Officials in Utah announced earlier today that a suspect in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a 22-year-old named Tyler Robinson has been arrested.

There's a great deal of speculation about his motives.

We will try to be responsible here about not overs speculating given the paucity of details so far, but what I can say with certainty is that America has a serious problem with political violence.

The list of its victims or would-be victims, is distressingly long and features figures from both the right and left, from Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and of course the Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, both assassinated in June.

Joining me tonight to discuss the Kirk assassination and its fallout.

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times.

Laura Baron Lopez is a White House correspondent for MSNBC.

Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Um, thank you all for joining me.

Um, pretty bleak week.

Like I said, let's start at the beginning.

Peter, and I want everybody to jump in this.

Let's talk a little bit about Charlie Kirk, who he was, and what role he played in the broader Republican ecosystem and the broader political ecosystem.

Yeah, yeah, so Charlie Kirk was a 31-year-old, we call him influencer I guess these days, provocateur would be another word.

He, uh, out there galvanizing young voters, particularly on the right to support Trump.

He actually was not originally a Trump supporter but became one of his most fer's not unusual.

That's not unusual in modern, modern conservative politics, but age 31, he had become, you know, a pretty significant force in young people's politics, and he became a friend not only of Trump but Donald Trump Jr. JD Vance in particular.

D Vance was so moved by this event that he ripped up his schedule, flew out to uh Utah to personally have the casket brought home on Air Force 2 to Arizona.

So, so even though Charlie Kirk held no office, never ran for office, had no position of power or authority in the traditional sense.

He had obviously a network of people who uh he influenced.

Now, he said a lot of things.

They got a lot of people riled up, right?

And that's part of his, uh, that was part of his, uh, style, about race, about gender, about affirmative action, and and Islam and things like that.

um, but he also enjoyed going to college campuses like the one he was at, even though he knew an audience there might include people who didn't agree with him, and he and he liked to mix it up, uh, and he's, uh, uh, you know, become in this last few days, I think a symbol of the uh of the toxic culture that we're in right now.

Laura, how important was he to the Maga movement.

Oh, he was incredibly important.

I mean, as Peter laid out, the president, the vice president, and a number of people across the White Housere Charlie Kirk for the, the increase that the that Donald Trump got in the 2024 election when it came to young voters and more specifically young men because he was out there engaging them online and in spaces where they felt like they needed to be engaged.

The reason that he is seen as a divisive figures and why the left has had a reaction.

as well in this is because he has been known to make racist statements to say that, you know, if he were to see a black pilot, he wouldn't necessarily trust their ability to fly a plane.

He has also said that it was a mistake to pass the Civil Rights Act and has definitely lobbed a number of attacks on transgender individuals, and so there's a lot across the LGBTQ advocacy space who are opposed to him and I think you're seeing right now in the aftermath of his horrific and tragic killing that there are two things that are happening, which is the, the, the condom rightful condemnation that political violence across the board is wrong, should never happen, but then the administration and the White House and the Republican movement essentially trying to revise a bit of the history of his legacy.

And um that is something that is also being talked about right now.

Tom Z Charlie Kirk to jump onto what Laura is saying a bit provocateur, organizer, activist, troll, how do you understand his role and and the actual things that he said, not the, not the sort of the the version we're getting which is understandable given that he was just assassinated, but, but as Laura says it's a complicated picture with some things that offended a lot of people and some things made a lot of people very happy, but how do you, how do you think about him in this, in the, in the social media landscape, even when he was alive, he was unusual in that he, he said, as, as, you know, Peter and Laura are pointing out some really awful things, but he did it with a certain amount of charm.

He was kind of a happy warrior, uh, which was different, I think, from a lot of the other mega, uh, leaders who came even now, you know, come across sort of angry and sour and combative and um what what Charlie Kirk, I think, kind of patented almost was the ability to do this and seem lik able friendly, open, um, you know, the people that met him, even people that didn't agree with him, said he, you know, he was always polite and so on, you know, he modeled himself early on after Rush Limbaugh, um, but without Limbaugh's hard edges.

I mean, Limbaugh was, you know, caustic, constantly, and I think what, what makes this such an unusual case.

Again, even before his his assassination.

is that Kirk kind of pioneered this um smiling version of MAGA that, you know, you don't really see very often among a lot of MAGA supporters.

Susan, it's fair to say that he was truly committed to free speech, and he wanted to be out there and mix it up in verbally, but only verbally mix it up with liberals, other people who might oppose him.

I mean, he did play a positive role in modeling a kind of open inquiry or is that an unfair, I mean, I think, and that's the way he's being remembered.

That was in fact, you know, a key part of the very I thought moving obit for him that the Vice President JD Vance posted on X the other day.

That's what he said is that he exemplified this essentially constitutional virtue of free expression.

