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

New York Post ^ | Oct. 30, 2025 Updated Oct. 31, 2025, 6:43 a.m. ET | Douglas Murray

[E. Pluribus Unum]

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.

[Bruce Campbells Chin]

Younger people are naturally more rebellions. That's one reason that Reagan's strongest demographic in 1980 was young voters who were sick of the Blame America First crowd in the 70's. They were "rebelling" against that dominant mindset.

Same thing is starting to happen now. True rebellion is fighting against the Left.

[KC_Conspirator]

Its vile what people are saying about Erika Kirk. Mostly the left, but a few clowns on the right too.