"Treading Upon a Volcano"

Thoughts on political violence, the danger of jumping to conclusions, and prospects for healing a divided nation

(Image via Shutterstock)

I had another piece ready to post here two days ago, one about travel that had nothing to do with politics. But then the news of the day intervened. I will eventually put up that post, but I just couldn’t do it in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder. I felt a need to write about the political situation in America, a chasm of division that now seems to be infecting all of our lives.

Let’s start by saying that I’m dismayed by, well, everything.

By the tragedy and idiocy of any sort of violence, never mind violence in which someone is shot for expressing political beliefs.

By the response to the shooting, particularly from those who jumped to conclusions before knowing all the evidence and whose first thought was to call for war against their political opponents.

By the growing sense that our country is fractured in a way it hasn’t been for more than a century and a half. And seemingly without a leader able to lead us out of the rage-filled abyss into which our politics has fallen.

And by the personal tragedies unfolding with the headlines. Charlie Kirk lost his life. His wife and two young children lost a husband and a father. And a mom and dad in Utah lost their son, possibly to the death penalty. I disagree with much of Kirk’s politics, but I’m also distraught over the shooting and heartbroken by the human tragedy of it all.

Anyway, here are a few thoughts on politics and violence in America, on the danger of jumping to conclusions, and on prospects for healing our divisions.

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1. “Treading Upon a Volcano”

In 1856, the United States was riven by fierce disagreements. The Whig Party had disintegrated, Democrats were split between northern and southern factions, legislators in Congress were at each other’s throats, and pro- and anti-slavery settlers in Kansas were being murdered in their homes.

Amidst this turmoil, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina became enraged over an antislavery speech given by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. So, on May 22, he walked into the Senate chamber and clubbed Sumner repeatedly over the head with a metal-tipped cane. The Massachusetts Senator was beaten unconscious and nearly to death. The head trauma he suffered kept him out of the Senate for three years. Brooks, meanwhile, resigned his House seat because of the controversy but then in a special election was overwhelmingly re-elected by local constituents who saw him as a hero for thrashing a hated northerner.

In the aftermath of this incident, as hostility and divisions raged across the country, it was former Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri who remarked: “We are treading upon a volcano.”

That volcano, of course, soon led to a bloody civil war.

This bit of history came to mind as I grappled with the news of the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

I know, of course, that Senators aren’t being beaten nearly to death in Congress these days, and that the states aren’t likely to end up in an actual civil war. But that doesn’t mean the temperature isn’t running as hot now as it was in the 1850s. Nor does it mean that some Americans aren’t thinking along the lines of civil war.

• “Charlie Kirk getting shot is the shot heard around the country. I’m ready for civil war.” - a right-wing influencer with more than 35,000 followers on social media

• “I hope that every ‘moderate’ Republican has now become radicalized and is ready to do everything they can do to utterly ensure the Democrat Party, a Satanic death cult, is eradicated from power.” - Joey Mannarino, a conservative political strategist and commentator

• “The Left is the party of murder.” - Elon Musk

• “The left and their policies are leading America into a civil war … I will not allow these leftist scumbags to take my country.” - GOP Congressman Derrick Van Orden

And the president?

• “We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”

Yes, the president of the United States suggested to his followers, some of whom are already calling for civil war, that they need to start beating the hell out of the political opposition.

If that isn’t the definition of “treading upon a volcano,” I don’t know what is.

2. Why are we jumping to conclusions before there is evidence?

There was a time, not that long ago, when assassinations or assaults on democracy would have brought the country together in shared mourning, or a shared determination to overcome the attack. But these days so many people have been conditioned to assume the very worst about anyone with a different political belief that they’re seemingly ready to take up arms.

Even if what they’ve been led to believe may not be true. Because all we know about the individual who allegedly shot Charlie Kirk is that we don’t know anything definitive at all.

1. Robinson was a gun enthusiast, lived in a conservative corner of Utah, and came from a family of Republicans and self-described fans of Trump and the MAGA movement. He even once dressed up as Trump for Halloween.