He was on his way to college tour around the country, not just at this university in Utah where this ho rr ific killing took place, but he was headed to other universities where he was going to debate liberal social media influencers, and I think he's being remembered in that way by a portion of both the left and the right, but what's striking to me right now is that you know we're moving very quickly from the phase of who was Charlie Kirk, the uh the man, the political activist, into the phase of canonizing him.

He's going to be sort of the Maga martyr, and he may mean very different things a year from now, 6 months from now, 5 years from now than he does right now, and it's very interesting in that context that while many uh in the left and the right are calling for this as a sort of a wake up call.

Let's, let's, let's talk about the toxicity of our political culture.

Where have you not heard that from, and that is from the White House, which has a very different interpretation I want to come to the White House in a second, and President Trump's partisan response to this, but Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, who's spoken very earnestly and movingly throughout this period, calls it a watershed moment in American history.

It's too early to call it a watershed moment.

Yeah, absolutely.

Uh, you know, what's interesting about Spencer Cox is that he is the definition of a non-Maga Republican at a time when the party has broadly speaking been taken over by Trump and his acolytes, including Charlie Kirk Spencer Cox is out there modeling a very different kind of Republican Party, almost a throwback vision of America.

He he has worked with Democratic governors on a sort of de-polluting our public space.

He gave an almost 10 minute speech when they announced the arrest of the suspect in this case in which he pleaded, palpably pleaded with Americans, especially young Americans.

He said, get off your phones, get off social media.

It's a cancer on our society, and a lot of people are going to agree with that message, but it's not the Republican Party's.

I want you to watch that message from Spencer Cox if, if possible.

It was very, I, I haven't seen many politicians sort of name it.

So, so clearly as Spencer Cox did about social media.

Social media is a cancer on our society right now, and I would encourage, again, I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community.

Is it a watershed moment in terms of people's understanding of what social media can do to the brains of young people.

Again, it's early in our understanding of what motivated the alleged killer, right, but this conversation is moving toward this understanding of the nihilism.

that social media can seem to cause.

If it's a watershed, it may be a watershed proving the point.

I mean, because within minutes, certainly within hours of the reports of Charlie Kirk's death, his his assassination in a public setting.

People were instantaneously going at it on social media instantaneously raising the temperature rather than trying to calm it down, and I think that what we see and have seen so many times before, after acts of political violence, this sense of regret, this sense of, you know, we need to pull it back, this is going too far.

You heard a lot of people say that this week on Democratic and Republican, uh, you know, uh, messaging from, but not in the way that necessarily is going to change things in an enduring way.

We had two assassination attempts against Donald Trump last year.

We've had the assassination of Melissa Hortman.

You mentioned the, the, uh, the Minnesota lawmaker just this year, a Democrat, um, and it didn't change things.

It, it in fact always seemed to be one more step down a path toward dark place we're going right now in America and also the same day there was a shooting at a Colorado high school, and the shooter official said, was motivated and drew inspiration and was radicalized online in these spaces that Spencer Cox is talking about.

So thankfully two of the students that were wounded did not die, but that is something that when I talk to people who've worked in the domestic terrorism space, say that they feel as though the country hasn't fully grasped yet, which is that Charlie Kirk's assassination is not an isolated incident.

Over the past few years, you could probably date it back to even before 2022.

There has been an increase in political, culturally motivated, economically motivated violence in this country, and that it may now just be an enduring period that the country is experiencing.

Well, let me ask Tom this.

We just marked the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and we spent years focused necessarily on online radicalization of Muslim young people, um, are we now experiencing this same phenomenon domestically?

Yes, so we're doing it to ourselves, um, as opposed to foreign agents, I mean, you know, the Russians have been actively trying to get involved in these crises every time they happen, but mostly it's young people doing this to young people.

They're, you know, as opposed to foreign terrorist organizations trying to radicalize young people, and that's the paradox in Governor Cox's admonition because what he's really saying, I think people, you know, in middle wage, get it, right?

Say go outside, touch grass, um, at the very top of the political spectrum, the president and people around him, they're not going to do that.

But he doesn't touch a lot of grass at the very bottom of it, young people, the young influencers, what he's really saying to them, what they're they're going to interpret that as abandon who you are, abandon your identity, abandon the only thing that that is, gives meaning to your life.

They're not going to stop doing that because being online and generating this kind of engage ment is basically what they do, but I have to say though, is this conversation is so interesting to me because we're talking about social media as if it's the weather, which is not, which is we all complain about, but we can't do anything about it, but the social media algorithms are controlled by a small number of people who live in the United States and who make sure that anger is the product that they're pushing out and so we're talking, you know, it's just interesting there's a kind of learned helplessness almost, yes, no, Jeff, I think it's a really important point, but remember it's not just uh in isolation from our politics or from any other aspect in our life.

So it's not as simple as some sort of a technology problem where we can flip a switch because who's running the country right now?

People who have succeeded in a political environment in which hatred and division is a much more successful way to go, and it's not a, you know, I think one of the things that's frustrating, it's very painful, is that we know what is gonna happen in a moment like this.

