Gen Z, my generation, is the most online age group in world history.

It is also the loneliest.

Two weeks after the assassination of my friend and mentor Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, I embarked on a tour to debate my peers across ten college campuses, determined to help carry on Charlie's mission of vigorous civic engagement and honest conversations.

I was warned, in advance, that I would encounter radicalized, anti-American, ideologically obsessed students.

I found something much different - a generation, not obsessed with politics, but exhausted by it.

These students came of age watching a president survive an assassination attempt and their friends and family lose jobs over their beliefs. They saw classmates sit silent in lecture halls rather than risk ridicule for their faith and ideas.

Most spent nearly half of their high school experience trapped in Zoom rooms, even as rioters took to the streets and NFL players kneeled for the national anthem.

They watched it all on six-inch screens and learned how to go viral. Now, they may have thousands of followers but few friends - constantly connected and deeply alone. But these young Americans are not radicals. They are desperate for something real.

As America prepares to observe the semiquincentennial, I cannot imagine a more sobering assessment.

In 1776, James Madison was 25; Thomas Jefferson, 33; Alexander Hamilton, 21. But 250 years later, the inheritors of our young founders' great legacy are suffering an epidemic of social isolation and struggling to articulate their hopes and dreams.

As then-Governor Ronald Reagan warned in 1967: 'Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.'