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    Charlie Kirk shooting: new video of suspect released by FBI amid urgent appeal for help from the public

    US officials have issued an urgent appeal for help from the public as they continue to search for the shooter of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, releasing new videos and photos from the scene of the attack in Utah.More than 24 hours after Kirk was shot while speaking in front of thousands of people at a Utah university, the state’s governor, appearing alongside FBI director Kash Patel and other officials, said “we need as much help as we can possibly get.”“We cannot do our job without the public’s help,” Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox said, adding that the FBI had received more than 7,000 leads and tips so far.The newly released video showed a person wearing a hat, sunglasses and a long sleeve black shirt running across a roof, climbing off the edge of the building and dropping to the ground. The suspect is believed to have fled into the local neighbourhood after firing the one shot and has not yet been identified.Investigators said they had obtained clues, including a palm print, a shoe impression and a high-powered hunting rifle found in a wooded area along the path the shooter fled. But they were yet to name a suspect or cite a motive in the killing.View image in fullscreenThe direct appeals for public support at the night-time news conference, appeared to signal law enforcement’s continued struggles to identify the shooter and pinpoint the person’s whereabouts. Authorities didn’t take questions, and Patel did not speak at the news conference. The FBI is offering up to $100,000 for information leading to the identification and arrest of the person.The death of Kirk – a close ally of President Donald Trump – has drawn renewed attention to the escalating threat of political violence in the United States which, in the last several years, has cut across the ideological spectrum. The assassination drew bipartisan condemnation from political leaders.In appealing for information, Cox said on Thursday, “there is a tremendous amount of disinformation” online.“Our adversaries want violence,” Cox said. “We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world that are trying to instil disinformation and encourage violence. I would encourage you to ignore those, to turn off those streams.”Cox also pledged to find the killer and pursue the death penalty.Kirk’s casket arrived in his home state of Arizona aboard Air Force Two, accompanied by vice-president JD Vance. Vance’s wife, Usha, stepped off the plane with Kirk’s widow, Erika.Vance helped carry Kirk’s casket with a group of uniformed service members as it was loaded on to the plane. Kirk’s conservative youth organisation, Turning Point USA, was based in Phoenix.“So much of the success we’ve had in this administration traces directly to Charlie’s ability to organize and convene,” Vance wrote on social media, referencing Kirk’s role in getting Donald Trump elected last year. “He didn’t just help us win in 2024, he helped us staff the entire government.”Kirk was a provocateur and a divisive figure who is credited with helping bring young people, especially men, into the US president’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement.In a statement on Thursday, TPUSA wrote: “All of us have lost a leader, a mentor, and a friend. Above all, our hearts are with Erika and their two children. Charlie was the ideal husband and the perfect father. Above all else, we ask you to pray for the Kirks after the incomprehensible loss they have suffered.”Kirk’s killing drew bipartisan condemnation of the rise in political violence in the US.Trump, who said he would award the Medal of Freedom posthumously to Kirk, spoke to Kirk’s wife on Thursday.He said that authorities were making “big progress” towards tracking down the suspect and that in regards to a motive, he has an “indication … but we’ll let you know about that later”.Just hours after Kirk had been declared dead after being rushed to a nearby hospital on Wednesday, Trump delivered a video message from the Oval Office, vowing to track down the suspect.View image in fullscreen“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said.One day after his inflammatory address, blaming “the radical left” for Kirk’s death, Trump appeared to strike a more conciliatory tone, agreeing with a suggestion from a reporter that his supporters should not respond with violence.The White House quickly posted the exchange on social media, perhaps hoping to tamp down anger that has already spilled into violence, with the beating of a critic of Kirk in Boise, Idaho, during a vigil on Wednesday night.Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska who is retiring after this term, told NBC News that he wished Trump would unite the country after the shooting, “but he’s a populist, and populists dwell on anger”.“I have to remind people, we had Democrats killed in Minnesota too, right?” Bacon added, in reference to the murder of Minnesota’s former house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in June by a gunman with a hitlist of 45 people, all Democrats.With Reuters and the Associated Press More

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    ‘Liberal’ has become a term of derision in US politics – the historical reasons are complicated

    Kevin M. Schultz is Chair of the Department of History at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he specialises in 20th- and 21st-century American history. In Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals), he explores how the word liberal – and particularly its variant white liberal – became a term of derision across the American political spectrum.

