to talk about is cancel culture. If you all remember, cancel culture was a really, really big thing around 2018, all the way up until I mean, even today, we still see aspects of cancel culture on both sides. The right's getting more prone to using it, but not to the degree that the left has used it and continues to use it. So one of the first examples of cancel culture was in 2018. Scott Coffin, who is the idea genius behind Five Nights at Freddy's The video Game? He was actually exposed by some people that looked up his donation history on a website called OpenSecrets.org. And through that website, they were able to find that he had made donations to Donald Trump's campaign. Mitch McConnell's campaign, a lot of different conservative campaigns. And he came out and said that he was a conservative, pro-life, um, all the things that you really consider when you think about somebody that has more right leaning views. And he ended up being forced to quit his job at Five Nights at Freddy's, even though he was really the brainchild behind that very successful video game. And another interesting thing about this is if you know anything about some of the video games that people on the left play, this is one of their favorites. So it's really interesting that this was actually the brainchild of somebody that's very conservative, and he was booted out of his own game industry, and then now it's kind of morphed into something that many of the left wing video play video game players today really enjoy. Another example of cancel culture is Gina Carano compared the current political climate to that of Nazi Germany on her Instagram Story. So specifically, she stated Jews were beaten in the streets not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors, even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views? So basically, what Carano is saying here is that a lot of the reasons that the Nazis were able to round up and exterminate many tens and hundreds of thousands of Jews was because the government was able to make their neighbors hate them. And then it just seemed normal to continue that hate and to round them up into the concentration camps. They had to normalize the hatred of the Jews first. And her point being that today we have come to a point in our political discourse, a point in our political parties where we're villainizing both sides. And this was from 2018. So she was really talking about how the conservative movement was being villainized, and even the government was pushing to villainize conservatives. So she ended up being fired for putting this on her Instagram story, while her coworker Pedro Pascal compared immigration to Nazi Germany. And he posted on Twitter hashtag This is America with a picture of Jews in a containment camp in 1944. And then below it, he had immigrant children in a um, immigrant containment camp in the United States in 2018. So what he was trying to say is that rounding up illegal immigrants is the exact same as putting Jewish people in a concentration camp. Those are very, very different things. And Pedro actually got to keep his job while Gina Carano was fired from The Mandalorian. Another example is Roseanne Barr in 2018 compared Valerie Jarrett to a character in The Planet of the apes, and she said that she did not know that Valerie Jarrett was a woman of color and that she did it strictly because of the context between the character and Valerie. But it got pushed into more of a racist thing where Roseanne Barr ended up being fired from the reboot. Roseanne. Um, now, she had a lot to say about this, because she was never given an opportunity to come back onto the show or to try again. But Jimmy Kimmel made blatant false remarks about Charlie Kirk's shooter, Tyler Robinson, and his affiliation with the Conservative Party, and he ended up being able to come back on air and have his show reinstated. So he was given another opportunity when he was canceled for blatantly spreading false information, while Roseanne Barr made a joke that she thought was funny on her personal social media and ended up being fired, canceled and not asked to return after that. Now, the point of these three examples is really to show how cancel culture has come to silence Americans and to silence conservatives when one side disagrees with what the other side wants to put forward, or wants to communicate or talk about. Now, there can be accurate examples of cancel culture. For example, I firmly believe that Jimmy Kimmel needed to be held responsible for spreading false information about Tyler Robinson and his relationship with the Conservative Party. Kimmel came out and said that Tyler was a conservative, and that conservatives were trying to distance themselves from him to get political points and to basically get brownie points, where we know that while Robinson's family was conservative, he did not like Charlie Kirk. He had said that he was full of hate. Um, he had expressed this at a dinner. So. Cancel culture is just a really a way to silence opinions that others don't like it in any other context. It's really just holding somebody accountable for spreading false information or doing something wrong. In these instances, holding a conservative opinion or posting something of your own opinion on a private social media account that's not really doing anything wrong. None