Charlie Kirk Did the Unimaginable. He Turned the Youth Against the Liberal Establishment.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. After that quite amazing and moving memorial for Charlie Kirk, there’s been a lot written about him, his legacy, his achievements

We all were quite enthralled by his efforts as probably the most successful political organizer of any party under the age of 40 with Turning Point USA. It’s now up to, I think, requests for 75,000 new chapters. He was a columnist. He was a successful podcaster. He did it all.

But one thing, I think, that hasn’t been remarked about—what was the essence of his appeal to young voters? Why was he able to reverse the turnout in 2020 of young voters? Getting more of them out and getting somewhere from 6% to 20% more of the youth vote in particular states.

And he may have got as many votes for President Donald Trump of those in the more narrow category, 18 to 29, than voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris. Even the 18 to 39 was almost 50/50 in Michigan. So, in some ways, he might have won the election for Donald Trump.

So, what was the secret to his success? I think what he did was quite brilliant. He understood that young people are, by nature, rebellious. You’re full of energy. They’re full of hormones. They’re full of ideas. They haven’t lived a long time. And they question authority. That’s innate to all of us at that age.

But what he was trying to tell them was: Use that natural inquisitiveness, skepticism, maybe even rebelliousness, at the establishment. But you’re mistaken. The establishment is not conservative. The establishment, as defined by the network news, PBS, NPR; as defined by higher education, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford; as defined by the corporate boardroom at Budweiser or Target, or Disney; as defined by the popular culture, if you look—I could just direct you to the halftime show at the typical Super Bowl extravaganza. We could go on, but you get the message.

So what Charlie Kirk was telling young people is, you are living in a society in which the baby boomers of the 1960s and ’70s, are now the establishment. And they are ossified. They are calcified. They have no new ideas. They still are trapped in amber of a sort of revolutionary idea of the ’60s and ’70s—DEI, critical race theory, critical legal theory, radical green environmentalism, open borders.

The result of all this is that you, the youth of America, are told not to do what history says will make you happy: to get married, to have more than two children, or at least two children, to buy a home, to be active in your community, to be patriotic, to be traditionalist. These are things that are not establishment, Kirk was telling young people on campus. These are counterrevolutionaries. You are revolutionaries.

So, what he asked young people to do is to, say, rebel. But remember what you’re rebelling against. It’s not some conservative, 1950s stereotype of an uptight America. America is not uptight. It has no rules. It’s completely without order. It’s in utter chaos. Whether we look at transgenderism or DEI, or an open border, or our legal system, it is a mess. And you’ve suffered.

So, you are going to be revolutionaries. But the trick is you’re not going to try to destroy the old order. You’re gonna try to restore it. The old order is what was normality and common sense. What you grew up under is an aberration. So, as good counterrevolutionaries, tie your youthful zeal to formal efforts to overthrow this dominant paradigm that has made your life, in some ways, miserable.

So, we look back at his career, Charlie Kirk came up with the idea that he was going to go throughout higher education, indeed, youthful America in general, and encourage that natural skepticism. And not to say, “Please don’t question authority. Please be stayed. Please be true.” He was trying to say, “Be a counterrevolutionary because the establishment is not you or me. It’s radical. And it needs to be changed.”

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