    Why, he asks, are so many Americans unwilling to identify as liberals, white or otherwise, even while supporting government programs that fall squarely within the American liberal tradition?

    Review: Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History – Kevin M. Schultz (University of Chicago Press)

    Why Everyone Hates White Liberals is written by an American academic for an American audience. It tries to assess the current political situation in the United States in the light of history. It asks how American liberals should respond to a situation where they are often viewed with disdain.

    The book’s relevance is less obvious for those of us who live outside the US, but it promises to shed light on America’s political volatility and culture warring, which eventually affect us all in one way or another.

    This thing called liberalism

    Unfortunately, liberalism defies definition. Its roots can be traced to early European modernity, and especially to debates over religious toleration in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its more immediate background was the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, culminating in great revolutions in America and France.

    From the beginning of the 19th century, liberalism evolved into something distinct, with its own name, founding figures and institutions. It responded to a changed world marked by population growth, revolutionary turmoil, an expanding sphere of public discussion in Europe and North America, and the beginnings of industrialisation and corporate capitalism.

    Schultz skates over this quickly, but he correctly refers to Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant as originating figures in 19th-century France, and to Spain and Sweden as pioneers in the rise of liberal political parties.

    Portrait of Madame de Staël – Marie-Éléonore Godefroid.
    After François Gérard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    It’s worth adding that, as liberalism took its early forms, it had input from numerous groups. These included religious non-conformists, free-market economists inspired by Adam Smith, utilitarian philosophers, and European thinkers (such as de Staël and Constant) who admired the French Revolution in its early years before the Reign of Terror.

    Given its mix of influences, liberalism never became a unified ideology or political theory. It was more a tradition or tendency in politics. It took many directions, frequently questioned itself, discarded old ideas and embraced new ones, and changed emphases in response to emerging circumstances.

    Comprehensive histories of liberalism give the impression of a chameleon-like quality. At different times, liberals have accommodated economic policies from unfettered free-market capitalism to a degree of socialism. Confronted with such a rich – or even contradictory – tradition, we might feel at a loss in giving liberalism any recognisable content.

    Still, we can find some common themes. At a certain level of abstraction, liberalism favours toleration, individual freedom, acceptance of social pluralism, and cautious optimism about the possibilities for intellectual and social progress. With these core ideas go more specific political principles, including free speech, secular government, and the rule of law. To this we can add values such as individuality, creativity and suspicion of hierarchies of birth.

    With that in mind, it’s usually clear enough what is being alleged if someone is accused, in a political context, of being “illiberal”. The accusation suggests intolerance, especially of opposed viewpoints or unusual ways of life, and hostility to individual freedom.

    People who advertise themselves as liberals can sometimes be revealed as illiberal in this broad sense. If that sounds paradoxical, the paradox is easily resolved as long as we’re clear about what concepts are in play.

    American liberals

    After a sketchy introduction to liberalism, Schultz zooms in on the 1930s in the US, when the depression-era presidential rivals Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt each claimed to be a true liberal. As Schultz observes, few Americans before this had thought of themselves as liberals.

    In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt defined the word liberal for the purposes of US electoral politics.
    Vincenzo Laviosa, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

    Roosevelt succeeded in redefining the words liberal and liberalism for the purposes of American electoral politics. In Roosevelt’s usage, they meant openness to new kinds of government intervention to address social problems. Thereafter, American liberalism can trace its history from the 1930s New Deal. It came to mean, in large part, policies of wealth redistribution and economic intervention.