of these people did anything blatantly offensive, and many of the other victims of cancel culture haven't done anything blatantly offensive. Now, when Republicans are accused of forcing cancel culture on left leaning individuals. We see radical pushback from that. But really, like I said, those individuals are being held accountable for something that they have done wrong, such as spreading false information or saying things that are just completely not okay. Like the professors at Clemson University that said that they wanted to, that Charlie Kirk deserved to die. Like, you cannot say that. You just can't. That is called accountability. That is not canceling somebody for holding a personal opinion. That doesn't matter. So the point that I'm trying to make here about cancel culture is that conservatives have been unfairly silenced for many, many years for holding a simple opinion or sharing a joke that they thought was funny. And that's just not fair to conservatives at all. You cannot cancel somebody and ruin their entire career because they have an opinion that they thought, but it was different than yours, or because they shared a joke that you didn't think was funny or agree with. That's not worth ruining somebody's entire career over, or making them leave projects that they've spent years and years and years developing. Um, I know that recently the left has or the right has been accused of cancel culture on the other side, just like we just talked about Jimmy Kimmel, but that is called accountability. Jimmy Kimmel was explicitly sharing false information that Tyler Robinson was a conservative, and that he thought that Charlie Kirk's beliefs were not far right enough. That is not what happened. We found out way before Jimmy Kimmel made that comment, that Tyler Robinson believed Charlie Kirk was full of hate and disagreed with many of the things that he said, that his family was conservative, but that Tyler was not, and that Tyler had been radicalized on social media. So Jimmy Kimmel was not, quote unquote, canceled because people just didn't agree with him or because conservatives didn't like him. He was canceled because he was spreading false information. Now he was reinstated. But for that period of time when his show was temporarily suspended, it was a consequence of him spreading false information, not a consequence of people just not liking that he was left leaning or liberal. So another area that I'd like to talk about is social media and the echo chambers within our algorithms. So what I'm talking about here is conservatives are unfairly silenced in many different areas of social media, because the way that our algorithms work your account, your TikTok, your Instagram, it understands what you like and what you don't interact with, and it feeds you more of the things that you like. It wants you to constantly click more, interact with it more, and have more of an obsession over whatever form of social media that might be. So it'll continue feeding you those things. And right wing and left wing people are both victim of this. I know personally my TikTok is highly conservative. Everything I see on there are conservatives talking about different things happening in the world, conservative news stories, things like that. But the same happens for the left, where they are constantly fed things that agree with their ideology and promote their agenda. And when this happens, you're not introduced to other forms of discourse and other forms of ideas, and it causes people to think that whatever they see on social media or whatever they think is right, and it's being reaffirmed and reaffirmed and reaffirmed because of the way that our social media algorithms work. We can also see this in comments sections. A lot of times people go into comment sections and constantly reaffirm each other's ideas, and then it really looks like there's no other opinion out there. And whatever is the prevailing idea in the comment section is the one that's quote unquote, right, or the one that's quote unquote wrong. Personally, I've seen this on an anonymous social media app called Yik Yak. My personal issue with Yik Yak is that you can downvote anything that you don't like, and if it gets enough downvotes or lack of interaction, the post itself disappears. So when people disagree with something specifically conservative ideas, it gets downvoted so much that it disappears. And then within the app, it looks like only the liberal ideology is prevailing, or that only the liberal ideology is correct, when in reality a lot of people might disagree with it. But those users aren't on Yik Yak because it's an air. It's a form of social media where, I mean, most of the users are liberal, so conservatives don't really use the app because it's quite frankly, there's no point to it. It's very similar to X, but anonymous and just full of silly stuff happening around campus. Like a lot of conservatives don't waste their time on it, but when there are conservatives on there making points or making comments, they either get blocked, they get downvoted, or it just gets so little interaction that it disappears. And when this happens again, like I said, you're constantly being reaffirmed that your idea is correct. And that's really the issue that we see on campus is that people's ideas are constantly being reaffirmed. So