Socialism Is Rising Under Zohran Mamdani. Charlie Kirk Already Had the Answer.
The right-wing thinks it’s just Marxist indoctrination. Charlie Kirk realized it’s a much simpler, scarier reality.
This is part of my ongoing series on Charlie Kirk. Read the full series here.
On Tuesday, three Mamdani-backed candidates won their primaries in New York.
All of them beat establishment Democrats. Two of them knocked off sitting congressmen.
The districts are deep blue, so winning the primary all but guarantees winning in November.
Which means three more allies of the socialist movement are heading to Congress.
That same day, the Democratic Socialists of America ran what it called the largest slate of socialists ever to run for a state legislature. At least a dozen DSA-backed candidates won across New York.
And it reaches well past New York.
In Los Angeles, DSA-backed Nithya Raman made the runoff for mayor of the second-largest city in the country, where she’ll face the incumbent, establishment Democrat Karen Bass, in November.
Socialism is rising in America.
Gallup has tracked how Americans see capitalism since 2010.
This year it fell to the lowest level they’ve ever recorded: 54 percent. Among young adults, Gallup finds capitalism and socialism running about even. And a 2025 Cato survey found that 62 percent of Americans under 30 hold a favorable view of socialism.
Among Democrats, the flip is already finished. 66 percent view socialism favorably. Just 42 percent say the same about capitalism.
Not only are young people becoming more socialist, they’re becoming more radical, and they are unapologetic about it.
Drawing on a UCLA survey that has tracked incoming college students since the 1960s, Rob Henderson notes that the share who call themselves far left has tripled since the early 1980s and doubled since 2013.
It now runs higher than it did at the height of the Vietnam-era protests.
And months before a single one of these candidates was on a ballot, someone called all of it.
Charlie Kirk was one of the few on the right who saw it coming, and could say it plainly.
His point was simple. Young people, especially young men, are stuck in a renter economy they can’t climb out of, and if you refuse to fix their economic reality, they will get radical politically.
He called it a distress signal.
He was right.
These people aren’t loyal to a party, or an economic philosophy. That’s why young people voted for Trump in historic numbers, and are now voting for socialists in historic numbers.
It’s the same exact distress signal, just channeled toward different candidates.
Today, you’ll learn:
Why traditional anti-socialist talking points are completely failing to move the needle with younger voters.
The primary root cause of modern political radicalism that has nothing to do with classroom indoctrination.
How a warning from Charlie Kirk accurately predicted the exact economic distress signals we are seeing today.
The bipartisan legislative actions quietly passing through Washington to tackle corporate housing monopolies.
Four structural shifts required to restore genuine market competition and hand an entire generation a reason to stay.
Socialism Is a Bad Idea. But Saying That Isn’t Enough.
I think socialism is a bad idea.
There’s not a single socialist or communist country on earth that Americans would actually choose to live in.
And the places people hold up as proof it works, the Scandinavian ones, aren’t socialist at all.
They’re market economies with high taxes and strong safety nets. They are capitalist.
Even the leaders of these countries say so:
“I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
— Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Danish Prime Minister, at Harvard
I also don’t buy that socialism just hasn’t been tried the right way. I think it’s flawed at the root. A market is millions of people solving problems at once, and that will always be smarter than a few hundred officials trying to plan an economy from a room. Innovation and growth are what dragged humanity out of poverty and let billions of people survive on this planet. Redistribution has never been the engine. It only divides what the engine builds.
But I’m not going to pretend the problems socialism is reacting to are imaginary. Healthcare in this country is indefensible. A home is out of reach for an entire generation.
The fix for that is a better capitalism, and it’s not the form of capitalism we have now.
The capitalism we have is not what the founders envisioned.
There is too much money in politics.
Both parties are captured by corporate interests. Both sides are bankrolled by billionaires.
Too often the laws get made based on who has the most power, not what’s good for the people.
So we need better capitalism, not socialism.
But frankly, most people don’t care what you call it. They just want solutions.
