Charlie Kirk’s killing came amid a rise in political violence in the US, the kind now so frequent that it moves swiftly out of news cycles it would once have dominated.
The list is long and growing. From the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump during his campaign last year to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home burnt in an arson attack in April and the Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband gunned down by a man dressed as a police officer in June, to name a few.
In the first six months of 2025, more than 520 plots and acts of terrorism and targeted violence occurred, affecting nearly all US states and causing 96 deaths and 329 injuries. This is a nearly 40% increase over the first six months of 2024, according to data from the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.
Mass casualty attacks, where four or more victims were killed or wounded, increased by 187.5% in the first six months of 2025 compared with the same period last year. Michael Jensen, the research director at START, wrote on LinkedIn in late August that “the warning signs of growing civil unrest in the US are evident” in the group’s data.
The killing of a high-profile Trump ally at a public event on a Utah college campus this week could serve as a turning point for political violence – but it’s not clear in which direction. As the right declared war on the left following Kirk’s murder, prominent politicians canceled events over safety concerns and historically Black colleges went on lockdown over threats.
“I absolutely believe this is a watershed in American history,” said Spencer Cox, Utah’s Republican governor, at a press conference on Friday. “The question is, what kind of watershed? That chapter remains to be written. Is this the end of a dark chapter in our history or the beginning of a darker chapter in our history?”
Those who study political violence say the current moment looks similar to the US in the 1960s, when assassins killed John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr amid a time of massive social change and backlash. But two key differencesmake this era more dangerous: social media and widespread availability of very lethal weapons, said Amy Pate, the acting director and executive director at START.
Increased adoption of conspiracy theories and online networks where those theories thrive mean that radicalization is “speeding up”, giving people less time to intervene when someone is on the path toward violence, she said.
The roots of political violence
A host of factors play into the rise of political violence, and the public’s support for said violence, which has been increasing in surveys over the past year.
People are dissatisfied with the government, the two major political parties and their ability to actually make change. There’s also a loss of trust in institutions, said Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism. Of the terrorist incidents in the first half of 2025, 35% were directed at government targets, up from 15% in the first half of 2024, START’s data shows.
Media ecosystems are fragmented, and social media algorithms prioritize polarization.Prominent voices can attract people by creating black and white scenarios, said William Braniff, the executive director at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) in the school of public affairs at American University
“We’re constantly being fed a stream of information that’s meant to make us feel righteous anger, and especially at someone else, at some other community,” Braniff said.
The plots and attacks categorized as terrorism this year fell across ideologies: 32 had some nexus to antisemitism; 20 targeted entities carrying out immigration enforcement; 13 targeted peaceful protests of the administration; 22 targeted the LGBTQ+ community; seven targeted Muslims; and six targeted people believed to be immigrants. Of those targeting lawmakers, 21 plots and attacks targeted Republicans, and 10 targeted Democrats.
If you zoom out over time, political violence is more commonly done by the far right, Baumgartner said, but today’s violent actors are “much more ideologically diffuse, and they don’t strictly adhere to a single ideology”.
“People don’t start their journey as a violent extremist expert on a given ideology,” Braniff said. “There are underlying risk factors in their lives. Those risk factors go unaddressed. … Ideology is often a lagging indicator for someone who’s gravitating towards violence.”
How politicians of all political backgrounds respond to incidents of political violence, no matter the motive, can help cool the rhetoric or inflame it.
Condemning the violence is helpful, Pate said, but the context of those condemnations matters. “Do you take this as a moment to point out and decry the degree of polarization within the country, or do you condemn it as a way to benefit from that polarization?” she said.
The motives of the shooter are still being parsed after he was captured on Friday. Authorities said he had written on gun casings phrases common to online gaming communities. Regardless of his political aims, and before a shooter was publicly identified, prominent voices on the right declared war, and Trump vowed to go after the “radical left”.
On Friday, on a Fox program, Trump was asked how to fix the country, given there were radicals on the right as well.
“I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble but I couldn’t care less,” Trump said. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. … The radicals on the left are the problem. And they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”
Calls on the right for war, revenge or retribution could lead to more violence, Baumgartner said. “All it takes is somebody with a grievance and a gun or a grievance and access to some sort of weapon, and you have a recipe for more violence. It doesn’t take an army to inflict violence on people,” he said.
Prevention programs could help
Shannon Watson, founder and executive director at Minnesota nonprofit Majority in the Middle, works to promote civility in politics. She said despite a broad amount of ideological diversity in the two major political parties, people tend to associate the other side with its worst actors. “We don’t compare our best to their best. We compare our best to their worst,” she said.
For those who are really politically active, it can be harder to get out of the mindset that their side is morally right and the other is morally wrong, Watson said. When she’s talking to people about polarization, she rarely tries to get them to challenge their assumptions and instead spends more time encouraging people to create relationships that don’t have anything to do with politics.
“Once you see somebody is multifaceted and less of a caricature, it’s easier to get along, it’s easier to try to work through some of the differences, as opposed to just dismissing the person,” she said. “It’s really hard to hate up close.”
Braniff, of PERIL, led the federal government’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships until March, when he resigned in protest over staff cuts. Grant programs to local jurisdictions across the country have been cut, he said, and the federal government is no longer investing in prevention programs that could head off acts of terrorism and targeted violence.
Prevention programs can assess risk factors – a breakup, a termination, unaddressed trauma, access to harmful online social networks, access to weapons – and seek to intervene. Pate advocates for a public health approach to the crisis that provides people who are vulnerable with off-ramps to prevent violence, which can include counseling services or treatment for substance abuse.
Researchers that tracked some of these online networks have been targeted by Republicans, who have claimed their work runs counter to free speech. Resources that focused on this tracking have been diverted to other places, Pate said.
“When these attacks happen, part of me always wonders, is that because the intelligence analyst was tasked or moved to a different priority, and so they didn’t see maybe some chatter that this was about to happen,” she said.
It is not inevitable that there will continue to be more violence, Braniff said. The country has reversed tides on other public harms by investing in prevention like seatbelts or fire alarms.
“It’s only inevitable if we do nothing about it, which is what we’re currently doing at the federal level,” he said. “But if we do nothing about it, yes, the frequency and severity of violence will likely increase.”
Source link