when they face another idea that might have just as much validity as their own opinion, they don't know how to interact with it and they just go, oh no, that's wrong. Even though it might have some validity to it. They don't understand how to argue with it, how to interact with it, or how to cope with it. Another area where we see the silencing of conservatives is through the cutting of advertising to conservative influencers. This was something that happened a couple of years ago where basically advertising campaigns said that it was too risky to run advertisements on conservative media because the media was more aggressive or less people would agree with it, things like that. So they would purposely not give advertisements to conservative influencers, conservative newscasters, etc. and that decreased the profitability of these channels. This is a way to silence conservatives and make their movements unprofitable, and make it not even worth their time to have their social media accounts host their news shows, whatever it may be, because they were not getting any of that advertising revenue and they could not afford to continue whatever they were trying to produce, whatever information they were trying to share. Just it wasn't profitable and it wasn't worth it. Now, my final example of silencing of conservatives off of college campuses is violence. We've seen people who can't win a debate, who can't effectively share their ideas or their ideologies. We've seen them turn to violence. This happened to assassination attempts on Donald Trump because people didn't agree with him. And instead of trying to compete with him or try to put up a campaign that was better than his, they thought it was just easier to silence him and shoot him. And that is not okay. We cannot resort to political violence under any circumstances. It is better to have a battle of ideologies than to have a battle with physical weaponry and a loss of life. Again, we saw this with Charlie Kirk. The gentleman that shot him very well could have gone down into the crowd, had a discussion with him, talked to the mic and really gotten to understand Charlie's perspective and share his own perspective. But instead of doing that, he was too afraid. He was too afraid to face Charlie face to face. And he used a gun instead of using his words. And that is not okay. That is not where we need to be as Americans. As Charlie said, when we stop having discourse and we stop being able to communicate, violence ensues. And that is what we're seeing. We're seeing people who cannot effectively communicate, whether it be from the results of Covid 19, whether it be from the results of social media, whatever it may be, there is an entire group of people that cannot effectively communicate, and that is wreaking havoc on our country through various forms of political violence. Silencing positive speakers also yields more radical speakers. Let's look at Nick Fuentes. He's a very, very radical right wing conservative, and he's blown up in popularity since Charlie Kirk's assassination. A lot of people are saying, you killed the nice guy, so now you get the mean guy. And unfortunately, that's relatively correct. When violence ensues, people get angry. People have an emotional reaction to that, and it radicalizes them every step of the way. And that's where we see the radical polarization of the two political parties. We have the far left and the far right, and policies are becoming more and more accepting of these ideologies because we can't have a simple conversation, and we need to be able to have this discourse in order to bring moderates back onto both sides and to stop this polarization of the two parties. We also see what happened at the Ice facility, where that individual tried to kill Ice agents and ended up killing illegal immigrants instead. This is not okay. This is again political violence at its finest. You can talk to your legislators, you can call your representatives. You can call your senators. You can tell them that you don't like what's happening. You don't like ice. You don't like the illegal immigration policies that are being established. There are ways to work the system that are constitutional, that are legal and that involve discourse. But what we're seeing is people are not taking use of this. People are not going through the chain of command as they're supposed to be. And as our Constitution established, they are going straight to violence because they don't want to learn, and they don't understand how to navigate our government in the way that it is supposed to be used. We also see Antifa trying to silence independent journalists in Portland. This is not okay. We cannot silence journalists because you don't like what they're reporting, or because you simply want to cause chaos and you want to cause anarchy. That is illegal and that is going to be punished. And Donald Trump has every right to send the National Guard into these places, to reestablish order and to reestablish the law, because political violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America. We see this at Charlie Kirk vigils across the United States. This is more of an on campus topic. But instead of letting these vigils ensue, just like conservatives let vigils for George Floyd ensue, liberals are trying to silence them. They are trying to