Simon Van Zylenwood

because of Charlie Kirk's close relationship with Trump in the administration, makes it sort of a natural place, not just for political junkies, but for all kinds of students who aren't even that plugged into politics.

I don't know who they, it's a great question because it's, there's no, Erika Kirk nominally is the leader, but she's also a widow who is dealing with the murder of her husband.

She is not the sort of ideologue or sort of polemicist, pugilist that Charlie Kirk was.

And so what I saw was a organization that was kind of running on autopilot up to the whims of its campus leaders.

It is ostensibly answerable to the national organization, which is based in Phoenix, Arizona.

But there's this paradox, which informs everything I started learning, which is that TPUSA is more powerful than ever, but functionally leaderless.

And that leads to this question of sort of like, what's going to creep in and come next?

There's a bunch of different groups.

TPSA being the sort of top dog right now, but there's Young Americans for Liberty, which is kind of the Ron Paul style libertarian group, Young Americans for Freedom, outgrowth of an old William Buckley group.

Then there's the classic college Republicans groups, which are themselves divided into all these various, they're sort of like situated in all these umbrella groups.

What's really important, and I found out, is that TPUSA, I kind of assumed that because of Charlie Kirk's identity and the way that he would debate liberal students as, you know, this is his calling card, basically, was going to be the group on these campuses engaging in kind of bare-knuckle culture war, especially after the radicalization that followed Charlie Kirk's death.

It turns out it doesn't really work that way.

The group was very loyal to Trump, and it actually kind of serves as a sort of a pep squad for Team MAGA.

That might sound really right-wing to a lot of listeners, but they end up looking like the moderates in this arch-right conservative ecosystem.

The radicalization of Gen Z is sort of the through line of my piece.

And what happens is that a young woman like Leslie Lachman, who's running TPUSA, she's got impeccable conservative bona fides.

But actually, there are many, many students, even to her right, who feel like Trump is too moderate.

J.D.

Vance is suspect.

Charlie Kirk was barely acceptable as a moderate.