Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said on Monday that she was fired from the publication over social media posts she made following the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Writing in a lengthy Substack post, Attiah said she was dismissed over her posts on Bluesky that she says were deemed to be "unacceptable,” “gross misconduct” and that endangered the physical safety of her colleagues.

“They rushed to fire me without even a conversation,” she wrote. “This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”

The Washington Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this year, the publication shifted its opinion section to focus on supporting “personal liberties and free markets.” Owner Jeff Bezos said at the time that a “broad-based opinion section” was no longer needed because a diversity of opinions were available online.

Some of Attiah’s social media posts condemned political violence but also highlighted Kirk’s divisive comments on Black women. In her only post directly mentioning Kirk, she quoted the Turning Point USA founder’s comments that Black women lack “brain processing power.”

“I made clear that not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them,” Attiah said.

Attiah, who started her career at The Washington Post in 2014, said the publication “silenced" her. She warned her firing is part of a larger trend.

“What happened to me is part of a broader purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media — a historical pattern as dangerous as it is shameful — and tragic,” she said.

President Donald Trump’s already brass-knuckled push for red-state redistricting is taking on an increasingly apocalyptic valence among MAGA stalwarts following the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Inside an Embassy Suites ballroom in suburban Indianapolis this weekend, Sen. Jim Banks’ inaugural Hoosier Leadership for America Summit drew hundreds of attendees who came to hear from next-generation MAGA figures ranging from Alex Bruesewitz, a top Trump adviser and longtime friend of Kirk’s, to GOP strategist Alex DeGrasse.

The summit marked the first official MAGA gathering since Kirk’s death and served as both a Kirk memorial and redistricting rally, unfolding amid an increased security footprint and ubiquitous police presence throughout the conference center.

Between musical interludes featuring Jason Aldean’s “Fly over States” and “Try That In a Small Town,” MAGA leaders spoke of “demons” at work behind the shooting of Kirk and the stabbing of Iryna Zarutska and “the righteous versus the wicked.” An attendee who posed a question to Banks wondered whether Kirk’s killing “lifted the veil between good and evil.”

“This isn’t a political battle anymore,” said Bruesewitz, who spoke to the crowd with visible emotion about his friendship with Kirk dating back to their teens, and recalled their last dinner together in South Korea just days ago. “It’s a spiritual battle.”

All of it presaged a coming national political hardening on the right with Kirk’s killing as the raison d'etre. More than any other issue at the conference, Kirk’s death seeped into the rationale for mid-decade redistricting.

In the final weeks of his life, Kirk underscored the argument for that push in Indiana: He posted to X last month Turning Point would “support primary opponents for Republicans in the Indiana State Legislature who refuse to support the team and redraw the maps.”

Bruesewitz in an interview with POLITICO on the sidelines of the summit said he initially considered asking Banks’ team to cancel the event in light of Kirk’s killing. But he decided to push ahead, recalling a message from White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. “She said, ‘Do not let your words or your voice get softer, speak out now more than ever,’” Bruesewitz recalled.

Bruesewitz made the case to still-hesitant Hoosier lawmakers for a congressional map that delivers Republicans all nine Indiana districts, carving up Democratic-held areas in Indianapolis and Northwest Indiana.

“They need to recognize what time it is in our country,” Bruesewitz told POLITICO. “We are up against a wicked ideology that cannot continue to have power in our country. And Indiana has a unique opportunity to take some of their power away, doing it through lawful means and doing it through legislative means, and they should listen to the president and get it done.”

Banks said in an interview that Trump is closely monitoring the redistricting effort — and similarly tied the importance of the push to Kirk’s death.

“They killed Charlie Kirk — the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map,” Banks said. “And I sense it in this crowd, in a big way. And I sense it from supporters all over the state; that now's not the time to back off. Now's not the time to be nice. Now's the time to engage in a peaceful and political way.”

Missouri lawmakers passed Republican-drawn maps this week at Trump’s behest. Ohio is required to produce new maps soon, too. But in Indiana, Burkean conservatives have dragged their feet. Since an Oval Office meeting with Trump last month, legislative leaders have neither publicly addressed that meeting nor shown their cards.

Speaker Todd Huston and state Senate President Rodric Bray have been holding behind-closed-doors caucuses to take the temperature of their members. But people familiar and briefed on those proceedings say Huston hasn’t taken a vote on the matter and Bray’s Senate is said to have not made much headway.

Throughout Saturday morning, precinct officials, local GOP grandees and state lawmakers heard speakers turn up the pressure on the issue.

War Room host and keeper of the MAGA flame Steve Bannon joined the event via live stream, calling for a maximalist approach to redistricting. “We’re absolutely pushing for 9-0,” DeGrasse told Bannon from the stage. “That’s the whole ballgame.”