silence these vigils because they are afraid of ideas. Now, I'm sure you all understand your emotions are not fact. Other people's words cannot hurt you. It is the person behind the words that hurt you. But it is not the words that hurt you so violently. Trying to silence vigils, trying to destroy murals, trying to interrupt speeches of conservatives. That is not how you go about political discourse. And also none of those things will hurt you. They are peaceful. It is very different than the 2020 riots for BLM. There was nothing violent happening. If you think that Charlie Kirk's ideas were violent, that's one thing. But ideas cannot hurt you. We also had an individual at one of our college Republicans tables that had a sticker slapped on his face that said, EFF Trump. Again, that's just trying to silence an opinion. That individual could have had a very nice conversation with our member, but instead he resorted to assault. He resorted to battery, and he resorted to violence because he was not comfortable trying to engage in that discourse and trying to understand an opinion that was different than his own. The last example I'll give is Yik Yak. We talked about this really? People on Yik Yak are resorting to trying to silence conservatives, saying that our College Republicans club needs to stop tabling, saying that we need to stop talking. Saying that I need to stop talking. And it's because they're not comfortable with the ideas that are being presented. But in order to grow, you have to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. And in order to grow, you have to face ideas that might be different than your own, so that you can understand where those ideas work, and your own personal worldview and your own personal perspective of reality. So now I want to talk a little bit about the silencing of conservatives on college campuses. One of the major ways that this is happening is through something called the Heckler's veto. And basically what the Heckler's veto entails is that people will use protests being loud, being disruptive, and intimidation tactics to prevent an event from happening, or to silence a certain speaker from a speech that they disagree with. Now this is happening more and more often on college campuses, where conservatives are inviting like minded speakers onto campus, and these speakers are being prevented from speaking because of the tactics of the opposition groups. So they'll protest, they'll riot, they will try to hurt people. They will try to storm into the event. Um, one of the interesting things I do is actually buy tickets for the event and then not show up so that it wasn't worth the speakers time to even be there. So these are some of the tactics that are being used to silence conservatives on campus. And it's actually just happened. One example is Ilya Shapiro. Um, was going to New York University on October 7th of this year to address free speech issues on campuses and an uptick in antisemitism, and also to speak on the two year anniversary of the Hamas attacks in Israel. And the campus got many, many concerns about safety issues and an uptick in violence and potential threats to the event, to where they barred the student group from hosting Ilya on campus on that day. And they ended up having to move the event off campus, which isn't fair. I mean, I think we can all agree that it's not fair to force a speaker to not speak because of the intimidation tactics of other students, like nobody allowed, nobody forces them to relocate their speakers or to not have their speakers come on to campus. But for this group, they were forced off campus where there might be more security issues, less campus support, and it's going to cost them more money to find a venue off campus. Another example was at Virginia Commonwealth University, where a pro-life speaker came to speak on abortion and pro-life issues, and they were met with protests and actually violence and injuries. And the school refused to offer any additional security or help. And the event ended up being completely ruined by this heckler's veto and by these other students that were trying to silence the speaker. Now they had the opportunity to just not go to the event, but they were so afraid of the ideas that they felt the need to silence them instead of let them continue in their absence. Finally, y'all may have heard about Riley Gaines at San Francisco State University, where a group of individuals actually came in and kidnaped her and held her for ransom because they didn't like her ideas. Like I said, they had the opportunity to just let the event go on. They could have gone home, gone out, gone and done something fun. But instead they felt the need to silence her speech and to intimidate her to the point where she admitted when she came to UNC that she was slightly fearful of continuing to do these college tours. She wants to keep doing them and she will keep doing them, but she doesn't have the same degree of fearlessness because people literally held her for ransom. And then the school congratulated those students and said they were so proud of them for standing up for what they believed in, which is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, for a school to come out and say that they're proud that their students kidnaped a famous speaker and held them for ransom, that is