Image: Utah Governor Spencer Cox

What metaphor aptly describes the Dis-united States of America at this point in its nearly 250-year history? Every month, every week, practically every day is seemingly a new twist, a new convulsion, the latest mass murder, in our tragic fall from historical grace. It calls to mind what Benjamin Franklin warned when he emerged from the final day of the Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787, and was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” He replied, “A republic. If you can keep it.”

Prior to the rise of Donald J. Trump, few would have imagined that we might not be able to keep this representative democracy. But suddenly here we are, and – anything goes.

How many of the January 6 thousands pardoned by Trump or their like-minded allies are ready to be Sturmabteilung Brownshirts – shock troops ready to intimidate political opponents and carry out violence on command? Trump already has roaming federalized troops conducting domestic raids in a number of cities. They started out by targeting “untouchables” of this era: immigrants who committed crimes. But it didn’t take the White House long to start sweeping up others, including U.S. citizens and essential workers.

In 1933, seizing on the mysterious burning of the Reichstag as an opportunity to essentially outlaw their political opponents, Hitler and his Nazis and began the implementation of their master plan. In similar fashion, Trump and his top advisers capitalized on Charlie Kirk’s murder on September 10 to level unsubstantiated claims against his political opponents. They threatened to unleash the full power of the federal government to harshly punish what they alleged, without evidence, is a vast leftist network that funds and incites violence against conservatives.

Debater and flame-thrower

Charlie Kirk frequently hosted free and open public debates on college campuses. He was like a patriarchal Christian version of Socrates, cross-examining whoever would dare step into the hot seat. A sharp and practised orator, he mastered the art of the “what about?” retort, turning questions back on those who challenged him. Something about Kirk’s strategies and methods undeniably worked. Over a 10-year period, his personal brand of populism began to chip away at the solid “youth vote” for Democrats on U.S. campuses. Finally, in the 2024 election, his efforts achieved a stunning result: a 10-point jump (from 36 per cent in 2020 to 46 per cent in 2024) in support for Donald Trump among young people. That shift alone likely cost Kamala Harris the election in key battleground states.

Kirk aimed his arrows at exposing what he viewed as liberal bias at universities. In 2016, his Turning Point USA organization pioneered a Professor Watchlist: students reported on and videotaped their professors, and Kirk would “out” targeted professors on social media and in his podcast. Once added to the list, many of the professors were harassed online, and sometimes it escalated to death threats. Following concerted campaigns to pressure the universities, a number of professors were fired.

With more than 300 professor names now on the list, the Professor Watchlist was an inspiration for today’s intensified attempts by the Trump administration and other GOP governments to chill classroom free speech by intimidating professors, teachers and students over what they say in class. It has also been a precursor to Trump’s – often illegal – attempts to pressure and fire any undeferential administrators previously appointed to congressionally mandated independent federal agencies, such as the Federal Reserve Board, the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Trade Commission.

But strategy and performance aside, what did Charlie Kirk actually say? What did he believe? That’s where things get more problematic. His flame-throwing espousal of patriarchal Christianity and the gender and racial politics associated with that worldview certainly did not mean he deserved his horrific fate. Nonetheless, Kirk’s “turn back the clock” diatribes – substantially based on biological determinism and rigid gender-based beliefs – made him one of the nation’s leading advocates for White men, Christianity and a return to a bygone era of women’s role in the family and society, and a leading opponent of reproductive rights. Even more alarming, millions of fellow Americans, including many among the young, apparently agreed, at least to some degree, with his revanchism.

Left, right or mentally ill?

During this time that is trying men and women’s souls, where do we find points of light amidst the madness? Certainly not from the President, who in one breath could call for unity and in the very next place blame for Kirk’s killing on the “radical left” before he knew anything about the murderer. He then upped the ante on Fox News, calling on prosecutors from his weaponized Department of Justice to file racketeering charges against George Soros, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, claiming without evidence that the 95-year-old Soros is fomenting violent protests.

