Title: Charlie Kirk's Killing and Political Violence in America

[MUSIC]

Brian: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Today, tragically, we seem to have two acts of political terrorism to acknowledge, 9/11 on this 24th anniversary and what appears at least to be the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. We'll talk about the killing of Kirk now and the larger cycle of political violence that the country is in in recent years, that the murder of Charlie Kirk appears to be a part of.

The New York Times has an editorial now headlined, "Charlie Kirk's Horrific Killing and America's Worsening Political Violence," that also says his killing is part of a horrifying wave of political violence in America. Since last year alone, a gunman killed a member of the Minnesota State Legislature and her husband and shot another Minnesota politician and his wife, that was an attack against Democrats from everything that was reported. A man set fire to the home of Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and a would-be assassin shot Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

In 2022, an attacker broke into Representative Nancy Pelosi's home and fractured her husband's skull. In 2021, a violent mob attacked Congress, smashing windows and brutalizing police officers. In 2017, a gunman shot four people at a Republican practice for the Congressional baseball game, badly wounding Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. That from the New York Times. I might add the shooting at the Centers for Disease Control just recently by a gunman who, according to all reports, fired more than 180 shots to protest against COVID vaccines.

We have three guests. McKay Coppins, Atlantic Magazine staff writer who went to college at another school near Utah Valley University, where Kirk was shot dead yesterday. McKay posted on X, "Every act of political violence is like a blinking red light alerting us to the growing American emergency. We are in an incredibly fragile moment, praying for Charlie Kirk, his family, and our country." Also with us, Reuters journalist Ned Parker, who has written extensively about political violence in America, including a Reuters special report in 2023 called "Political violence in polarized us at its worst since 1970s." He also has an article today called "Nation on edge: Experts warn of 'vicious spiral' in political violence after Kirk Killing."

Kelly Drane, research director at the Giffords Law Center, launched by former Arizona Democratic Congressman Gabby Giffords, who herself was shot at a public appearance in 2011. Gabby Giffords herself posted this yesterday, "Democratic societies will always have political disagreements, but we must never allow America to become a country that confronts those disagreements with violence. Kelly Drane from Giffords, McKay Coppins from The Atlantic, Ned Parker from Reuters, thank you all of us for joining us. Welcome to WNYC today.

McKay Coppins: Thank you.

Ned Parker: Thanks.

Kelly Drane: Thank you for having me.

Brian: Listeners, in your opinion, what can this country do about the increasing amount of political violence? Anything you want to say or ask that's relevant, call or text 212-433-WNYC. We hope it will be productive and constructive. 212-433-9692. Ned Parker, let me start with you and roll back the clock. Two years before, at least this incident, what did you and your Reuters colleagues document that you compared to the 1970s?

Ned Parker: My colleague, Peter Eisler, and I, we started a count of political violence beginning in 2021. We spoke with experts and reviewed a global terrorism database that existed and of tracking violence from 1970 to 2020 that was run out of the University of Maryland and a consortium on national terrorism. What the experts said was that really in the '70s, you saw a lot of violence carried out, particularly from the left, often bombings against academic institutions, government buildings. These were bombings that would be carried out at times when people wouldn't be there. In some years, you had as many as over 100 and 150 incidents.

Those kinds of numbers started to drop and drop significantly through the '80s into the '90s with blips like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1990, I believe four or five that was still considered the deadliest act of terrorism on US soil-

Brian: Domestic terrorism.

Ned Parker: -carried out by a homegrown terrorist as opposed to the 9/11 attacks. Really, you would see numbers of between 30, 40, 20 terrorism incidents or political violence incidents, incidents of politically motivated attacks with some intention, through really 2015, 2016. Then you start to see a steady rise. While the numbers weren't like what you saw in the '70s, you started to see a sustained increase where the levels were 70, 80, 65 incidents of premeditated ideological, political violence per year.

Those numbers are sustained from when we started our count in 2021. 2021 was the highest number of incidents till now, but you really saw the violence being in the range after 2021, of 79 incidents of political violence in 2022, 2023, 76. Last year, we counted through a month before the election, and the numbers were a bit lower, but preliminary counts suggest numbers would have been around 60-something last year, but we need to finalize the final count.