that is literally just the school incentivizing breaking the law, which is absolutely ridiculous. Now, in regards to the Heckler's veto, it is actually Unconstitutional. So in Terminiello versus Chicago. Justice William O. Douglas came out and said a function of free speech. Under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. So a little bit about this case. Terminiello came out and he had a speaking event where he was saying some things that might be more radical, more, um, disagreeable, just. He was talking about some things that people felt very strongly about, and it eventually stirred up a riot and a protest that caused violence and issues. I mean, as as any riot or protest does. And he was actually detained because they said that he was inciting a riot, but in reality, he wasn't inciting a riot. He was sharing views that he had that may be more radical, but that are protected under the First Amendment And by the effect of his speech, a riot ensued. He did not incite the riot. People did not like what he was saying and rioted in protest of it. And that is illegal. It is illegal to try to silence somebody out of fear that a protest or a riot, or some form of dissatisfaction will will come out of it. So what we're seeing on campus, where students or speakers are being silenced and student groups are being silenced because there's a fear that there's going to be violence or that there's going to be dissatisfaction or disagreement. It's completely illegal and unconstitutional to silence people through the heckler's veto, or to silence them at all if they're if their speech is protected under the First Amendment, that is, that it's not hate speech and it's not openly threatening a certain individual or group. So another aspect of silencing of conservative opinions on college campuses, and honestly, the silencing of many different opinions on college campuses comes with safe spaces and mental health concerns and mental health resources. Now. I completely advocate for mental health resources like the counseling center and things like that. But what universities have actually turned to is more of a concern over emotional reasoning, mental filtering, disinvitation and safety ism. And these things are not okay. So let's jump into each of these one at a time. Emotional reasoning is the idea that your emotions are fact. So if I say that I am anxious right now, then obviously something is wrong in this moment for me to be anxious. Now we can agree that that's a little bit ridiculous. Just because you feel a certain way does not mean that that is fact, or that something is happening to elicit those emotions. Now, you might be anxious because you have a big exam that day or because something is happening in your life, but the emotion itself does not necessitate fact. And we're seeing more and more on college campuses that students are being programed to believe that their emotions are valid and their emotions are factual, and that they are indicative of something that is happening at that moment. Um, I've been told that I'm threatening and that people are afraid of me and that I need to stop tabling and things like that on campus. But really, what that means is that somebody is having an emotional response to something and that they want whatever's making that emotional response happen to be shut down. We learned as toddlers that just because you have an emotional response to something doesn't mean that it's everyone else's problems. This is where the term walking on eggshells comes from. Like, you're not going to change your actions just because somebody else has an emotional response to it, and that emotional response from that person should not be deemed as fact. They need to look at themselves and look at their situation and understand why they feel that way and if it's valid or invalid. But universities do not need to be pushing this narrative that, oh no, you feel something and that is completely valid and you need to end whatever is causing that emotional response that is not teaching resilience or maturity or anything about discourse and learning from any other perspectives outside of your own. That's pushing a narrative of staying in the status quo and not growing and learning and adapting to the world that you live in. Nor is it preparing you to go into a workforce or a work space. This is why we see Gen Z having troubles with getting jobs and going into interviews, and being successful as independent individuals. Now, another issue that we're seeing is this idea of mental filtering. And what mental filtering is, is looking at something and only taking the negative out of it. And this has been yielding Disinvitation Disinvitation. So what I'm talking about here is people are looking at individuals who have had a history in social media, a history of political donations, things like that. And instead of looking at the person as an entire human being, they're only looking at these aspects that they believe are negative and choosing to disinvite them from campuses or from keystone speeches or graduation speeches and things like that. And this generation is having a real issue with only picking the negative out of things and choosing to focus on that instead of focus on the positive or the entire thing as a whole. And that's really part of what's sparking the cancel culture