Nor did Trump mention the easily provable truth that the young White man who came within an ear’s length of ending Trump’s life in July 2024 was a registered Republican, or that a long list of perpetrators of violent acts – the Colorado high school shooter who went berserk on the same day as the Kirk murder; the Jacksonville Dollar General shooter; the Allen, Texas, outlet mall shooter; the Buffalo supermarket shooter; the boogaloo attackers who killed two security officers in California; the El Paso Walmart shooter; Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston; the 13 men arrested in 2020 for plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan – all espoused some variation of neo-Nazi, racist, antisemitic, White supremacist or antigovernment far-right nationalism that has, shockingly, become all too familiar.

These right-wing extremists and their murderous activities are invisible to Trump. Who knows, maybe he’s planning to pardon them.

Over the past decade, right-wing extremists have killed many more people than left-wing extremists, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Of 429 deaths from 2015 through 2024, right-wing extremists accounted for 76 per cent, while left-wing extremists accounted for only 4 per cent. Most of the rest (18 per cent) were perpetrated by domestic Islamist extremists. (By September of this year, the table had tilted a bit, with 21 plots and attacks targeting Republican lawmakers and 10 targeting Democrats.)

Indeed, this “right-wing vs. left-wing fanatic shooter” analysis is not the full story. Look at the shocking attack on schoolchildren at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis in August. The killer posted two YouTube videos which showed scrawl on the guns including racist phrases. Maybe a Donald Trump supporter? He also spewed “Kill Donald Trump” – as well as antisemitic messages like “6 million wasn’t enough,” plus anti-Catholic messages and the names of several mass shooters. There were references to suicide as well. The lunatic spread his hatred in all directions, like a mass killer strafing the room, targeting everyone.

Or how about the attempted assassination last April of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Jewish Democrat, by burning down his governor’s residence while he and his family slept inside? The would-be assassin tried to convince his family members to vote for pro-Israeli Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, yet in a 911 call criticized Shapiro as anti-Palestinian, saying that he “will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.”

Then there’s Luigi Mangione, apparent killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson – must be a leftist? But his social media posts showed scepticism toward both Trump and Biden and support for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

As much as some on the different sides, right and left, want to blame each other for these killers, it seems more likely that many of these murderers, whatever their political leanings, hail from the sad and tragic fringes of mental illness and psychosis. What is obvious, though the established media seem to be uncomfortable pointing it out, is that most of these crazy perps – including the guy who shot Kirk – are youngish White men from Christian backgrounds, not Blacks, immigrants or any of the other Trump-targeted demographics.

According to the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, in the first six months of 2025 more than 520 plots and acts of terrorism and targeted violence have occurred, affecting nearly all U.S. states and causing 96 deaths and 329 injuries. This is a nearly 40 per cent increase over the first six months of 2024. Mass casualty attacks, where four or more victims were killed or wounded, increased by 187.5 per cent in the same time frame.

Following Kirk’s murder, prominent politicians cancelled events over safety concerns, and historically Black colleges and universities had to lock down their campuses in reaction to threats. Instead of a moment for reflection, balance and recalibration, Donald Trump doubled down on blame, accusations and threats against perceived opponents.

More dangerous than the 1960s

It appears that this era is shaping into one like the 1960s, when assassins killed John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcom X and other civil rights workers within a few short years, amidst a time of massive social change and backlash. Two key differences make this era arguably even more dangerous: digital media platforms, first and foremost, and widespread availability of more lethal weapons.

The fragmented ecosystems for the “social” media have unleashed a firehose of sensationalized misinformation and conspiracies that are meant to provoke in us a sense of righteous anger toward some other “tribe,” an ecosystem in which a Donald Trump and a Charlie Kirk have thrived.

