AUSTIN (KXAN) — Conservative activist, and Turning Point USA founder, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed Wednesday at a college event in Utah. Officials announced Friday morning that a suspect was taken into custody and law enforcement officials say bullet casings found after the shooting had messages scrawled on them.
“This is certainly about the the tragic death, assassination, political assassination of Charlie Kirk,” said Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. “But it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals.”
Cox also specifically addressed young people — calling for them to take a “different path” when it comes to political discourse.
KXAN spoke with Arie Perliger, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Jeremi Suri, a professor of history and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, about the significance of this assassination and how it may shape the temperature of politics moving forward.
The following interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.
Grace Reader: First, with your experience, talk about your initial reaction to this shooting.
Arie Perliger: I think there are at least two things that I thought were interesting about the incident. First of all, is that it was an assassination attempt against an unelected official. In the last few years, most of the assassinations were against elected officials, people that had actual official roles within local government or the federal government. This was basically a symbolic attack against a symbol of a movement, and I think it really reflects how our politics are really shifting from the traditional mainstream spaces of politics into the extra parliamentarian spaces of politics, and how those spaces are becoming much more important. Someone like Charlie Kirk really showed that he was much more influence than most Republican politicians. He really shaped the Republican/conservative discourse. If someone wants, really, to engage in an act of violence that will have a substantial symbolic, psychological impact on the conservative movement, he’s the guy, and not some politician, congressmen and so on.
I also…it’s interesting that it happened on a university campus, and I think it reflects the fact that university campuses are becoming more and more contentious spaces, where we’re seeing much more tendency to engage in, I would argue, contentious behaviors, extremist behaviors, radical behaviors, as well as violence occasionally. And those are not any more spaces for some kind of a nuanced intellectual debate. But really, campuses are becoming basically the hotspot of the political discourse, or this cultural clash that we see in the United States. And you know, of course, it started with the Gaza war and how, basically, almost the entire discourse focused on university campuses, but now we see that it really expanding into other political, cultural issues.
Jeremi Suri: I’m very concerned about the rise in violence, political violence in particular in American society. As a historian I’ll say that political violence is something that’s been with us throughout our history and it waxes and wanes at different moments and we’re in one of those moments now where we’re seeing more political violence than we’ve seen before and we’re seeing it targeted at all different kinds of victims including people who are social media influencers, elected officials and various others and I’m concerned about what that means for our democracy.
Reader: You (Perliger) also look at extremism and social media. Can you talk about the role that social media may play here?
Perliger: I think there’s at least three levels in which social media amplify and enhance the political polarization that we see. First of all, it enhanced the tendency to portray political rivals in very extreme terms, to demonize, to delegitimize, to, really, I would argue, undermine any efforts to engage in actual conversation or collaboration, or any kind of bipartisanship policies with the other side.
A second element is this process of dehumanization of political rivals and the engagement in rhetoric that really portray political rivals as an existential threat to the nation, to our society, to our country, to our democracy.
And this is related to another aspect of social media. Almost every issue on social media becomes a catastrophic issue, an existential threat. It’s a zero sum game. Almost every policy is the end of democracy on one hand, or a the end of the Second Amendment on the other end, right? So both sides see almost every policy promoted by the other side as some kind of a of an existential threat that means the end, the end of the country. And I think that leads, of course, extremists to become more and more emboldened and feel that they must do something, even if it’s a very extreme radical something, in order to prevent those kind of policies.
Reader: Are you concerned that this may inspire copycats moving forward?
Suri: Historically we’ve seen that acts of violence often trigger copy cats, they often trigger individuals to either react against or in favor of what they’ve seen — so we have to be concerned, as I’m sure law enforcement is. But I think the real question is what we are going to do, what we are going to say, how are we going to discourage repeat acts like this? Simply doing what we did before. Saying how horrible this was, which it was, but then not taking any action to change things will leave us in the same place we’ve been in for a while so the onus is on us as educators, as citizens, as leaders to de emphasis violence and hatred, discourage these actions and to encourage a much more open and collegial environment for people. We have to work hard at that.
Perliger: We already see on social media, on accounts, calls for basically retaliation. And I think that this is something which is extremely concerning, because usually we do see some connection between heightened discourse and increase in hate crimes, in violent crimes and so on.
I would also argue that from my research on political assassinations, one of the things that characterize political assassination is that they come in waves. In most democracies that experience political assassinations, usually it doesn’t end with one political assassination, usually there’s some kind of a contingency effect and reflect that both sides are losing trust in civil political discourse, and the extremists on both sides believe that, okay, we are now moved to a different phase of politics where violence is becoming legitimate. And we also see that with the fact that we see that latest polls show something between 20% and 30% of a progressives and conservatives justify the use of political violence under some conditions, something that we haven’t seen in the past.
Reader: How then do leaders and folks who are on social media…what kind of rhetoric is needed to tone this down and make it so that’s not the case?
Perliger: First of all, I think that it’s really important to engage in constructive discourse. I think that the most important thing is politicians, leaders, public leaders need to understand that words have meaning and have influence, and their constituencies are very sensitive to the signals they’re saying. And I truly believe that the best way to do that is by demonstrative behaviors, and I think it would be great if we incentivized politicians who are willing to work across the aisle, are willing to work with political rivals in order to promote pragmatic, constructive policies. This is something that we don’t see anymore in our politics, and the signal that sends to the public is that there’s nothing to discuss, there’s nothing to collaborate, there’s no reason to work with the other side. And I think if we start to promote policies where both sides are actually invested, have an agency, I think that will convince the public that the political system is not completely dysfunctional, that there’s actually a way to work through the legitimate political system, and hopefully that will marginalize and will isolate extremists on both sides. I think that both parties should support and incentivize their leaders who are willing to engage in actual policy making, rather than endless political rhetoric that doesn’t really help to reduce the level of polarization.
Reader: This happened on a college campus, you obviously work at a college campus and know that space well, can you talk about what that means?
Suri: One of the things that shakes me the most about this is the violence on college campuses. College campuses need to be places where people can learn, where they can exchange ideas. And they’ve become so politicized in the last few years that the violence of our politics outside of campus has come to campus and that’s something that we really have to resist. If we don’t have safe places on campus for people to talk and exchange ideas, it’s very hard for us to do the educational and intellectual work that we do.
Reader: Is there anything else you would like people to know?
Perliger: I would call to people, just to take a step back, to breathe and to think about what is their impact on the political discourse. We’ve seen a lot of people, I think, putting on social media, language and words that I don’t think are helpful, including academics, including educators, including public leaders. I think it’s really important to take responsibility and to understand what are the long term impacts of our of our language. In my interviews, that’s something that I’m trying to do, just provide a perspective that help us understand how we can really restore more civil political discourse.
Suri: I think it’s very important for people to understand that most citizens, and most students certainly, are not on one side or the other. They’re struggling to figure things out. And I think I see a lot of confusion now, I see a lot of fear. And I think it’s our job as leaders, as citizens, as educators to encourage people to think and speak freely, to provide space for that and to allow people to take their confusion and use that as a learning opportunity, to understand the issues more. I want people to study the history more and I want them to use that history to better inform their political opinions. I am confident that better informed opinions will be less extreme.
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