Victory Davis Hanson, in his weekly commentary for The Daily Signal, commented on the big picture of Charlie Kirk’s campaign to question progressive academic orthodoxy:

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think we all want to put the passing of Charlie Kirk in perspective, and it’s been a terrible week. What do we do to make sense of this terrible incident? One thing is to remember what Charlie Kirk did. He didn’t go to the campuses and say, this is the conservative agenda, this is the big beautiful bill, this is immigration, and I want you to vote along this ticket. That’s what a traditional politician does. He wasn’t. What he was trying to do was address root causes that make people vote in a particular way. So he was saying to the Republican Party, we’ve got to address this existential crisis of young people. That was his forte, on campuses and off campuses – people who can’t afford to buy a car, who can’t afford to buy a home, who can’t afford right away to have children. That has enormous consequences, not just for the Republican Party. This alienation of the youth and its flirtation with socialism, with its false answers to these real problems – more importantly it’s creating a social, cultural problem called prolonged adolescence. People are not getting married at the age they used to. They’re not having as many children or as early in their lives as they used to. They’re not buying homes in their late 20s or early 30s. They’re going to school not for four years, but for six or eight years. They’re not graduating after four years and getting a good job – they’re graduating after six or eight years with, in some cases, a quarter million dollars in student loans. So he was trying to address the cultural, the economic, the social maladies of this country that express themselves in politics, and he thought if he took care of that, then he would be successful elsewhere. And so he was. If you look at 2020, why Donald Trump lost – one of the reasons was that the youth vote, that traditionally goes to Democrats, really went to Democrats and to Joe Biden in 2020, that key demographic of 19 to 40-year-olds. However, in 2024 Donald Trump made amazing rebounds. He got nationwide about six to eight percent higher of that youth vote than he did in 2020. But more importantly, in the key swing states – Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia – in some cases he got up to 18 or 19 percent higher. That flipping, greater margin in 2024 than he did in 2020, ensured him an Electoral College victory. And that was largely, not exclusively, due to Charlie Kirk’s efforts at addressing the real issues that young people were worried about. There are a couple of other things about him that were unusual. He was the most successful political activist under 40 of either party – liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. And one of the reasons was that it’s very hard for someone coming out of college to be a political organizer, a political activist, to create a business-like organization. Although it was a 503(c)(3), a nonprofit, it was huge, with a $ 100 million budget. He was a writer. He was a podcaster. Part of that was because he did not go in the traditional academic pathway. He dropped out of college at 18, and he had to live by his wits – not in the artificial bubble of academia, or the la-la land of the campus where there are no consequences to behavior. He had to earn a living, and he had to form an organization, and he had to appeal to people. So pragmatism was his benchmark, and so he learned to speak to people in a practical way. He learned to write with people in a pragmatic way. He learned to organize and galvanize people in a practical way. And he said the universities are training generation after generation in this seriously dangerous leftist dogma. In other words, if you’re worried about this bizarre transgender movement, this cult-like effort to have biological men compete in women’s sports, or if you’re worried about the idea that you can steal $ 950 and not be prosecuted, or if you think that race is essential and not incidental to who you are – where did these things come from? He said they came from the campus, and therefore he went to the campus and tried to stop this indoctrination by offering a different pathway. You put it all together, and if people want to remember Charlie Kirk’s legacy, I think the best thing they could do is register voters. Get as many people as you can to register and to upset the historical laws that say a president will lose, and lose badly, in his first midterm. If that should happen, Donald Trump will have an agenda that will be derailed and he will not be able to fulfill the promises that he made. The Democratic House, in its lunatic fashion, will try to impeach him. But if you do go out and register, and you show the same energy and creativity that Charlie Kirk did, then you can pull off a historical upset and defeat the out-party. You can ensure a large Republican majority in both the House and the Senate, and that will force-multiply the Trump agenda.

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