Imagine you go to the doctor with back pain. You’ve tried everything. The heating pad, the stretches, the supplements you read about online, the brace your cousin swore by. You’ve even tried weird esoteric stuff, energy healing, hypnosis, even crystals. You’re willing to try anything, because you’re desperate to heal.
But you’re still in pain.
And the doctor, instead of treating you, spends the whole visit telling you how stupid you were to try those things. How dumb your research was. How wrong you got it.
Maybe the doctor is right. Probably the doctor is right. He’s the expert. But you’re still in pain, and he hasn’t done one thing about it.
So what happens? Do you change your mind? Or do you change your doctor?
That is exactly what the constant fixation on the tertiary causes of socialism — indoctrination, foreign influence, poor education — instead of the primary cause, economic pain, is doing.
It’s pushing people to a new doctor.
Socialism doesn’t work, critics say, and they’re mostly right.
But the patient is still hurting, and being told you’re wrong while you’re in pain doesn’t make for a happy patient.
The right-wing internet has its explanations ready. Islamist infiltration. Voter fraud in California. Dumb white wealthy college kids. Foreign influence out of China and Russia.
Each one has a kernel of truth, but the size of the kernel varies wildly, and people fixate on the ones that feel best, because those are the ones that hand you a villain.
A boogeyman means the problem is them, not us.
But the seeds of socialism have been in American soil for a hundred years. So why is 2026 such fertile ground for them to finally sprout?
Kirk already gave us the answer.
Young People Are Giving Up on the American Dream
I know people in LA who have given up on ever owning a home.
People in their 30s buried under student debt they’ll spend decades climbing out of, handed to them by a system happy to loan a kid $100,000 for a degree that was never going to pay it back, then collect interest on him for life.
People locked in a permanent renter’s cycle, paying off someone else’s mortgage forever.
Lately it’s been said that young people just aren’t patriotic anymore, like it’s a flaw in their character.
I’d love to see more patriotism from young people.
But how do you love a country you own no piece of, and don’t think you ever will?
How do you pledge yourself to ground you’ll never hold a square foot of?
They’re not detached because they hate America. They’re detached because they have nothing to be attached to. That’s the fertile soil of despair where the seed of socialism takes root.
No amount of videos showing a college student give an idiotic answer in an interview is going to change that.
No number of street interviews exposing a confused No Kings protester is going to change that.
No video explaining why billionaires exist is going to convince a 25-year-old in New York who can’t cover their $3,500 rent.
“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” means nothing to someone carrying $100,000 in debt from a degree the system was thrilled to finance.
You can run that playbook every day for the next four years. The kids will only drift further left. Because it’s the doctor again, mocking the patient while the pain gets worse.
Every clip of a smug 20-year-old getting “destroyed” is satisfying, and it moves the needle exactly nowhere, because it never touches the thing driving people to socialism in the first place.
We Need a New Approach
The socialists are not winning because the right hasn’t mocked them hard enough.
They’re winning because people are in pain and someone is finally offering to do something about it.
Until the conversation on the right becomes about addressing that pain, about building a capitalism that works for regular people, instead of an endless parade of “look how dumb these kids are,” the socialists will gain ground and young people will keep drifting left.
Last fall I wrote a piece called “Why Zohran Won.”
The short version was that an entire generation had stopped being able to afford their own lives, and Mamdani was the only one treating that like the emergency it is.
I warned that if the right kept laughing at his voters instead of listening to them, they’d hand socialism the keys.
On Tuesday, the socialists reached out and took them.
So what does addressing the pain actually look like?
Two months before he was killed, Charlie Kirk didn’t just name the problem.
He wrote down the cure, down to the number.
And there’s some good news — because quietly, in Congress and inside the Trump administration, the first pieces of it are already being built.
From here, you’ll learn:
The exact legislative levers being pulled to ban giant investment firms from buying up single-family starter homes.
How an unglamorous, bipartisan rule change is quietly slashing thousands of dollars off the cost of new home construction.
A definitive roadmap to dismantle the student loan machine, eliminate corporate capture in politics, and lower healthcare costs without nationalizing a single industry.
