“Kids! I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today!
Kids! Who can understand anything they say?
Kids! They are disobedient, disrespectful oafs!
Noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy, loafers!
Kids! You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
Kids! But they still just do what they want to do!
Why can’t they be like we were
Perfect in every way?
What’s the matter with kids today?”
These are the lyrics from the Broadway stage play from 1963 entitled “Bye Bye Birdie”. These lines also describe why political consultants have perennially avoided trying to recruit young people into their ranks until they reach mature adulthood and are full-time in the workforce. Until then, they are not understood; they may or may not vote; and they may vote for the wrong candidate.
Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election by retaining most of the old Republican voters while attracting a vast number of former Democratic voters in the Rust Belt states, who had experienced better times before globalization began shifting their jobs elsewhere. He also attracted Spanish-speaking and black voters that the Democratic elites had taken for granted.
In 2024, college-age voters shifted from their usual Democratic leanings to give Trump a significantly larger vote count than he received in either 2020, when he lost, or in 2024, when he won! Some analysts attribute Trump’s success with younger voters in 2024 to the ‘Charlie Kirk Factor’. What did Kirk know or do that high-paid consultants from either party failed to understand?
Despite their youth, after a short time on a university campus, most potential voters could sniff out fiction from the truth – a stand-up guy from a phony. Beginning his activist career at 18, Charlie Kirk was able to address controversial issues with those of his generation and earn their respect, even if they disagreed with him.
That generation had been through the COVID-19 fiascoes and the loss of two years of education and social interaction. They were exposed to too many hours of daily internet rants and misinformation. When on campus, they saw grade-point escalation, political bias, and mediocrity rampant. DEI, gender confusion, and excessive drug use prevailed. Hundreds of thousands of young people from Kirk’s generation had been poisoned by drug overdoses while searching for meaning in their lives. Myriads of one-time sexual hook-ups replaced close relationships.
Too often, this generation borrowed large amounts for student loans to take degrees for which, if finished, there was no demand. They took jobs for which they were overqualified and moved back in with their parents because student loans had to be repaid. The minimum wage jobs they took were insufficient to cover even basic adult expenses.
In this young society that abandoned absolute truths in exchange for immediate satisfaction, Charlie was unafraid to discuss his faith and the meaning of life with them, concepts that were missing from the atheism of social justice victim ideology. For the prevalent university Progressives’ mindset, anti-Semitism is in; religious practice – forget it! Charlie abhors those concepts and challenges all comers to prove him wrong by basing his views on faith, family, and country.
Charlie Kirk did not condemn those of his current generation, who were dealt a horrible hand by those wielding power, concerned with obtaining power and wealth, and in pursuing alien ideologies. By being out among them, he earned their trust by speaking the truth and providing them with a forum.
As such, plus being a strong supporter of Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk enraged the animosity of the Progressive hard-core activists, which most likely helped lead to his savage assassination by someone from his own generation.
TW3
September 18, 2025
John Whitmore Jenkins