Kurt Schlichter, the Townhall columnist, said Indiana lawmakers needed to “get hard” and “have the stones” to succeed in their push. “You need to carve this state into nine Republican districts and drink their tears,” he told Republicans of Democrats.

The keynote panel featured three Indiana GOP state lawmakers who have become vocal proponents of redistricting. Among them was state Rep. Andrew Ireland, who said in an interview that Kirk’s killing “crystallizes what a lot of people think, what the party believes,” emphasizing that the country has a “real issue” with political violence — which he claimed the left was particularly responsible for — and that Republicans have been complacent. “For too long, I think Republicans have tried to just rest on their laurels when it comes to things like redistricting.”

Not all of those gathered were nodding their heads. State Rep. Becky Cash, who represents more purple parts of the Indianapolis suburbs, told POLITICO that even after hearing the case for redistricting afresh at Saturday morning’s event following her White House visit last month, she remained opposed. Since Kirk’s death, Cash said she has received messages saying she and her colleagues should “redraw it all.”

“I tell people, ‘I don't think it's gonna happen,’ and then they look at me and they're like, ‘Oh, you're definitely going back in” for a special session, she said. “I'm like, ‘Well, do you know something that I don't know?’ Like, I think it's 50-50 at this point.”

Even if lawmakers do go back into a special session, Cash said based on her attendance at private caucuses she is not at all certain new maps would pass.

“I can tell you that the speaker did not take a count,” Cash said. “People are individually communicating with him. Obviously, we have three legislators who were on a panel today who are 100 percent yes. And I don't know many who are ‘yes.’”

Spokespeople for Huston and Bray did not return requests for comment.

Banks painted the stakes of the effort in no uncertain terms, asking the audience of statewide officials, lawmakers and precinct officials and grassroots powerbrokers to imagine Republicans losing their House majority by one or two seats because the state failed to take up redistricting.

“Indiana could be ground zero for keeping the House of Representatives,” Banks said.

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Charlie Kirk emboldened a new generation of conservatives. His killing Wednesday as he addressed a crowd on a college campus has left those he brought into politics grieving — and vowing to continue his mission.

Nearly every young conservative staffer in Washington was involved with Kirk’s enormous youth organizing group Turning Point USA, whether through a college campus chapter or its national and regional conventions. That created a pipeline of young conservatives, who are now looking to cement his legacy in next year's midterms and beyond.

“I was passionate before and this movement was important, but now it’s personal,” said 19-year-old commentator Brilyn Hollyhand, who met Kirk when, at 11 years old, he asked Kirk to appear on his podcast. “We have a martyr.”

Young men have become key to the coalition that elected President Donald Trump to his second term, a trend that many in the movement credit to Kirk.

Kirk was divisive — beloved by a generation that is shifting rightward; castigated for controversial and antagonistic remarks that critics deemed hate speech.

But that divisiveness helped him gain national attention and turn out young voters for Trump, particularly Republicans in Arizona, which flipped to Trump in 2024. In 2020, Trump lost young men by 11 points, according to Catalist data. In 2024, he won them by 1 point. And his vote share among young women improved too — from a 35-point deficit in 2020 to a 23-point gap four years later.

Kirk’s killing this week “has awakened an army of believers,” said 25-year-old activist Isabella DeLuca, who was arrested in 2024 for her role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and pardoned by Trump in January.

“We are at war for the soul of this nation. I will not retreat. I will advance,” DeLuca said. “Charlie’s voice did not die with him. It will live through us.”

Hollyhand, who has worked closely with Turning Point, said he hopes to return to Utah and continue the “American Comeback” tour, which kicked off the day Kirk was shot. On Friday, Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced that law enforcement had apprehended a suspect in the shooting, 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson, who a judge ordered to be held without the option of bail. Formal charges against Robinson are expected to be announced next week.

The rightward shift among young people is largely credited to Kirk’s megaphone, as well as his grassroots political organization, which he founded at 18. It quickly grew to more than 800 chapters on college campuses, with more than 250,000 student members nationwide.

Turning Point “is what got me interested in politics,” said 24-year-old White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers, who founded Clemson University’s first chapter in the fall of 2020.

“That’s what truly guided my career in politics and where I am now,” Rogers added. “It was really Turning Point and their resources that were able to jumpstart the career of a young conservative like me.”

Kirk has a huge social media platform — he posted TikTok videos of him debating college students to more than eight million followers and hosted a popular podcast. It is likely to be hard for the movement left in his wake to replicate the charisma and political organizing skills of Kirk, who also had a direct line to Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

Kirk’s critics noted he utilized provocative language to roil national debate and normalize fringe theories. Some of his most memorable exchanges come from clips of his inflammatory back-and-forths with liberals over LGBTQ+ rights, restrictions on firearms and gender roles.

