“The Kind of Event I Was Warning About”: Charlie Kirk and Our Era of Political Violence

In June, after the assassination of a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota, Robert Pape, a leading expert on political violence as the director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats at the University of Chicago, warned in a New York Times op-ed that “we may be on the brink of an extremely violent era in American politics.” The killing of Charlie Kirk, on a college campus in Utah Wednesday, was “tragic, but predictable,” Pape told VF Wednesday. “This is exactly the kind of event I was warning about.”

Pape is one of the most prominent voices warning about the dangerous climate in the country over the last several years. “We are on a dark road as a country,” he says.

Kirk, the prominent right-wing activist and key ally of Donald Trump, had just begun a speaking engagement before a large outdoor crowd at Utah Valley University and was answering a question about gun violence when he was shot in the neck. Trump announced his death soon after. “All who knew him and loved him are united in shock and horror,” the president said from the Oval Office later Wednesday. “He’s a martyr for truth and freedom…This is a dark day for the nation.” Kirk, who had a wife and two young children, was 31.

Kirk is one of several victims of assassination in recent years: Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of Minnesota’s House of Representatives, and her husband were murdered in June; her colleague, John Hoffman, and his wife were shot by the same perpetrator, but survived. In recent years there have also been attacks directed at Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a potential Democratic candidate for president, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, and, of course, Trump himself.

The assassination attempt on Trump last year in Pennsylvania was initially said to have softened him. But the president has remained a bellicose figure in American politics, including in his address on Kirk’s death, in which he lamented “demonizing those with whom you disagree”—and in the same breath blamed the media and the “radical left,” his catch-all for those with whom he disagrees. “I think that the political rhetoric about opponents being enemies from within, I think that concept has taken on a life of its own,” says Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University.

“The United States has been experiencing a period of political violence unlike anything we’ve experienced since the 1960s and early 70s,” Dallek says. “The violence is not apart from the politics and culture of the past decade; it’s actually endemic to it. It’s central to it.”

Political leaders of both parties condemned the Kirk killing. Trump and a number of Republican elected officials, as well as those in the media, remembered the influential conservative activist. Former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden each expressed their condolences and opposition to political violence, as did other elected Democrats—including California Governor Gavin Newsom, who hosted Kirk on his podcast earlier this year. “Charlie Kirk’s murder is sick and reprehensible, and our thoughts are with his family, children, and loved ones,” Newsom wrote. “Honest disagreement makes us stronger; violence only drives us further apart and corrodes the values at the heart of this nation.”

But the sober statements competed on social media with the belligerence of figures like Elon Musk, who wrote on his social media platform that Democrats were the “party of murder,” and Steve Bannon, who suggested that the country was now at “war.” The condemnations also threatened to be drowned out by the graphic video itself, which was nearly unavoidable in the social media scroll on Wednesday. “I think it’s destabilizing,” Dallek says. “It’s not the kind of thing one would expect from a stable, healthy democratic polity.”

And, Pape warns that it could portend even more darkness ahead. “This needs to be taken seriously, because otherwise you could end up having this snowball, even in the near term,” Pape says. “It will not fade away on its own.”