2. Robinson had expressed more recently to some friends and family members his dislike of Kirk and Trump. There were new reports out yesterday that he had a roommate who was transgender. This information, combined with anti-fascist messages on bullets in Robinson’s gun, has been interpreted to suggest he was “infected with leftist ideology.”

3. People who know a lot more about online culture than I do have reported that the messages on Robinson’s bullets are also all associated with popular online memes or video games. And that these memes and messages may be linked to Groypers, or white supremacist followers of “America First” podcaster Nick Fuentes.

Fuentes and his alt-right followers have long been critical of Kirk for not being conservative enough. They’ve even engaged in so-called Groyper Wars in which they’ve disrupted events put on by Kirk and other conservative organizations whom they believe are not adequately “pro white.” And the song Bella Ciao (which is referenced on a bullet found at the shooting) is not simply an antifascist song, as has frequently been reported, but also one that was appropriated by Groypers and included in a playlist titled Groyper Wars (America First). Which means that Robinson’s dislike of Kirk might have come not from the left but rather from extreme rightwing beliefs.

4. Robinson hadn’t voted in the past few elections, was registered as unaffiliated with either party, and was said until very recently to have rarely discussed politics. Which seems to mark him as fairly apolitical. He was also known to be a bit of a loner who spent a lot of time online. Some reporting has speculated that Robinson was connected to online groups that aren’t politically partisan but which encourage their members to commit shootings and other such crimes for the sole purpose of stirring chaos or going viral themselves.

As The Atlantic said in a recent piece: “The Mass Shooters Are Performing for One Another.” Dave Cullen, author of the book Columbine, put it this way: “As you read this, a distraught, lonely kid somewhere is contemplating an attack—and the one community they trust is screaming, Do it!”

I can take these four points and construct any argument you’d like. Or you can take this information and have it support any of your preconceived political beliefs.

• Was Robinson a black sheep in a MAGA family and an ideological leftist who disliked Kirk for his demonization of the trans community?

• Was he a Groyper and a white nationalist who was mad at Kirk for not being extreme enough in his America First beliefs?

• Was he an apolitical loner who spent too much time online, like so many other perpetrators of mass shootings, and who wanted to stir chaos or go viral?

Maybe, maybe, and maybe.

Anything seems plausible. I don’t know the answer, and neither do you. The truth will almost surely come out in time but, with what we know at the moment, it’s impossible to discern the alleged shooter’s beliefs or motives. Nevertheless, this lack of definitive evidence hasn’t stopped some from calling for civil war or for the destruction of the Democratic Party.

You’d think by now that people would realize the danger of jumping to conclusions.

• The left was likewise immediately blamed for the assassination attempt on President Trump last year. And then the shooter turned out to be a mentally unstable 20-year-old who came from a conservative family and who had searched online for information on upcoming events featuring both Trump and Joe Biden. Trump just happened to have a rally scheduled near the young man’s home.

• Or, consider the unrest that broke out in major cities during the 2020 George Floyd protests. The right never tires of bringing up these protests, particularly the fire set to a police precinct in Minneapolis, without mentioning (or maybe without even knowing, depending on which information bubble they live in) that among those arrested for arson, for firing shots into a police station, and for causing property damage were rightwing extremists who’d gone to the protests with the specific intent of stirring up trouble and raising tensions.

One would also think there’d be an appreciation by now for how political violence is affecting both major political parties. This is very obviously not one side attacking the other.

Yes, President Trump was the victim of an assassination attempt by a troubled young man with no discernible political motive.

Yes, Republican Congressman Steve Scalise was seriously wounded when a leftwing activist eight years ago opened fire on a Republican congressional baseball team.

And yes, the CEO of United HealthCare was murdered by a young man upset over the health care system and what he believed to be corporate greed.

But also, three months ago a conservative extremist murdered Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home, shot Democratic State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, and had in his car a list of planned attacks on other Democratic targets.

We’ve also seen:

• An arson attack on the Pennsylvania governor's residence while Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family were asleep.

• A plot by rightwing extremists to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (Trump is now considering pardoning the men convicted of the kidnapping plot).

• An intruder breaking into Nancy Pelosi’s home looking for her, and then attacking her husband Paul with a hammer, fracturing his skull (an attack that Trump and his son later mocked).

