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.'

If America is to, God willing, survive and thrive for another 250 years, then we must restore Gen Z's vitality – and the typical solutions won't suffice.

If the conservative movement spends the next 20 years organized around opposition, being anti-this and anti-that, measuring success by viral clips or outrage cycles, it will fail.

For as politicians and cable news pundits fight over the issue of the week and influencers chase the next viral controversy, young Americans are left wondering why the basic milestones of adulthood seem further and further away.

Housing costs have exploded. Higher education has become one of the biggest financial gambles in America. Millions of young people are told that taking on massive debt was the only path to success, only to discover that a diploma is no guarantee of economic security.

This explains the relative recent success of Democratic Socialists – like Zohran Mamdani in New York City – and the acolytes of socialist senator Bernie Sanders, who promise to solve all the issues of affordability and income disparity with promises of free housing, food and education. But these solutions also fail to meet the challenge, not only because they are illusory, but because handouts only breed dependency – and human beings really desire self-worth.

The loneliness epidemic will not be solved from Washington DC.

Conservatism, at its best, is about more than tax rates. It is a belief that free people are more capable than bureaucracies. That families are stronger than government programs. That communities matter. That faith matters. That responsibility matters.

Those ideas are not outdated. They're desperately needed.

Gen Z came of age under a suffocating blanket of censorship. My generation knows, perhaps even more than our parents, that freedom matters. And this is what the conservative movement must deliver.

But that means believing that parents know their children better than bureaucrats. That churches know their communities better than federal agencies. That entrepreneurs create more opportunity than government programs. And that a strong neighborhood beats a new federal initiative almost every time.

Conservatives should stop being too embarrassed to say that strong communities create strong citizens and strong nations.

What's more, not every student needs a four-year degree. Not every successful career starts in a university classroom. In an economy being transformed by artificial intelligence, a student who becomes an electrician, starts a business, learns a trade, or builds a company should be valued every bit as much as someone sitting in a university lecture hall.

The future of conservatism will not be decided by how many arguments we win online. It will be decided by whether the next generation can build a life with real people.

As America approaches its 250th birthday, I remain optimistic, not because our challenges are small, but because the young people I meet every week are far more capable than the caricatures often presented on television.

They're entrepreneurial. They're resilient. They're thoughtful. They're ambitious. And despite everything they've been told, they still believe their future can be brighter than their present.

The biggest misconception about Gen Z is that we're searching for someone to save us.

We're not.

We're searching for the freedom to build.

Help us create an economy that rewards hard work. Give us communities worth belonging to. Give us the freedom to speak, worship, innovate and create. Give us a fair shot at the American Dream.

We'll take it from there. Because despite all the noise, that's what most young Americans still want.

Not another revolution.

But a future.

Brilyn Hollyhand is a 20-year-old political commentator, bestselling author of 'Make America Talk Again' and 'One Generation Away', and host of 'The Brilyn Hollyhand Show'