    Roosevelt’s success as a national leader lent prestige to his redefined conception of liberalism. For several decades, it attracted allegiance across social and political divides.

    For Schultz, therefore, American liberalism in the New Deal tradition means “generosity of spirit and expansion of individual freedom” or using the power of the state “to ensure individual freedom for the maximum number of people”.

    These definitions fall within the general tradition of liberalism, but they have a more specific suggestion of government interventions for the common good.

    That might seem attractive as a political vision – so what went wrong?

    Liberalism unravels

    As Schultz tells the story, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, some figures on America’s left were losing patience with what they saw as a stultifying, bureaucratic, politically timid liberal establishment.

    Schultz pinpoints 1964 as a key year when American liberalism began to lose its prestige. As he describes in detail, there was a marked change in political tone between 1963 and 1964, when Black radicals started to criticise white liberal allies, whom they had come to regard as spineless and hypocritical. From this point, white liberal crystallised as a term of abuse on the political Left.

    Schultz appears sympathetic to the Black civil rights leaders of the time, whose impatience with the pace of change was understandable. But he also reminds us of the considerable effort, self-sacrifice and achievements of white liberals during the 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in dramatic initiatives such as the landmark Civil Rights Act.

    Part of the problem was a mismatch, not only of priorities, but perceptions of what was realistically achievable. As radical left-wing movements emerged during the 1960s, their leaders distanced themselves from liberals and liberalism.

    American liberals endured much worse from the conservative side of politics. During the “long” 1960s – the decade and a half from the late 1950s to the early 1970s – there was a right-wing backlash. Key conservative figures, such as William F. Buckley, ceded the term liberal to their opponents, which Herbert Hoover had refused to do in the 1930s. Then they attacked it and everything that it stood for within their understanding.

    Conservatives like William F. Buckley associated ‘liberals’ with radical politics.
    Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    Political conservatives associated liberals with radical politics, atheism, communism, and what Schultz refers to as “cultural effeteness”. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew weaponised this narrative in the the 1972 presidential election and inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Democratic Party’s candidate, George McGovern.

    Schultz sees the term liberal as having been abandoned during the 1970s, in the sense that almost nobody in politics or public debate wanted to identify with it. Instead, it was used to label others. More recently, liberalism has been blamed for the harshest outcomes of what is known as neoliberalism, although the latter has little to do with traditional liberal ideas such as individual freedom, social toleration, or the rule of law.

    The term neoliberal has a history dating back to at least the 1930s, but has been applied to regimes and administrations not otherwise regarded as liberal. As Schultz reminds us, it was first applied pejoratively to the economic policies of the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

    Schultz emphasises an “owning the libs” strategy that has recently prevailed on the American right. Anybody with even slightly left-wing, liberal or progressive tendencies is now painted by conservatives as an unhinged radical deserving of mockery and political, if not personal, destruction. The “libs” have thus become an imaginary enemy against which disparate groups on the right can unify and rally.

    Ironically, historic liberal reforms in areas such as health care and social security remain widely popular with the American electorate, but the actual words liberal and liberalism seem to have become toxic.

    Some deeper issues

    In explaining the challenges to American liberalism during the long 1960s, Schultz adds to our understanding. Yet Why Everyone Hates White Liberals is seriously incomplete: it glosses over important issues and entire decades.

    I can only go so far in exploring what it omits, but for a start, Schultz ignores important developments in the late 1970s and the 1980s. This was a time marked by fraught debates over censorship, pornography, abortion and numerous other hot-button issues. These debates severely tested what liberalism stood for in the US.

    As the legal scholar Owen M. Fiss has argued, the debates of that era revealed “liberalism divided”. On the left side of politics, identity-based demands, (mild) socialist influences, and activist approaches to legal interpretation increasingly clashed with the liberal instinct to restrain government power and support individual freedom. This rupture within American liberalism, or perhaps within America’s broader political left, has never healed.

