Simon Van Zylenwood

Yeah, I think the question was not only what is going to happen to TPUSA, his campus and sort of electoral apparatus.

It's such a multi-pronged organization that's grown over the last decade, but also what was going to happen to youth conservatism.

As everybody probably remembers from the post-Charlie Kirk assassination moment, there was a swelling of energy on the young right.

There was the massive 100,000-person memorial at the NFL stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

There were reports of surging Bible sales.

There was reports of booming TPUSA chapters in high school and in colleges.

We now have 37,000 applications to start chapters around the country.

So I went to the memorial and started talking to college kids, and it became evident that the place to go investigate the post-Charlie Kirk moment was the campus.

I started fanning out around the country, especially in bigger state schools and conservative-leading campuses where the TPUSA presence was much stronger and prouder.

Although I also talked to students starting chapters at smaller liberal arts colleges or even Ivy League institutions there.

in the Northeast.

And I wanted to investigate this question of what was going to happen.

And the short answer, which we'll get into, is that the answer in mid-September looked really different from the answer in mid-December, just three months later.

If I had written my story three weeks after Charlie Kirk was killed, and I think people started writing this story, I would have thought that there was a sort of nationwide religious revival taking place.

Charlie Kirk, whatever people thought of his right-wing politics, he was personally a very pious individual.

He didn't drink.

He observed the Sabbath on Saturdays.

He sort of had the persona of a family man.

And in many ways, his most ardent followers on the young right saw him in that light.

And the kind of evangelical feel of the memorial, where there was Christian rock for hours, where he was eulogized by the president and his cabinet.