Online networks such as private, encryption-protected Facebook Groups create the digital hideouts for extremists looking to find one another. Launched in 2010, Facebook Groups can be walled off as “private” – secured as “hidden” or secret and accessible only to admitted members, who must invite new members. As an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project has found, the violent antigovernment movement has used hundreds of Facebook Groups, under an array of code names, where followers have circulated links to manuals on bomb construction, kidnapping, making flash stun grenades, snipers and murder. Some of these groups have had thousands of members.

Other secret meetups on the internet can be found on platforms like subreddits, Parler, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp and chat rooms on 8kun. The notorious digital platform 4chan – a hideout for hackers, hate purveyors, child pornographers, murderers, and other digital misfits – features anonymous, anything-goes forums. What the internet has facilitated, according to Stanford law professor Nathaniel Persily, is the creation of hidden online lairs in which extremists of all stripes, unconstrained by real-world geography, can make common cause with “people they would not find in their neighborhood or in face-to-face forums.”

Extremists’ use of digital media drastically reduces the costs of organizing with like-minded but geographically dispersed compatriots. It allows such individuals to find one another more easily and to organize and learn from one another. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, two Muslim brothers, used digital platforms to easily find sources of radicalization and an article by Al Qaeda titled “How to Build a Bomb in Your Mom’s Kitchen.”

This capacity of digital platforms is powerful and dangerous. And it is being increasingly used by toxic political actors to foment everything from spoiled elections to genocide. Members of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar were brutally massacred at the behest of a Buddhist leader and his fanatical followers using Facebook and other digital media to whip up anti-Rohingya hysteria. Pro-democracy activists in the Philippines were harassed and murdered by a Trump-like quasi-dictator, Rodrigo Duterte, who used Facebook not only to get elected president in 2016 but also to foment violent paramilitary attacks against his opponents. In addition, he used YouTube and X to spread “deepfake” videos of political opponents. In the United States, supercharged leaders with huge numbers of followers, starting with Trump and Charlie Kirk, have deployed these unprecedented “tools of virality.”

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube and other companies have been let off the hook for the way they have created dangerous technologies that frictionlessly network together the most extreme elements of our societies. Indeed, those companies are getting rich off of these technologies, even as their products and services are having a disproportionate impact on our political discourse and electoral outcomes. Combined with the widespread availability of lethal weapons, this makes this era more dangerous than the 1960s.

A point of light emerges

Beyond the issues that separate them, both partisan sides need to be willing to tamp down the volatility and escalation, which necessitates new Republican leadership. Into the current void has stepped Utah’s GOP governor Spencer Cox with a common sense message. Following the assassination of Kirk in his state, Governor Cox was a frequent media spokesperson for Utah as it struggled to cope with the tragedy.

To a nationwide audience he said, “I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community … At some point we have to find an off-ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.” The attack against Charlie Kirk, he said, is “much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of us … on our ideals.”

Governor Cox previously had tried to make cross-aisle collaboration and depolarization a central theme of his administration. He has tried to combat polarization and issues over teenage social media use in favour of civil discourse through his “Disagree Better” campaign, partnering with Democratic Governor Jared Polis of Colorado and other governors to show what “disagreeing better” looks like. Calling digital media a “cancer on our society,” Governor Cox addressed young people, saying,

To my young friends out there…politics feels like … rage is the only option. But …through those words we have a reminder that we can choose a different path. Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now. Not by pretending that differences don’t matter, but by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations.

Governor Cox is one of the nation’s moral leaders now, stepping up and assuming the chair of responsibility and leadership that has been vacated by this Trump White House.

Steven Hill is chief editor of the DemocracySOS newsletter on Substack. DemocracySOS is a reader-supported digital portal for the pro-democracy movement. This article was adapted by Henry Milner from two issues of DemocracySOS: “With Charlie Kirk’s Murder, the US Descends Further into Winner-Take-All Mayhem,” September 16, 2025, and “Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump and the Backlash Against Women’s Rise,” September 26, 2025. Subscribe to DemocracySOS for $5 (USD) per month to receive full benefits and to support its work.