The Compression Released
I need to be honest: I didn’t always agree with Charlie Kirk. But I respected the hell out of what he built.
I study organizational dynamics for a living, and Turning Point USA shouldn’t have worked. A teenager with no institutional backing, taking on universities with billion-dollar endowments and decades of ideological entrenchment? That’s a recipe for failure. Except Kirk didn’t fail. He built something that terrified people precisely because it worked.
Here’s what actually happened: Kirk identified a market inefficiency. Conservative organizations had essentially ceded college campuses since the 1970s. They’d complain about liberal bias in academia but wouldn’t actually show up to compete. Kirk showed up. With branded tablecloths and free pocket Constitutions and an army of twenty-somethings who could argue Hayek versus Keynes while speaking fluent meme.
The backlash was predictable but the intensity wasn’t. I tracked the media coverage of TPUSA from 2016 to now—it went from dismissive to hysterical. The Professor Watchlist controversy. The disputes over chapter recognition at various universities. The disinvitation campaigns. Each escalation revealed something important: institutions don’t fight this hard against things that don’t threaten them.
What happened at Utah Valley University on September 10th wasn’t just a tragedy—it was a system failure. The security questions being raised now, the investigations underway, they all point to breakdowns we should have seen coming. When you create an environment where certain speakers require extensive security just to appear on campus, you’ve already lost something fundamental about academic freedom.
Charlie Kirk is dead at 31. That’s not a political statement. That’s a civilizational failure. When we can’t protect people who organize legally, speak publicly, and participate in democracy—even controversial people, especially controversial people—we’re not losing a political fight. We’re losing the entire experiment.
The compression I study in systems? It’s what happens when pressure builds with no release valve. Kirk was actually a release valve—a legitimate channel for conservative youth who felt voiceless. Close those channels, silence those voices, and the pressure doesn’t disappear. It finds other ways out. Usually worse ones.
I’ve been modeling this pattern for years. When you eliminate moderate outlets for dissent—and yes, despite what his critics said, Kirk was a moderate outlet, operating within democratic norms—you don’t eliminate the dissent itself. You radicalize it. The data from historical precedents is unambiguous on this point. TPUSA gave conservative students a legitimate organization, official recognition, a seat at the table. Remove that seat, and they don’t disappear. They go underground. They get angry. They find less legitimate channels.
There’s something else that nobody wants to talk about: the escalation pattern we’ve seen at campus events over the past five years. The confrontations almost never start with violence. They follow a predictable sequence: mockery, deplatforming, doxxing, threats, property destruction, physical confrontation. Kirk’s organizations experienced all of these, in order, multiple times. We had all the warning signs. The system had multiple opportunities to de-escalate. Instead, at every decision point, authorities chose to look away or, worse, to validate the escalation. When administrators blamed conservative speakers for “provoking” violence by existing on campus, they guaranteed this outcome.
We should all be worried about what comes next.
— Reed Holloway
Reed Holloway writes for Wealth Creation Investing on the intersection of financial sovereignty, economic policy, and systemic risk. His work exposes government overreach, defends hard-asset strategies, and challenges the narratives that mask deeper economic instability.