    At one point, Schultz drops a clue to some of the deeper issues. Following the historian David L. Chappell, he identifies a fundamental disconnect between white liberal reformers in the 1960s and the Black activists who came to despise them. Despite some common goals, they had different temperaments and worldviews, grounded in different experiences and cultural histories.

    The white liberals’ optimism about human nature and the possibilities for incremental progress clashed with the Black activists’ prophetic sensibility, their more pessimistic view of human nature, and their demands for national repentance and total transformation of American society.

    This points to a larger problem that only became more difficult in the decades that followed. It’s one thing to defend the rights and freedoms of one or another oppressed group, viewing the issues from a traditional liberal perspective. It’s a different thing to defend a group’s rights and freedoms by adopting whatever ideology or rationalisation the group itself (or its leaders) might develop.

    Moreover, as oppressed groups recognise each other’s struggles and form pragmatic political coalitions, they tend to see analogies between each other’s causes and attempt an ideological synthesis. As they do so, they are likely to seek insights from whatever sources they can find. Importantly, they needn’t confine themselves to ideas and thinkers from the liberal political tradition.

    A demonstration by members of the Black Panther Party on the steps of the Washington State Capitol building in Olympia, Washington, February 28, 1969.
    CIR Online, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

    Thus, liberals can find themselves supporting demographic groups whose representatives are, in turn, nourished by various kinds of religious fervour – or else by Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and other -isms that are not especially concerned with liberalism’s traditional ideas, such as freedom and toleration. Goals might be shared at a high conceptual level, but with starkly different perceptions of legitimate methods and acceptable costs.

    In this setting, liberals face a conundrum. How far should they maintain traditional liberal ideals, and how far should they move towards non-liberal, and potentially illiberal, ideologies if these seem more promising for the purposes of social change?

    When rapid and comprehensive change seems imperative, might this justify illiberal methods, such as attempts to control what people say and think? In the past, revolutionaries have often believed so, but the conflict with traditional liberalism is obvious.

    Yet Schultz appears dismissive of any idea that American liberals sometimes veer in illiberal directions, or that this might undermine their credentials if they still claim to be part of the broader liberal tradition springing from the Enlightenment.

    Useful, but frustrating

    Why Everyone Hates White Liberals offers a useful, if limited, defence of America’s (white) liberals and their achievements, particularly in the face of unfair criticism and derision since the 1960s.

    As far it goes, the book’s history is accurate. But it is incomplete, and hand-in-hand with this there’s a frustrating analytical shallowness.

    For Schultz, the actual words liberal and liberalism are irredeemable in the US. For all I know, this might be correct (though it might also be slightly hyperbolic). Be that as it may, Schultz backs off examining how the problems for American liberals go deeper than slogans and words. These problems deserve a bolder reckoning. More

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    Senators say US is complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza

    Two Democratic senators claim they have reached the “inescapable conclusion” that Israel is acting on a systematic plan to destroy and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza to force locals to leave, and they say the US is complicit.Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both members of the Senate foreign relations committee, released their findings in a report on Thursday after returning from a congressional delegation to the Middle East where, they note, the destruction goes beyond bombs and bullets. They say they also found a systematic campaign to strangle humanitarian aid, which they call “using food as a weapon of war”.“The Netanyahu government has gone far beyond targeting Hamas to imposing collective punishment on all the people of Gaza,” Van Hollen said at a Thursday press conference. “What they’re doing, and what we witnessed, is putting those goals into action.”At least one hundred people have died from famine in Gaza, the United Nations said this week, citing the Gaza health ministry.View image in fullscreenThe senators, who visited Egypt, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Jordan, argue that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a deliberate strategy to ethnically cleanse the local population rather than collateral damage from the war against Hamas. Their report is titled The Netanyahu Government Is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. America is Complicit. The World Must Stop It.During their visit to the Egyptian-Gaza border, they observed Rafah, the southern Gaza city – once home to 270,000 Palestinians – reduced to rubble. Van Hollen described how both lawmakers climbed an outside fire escape from the Egyptian side of the border to get a clear view of the destruction.The lawmakers also met with former Israel Defense Forces soldiers who described participating in “systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure”. Their report noted first-hand accounts of “how this was a part of an intentional pattern of using explosives to blow up whole city blocks, houses, schools and other civilian sites”.The senators documented arbitrary restrictions that have left aid groups unable to predict what will be denied entry. Jordanian officials told them that peanut butter, honey and dates had been suddenly banned from convoys, with entire trucks turned away for carrying a single restricted item. Each truck, the report says, is subject to a new $400 customs processing fee, and when the truck is not able to make it through the screening process, the $400 has to be paid again to join a later convoy. Because of those and other restrictions by the Israeli government, humanitarian aid coming in from Jordan was currently operating under 10% of its capacity, according to the report.In Egypt, the senators report, the UN’s fleet of trucks have “sustained severe damage”, with United Nations organizations showing the senators video of their convoys coming under fire from the IDF, “a regular occurrence”. The senators also toured a warehouse run by the Egyptian Red Crescent and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) with goods that had been banned by Israel, including solar-powered water pumps, tents, wheelchairs and even spare parts for trucks under “dual-use” restrictions, according to the report.At the Israeli port of Ashdod, WFP officials told the senators that 2,200 shipping containers of food – enough to feed everyone in Gaza for three weeks – sit delayed by screening procedures requiring each pallet to be checked individually.Merkley described the strategy’s two components: “One is to destroy homes so that they cannot be returned to … That second strategy is to deprive Palestinians of essentials to live, food, water, medicine.”Israel replaced the UN’s hundreds of distribution sites with just four aid points for 2 million people, three located only in southern Gaza. The senators heard accounts of malnourished mothers unable to walk miles to distribution sites while carrying children and then lift 40lb food boxes for the return journey. From 22 May to 31 July, 1,373 people were killed in the vicinity of these sites, according to the UN.That Israel and the United States are calling plans for the mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza a “voluntary exodus” is one of the “most fraudulent, sinister, and twisted cover stories ever told”, the report reads.“There is nothing voluntary about wanting to depart when your home is gone, when your agricultural fields are no longer accessible,” Van Hollen said at the press conference.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBoth senators accused the US government of enabling the described ethnic cleansing. “We, the United States, are complicit in all of this,” Van Hollen said. “Because we’re providing taxpayer dollar support to the Netanyahu government to use weapons in Gaza.”Sentiment in Congress with regards to longstanding US support for Israel has been slow moving, but it has been shifting. A recent Senate vote on arms sales to Israel saw 27 Democratic senators – more than half the caucus – oppose weapons transfers.“The same values that made me a champion for Israel compel me to say what they are doing to the Palestinians, both in West Bank and in Gaza, is absolutely wrong,” said Merkley.Both lawmakers called for immediate action to secure a ceasefire, noting that Israeli hostage families had told them Netanyahu “has prioritized his political survival over the survival of our loved ones”.“The world has a moral and legal obligation to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing,” their report concludes. “Strong words alone will not be sufficient. The world must impose penalties and costs on those carrying out this plan.” More

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    Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’

    Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences.If it was current and controversial in US politics, chances are that Kirk was talking about it. On his podcasts, and on the podcasts of friends and adversaries, and especially on college campuses, where he would go to debate students, Kirk spent much of his adult life defending and articulating a worldview aligned with Trump and the Maga movement. Accountable to no one but his audience, he did not shy away in his rhetoric from bigotry, intolerance, exclusion and stereotyping.Here’s Kirk, in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative media.On race
    If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

    If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022

    Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

    If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
    On debate
    We record all of it so that we put [it] on the internet so people can see these ideas collide. When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.
    – Kirk discussing his work in an undated clip that circulated on X after his killing.