Politicians instinctively know in a way what they're going to say even before the facts are out.

They understand, well, you know, we've got to put out a statement.

We've got to say it's time to dial down the temperature.

I went back and looked at what did President Biden say in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump's brush with an assassin's bullet in the summer of 2024.

He said it's time to dial down the temperature in American politics.

He said just because we disagree with each other, we're not enemies Those, you know, could have been used exactly in many of the statements this week.

However, you have Trump and a MAGA movement that, uh, you know, some portion of which and certainly the president himself believe that division uh is part of what people are responding to.

They want him to talk about an us and them.

And that's not going to go away.

President Trump understands the power of anger, obviously as a as a coalescing force.

If I could just add one thing that I think is key here is that also in the 1st 6 or 7 months of this administration.

The, the teams in the task forces across the government, including inside the Department of Homeland Security that were designed and built up to prevent acts of domestic violent extremism have been gutted.

They are gone.

The main entity for that at DHS is totally gone, and the former people that work there that I talked to said that the reason that they're so important is because those are the teams that would work with states across the country to try to find off-ramps for young people as they were being radicalized online and that they can catch them before they commit and presumably would work against left-wing variants of as well as acts of political extremism.

Well, let me stay on this.

I want you to listen to President Trump, who talked about um talk about who he sees as as the the the the the blame here, who he's laying blame on.

Let's listen to this.

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.

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.

So there's no doubt that many people on the left have called Charlie Kirk and other people on the right.

parable names, exaggerations.

There's also a level of uh obliviousness.

to what Donald Trump said, because people in his own movement, including and especially him, have also used what you would, what we would think of in older periods of American politics as outrageous language to talk about adversaries on the left that he used the word evil even more this time than he did in his first term.

I did a search of of this in his public statements.

He calls Joe Biden evil.

He refers to his enemies as communists, as traitors, as treasonous.

These are words that of course, you know, inflammatory just as the rhetoric on the left can be inflammatory about conservatives, but in Trump's mind it's all on one side, right?

He wants everybody to think this is just about the left wing, have no uh no conversation about his own rhetoric or the rhetoric of the people who support him.

Right into the memory hole, uh, the president's statement as he gave that statement as if he has never called his opponents vermin.

human scum Um, really, you know, violent, uh, imagery and language, even right after this thing, you know, we have to find these people and uh you know, do them harm basically and and it's, it is remarkable the degree to which the president kind of just waves a hand and says all of those things, that's just political rhetoric.

What the left does is extremely dangerous and evil and and and so on, and I stop him from saying or his people, then you're canceling, right?

That c ens or ship But the other side, and that's where I think we have to wonder whether this marks not just rhetoric from Donald Trump, and those were some striking words he used the other night, but I was really struck by his, uh, vow to go after organizations and groups that were supporting this.

First of all, he talked about the this being the radical left.

That's the term he uses for the Democratic Party, which in, in essence is saying that before we know anything about the suspect, right?

So he's blaming in effect, the Democratic Party for this killing without even having a suspect, but more importantly, it strikes me that Trump and a number of very influential maga figures, uh, have been out there calling for activities to investigate and defund the left to go after their organizations to uh use the government against basically the political opposition in a much more concerted full-throated way and are they going to take the moment of this tragedy and turn that into a government campaign against the political opposition.

That's the implication of what Trump was saying.

We don't know if he'll follow through.

It seems like what we're seeing is the beginning of two streams of, of thought, of Spencer Cox kind of idea, which is everybody needs to calm down, and Donald Trump saying the problem is on the left, and obviously the, the weight in the Republican Party right now is more on the Trump side.

I want to, we could talk about this all night.

There are a couple of quick subjects I want to get to.

One relates to this directly, an intense criticism of Kash Patel.

FBI director.

Um, uh, coming from some unexpected sources, prominent conservative activist Christopher Ruffo said it is time for Republicans to assess whether Cash Patel is the right man to run the FBI.

He performed terribly in the last few days, and it's not clear whether he has the operation expertise to investigate, infiltrate, and disrupt the violent movements of whatever ideology that threatened the peace in the United States.

Is the clock ticking on Kash Patel here?

Ruffo is a serious figure in the conservative movement, and he's not the only one.

He wasn't the only one.

Erick Erickson, a few others have come out and said Fatel has to go.

Now whether that amounts to anything, um, you know, if, if being incompetent and bad at your job, uh mattered that much.

Pete Hegseth would not be the Secretary of whatever we're calling him these days, defense, but war, defense, and Allen, the Secretary of going with defense, but, but you know that that it is interesting that the first calls on this, and I think in part because this was one of their own.

They, they didn't expect a conservative, you know, their guy to screw up the investigation into the into the assassination of one of their people, and I think that actually mattered a lot, but there is again that kind of odd feeling eight months in of who, who could have possibly put this guy in charge.

Well, um, there's um