It’s safe to say that no one knew the scope of Charlie Kirk’s influence until after his death. What he was able to achieve on college campuses has no parallel. This country desperately needs someone who will do the same in our big cities.

Charlie – we feel it’s more appropriate, more human to use his first name rather than his last last name, a traditional newspaper treatment that under the circumstances feels vulgar – was known for his argument that college was a scam.

But his real contribution was challenging students to cast off the conditioning that has been imposed on them by the smug, radical professors and administrators who have taken over the academy. Young people needed to hear what he had to say, and to hear the way he said it, and they responded in numbers and in ways few of us could have imagined.

Urban dwellers need to hear a similar message. Someone inspired by Charlie, someone of comparable intellectual nimbleness, affability and decency, ought to set up events in New York City’s Central Park, Los Angeles’ McArthur Park, Chicago’s Grant Park and other big city venues and have a conversation with the voters who keep putting Democrats in office – the political animals who are looking at the next election for the next highest office; who secure government contracts for a company owned by their brother-in-law who will kick back cash to elected officials; who care about political power and fame more than the health of their cities.

America’s great cities have been turned into death traps and decaying husks by Democratic administrations. They’ve been surrendered to vandals and looters, abandoned to lawless forces.

The mayor of Los Angeles is a Castro-loving communist and former “community organizer” who seems to care little about the well-being of the city she’s supposed to be nurturing.

Chicago’s mayor is a soft-on-crime, pro-illegal immigrant, teachers union hack who has mismanaged the city in nearly unprecedented ways.

The likely next mayor of New York City is a performative politician, a theater kid whose brand of Democratic politics closely resembles Marxism.

Residents are fleeing these and other Democrat-run cities. For many, they have become unlivable. Unless urban voters are awakened, the flight will only continue.

Charlie is no longer here to take on the job, his life ended by the normalizing and even encouragement of violence by the same party that’s killing our cities. We pray someone from his generation will step up and pull our urban communities out of their decline.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board