Even before the assassination of Charlie Kirk, an influential Right-wing activist, there were signs of a looming political crisis. Rising polarisation and the coarsening of public discourse left little room for shared understanding. Acts of violence, targeting figures on the Left and the Right, had begun piling up.
But the killing of Kirk on a Utah college campus on Wednesday — shortly after he began speaking to a young crowd on a sunny afternoon — raises the possibility that the country has entered an even more perilous phase.
On social media, it was easy to find Left-wing posters reveling in Kirk’s death and suggesting he got what he deserved. On the Right, initial expressions of grief and shock were overtaken by open calls for political reckoning and vengeance. There were ominous proclamations that the country was on the brink of civil war — or should be.
The outbursts worried experts, who warned that Americans’ tolerance for politically motivated attacks has been growing at a striking pace.
“We’re basically a tinderbox of a country,” said Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who has been conducting regular polls to measure attitudes toward political violence since supporters of President Donald Trump attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “We are seeing more radicalised politics and more support for violence than at any point since we’ve been doing these studies in the past four years.”
That killing had become entangled in an escalating national debate over Trump’s desire to send the military into Democratic-led cities to combat crime. In a country where the President calls his opponents “scum”, and opponents accuse him of fascism, it already seemed to many that the fabric of public discourse had hopelessly frayed.
Kirk, who was prolific on social media, was himself deeply engaged in the conversation about crime, posting on X just hours before he was shot that it was “100% necessary to politicise” the Charlotte murder.
“I think that you have a cultural civil war underway,” said Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker, in an interview on Wednesday afternoon. Gingrich said he fully supported Trump’s efforts to upend the American status quo. But he acknowledged that they were rocking the ship of state.
“You have very profound differences about the very basics of life,” he said, referring to partisan divisions. “And the country has not figured out how to sort it all out yet. We felt like we were under enormous pressure from the Obama-Biden cycle. The Left feels like it’s under tremendous pressure from the Trump cycle. And we don’t know how this is all going to play out.”
In the Rio Grande Valley on Wednesday, Sergio Sanchez, a longtime conservative radio host and former chair of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, spoke through tears as he accused some liberals of “perpetuating and promoting this culture of hate and violence”. Sanchez also pined for what he believed was a better and simpler chapter in the American story.“I’m a kid of the late ’80s,” he said. “I remember a time in America when we would live and let live. And I don’t recognise our nation anymore.”
Matt Forney, a Right-wing journalist known for racist and misogynistic content, called Kirk’s assassination “the American Reichstag fire”, alluding to the 1933 fire at the German Parliament building that was used by the Nazi party as a pretext to suspend constitutional protections and arrest political opponents.
New York Times News Service