As President Richard Richard Milhous Nixon once said during the Vietnam War, shall we "lower our voices?" As Senator Robert Kennedy said in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King ws murdered in Memphis, "What we need in the United States is not hatred....."
From The New York Times:
Kirk’s Killing Tests Utah Governor’s Plea for Americans to ‘Disagree Better’
Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah has called for politicians to tone down their rhetoric. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is challenging the limits of that high-minded approach.
Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah built a political brand as the Republican antidote for an age of anger, imploring a divided United States to “disagree better” through civil discussions and bridge-building service projects.
Then an assassin gunned down the outspoken conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college rally on Wednesday. With the killer still on the loose that day and calls for revenge boiling across social media, an emotional Mr. Cox walked in front of the television cameras to make his highest-profile plea to date against the rising tide of political violence that had just crashed into his backyard.
“Our nation is broken,” Mr. Cox said, as he ticked off a growing list of political violence targeting Republicans, including President Trump, and, he pointedly noted, Democrats as well, including the assassination of a Democratic state lawmaker in Minnesota and the attempted assassination of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.
For those who “celebrated even a little bit at the news of this shooting,” Mr. Cox said, “I would beg you to look in the mirror, and to see if you can find a better angel in there somewhere.”
On Friday, with a suspect under arrest, Mr. Cox repeated his entreaties to the nation, saying the United States stood at an inflection point. Which way the country goes, toward chaos or reconciliation, would be up to its citizens.
Even he seemed to acknowledge it is far from clear whether the country’s better angels can still be reached.
“We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence,” he said. “It metastasizes. We can always point the finger at the other side.”
“At some point, we have to find an offramp," he implored, “or else it’s going to get much worse.”
The question now is what the nation wants. Phil Lyman, a former state lawmaker who challenged Mr. Cox for governor last year in the Republican primary from the right, called the governor’s invocation of the shootings of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota a “false parallel.”
It was the second time an assassin’s bullet had shined a national spotlight on Mr. Cox, the second-term governor of a solidly Republican state whose large population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been uneasy with Mr. Trump’s angry rhetoric and louche personal behavior.
Mr. Cox, like many other socially conservative Latter-day Saints who take decorum and character seriously, had publicly vowed not to vote for Mr. Trump in 2024, but after Mr. Trump survived a shooting at a July 2024 rally in Pennsylvania, the governor reversed course and endorsed him. He told Mr. Trump in a public letter that he believed his life had been saved through a “miracle,” and that Mr. Trump could “unify and save our country.”
On Wednesday, several leaders in Utah echoed Mr. Cox’s appeal to tamp down the overheated political rhetoric, reflecting the state’s self-image as a bastion of a kinder, gentler conservatism. Former Gov. Gary Herbert, whom Mr. Cox served as lieutenant governor, said he hoped the moment would act as a “wake-up call.”
“We should not get so angry that we feel like we have to win the argument or kill them,” said Mr. Herbert, who also made compromise a key tenet of his term and now runs an institute at Utah Valley University — the same college where Mr. Kirk was killed — that teaches young people about moral character in politics.
J. Stuart Adams, the Republican State Senate president, said Mr. Kirk’s assassination struck at the heart of free speech and showed that there was too much hate coursing through the country.
“We need to make sure we try to defuse the hate,” he said in an interview, adding that the country should “try to find a way to disagree and do it in a respectful way.”
But any messages of compromise and staying above the partisan fray may be getting drowned out. A scattering of voices on the left did cheer Mr. Kirk’s death. Far heavier hitters on the right, including Elon Musk on his social media site and Mr. Trump from the Oval Office, have not held back in assigning blame.
“They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not,” Jesse Watters, the right-wing Fox News commentator, said on his broadcast on Wednesday. He added that “we are going to avenge Charlie’s death in the way that Charlie wanted to be avenged.”
Mr. Trump, in an Oval Office speech, blamed “the radical left,” suggesting that their rhetoric was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Mr. Cox is far from a typical Republican in today’s era of hyperpolarization. He has made an initiative called “Disagree Better,” aimed at tackling partisanship and encouraging political foes to behave with more humility, a hallmark of his tenure.
In the waning days of his first run for governor in 2020, he appeared alongside his Democratic opponent, Chris Peterson, in an unusual advertisement in which both candidates urged voters to listen to one another. Four years later, he sat down alongside Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, a Democrat, at a forum in Washington to discuss how to solve problems without devolving into anger.
As lieutenant governor, Mr. Cox, whose policies remain those of a conservative Republican, made an impromptu appearance at a vigil for those killed at a gay nightclub in Orlando in 2016, apologizing in a tearful speech for treating his gay classmates poorly when he was in high school. Three years later, he sat on the floor of the state capitol with L.G.B.T.Q. advocates and apologized after a bill to ban conversion therapy in the state died.
“That’s why, when Governor Cox calls on us to lower the temperature, I think it really means something,” said Becky Edwards, a moderate Republican and former Utah lawmaker who runs an organization called the Governing Group, which backs candidates that commit to civic discourse. “He’s exactly right. The words we choose, the tone we set — they really matter.”
Mr. Cox’s approach has earned the admiration of Utah’s re-emerging center-right groups, but it has also prompted disdain from Republicans who view him as hypocritical; the governor was booed off the stage at his state party convention last year.
“Maybe you just hate that I don’t hate enough,” Mr. Cox told the convention audience.
Mr. Lyman has long derided Mr. Cox’s tactics as a ploy to muzzle outspoken critics. The former rival of the governor drove to Utah Valley University to meet Mr. Kirk on Wednesday, and said the men greeted each other as Mr. Kirk waited backstage. From a few feet away, Mr. Lyman filmed Mr. Kirk as he handed out baseball caps to the crowd. He said he was making his way to the back when he heard a sharp bang.
Mr. Lyman said he spent the afternoon at a relative’s house nearby, trying to absorb what happened. He said he thought the governor had channeled Utah’s shock and anger when he reminded the country on national television “that we still have the death penalty here in the state of Utah.”
Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.
Jack Healy is a Phoenix-based national correspondent for The Times who focuses on the politics and climate of the Southwest. He has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s journalism school.
1 comment:
One dude did something to one other dude. At the end of the day, that's all that happened..but surprise surprise.... people use relatively isolated incidents to catastrophize and whip up some some mob (to further some agenda.) "Never let a tragedy go to waste" - Bush era Republicans
Post a Comment