Turning Point USA founder and conservative activist Charlie Kirk was supposed to speak in Baton Rouge on Monday as part of his “The American Comeback Tour”.

Unfortunately one of the most tragic political assassinations in recent years occured in September when the 31-year-old husband and father of a three-year old daughter and one-year-old son was cut down by a 22 year old perched on the roof of a campus building at Utah Valley University.

Rather than cancelling the Baton Rouge event a month after his assassination, the organization he built moved not just on but forward.

The event in downtown Baton Rouge was well attended, with the orchestra seats filled and spill over in the balcony.

Both Governor Jeff Landry and featured speaker Fox News regular and Blaze Media podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey gave energetic talks to the gathering, with Stuckey fielding questions from a very long line of folks with topics ranging from faith to political organization.

While I’ve been to a number of conservative conferences where Charlie Kirk appeared, the Baton Rouge event was the first time I visited a standalone Turning Point USA event.

I’ve attended countless LSU College Republican and national Young Republican meetings, CPACs (which used to be the premiere conservative annual conclave), a number of RNC quarterly meetings, and seven Republican National Conversations, but what I saw on Monday night at the River Center Theatre was completely different.

First at the aforementioned GOP and CPAC meetings, the attendees were TALKED TO, granted by high profile muckety-mucks.

And that’s not to discount those events; I learned a great deal from a number of the featured speakers and would end up forming lasting friendships with a few, including former Louisiana governors Dave Treen and Buddy Roemer, both of whom heavily influenced my career in politics.

But the Turning Point USA event was neither the stuff of a stilted party rah rah speech or a Leadership Institute activism training course (Louisiana native Morton Blackwell mentored thousands of latter day candidates and campaign managers through his LI handbooks and classes), but closer to a political revival tent, offering a gospel focused on political truth, love of country, maintaining self-respect in the face of a culture that celebrates self-degradation, and actual Gospel.

They TALKED WITH the audience.

The questions posed were not rooted in policy wonkery but on topics more basic and real to the attendees who personally confront a strident leftist militancy brazenly pushed, both figuratively and on documented occasions literally, in the classrooms and the quad,.

Turning Point USA also offers strategies on how to deal with the bullies who seek to suppress the freedom of dissenters to organize on campuses, something we are seeing play out at the perpetually problematic Tulane and that Jesuit of leftist small-c catholicism, Loyola.

Secondly the Turning Point USA event stood out because of the attendees. For years I’ve watched political curmudgeons regularly mock young people in politics with one exception- Mark Levin, who rather than chide them as hopeless hostiles would instead refer to young people as the Rising Generation.

On Monday night I saw firsthand what Levin had been preaching- a new generation of Americans thirsting for truth, tested by the most belligerent popular culture towards traditionalism and patriotism in the history of the country, and ready and willing to be bold apostles for liberty in the most hostile corners of society.

I saw the future of America on Monday night and they’re ready to defy to prevailing cultural Marxism to keep the flame of freedom burning bright.

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About an hour train ride south of Salt Lake City is Orem, the home of Utah Valley University. The college is set in the midst of an idyllic landscape, surrounded by forest capped with a mountain backdrop.

In the heart of the campus is a manmade waterfall that adds a tranquil ambient sound to the visual serenity, contrasting with the violent tragedy that took place yards away.

Less than a few weeks later tributes to the fallen college campus revolutionary of all kinds were still visible flooding a green.space adjacent to where Kirk was gunned down.

Unlike the ANTIFA claptrap one would see spray painted by those emboldened by a confidence they would not be held accountable by authorities, messages to Kirk were left with chalk, meant to honor yet not deface.

A large American flag hangs over the area where Kirk fell and there are statues in the vicinity of a general student-oriented nature not honoring anyone in particular that have assumed quasi-monument status.

If there’s a place for a physical memorial for Kirk, it’s in Orem, Utah.

The best way to honor Charlie Kirk in Louisiana, beyond funding scholarships for high school conservative activists who lack the financial means to attend college, is to fight via the courts and through donor and alumni pressure to ensure that Turning Point USA chapters are not summarily blocked by intolerant and exclusionary entities who control organizational recognition and university space access that are granted unequally to their fellow ideologues.