The murder of Charlie Kirk, a prominent conservative activist, has given alarms about the scourge of political violence in the United States, increasing anxieties on the safety of public figures on both sides of the ideological spectrum.
Kirk’s murder was the last of a series of attacks and threats aimed at a variety of US political figures, from President Donald Trump and members of Congress to governors and judges. Kirk was not an elected official, although he had an influence as the founder of the Turning Point USA Conservative Defense Group and was a nearby Allied Allied Trump Administration.
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“It was not, in any way, surprised” by Kirk’s murder, said Michael Jensen, a researcher at the University of Maryland that tracks that violence into a domestic terrorism database. Jensen said he has seen an increase in attacks aimed at what he characterizes as “government entities”: legislators and candidates, as well as officers who carry out immigration application actions.
“You can’t simply say that it comes from the left, it comes from the right [or] It comes from the strip. It comes from everywhere, ”said Jensen.
American politics has been persecuted by political violence. In the 1960s, for example, one of the most socially turbulent decades in the modern history of the United States, the murderers fired President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and the leader of Civil Rights Medgar Evers. In the decades that followed, President Gerald Ford and President Ronald Reagan survived the attempts of their lives captured by television cameras.
But modern American life includes an accelerator that did not exist in those previous times: social networks and the ability of the average person to easily transmit extreme views to large audiences worldwide. It is a technological change that has led to a more intense polarization, stripping the public discourse of context and nuances. As a result, many politicians have also adopted these methods.
2010 NBC survey data show that 50% of Republicans at that time saw the “very” Democratic Party, while 40% of the Democrats see negatively the “very” Republican Party. A NBC news survey in March 2025 showed how both figures had increased in the last 15 years, with 69% of Democrats watching the Republican party very negatively and 70% of Republicans say they had very negative opinions about the Democratic Party.
Jensen, the University of Maryland’s researcher, said the contemporary political environment, defined in part by “hyperpartidism” and misinformation, leads to conditions that are “potentially primary for violence.”
“What is important to understand is that all this is happening in an information environment in which the strongest and most vitriolic voices obtain the biggest audience,” said Jensen.
Only in the last five years, the country has seen a touch of constant violence.
Kirk’s shooting at Utah Valley University occurred almost three months after an armed man killed the former president of the Chamber of Minnesota, Melissa Hortman and her husband, and injured state senator John Hoffman and his wife. Two months before, the residence of the Governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, was burned by a man who suggested that he was upset by the position of the governor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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In the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump survived little shooting during a demonstration in Butler, Pennsylvania. Two months later, he was saved by secret service agents who fired an armed man who has just waited for Trump in his golf course in Florida.
In the autumn of 2022, a man broke into the house of the former president of Casa Nancy Pelosi in an effort to kidnap her and then assault her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer. The previous year, on January 6, a violent mafia broke into the United States Capitol in an attempt to revoke the results of the presidential elections of 2020, and pipe bombs were found at the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican Party.
In recent years, officials responsible for enforcing the law have also prevented attempts to damage political figures. The authorities arrested and accused a man of California in the murder attempt of the Judge of the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court in 2022. Two years before, the FBI agents frustrated a plot to kidnap Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer.
Meanwhile, democratic and republican officials have described the growing harassment and threats. More than half a dozen potential contenders in the 2028 presidential contest have personally experienced political violence or they have found being managed by the response to such acts, including Shapiro, Whitmer, the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, and the Secretary of State Framework Rubio.
Last year, more than 9,400 direct threats and statements about the members of the Congress, their families and the staff, and the Capitol complex, according to the United States Capitol Police. That is more than double the number in 2017, according to data. At the end of this calendar year, the United States Capitol Police said it is on the way to work through 14,000 cases of threat evaluation involving legislators.
The serious threats against federal judges doubled from fiscal year 2021 to 2023, rising to 457 from 2024, according to data from the US Sheriff Service.
Kirk’s murderer remained in Thursday. The identity and motivation of the shooter were unknown. Kirk went to a multitude of hundreds at the University of Utah Valley in an outdoor amphitheater.
In an interview, a former official of the Senior Department of Justice said it was too early to know if Kirk’s murder could lead to a greater spiral of political violence.
“I am worried about violence but I have no information,” said the former official of the Department of Justice. “Tell me who did it. Tell me his reason.”
Glenn Gerstell, former general advisor of the National Security Agency, who has written extensively about online misinformation, said that society should also worry about how to recover from political violence.
“We have many times in our history where we have had terrible and terrible divisions, one led to civil war,” he said. “I think there is a lot of resilience in the American character. Most people don’t like insults. I think it’s not us.”
But Gerstell said he fears that the theories of misinformation and conspiracy that abound in social networks platforms will make it difficult for Americans to unify now that in previous times.
“I think we can only return partially due to the arrival of social networks, which exacerbates hatred and division,” Gerstell said. “Stokes Division. He not only encourages him, but he holds it.”