that we were talking about earlier is they're not focusing on the individual as a whole or their beliefs as a whole. They're only picking out these specific things that they don't like, these specific negative traits or negative statements, and they're making a judgment about the entire person based on a few cherry picked things that they may have said or posted on social media. And that's really not fair. That doesn't teach empathy, understanding, or an ability to adapt to other ideas. It's teaching. You made one mistake. You're not perfect, and you deserve to be canceled because of that. Which, honestly, is increasing. More than likely, that's a part of what's increasing the anxiety that we're seeing rising in generations and Gen Z, Gen Alpha, things like that. Because everything is permanent on the internet and people are canceling each other for making one bad comment and nobody wants to get canceled. So this idea of mental filtering is really just a constant cycle of wanting to make everybody perfect and making a fear of messing up or saying the wrong thing, or donating to the wrong candidate or anything like that, because we're all so afraid that we're going to say the wrong thing or make the wrong decision. And our entire career, our entire future will be ruined because of it. Now lastly, I want to look a little bit at safety ism, which is a new cultural idea that safety should be the priority at all costs. And this is not just physical safety. I firmly advocate for physical safety like we should not hurt each other. There should not be violence. Physical safety should be upheld at all times. But safety ism has also filtered into an idea of emotional safety, which is reaffirming emotional reasoning and reaffirming mental filtering. And this is where we're getting safe spaces on college campuses where if you don't like what's going on or you feel overwhelmed by something that you heard that might not align with your own personal views, you can go into the safe space with like minded individuals or by yourself or sensory deprivation rooms, and you can try to feel better. It's kind of like time out, but instead of it being a punishment, it's an opportunity to come to terms with what you've heard and try to calm down and go through mental health exercises and things like that. And that's not what the real world is. In reality, you're going to be hit with many things that you disagree with. All day, every day at work, coworkers that you don't like. And you can't just run away to a safe space or engage with safety. Every single time. Employers will not tolerate this, and it's ultimately going to be an economic detriment in the workplace because nobody's going to get anything done. And on college campuses, it's resulting in professors losing their autonomy because they feel like they can't talk about certain things without having to put a trigger warning in, or worrying about getting in trouble with a student or a student reporting them to admin, and then losing tenure or getting in trouble with admin, things like that. It's also causing classrooms to lose the depth of the things that they're talking about. If professors are afraid to talk about certain ideas that might be triggering to some students, then they're not breaching that full curriculum that they need to talk about. They're cherry picking things that make everybody happy, and they're only teaching this positive worldview, which is going right back to that mental filtering. They're taking out the negative, not wanting to talk about the negative and only talking about the positive. And that's not producing well-rounded students. That's not what we're paying for. That's not what our tuition is for. Our tuition is to produce well-rounded students that can engage with discourse, that can engage with ideas that they agree with, and that can engage with ideas that they disagree with. And by promoting safety ism in the classroom, you're only getting the things that make you feel good. You're not getting the things that make you feel bad, or that make you question reality, or make you question worldviews, or that make you question things that have happened in the past. You're just only getting a cherry picked utopia of a narrative. And finally, it breeds an inability to coexist with other points of view. Because if you're only being taught the positive point of view or the point of view that you agree with, then just like we said earlier, you're not really going to know how to interact with points of view that you disagree with. You're not going to understand how to engage in discourse that's different than your own or how to engage in debates on our campus. That's something that we've seen on campus. We've been putting out boards with controversial topics on them to try to get individuals to come and debate with us. And many of them do. Many people are mature enough to have that discourse, but the people who aren't are telling us that they're afraid because we're making them upset. Emotions and fear. Those should be separated. You should not be fearful because you're having an emotion. You should be fearful because of a physical stimulus. That's your fight or flight response. You should be fearful if somebody is chasing you or if somebody wants to hurt you. But you shouldn't be fearful because there's a word on a whiteboard