As I scan the political landscape, I am heartened by what I see. The young conservative movement of 2025 is remarkably similar to the young conservative movement that I remember as a 21-year-old casting my first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan in 1984.
As a college student, I had a wonderful political science professor, Dr. Victor Bucci, at St. John's University in New York, who was an unabashed devout Catholic and political conservative.
A transplant from Italy, Prof. Bucci did much to mold my own political views and strengthen my convictions in conservatism, as America recovered from the liberal malaise of the feckless administration of Jimmy Carter. Carter could be considered perhaps Joe Biden 1.0, if somewhat less disastrous in the effects of his policies. Dr. Bucci had strong feelings regarding the hapless, weak parliamentarian governments on the European continent, where he had been raised and educated. He greatly respected and advocated for the federalist system in his adoptive United States, which was capable of producing strong chief executives, as exemplified by Ronald Reagan.
In the presidential campaign of 1984, President Reagan gave a speech in the St. John's arena. My then-girlfriend and I got the very last two tickets. It was electric. And packed. The roars from the students that frequently interrupted Reagan's speech were deafening. The benches shook as if the school's then-impressive basketball team, known then as the Redmen, had just won the semi-finals in March Madness. Before Wokeness was even a real thing, the school would feel compelled to abandon that noble moniker and confer on the basketball team the meaningless appellation Red Storm. What does that even mean, anyway? But I digress.
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Watching President Trump's speech at the University of Alabama last week took me back to Reagan's 1984 speech at St. John's. In fact, Trump used a line that was strikingly similar to one used by Reagan.
Trump said, "The next chapter will not be written by the Harvard Crimson, it will be written by you -- the Crimson Tide." Reagan said to us (although I am paraphrasing a bit), "I hear that St. John's is the new Harvard of the East Coast."
Nobody really equated St. John's with Harvard, but the point is that both presidents recognized that America's conservative future lay in young working-class university students at places like St. John's and Bama - not with entitled Wokeistas majoring in Non-Heteronormative Transgender Studies at places like Harvard. (I just made that up, but I’m sure there’s a similar major available in the Harvard course catalogue.)
St. John’s was still a fairly conservative university at that time, populated by middle class kids from mostly blue-collar parents who knew the value of hard work. Seven courses divided between theology and philosophy were required in the core curriculum for a Bachelor of Arts degree in the College of Arts and Sciences in the 1980s. I think those courses had a valuable purpose in crafting young minds, regardless of the student’s major. I do not know if that is still a requirement for graduation at St. John’s, but it should be.
Just as that era produced a whole cadre of young Reagan Conservatives, I believe we are witnessing something similar occurring under President Trump, who received a remarkable share of the 18-29 year-old voting bloc in 2024. While young people, who have yet to feel the ravages of mostly Democrat-imposed taxation, are typically liberal in their political outlook, the share of female voters who went Democrat in 2024 dropped to 58% compared to 65% is 2020. And among young men in that age cohort, the shift was a remarkable 41% voting Republican in 2020 to 56% voting Republican in 2024. There is hope.
I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked in the conservative political arena for over a decade and being able to meet, and in some cases help shape, young conservative men and women. They have invariably been intelligent, critical thinkers with bright futures ahead of them.
My life and career are mostly in the rear-view mirror, and one becomes reflective as their professional life nears the end. One hopes they have made a difference. The late great conservative pundit, author and physician, Charles Krauthammer, once said that the hope of every writer was to "nudge the universe." That is probably the hope of most of us, regardless of vocation. Most aspire, I think, to make at least a little difference in the cosmic scheme of things.
Winston Churchill purportedly said, “Anyone who was not a liberal at 20 years of age had no heart, while anyone who was still a liberal at 40 had no head.” Perhaps conservatism is just commonsense, acquired with age, but strong leaders like Reagan and Trump can also help galvanize young people behind that wisdom, thereby ensuring the rise of a new generation of wise political leaders.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for 38 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. His work has been featured on CBS News 48 Hours Mysteries and NBC News Dateline. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)
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