“I visit college campuses so you don’t have to,” said Charlie Kirk at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. On the one-year anniversary of his assassination at Utah Valley University, his speech gave voice to the aspirations of young conservatives and rallied them to Trump’s side.
“I hear a lot from young people about their hopes, their dreams, and their fears. You see, young people are idealists. They respond to vision. For the past four years, they’ve seen the vision of the Biden-Harris regime. That vision is you’ll own nothing and be happy.”
What made Kirk’s speech so effective was its brevity: speaking for just over five minutes, he tackled housing, affordability, and what the American Dream means to the next generation. He also laid out the stakes of the election in clear terms.
“The Democrats say instead of owning a home, you’ll rent a 400 square-foot studio apartment. Instead of owning a car, you’ll rent a scooter using some app. Their vision is this: Limit your dreams. Give up. Aim lower. Be content with less.”
Kirk was honest, agreeing that 20-somethings in America have faced challenges. “You’ve watched home prices rise 47 percent since 2020. Home ownership is now out of reach unless you make over $106,000 a year.”
He himself had grown up since speaking at the Republican convention in 2020. Since speaking that year, he had became a husband and a father, he said with his biggest smile of the evening.
“Two under two. I think I get extra points for that,” he added. He then explained that marriage and children are fundamental to a healthy society and called out the failures of the Biden-Harris administration.
“For millions of people my age, that is a dream that feels farther away than ever. According to current projections, one-third of today’s young Americans will never get married. The average American is having fewer children than ever before. Why? It’s because for far too many, they simply can’t afford them. The basic things our parents enjoyed are increasingly out of reach for Gen Z and millennials. You see, the American dream has become a luxury item for the wealthy elite.”
He continued, saying, “Happy countries have children. Broken countries have addiction, depression, and suffering. Democrats have given hundreds of billions of dollars to illegals and foreign nations, while Gen Z has to pinch pennies just so that they can never own a home, never marry, and work until they die, childless. Under Biden, our young people own nothing and they are miserable. Donald Trump refuses to accept this fake, pathetic, mutilated version of the American dream.”
Painting a picture with words, Kirk made the case for Trump. “When he was president, young people were richer than ever before, and he will do it again. Donald Trump is on a rescue mission to revive your birthright, one your grandparents and those before them gave everything to hand down to you.”
He continued, “To all the Gen Zers watching this convention on TikTok right now, I have a message just for you. You don’t have to stay poor. You don’t have to accept being worse off than your parents. You don’t have to feel aimless and unhappy. You don’t have to support leaders who lied to you and took advantage of you for your vote. America’s future is a series of choices. Our current state of slow motion national decline is a choice. This November, we’re going to choose success.”
He closed with a call for even the youngest voters to get in the game and choose to no longer be spectators in the election. “We’re going to choose to put the future of Americans first. We together are going to do the work to save America. With all of us together working harder than ever, we will fire the Biden-Harris regime and put Donald Trump back in the White House where he belongs. God bless you guys.”
And he did. RIP, Charlie.
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