What's different now in the '70s is that the violence is much more lethal. I think in part, you just seem to see attacks where there is a gunman and mass shootings that have some ideological dimension. That's really perhaps the distinction. While there were more political violence incidents in the '70s, typically these kind of left-wing oriented bombings at places, buildings that would be a symbol, a political statement, but not meant to result in mass casualties. Now, when we have political violence, often there is intent of causing a lethal attack.

Brian: People are more often the target.

Ned Parker: Right.

Brian: McKay Coppins, again, you're from Utah, you know the area where this took place, and you posted on X, "Every act of political violence is like a blinking red light alerting us to the growing American emergency. We are in an incredibly fragile moment, praying for Charlie Kirk, his family, and our country." What do you mean the growing American emergency?

McKay Coppins: As a political reporter, I was looking back at my 15 years of covering American politics, and one of the most striking patterns throughout that 15 years is that an unnervingly large number of the political figures that I've written about, profiled, interviewed have been targeted for violence. I think of Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator, who was at the congressional baseball practice when a gunman opened fire and shot four people. I think of Brett Kavanaugh, who I profiled, who had a man planning to kill him show up outside his home in Maryland before turning himself into the police.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, who had to be rushed from the US Capitol building by Secret Service on January 6th as a violent mob called for his hanging. I could go on and on. I think that these acts of political violence and attempted political violence are a symptom of an increasingly sick and dysfunctional political culture that really-- I think that a lot of us feel this, that we are on the brink of something very, very dangerous and very bad. The problem with political violence is it begets more political violence.

Every murder, every act of violence, is heinous on its own terms, but when it's done in the name of politics, it's a direct threat to the democratic experiment. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to realize that a democracy that resorts to settling political differences with bullets instead of free speech and elections ceases to be a functioning democracy. That is my concern. In addition to my concern for, of course, Charlie Kirk's family and the people he knew, I think that this really is a microcosm of a much larger and more alarming problem that is taking place across the country.

Brian: Kelly Drane from Gabby Giffords Group, your specialty is gun violence and gun policy. You wrote an article in 2023, I see, called The Role of Guns in Rising Political Violence. What did you document at that time?

Kelly Drane: Over 150 indictments for people that had threatened federal legislators. What we saw was what the other two guests have talked about, that we saw this increase in these incidents, and we saw that guns played an enormous role in so many of those threats. So many of those threats, even when they didn't actually result in a violent act, just people that called offices or showed up at congressmen and women's office, so many of them evoked firearms. They used words about how they were going to shoot or how they were going to use a firearm to cause harm.

I think that work, as well as so much other research that's come out in recent years, has really solidified this idea that political violence is gun violence. So many of the policies and efforts that we need to put in place to prevent the everyday acts of gun violence are also necessary to reduce political violence in our country, that political violence is so much more dangerous because it is coupled with easy access to guns in this country.

Brian: I don't know if we have calls coming in that are going to be anything other than trying to blame one side or the other, from what I'm seeing so far. A lot of that we're seeing in our text message thread as well. McKay, I'll read just two that are kind of representative. One listener writes, "I don't want to hear a word about Trump rhetoric. This is squarely on the media for not calling out the constant demonizing of anyone who is a conservative as a bigot and Nazi."

Another one says, "Charlie Kirk was a provocative troll who spent years minimizing the effects of gun violence in society. I think it's ironic that his literal last words were racist and reductive toward public violence." You see where both sides are going, obviously. Should we not over-interpret the loudest voices online, or should we be concerned by those who are simply shooting political arrows after this tragedy, after this murder?

McKay Coppins: I think that the reaction from your listeners is probably fairly well represented across the country. Not necessarily in degree, but in terms of how we talk and think about politics in this country. This horrific thing happened in a climate of ever-escalating political rhetoric, ever-escalating stakes over the culture war in our country. Of course, there is an immediate rush to use every new act of political violence to say that, "Look, I'm right and my political enemies are wrong about everything."

