The Yale College Republicans hosted Isabel Brown of The Daily Wire for a talk on “Why Gen Z is Shifting Right”
Isabel Brown speaks to the audience. (Credit: Hannah Owens Pierre)
Hannah Owens Pierre
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
On Wednesday, the Yale College Republicans hosted a speaker event with Isabel Brown, host of The Isabel Brown Show on The Daily Wire. Brown, who has over 1.3 million followers on Instagram, spoke to an audience of around 20 people about the revival of conservatism among young people and the importance of Christian faith in American politics.
Brown, 28, began her career in conservative media by working alongside the late Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA. She led a TPUSA chapter at her alma mater, Colorado State University. She has published two books on conservative politics, including “Frontlines: Finding My Voice on an American College Campus,” which shares her experience as a conservative student within liberal institutions. She regularly speaks on college campuses, commenting frequently on Gen-Z’s political engagement.
A Yale chapter of TPUSA was recently formed by Yale College Republicans members Carlos Perez ’29 and Diego Victoria ’27.
Brown’s talk was co-sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation, an organization for young conservatives that frequently hosts speaker events at universities.
Brown began her speech by commenting on the state of politics on Yale’s campus, which she described as an “echo chamber for radical leftism.”
“Amazingly, even your own administration is admitting just how off the rails unchecked leftism has become in our culture,” she said, referring to the recently published report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which placed blame for a decline in trust in universities partially on Yale for issues of affordability, academic standards, and censorship. She cited statistics from a Buckley Institute report, which found that Democratic faculty outnumber Republican faculty by a ratio of 36 to 1.
In line with the title of her speech, “Why Gen Z is Shifting Right,” Brown commented on the state of politics for young people. She argued that Generation Z is rejecting “woke ideology,” citing their support for Kirk’s movement and how young people, particularly Gen Z men, turned out in the 2024 election.
“Our generation is both politically and culturally the most conservative one humanity has seen in the last several centuries,” she claimed.
Most of Brown’s talk centered on the importance of Christian faith in providing meaning to young people’s lives and a guide for their politics. She stated her message as the following: “Your life is not about you,” arguing that it is instead about “faith in the immovable and Almighty Creator of the universe.”
She centered conservatism as a religious battle, telling her audience that “What you’re doing and showing up visibly as a conservative is so much bigger than just changing someone’s mind to get them to vote in an election. You are impacting souls.”
Her claim that “the West has always been rooted in Christian theology” drew some pushback from the audience. In a Q&A after the event, Cayla Waddington ‘28 shared Brown’s Christian faith but expressed concerns about “legislating Christianity.”
“I’m deeply concerned that if we let the government start legislating our religion and make people choose one, then…this will separate people from having a personal relationship with God,” Waddington said.
In response, Brown argued that the separation of church and state is “one of the most misunderstood doctrines of our nation,” arguing that it is “not actually in the Constitution.” She cited the influence of religious texts on founding documents and claimed that “our founding fathers were very clear about where they stood. They were Bible-believing Christians.”
At the end of the event, Brown thanked audience members for coming and gave a closing message to conservative students. “I know it can feel unimaginably difficult to be a conservative student. It takes courage, it takes guts, it takes a level of bravery the world out there often doesn’t see. But we are in the middle of a generational revival because of the work you do every single day.”
Manu Anpalagan ‘26, president of the Yale College Republicans, commented on the event afterwards. “There is a serious disconnect between the political establishment and what the American people want,” he said. “Isabel captured this sentiment perfectly when she railed against the old guard Republican establishment in her speech, in favor of a new conservative vision for our country that is led by young people, like the members of YCR.”