    Prove me wrong.
    – Kirk’s challenge to students to publicly debate him during the tour of colleges he was on when he was assassinated.
    On gender, feminism and reproductive rights
    Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
    – Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

    The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.
    – Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024

    We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024
    On gun violence
    I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.
    – Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023
    On immigration
    America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025

    The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

    The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024
    On Islam
    America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April 2025

    We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025
    On religion
    There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022 More

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    The Guardian view on the killing of Charlie Kirk: a perilous moment that may lead to more | Editorial

    “Democracy is the way that we have diverse societies that don’t kill each other, largely,” Lilliana Mason, a leading scholar of partisanship, observed recently. She added: “As soon as we stop believing in it, it disappears.” Dr Mason’s own research suggests that there is sharply rising tolerance of political violence. On Wednesday, it claimed one more victim.The shocking killing of the co-founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk, a hugely influential activist who rallied young people to Donald Trump’s cause and far-right ideology more broadly, has been widely and rightly condemned across the political spectrum. Leading Democrats and progressive activists made clear that such violence must not be tolerated.Before a perpetrator had even been identified, the president, like several other Republicans, blamed “radical left political violence”, claiming that liberal rhetoric against conservatives was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country”. Mr Trump himself faced two attempts on his life last year. He cited other victims, but not the many Democrats who have been targeted, including Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota state representative shot dead at her home alongside her husband, Mark, in June. Meanwhile, some far-right commentators spoke of vengeance.Political violence is hardly a new phenomenon in a country that has seen a civil war, four presidential assassinations, and lynchings. But it is rising again. Ordinary Americans are being radicalised. In such an environment, one thing unites the political poles; any prominent figure is vulnerable, though women and people of colour are particularly targeted. Threats to members of Congress rocketed last year.“Demonising those with whom you disagree” is indeed dangerous, but Mr Trump himself has normalised vicious attacks on opponents. The tolerance of violent action – as with Mr Trump’s blanket pardons for the January 6 rioters – sends a message too. The roots of violent acts are complex, but an environment conducive to political attacks may channel the propensities of potential perpetrators. Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, has warned that US politics may be on the brink “of an extremely violent era … The more public support there is for political violence, the more common it is.” The US addiction to guns drastically increases the impact.Acts of political violence exact an appalling human toll in lives lost and families shattered; Mr Kirk’s death leaves two small children fatherless. But they also – by design – deter other people from political or other civic activity at all levels. The most extreme voices may persist and prevail. Blaming political adversaries before a perpetrator has even been identified risks fuelling anger and attacks, to everyone’s cost. Research by Dr Mason, of Johns Hopkins University, and Nathan Kalmoe, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that a fifth of respondents said political violence could sometimes be justified, but three-fifths thought it could sometimes be justified if the other side committed violence first.Yet other research notes that people appear less willing to condone violence if misperceptions of the other side’s extremism or propensity for force are corrected. In this perilous moment, the response to such hateful crimes should be to coalesce to stress non-violence and civic tolerance. To instead promote division will only increase the threat to politicians and activists of all stripes, and strike another blow to democracy itself.

    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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    Where does the US go after the Charlie Kirk shooting? – podcast

    Archive: ABC News, ABC7, CBC National, CBS News, PBS Newshour, Charlie Kirk, NBC News, Fox News, Turning Point USA, King 5 Seattle
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    Charlie Kirk shooting: another grim milestone in America’s long and increasingly dangerous story of political violence

    Charlie Kirk, figurehead of the American far right, took a question at a 2023 event in Salt Lake City about the second amendment to the US constitution and gun-related deaths. He answered: “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

    Two years later, once again in Utah, Kirk was killed with a gun. His death comes against a backdrop of increased political violence in the US, driven by a new set of political, societal and technological factors, and its future trajectory will determine the health of American democracy.

    Political violence is differentiated from other crimes and it is helpful to have clarity about its particular meaning. It is defined specifically as acts intended to achieve political goals or intimidate opponents through the use of physical force or threats to influence a political outcome or silence dissent. While most of these incidents come from the far right, violence is used by extremists on both sides.