that you dislike. And safety ism is really breeding. That mentality of my emotions are telling me this, so it must be fact. And because it's fact, you need to cater to me and you need to make me feel better, and you need to stop saying that on a whiteboard, or stop putting that narrative out there, or stop trying to talk about that topic because it makes me unhappy. That's a very selfish perspective. It's very immature, and it's not going to go well when students leave their little self-contained colleges and go out into the real, real world where people don't, quite frankly, care about their emotions or care about if they're uncomfortable, they're going to say what they want. Your boss is going to ask you to do an assignment, and they're going to expect you to do that assignment successfully, regardless of if it makes you uncomfortable or not. And that's what colleges need to start teaching and producing. Otherwise, we're going to have an entire generation in the workforce that has no clue how to do anything if it doesn't make them comfortable, or if it goes against something that they agree with. So now all the things that we're talking about, it really culminates with individuals on campuses calling for expulsions of students that say things that they disagree with it. It results in the desire for groups to be banned from hosting events on campus, from groups being banned from simply existing on campus, quite frankly, from being able to table on campus. I mean, we've had people calling for our college Republicans members to be expelled, to be suspended for us to be forced to stop tabling, stop hosting events, stop being on campus. And this is really that that safety ism concept that we talked about in action. Other people are having emotions and they want those emotions to go away because they're negative and they don't like them. And in order to do that, they think that the thing that's making them upset needs to be silenced. And that thing happens to be conservatism. And safety ism is a very left leaning ideology. It's more of a cultural issue on the left than on the right. So that's why it's becoming such an issue for conservatives is because it's being promoted by the left, it's being researched by the left, and unfortunately it's being used by them upon conservatives. And that just happens to be on college campuses specifically and in the entire world. Now it's easier to invoke it on college campuses, like I said, because they're very self-contained groups of like minded students and like minded faculty and researchers and administrators, where in reality you're going to come across in the workforce, it's just not feasible to have a safe space or to stop working because you're uncomfortable. So that's why it's breeding so much on college campuses is because it's feasible to enact there, where in reality we know that facts don't care about your feelings. And that's what's being promoted in workplaces and small businesses and, you know, places other than mega liberal corporations like Disney and Google and things like that. Now, conservatism is a rapidly growing movement, but we're getting more pushback than ever as we go out of our way to invite speakers to campus and promote our ideas on college campuses, and try to engage with other points of view so that we can learn how to better expand our ideas and how to better engage with other diverse opinions. So as a conservative, it's up to you to stand up, be brave and be bold, but also be respectful. You do not have to be silent regardless of what people are telling you on campus or what people are telling you in the workforce or wherever you may be. You don't have to be silent. And constitutionally, you have your First Amendment right to free expression and freedom of speech. So stand up and say what you want to say and do what you want to do, as long as it's not infringing on the rights of other people, as long as it's not hate speech, and as long as it's not blatantly false or offensive to anybody, you can promote your conservative ideals. Now. You may get pushback, you will get pushback, but it's up to you to not fall into this victimhood of being silenced. It's up to you to push back and say, no, I'm going to keep spreading my beliefs. I'm going to keep sharing my beliefs because they're important to me, and other people's feelings shouldn't force me to stop talking about what I want to talk about. You also just can't be silenced out of fear. Like things might happen. There might be consequences. People might not like you. But if you stop talking out of fear of that, you're no better than the other side. It's up to you to be strong and be courageous and stand up for what you believe in. That's what conservatism is all about. It's about being brave enough to fight and to talk and to speak, even when the world is against you. And biblically, that's what we have to do, too. God gives us the call to be strong and courageous and to preach and to fight, even when it's not easy, even when it's hard. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of The Regan Faulkner Show. I can't wait to see you next Wednesday. And in the meantime, remember to follow us on social media and on my website, Regan Faulkner. Com you can find us on Instagram and TikTok at the Wilmington Standard or the Regan Faulkner Show. Thank you all so much.