Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2025
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by The Association of Mature American Citizens
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2 Comments
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AMAC Magazine Exclusive – By Charlie Kirk
Whenever a nation goes into crisis, an invisible countdown begins. We may not be able to see it. We may not know how much time is left. But the countdown is there—the countdown to reform or revolution.
When a nation faces major problems that leave the people of the country distressed and unhappy, they can either solve the problem responsibly— through reform—or they can wait for it to explode in revolution.
America has passed this test before, where other nations failed. At the dawn of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt curbed the worst excesses of the Gilded Age and encouraged broad-based prosperity, sparing America from the communist, socialist, and fascist revolutions that rocked Europe in the decades that followed.
Now, America is in a challenging period once again. Young Americans are in crisis, and the crisis is getting worse. They look around, and they feel like the entire country is rigged against them, and the life that their parents and grandparents lived is no longer available. Forty years ago, the average home in the US cost the equivalent of three and a half years of income. Today, the median home costs about six times the average income. In most of California, it’s more than 10 times the average income. Since 1980, the age of the median home buyer has risen from 31 to 56; 10 years of that increase have happened since the COVID pandemic.
It’s not just housing. In 1980, public college tuition averaged $2,800 in today’s dollars. Today, the average is about $10,000. Unsurprisingly, the average college graduate has a huge amount of student loans—yet even if they studied a serious STEM subject, their job prospects are rough, in part due to AI but also because America has, for decades, been importing foreign replacements for all kinds of skilled work.
All the economic pressures would be bad enough, but young people face other troubles as well. The kids entering the workforce today spent high school trapped inside for COVID lockdowns. They are more anxious and depressed than any prior generation, have fewer friends, and most of them are on track to never get married.
Almost no young Americans are politically moderate. No 21-year-olds are racing out to vote for Lindsey Graham or demand the return of Joe Manchin. Whether they lean right or left, young Americans want big changes. And if one side can’t give them those changes, they’re happy to do a complete political 180 to get them. Last fall, Donald Trump did remarkably well with young Americans, precisely because he offered them a real platform for major change in America: a revival of American manufacturing, a return to having a border, and no woke police state policing their every word and thought. But most importantly, Trump offered the most basic and compelling platform of all: When he was president, the economy grew, for low-wage workers most of all. And Trump could credibly promise to bring that back.
Now, in New York, we can see another possible end result of this generation’s difficulties. As I write this, Zohran Mamdani is the heavy favorite to become the next mayor of New York City. Mamdani is offering a simple, revolutionary message to disaffected young people. That message is, in essence, “All those things you want and don’t have? You can just vote them to yourself.”
Housing too costly? Freeze the rents. Tired of price inflation? Government-run grocery stores and daycares will fix it. Oh, and we’ll pull back the police and arrest Benjamin Netanyahu while we’re at it.
If Mamdani wins and implements his promises, it will be a fiasco. Price controls won’t solve a housing shortage, and government-run grocery stores will work about as well as they did in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the left’s endless war against all forms of economic productivity will drive more and more jobs out of New York, forcing ever-higher taxes on the saps poor enough to stay behind.
But because he offers a simple and revolutionary message during difficult times, Mamdani’s message will always be popular. And even if his tenure in New York is the disaster I fully expect, his cancer will spread to other places if we cannot get America into a position where young people feel satisfied with their opportunities.
And that’s going to mean embracing some policies that put young Americans first. If we loosen regulations to drive more home-building, it will mean that the homes of seniors will appreciate less. We may have to prioritize the welfare of young people over the welfare state.
But it must be done. Because what would you rather have: MAGA reform, or the Mamdani revolution?
Editor’s Note:
This article was submitted prior to the tragic events of September 10, 2025. In loving memory of Charlie Kirk—a wonderful man, husband, father, and friend to myself and to America.
Read full article here