    Over the past decade there has been a dangerous escalation in political violence driven by rage and resentment without clearly defined goals by self-radicalised individuals rather than organised extremist groups. High profile incidents have dominated headlines. These include the insurrection of January 6 2021, the shooting at a baseball practice session of Republican members of Congress in 2018, the plot to kidnap Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, the vicious attack on Paul Pelosi – the husband of the speaker of the House of Representatives – in 2022, the torching of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s family home in April this year. And, of course, the assassination attempts on Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2024.

    Spiral of violence: polarisation has driven people to extreme acts, such as the January 6 2021 Capitol riots.
    AP Photo/John Minchillo, File

    But the threat has spread beyond the very visible faces of US democracy to targets such as judges, election officials, journalists and even private citizens based upon their perceived political affiliation.

    It is shocking yet unsurprising, given the new factors fuelling rage in an already deeply divided society. These can be broadly summarised by three characteristics.

    Hyper-partisanship at boiling point

    The way politics is discussed today shows that division can’t be seen in merely partisan terms. Opponents have become enemies and those with different worldviews have become traitors. In many examples, pundits, politicians and their mouthpieces indulge in dehumanising rhetoric. Research has consistently found that dehumanisation contributes to a more ready justification of violence.

    Indeed, Trump and other high-profile figures have incited violence, even when not actually issuing direct calls to action. This was most notably evident on January 6 2021, when Trump goaded supporters in Washington to march on the Capitol, telling them: “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

    Fight like hell: Donald Trump’s ‘Save America’ rally.

    Digital echo chambers

    These pressure cooker arguments play out on social media and online forums that help spread conspiracy theories, disinformation and violent content. Highly influential creators are able to conjure up “bespoke realities” for their followers, generating huge personal wealth from the fomenting of rage and hate. Citizens are consuming deeply flawed, incendiary political content in isolation. This fuels self-radicalisation when people become detached from reality of the world outside their bubble.

    Indeed, immediately following the Kirk shooting, social media was already awash with disinformation about liberals celebrating his death and the motivations of the killer before the shooter had been found.

    Erosion of trust in democracy

    When faith in government, the justice system, and the electoral process erodes, citizens may come to believe that the established systems are rigged, unresponsive, or illegitimate. This makes traditional avenues for change seem futile. In this environment, violence can be rationalised as the only effective means to “correct” the broken system. The American right has long railed against a corrupt and malevolent “deep state” convincing some citizens that democratic norms no longer apply.

    What next? There are three possible scenarios. The worst case is an escalation of violence in both its frequency and its organisation.

    The far right has been pushing for strict limits on civil liberties, and the most extreme members may use Kirk’s assassination as an excuse for violent retaliation. Widespread civil unrest is a persistent threat, particularly approaching the 2026 midterm elections. Many fear that if Trump’s allies sense they can use escalating disorder to declare an emergency suspension of democratic processes, they will push him to do so.

    More likely, but no less unsettling, is a stagnation in which political violence becomes a normalised feature of American political life without escalating to an existential crisis. This has potentially far-reaching consequences as more moderate politicians on both sides perceive the risks of being in public life to be too high and vacate their offices. This paves the way for more extreme candidates to fill the gaps. With the more moderate voices gone, it’s less likely the conversation will cool down.

    But things could improve. It will require bipartisan condemnation of political violence and a reconnecting of politicians to their constituents. Both sides need to work together to drag a bigger portion of the political debate back into the real world. Meanwhile social media platforms and the legacy media alike must be held accountable for the tenor and veracity of the content they feed to the public.

    And efforts must be made by political elites, the media and the public to rebuild civic trust. As the foundation stone of a healthy democracy, citizens’ trust in their government and in each other must be carefully pieced back together.

    America does not need to accept violence as the norm, in fact, it must collectively and consistently reject it. The future of its democracy may depend on it. More