Turning Point USA’s extraordinary crowd with JD Vance shows how young people are hungry for purpose

There was a time when conservative kids weren’t cool.

A time when they were fogey-ish, bow-tied, out of step and out of touch.

With their own generation at least.

But that has changed.

And nothing demonstrates that change more than something that happened at the University of Mississippi on Wednesday.

From early morning the queues started to form.

They grew throughout the day, in spite of the rain, as thousands of people waited to get into the Turning Point USA event.

According to Turning Point Spokeman Andrew Kolvet more than half of the entire student body of the University packed into the venue.

That’s a full 14,000 students out of a total of 27,000.

Not counting the 13,000 adults who also queued to get into The Pavilion — a building more used to housing basketball games than conservative political events.

The crowd heard from Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point´s Founder, Charlie Kirk.

And they also watched as Vice President JD Vance spent an hour onstage taking questions from the audience on a whole range of subjects.

Vance´s performance was an extraordinary tribute to his late friend.

What was even more extraordinary was not just the event’s scale, but what this scale speaks to.

For a couple of generations it has been presumed that young people want to be rebellious.

Until the 1960s that actually wasn’t true.

It wasn’t always the case that young Americans who went away to college became politically radical and then came back in the holidays to berate their parents for their “backwards” views.

But since the ’60s that has been the presumption.

That college kids would go away, get indoctrinated by their professors and before you knew it they were back home speaking a different language.

Not that it was a language much worth learning.

But it was a language nonetheless. In recent years that included being inducted into the language of “problematizing,” “conceptualizing” and “other-ing.”

At the same time students got baptized into the religion of gender-ideology, the problem of “whiteness” and of course the unfailingly alleged awfulness of American history.

That language held much longer than it should have done.

But it held.

Until now.

Earlier this month the Centre for Heterodox Social Science released new data on the number of young Americans identifying as trans, queer or “non-binary.”

In recent years these people were among the magical unicorn people in Generation Z.

If you couldn’t claim any other minority status you could leap over your peers, and appear fascinating and significant by announcing that you were gender-queer.

But new data shows that in the past year there has been a massive fall-off in this trend within Generation Z.

In 2022 almost 7% of undergraduate students polled in the US identified as trans.

Last year that figure had slumped to 3.6%.

And whereas nationally the number of students identifying as neither male nor female fell by a half, in some elite institutions — including Brown University — the number fell by two thirds.

What does this have to do with the crowds gathering in Mississippi this week?

Because young people want to find something to attach themselves to.

They want to find meaning and they want to find purpose in their lives.

As I and others have said over recent years, what was termed “woke” filled a huge gap for many young people.

It filled the gap where religion once was, and like a religion it had its own mantras (“trans women are women”).

It had its own saints (George Floyd).

It had its own means of excommunication (“cancellation”).

And it had its own high priests (Nikole Hannah-Jones, Robin Di Angelo etc).

The problem was that as religions go it was a horrible one.

It provided no meaningful purpose in life other than to live in a state of constant grievance and rebellion.

The connections and friendships it provided were shallow as a puddle.

It had no sense of beauty or the transcendent.

And it had absolutely no mechanism for forgiveness.

It was, in fact, more of a cult than a religion.

But we live in a time when people are after meaning and purpose in their lives as much as ever.

In our time this seems to be leading to what RR Reno, the editor of Catholic Magazine First Things, has called “The Return of the Strong Gods.”

After all, why should people keep trying simulated belonging when they could have the real thing?

Why should people try to commit to a faked-up pseudo-religion when they could have religion itself?

And that is one of the many things that is remarkable about the phenomenon which Charlie Kirk helped start in his life and which has taken on even greater energy since his murder.

Students queuing for the event in Mississippi this week noticed what Kirk said and they noticed what happened after his death.

He told his young followers what he thought a good life looked like.

A life he tried to live.

He urged young people to fall in love, to get married, to start families.

He urged them to commit more deeply to their Christian faith, or to find God for the first time.

And in a moment which few people will forget, at his own memorial service in Arizona last month, Charlie´s widow Erika even publicly forgave her husband’s killer.

Here is a difference between two visions of life which could hardly be more stark.

And it comes back to the place I started.

That conservative views — including conservative religious views — have become cool again.

Some people might put that down to a swinging back of the pendulum — a rebellion of its own.

After all, how else are Generation Z meant to rebel other than to rebel against the rebellion itself?

But I suspect something more is going on here.

The re-election of Donald Trump was undoubtedly a turning point.

As was the swiftness with which even Silicon Valley heads (formerly the Princes of Woke) got behind him on the turn of a dime.

And now the queues of young people to hear from conservatives — including a Republican Vice President?

We shall see whether this becomes a full-on revival.

But it is undeniably a turning of the tide.

And a welcome one at that.