• Nearly 200 shots fired at the Centers for Disease Control headquarters just last month by a man upset over vaccines. That shooting killed a police officer, who also left behind two young children, and a wife pregnant with a third child.

Finally, can we ever forget this? An attack on both police officers and on democracy by MAGA activists, for which every one of the attackers received a presidential pardon.

So no, this is far from a one-way street, and certainly not one where liberals are the perpetrators of all violence.

In fact, if you want to get literal about this, the Anti-Defamation League, which has a long history of reliably tracking hate crimes and terrorist attacks, has reported that between 2015 and 2024 there were 429 deaths in this country attributed to political extremism. Of these, 76% were committed by right-wing extremists, and 4% by leftwing extremists. The report notes that the left is more likely to engage in property crime (think the police car that was set on fire during this year’s Los Angeles protests) rather than physical attacks.

3. How do we break this cycle of anger?

Here is a question: What if each side today simply decided to stop casting blame? Agree to disagree, if you want, about which side is more at fault. But what if we could just agree that this is all incredibly sad, that a culture of political violence is affecting both parties, and that we need to find a way to transcend the divisions?

What if we focused, instead, on trying to tamp down the rage that has overtaken American politics? What if we focused on healing instead of revenge?

Is this bare minimum of an agreement even possible? I don’t know, but I fear not, in part because I don’t know if there is currently a political leader capable of leading us out of the abyss.

Typically, of course, one would look to a president to bring the nation together. Except that President Trump, despite the lack of certainty noted above, has already joined the chorus in blaming the left for Kirk’s murder.

We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.

This is not a recipe for unity.

It’s true there are some Republicans serving as voices of reason. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, for instance, said this:

“What I was really disgusted by yesterday is a couple of talking heads that sees this as an opportunity to say we’re at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this. It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you’re a leader of a conservative movement.”

Then again, Tillis has never quite been aligned with Trump and is retiring from the Senate. So he’s probably destined to be a lonely voice drowned out by the anger that pervades the MAGA right.

An especially promising note was struck by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, in the wake of Robinson’s arrest. Cox, who has long made civil dialogue a part of his political identity, made national headlines with his own call for tamping down the political anger.

“We can return violence with violence. We can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence — is it metastasizes. Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse …

“To my young friends out there, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage. It feels like rage is the only option … Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now, not by pretending differences don’t matter, but by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations.”

What was the reaction to Cox’ speech?

From Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii:

“I know this guy is a Republican and all but I swear you could win all the electoral votes with this message in ‘28.”

From conservative strategist Steve Bannon:

“Spencer Cox is a national embarrassment—in a time where we need action he tells us to sing Kumbaya and hold hands with ANTIFA. While the good and decent Charlie Kirk lies in a mortuary awaiting burial he tells us to invite Democrats over for a cookout — the radical Left that burns Portland daily and shoots up school kids weekly.”

Well, I don’t know, do you think there is any middle ground there on which to meet?

As an article in the BBC noted:

It is difficult to divine where American politics goes from here, but the trajectory is bleak.

4. It appears it’s up to us

The reality is that it’s impossible now to imagine any prominent Republican rebuking the president, never mind eclipsing him in the national conversation, even if someone had the inclination to do so. And while I can think of some Democrats who may emerge as a voice of reason and hope, that sort of thing rarely happens with a party that’s out of power. It may not be impossible, but it’s unlikely before 2028. Which is a long time away, politically.

Meaning if we’re going to tamp down anger and restore hope to our politics, it’s pretty much up to us. Can we collectively resist the urge to provoke anger? Can we promote civil dialogue? I don’t think we have a choice but to try.

Because if we can’t find a way to break the cycle of anger and violence, it won’t end. Or else it will end by burning itself out, but only after it has first burned down our democracy.

When I think of this, I am reminded of a 1968 address Robert Kennedy gave to a Black crowd in Indianapolis after the assassination of Martin Luther King. It’s one of the most powerful appeals to our better natures (and to resisting the urge for hatred or revenge) that you’re likely ever to hear.

I’ve posted this before, but it’s been a while. It’s only a short talk and is well worth just a few minutes of your time because of how it relates to everything our country is going through these days. So I will leave you with this.

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