You can feel it, sense it, see it. It is palpable. The country seems different since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Faith has been rekindled across the land. Patriotism, family, and traditional values are getting a fresh look. And leftists are shaking in their boots, understanding in no uncertain terms that their own vile rhetoric aimed at all who disagree with their relentlessly defiant deconstructionist narrative is going to cost them dearly.
As the lovely and courageous widow Erika Kirk said in her emotional remarks over the weekend, leftists have no idea what they unleashed when one of their own murdered her husband in cold blood and broad daylight in front of thousands of onlookers. The horror of it all has led to a widespread recalibration of the things Americans hold dear. There will be hell to pay, and the steepest cost for the left will almost certainly be among a core constituency it once took for granted: young voters.
Two numbers in particular define the ruinous state of the progressive movement among the young: 44 and 32,000. Prior to the assassination, the left had already hemorrhaged support among Gen Z voters. Donald Trump increased his vote from those under 30 years old by a whopping 44% in the 2024 presidential election, heavily affecting the outcome. This was due in large part to the unceasing efforts of Kirk to educate and detoxify high school and college students constantly bombarded with anti-conservative, anti-American rhetoric from the academy, big media, and Trump-deranged progressives.
Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), reports that since that fateful day in Utah, it has received an almost inconceivable 32,000 inquiries about starting new chapters of the organization. That number is even more off the charts when placed in full perspective. TPUSA currently has 900 college chapters, 1,200 high school affiliates, and a total of 3,500 branches in the United States, according to Andrew Kolvet, executive producer of the Charlie Kirk podcast. That means the number of inquiries TPUSA has received since the murder of its founder is more than ten times the number of existing chapters. Kolvet wrote in a message on X that Kirk’s ultimate goal of placing chapters in all of the roughly 23,000 high schools across the country “will now come true faster than [Kirk] could have ever possibly imagined.”
Indeed, young patriots are flooding the zone as the left girds its loins, hoping against hope that this horrific act will somehow be forgotten by Kirk’s peers come 2026 and then 2028. But martyrdom moves people in ways that little else can. Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy became much larger in death than they were in life. Even a criminal like George Floyd, stopped or arrested 20 times and convicted of crimes on eight occasions during his life, has been revered as a martyr.
From the moment Trump descended that golden escalator more than a decade ago, the left has pursued a strategy of calling the two-time future president every name in the book and an authoritarian dictator indistinguishable from Hitler or Mussolini. When asked during the campaign if she thinks Donald Trump is a fascist, Kamala Harris replied, “yes,” though it’s questionable that she even understood the meaning and implications of the word. Progressives have thrown around pejoratives so frequently that they have been drained of all meaning. They impeached Trump for a phone call and attempted to bankrupt, imprison, and murder him. God only knows what would have happened if either of the two attempted assassinations of Trump had succeeded.
What will now happen when any of the hundreds or thousands of Marxist professors on college campuses across the land launch into their next diatribe, spewing hatred against their own “systemically racist” country? Will it fall on unquestioning ears, or will students now stand up and challenge the blatant one-way bias that has poisoned their impressionable minds for years on end?
Emblematic of the sea change following the assassination is a post from Kyle Matthews, CEO of a real estate company in Nashville, on the morning after the tragedy:
“Last night, my oldest son said to me ‘Dad, me and all my friends are going to wear a coat & tie to school tomorrow.’ At drop off today I realized the entire school was doing it, when effectively every student was wearing a coat and tie … What I found remarkable was they wore a coat and tie not because the school forced them to, or recommended it, but the student body decided to on their own, out of respect for @charliekirk11.”
But it was the conclusion of Matthews’ message that really struck at the heart of what the progressive left has wrought: “I would bet my dollar that what drove the killer to murder Charlie Kirk was to ‘shut him up,’ but in the process only created 1,000X more Charlie Kirk’s [sic].”