I think that that really is emblematic of this problem that we have, which is there is this tendency to dehumanize our political enemies. I think we've all seen this become more and more prevalent in our national discourse. The problem with doing that, and it's very easy when we're on social media, it's very easy when we choose to live in kind of information bubbles where all the media we consume tells us that we're right about everything.

The much harder work of citizenship, and the only way to reverse this cycle of political violence, is to just step back and try to understand people who don't think like you. Charlie Kirk was a provocateur. Provocation was part of his project. Does that mean that he should be shot and murdered in cold blood while speaking to college students on a campus? Of course not. No one, I would hope, listening to this, believes that that's the case.

We have to realize that the way that we talk about people who disagree with us, even in profound and very important ways, I don't want to minimize political disagreements that can be very important on issues that really are very high stakes. If we can't get to a place where we can talk to each other, listen to each other, and walk away feeling like we at least understand each other, even if we have very different values and very different worldviews, then this cycle is just going to continue to get worse.

Brian: Ned, I wonder if you're reporting on political and violent political violence in America for Reuters, also brings the nature of the discourse online or in general in this country right now into it. Do you have anything on that?

Ned Parker: Yes, it's deeply problematic. There's the violence itself, then there's the violence of language. After key events like this one or other political events that are divisive, you'll look online and you'll look on message boards and social media and you'll see language by people on a side that flirts or wishes for violence, hangings, shootings against the other. Then there's the ripple effect of threats against officials, whether election workers, Congress members, judges, and some of the stuff is echoed by political figures. We see it online.

Together, I think with what McKay was saying, is we have this very divisive culture where your people are rooting for a side. Because of the nature of how we communicate now and consume information online, there is this real dehumanization and kind of flippant use of violent terms against who people see as their enemies, and it's troubling.

Brian: What's the single standard? I want to play part of the president's response last night in which, to be honest, he seems not to do what he calls on the country to do, which is turn down the temperature on political disagreements. Here's part of what he said.

President Trump: For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

Brian: There are so many examples of Trump using extremely coarse language. Here's just one from a New Hampshire rally in 2023.

President Trump: We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

Brian: A text says, also on this question of single standard, "Horrific for sure, the killing of Charlie Kirk, but the flags were not lowered for the representative and her husband who were murdered." That was the Minnesota state representative who was a Democrat, "or any other number of tragic political deaths." McKay, I'll go back to you on this. Everybody wants everybody to turn down the volume in theory, but if people really think the US is headed toward authoritarianism, they have to say it, and people will accuse the other side constantly of using political violence. Images or even just really, really harsh denunciations like fascist being used by either side, and it's used by both. Where's the single standard?

McKay Coppins: I would modify what you just said to say that everybody wants the other side to turn down the volume. You see very little policing of your own political coalition, really, in either party. I have to say. Look, there definitely are Democrats who have been, and certainly in the last 24 hours, we've seen this, quick to condemn political violence, to offer condolences over the death of Charlie Kirk. In fact, I think every major elected Democrat that I've seen has spoken out about this.

This isn't necessarily about elected officials. I do think, you see this again in the response from some of your listeners, that the rush to immediately reframe every tragic act of political violence or violence at all, whether they're school shootings or act of terrorism, as something that will make your side look better or more virtuous and the other side look worse. It's just an unhealthy impulse. I agree with you. I don't think anybody should be saying that we can't have strong political opinions, and we can't voice those strong political opinions.

Charlie Kirk is a very good example of this. He was incredibly outspoken, incredibly provocative. He also, to his credit, and I think some people would call it a shtick, and some people would say was more damaging than not to the body politic, but to his credit, he was willing to engage with people who disagreed with him. He went to college campuses all over the country, where people protested him. They didn't want him to come. Then his tour was literally called "Prove Me Wrong." He invited college students to come argue with him, and he would argue back. Was it a performance? That very well may be, but it is also very clearly protected free speech. It is the very embodiment of the First Amendment.

If we want to have a democracy like the one that we've had, we have to try to encourage the people we agree with to act in a more healthy, virtuous, civically productive way. We have to practice some civic hygiene. The fact that everyone has to acknowledge is that you are going to have much more influence over people who agree with you than you will by just angrily denouncing people who disagree with you. Try to get the people who agree with you to help you build the kind of country you want, rather than just lobbing bombs all day.

Brian: Casey in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Casey: Hey, Brian. I wanted to speak to this as a gun control issue in addition to an issue about the cadence and intensity of political rhetoric. I told your screener that I spent my Labor Day weekend in Chicago with my brother-in-law, talking about how we felt like now it's time for us to buy a gun, which is something I never thought I would say.

Brian: Why do you think it is?

Casey: We agreed that we might not be allowed to soon. I have an ethnic last name. I'm a registered Democrat voter. I forget if it was you or your guest referencing the loudest voices online. I spend a lot of time in conservative spaces online as part of my media hygiene. I think it's really important for me to hear what extreme voices on all sides are saying. A lot of people, including representatives and people in the White House, are calling for trans people to not have access to guns following the Catholic school shooting.

Brian: Your concern, just to be really clear, is not that gun rights will be limited across the board, as a lot of gun rights groups say. Your concern is in this political climate, gun rights for certain groups that might include you and yours, will be limited for political reasons and biased reasons.

Casey: That's exactly right. I'd rather no one have access to guns that can be used to kill people in this way. That's [inaudible 00:23:22].

Brian: Casey, thank you very much. One more related, I think, Michael in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Michael.

Michael: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking the call. It seems like in America, we've become so desensitized to the video games and just the widespread violence. I thought after Uvalde, Texas, things would have changed. Now, we don't even know who the suspect is, and there's already blame being laid on both sides. What's the answer? We don't even break bread anymore. We don't sit down and just listen to each other and comprehend where one side is coming from the other without escalating to where we're at now. When Trump was making his run-up, he was like, "Oh, get him out of here." I miss the good old days. We're going back to those good old days, and they don't seem as good as they used to be.

Brian: You told our screeners something about addressing gun violence.

Michael: Just the issue in New York, there's so much gun violence. If it's not a political issue, the civilian is left behind.

Brian: Thank you, Michael. Kelly Drane, research director at the Giffords Law Center, you specialize in research and gun violence. What are you thinking, listening to those last two callers?

Kelly Drane: I think that the sort of notion that the political violence is gun violence is really critical. When I look at the situation, obviously, it's still unfolding. We have a lot of details yet to uncover. Just based on what we know about other incidents, we know that there are good policies we can put in place that help to reduce incidents of gun violence. There are policies that help ensure that people that are demonstrating dangerous behaviors, just almost always a component of these types of shootings, there are policies we can put in place to ensure that those people have less access to firearms.

Then there are also, we call them guns and democracy laws. Making sure that rallies and protests are gun-free spaces, making sure that government buildings where elected officials and other political figures spend a lot of time don't have guns in them, making sure that voting places are not places that people can carry guns so that everyone feels safe when they go into a polling place. I think there's a lot of policy that we can put in place. I think that's where I really hope are the direction we take, rather than a society where we become even more fearful of one another.

I think that is an impulse that is completely understandable, that people look at the violence that's happening, both political violence and the everyday gun violence, the violence in our schools. It can feel overwhelming, and it can feel like a really unsafe world, and that impulse to arm oneself, I think, can come about. We know that adding more guns to the situation is not the answer. More guns leads to more violence.

I think we really need to be looking at what are the responsible steps that we can take to ensure people that should not have access to guns, people that have demonstrated dangerous behaviors and warning signs, what can we do to keep guns away from those people? What can we do to keep political spaces free of firearms so that there can be a free and open exchange of ideas in those spaces?

Brian: These conversations obviously need to keep happening here and elsewhere. We thank Kelly Drane from Giffords, McKay Coppins from The Atlantic, and Ned Parker from Reuters for having this piece of it today. Thank you all very much.

Ned Parker: Thanks, Brian.

McKay Coppins: Thank you.

Kelly Drane: Thank you.

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.