Kirk once called abortion in the U.S. comparable to, or worse than, the Holocaust. He promoted the “white replacement” conspiracy, which baselessly claims that immigrants are replacing white Americans.

Harry Sisson, a prominent online figure in Democratic circles who has drawn the ire of conservatives online, is one of those who commended Kirk’s legacy as an influential defender of open debate.

“Charlie Kirk did welcome debate from anybody,” Sisson, 23, said in an interview. “Do I think he did it in good faith? No. … But he did encourage debate.”

For college student Matthew Kingsley, his father’s Fox News-informed conservatism didn’t appeal to him while growing up in North Carolina. But he commended how Kirk encouraged young people to do their own research when forming their own political views, and joined his local chapter while in college at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he now serves as chapter president as a rising senior.

Kirk’s impact on the young conservative movement has been “astronomical,” Kingsley said. “I really don't think this is going to stop it at all,” he said. “I think it is actually going to accelerate it.”

Liz Crampton contributed to this report.

In the aftermath of the killing of conservative organizer Charlie Kirk, Politico’s Global Editor-In-Chief John Harris observes that there are few, if any, national figures who are spreading a message of unity.

We’re at a point, he says, “where almost every news event very quickly does become politicized, and people view events as … weapons or shields in a nonstop political argument.”

Kirk, 31, was shot and killed while he was speaking at an event at Utah Valley University. Kirk was among the nation’s most prominent conservative organizers, founding Turning Point USA when he was just 18 years old and growing it into a nationwide youth movement with hundreds of chapters.

Harris joined POLITICO’s Dasha Burns to discuss Kirk and the impact of his life and death on American politics in the latest episode of “The Conversation.”

“He was a larger-than-life figure in Republican politics,” Burns said, describing him as “controversial” and “provocative” but noting his commitment to debate. “I interviewed Charlie multiple times and our exchanges were sometimes intense. I pressed him, he pushed back, but in the end he was always cordial. Always willing to engage,” she said.

His killing is the latest in a string of acts of political violence — from the attempted assassination of then-candidate Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer to the killing of Melissa Hortman, the former Democratic speaker of the Minnesota house, and her husband in June.

Harris notes that while there have been periods of violence in America — the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, among others — in the past, national leaders have at least sought to share messages of unity in the aftermath. While the current political moment has taken us away from that messaging, Harris notes that our climate of divisiveness is out of step with the majority of Americans.

“I think a lot of people do wish for something better," he said, "I would think almost every person wishes for something different than the horrific violence that we saw.”

The full interview with Harris is available this weekend on The Conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

'A uniquely dangerous time?': The aftermath of Charlie Kirk's killing | The Conversation

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https://www.politico.com/video/2025/09/12/a-uniquely-dangerous-time-the-aftermath-of-charlie-kirks-killing-the-conversation-1737686

In naming Memphis the next destination for National Guard deployment, President Donald Trump has opened a new front in his crusade against cities — one that relies on cooperation from Republican governors.

So far, Trump has targeted crime in cities within states led by Democrats, deploying the Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, and threatening action in Illinois, Maryland and Oregon. But launching troops into one of deep-red Tennessee’s largest cities marks a shift for the White House, alleviating legal hurdles and strengthening the president’s efforts as he increasingly relies on the military for policing.

And Memphis may just be the start — GOP governors have shown a willingness to lean on the Guard to aid in crime fighting and deportation efforts. Before it was declared the next target on Friday, Trump had suggested he would dispatch the Guard to New Orleans — which GOP Gov. Jeff Landry celebrated. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders this week detailed the Guard to assist in immigration enforcement in Little Rock and Fayetteville. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has routinely sent the Guard to police the border, and in June authorized 5,000 troops in anticipation of protests against deportation raids.

Tennessee Republicans view the entrance of the Guard in their state as an opportunity to sharpen their attacks on Democrats over crime, an issue that remains one of the GOP’s biggest strengths.

“Why these blue state governors would act like dumbasses and not welcome the federal help to reduce the crime for their own citizens is beyond me,” said Tennessee Sen. Brent Taylor, a Memphis-area Republican who has long requested federal intervention in his city. “When it comes to the crime issue, blue state governors are as useless as a milk bucket under a bull.”

But by teaming with Republican governors, Trump will “be able to demonstrate to the rest of the country, in particular to the blue state governors, that your opposition kept your crime rate high in your cities,” he said.

Trump’s decision to go to a red state also offers more flexibility in how the National Guard is mobilized — and allows him to avoid some of the legal resistance he has faced with Democratic leaders. The White House and governor’s office have yet to decide how resources will be deployed in Memphis, but with Lee’s buy-in, the National Guard could remain under the state’s authority and avoid the constraints of the Posse Comitatus Act, which which bars the military from enforcing domestic laws without explicit permission from Congress, said Christopher Mirasola, an assistant law professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

A White House official touted the president’s federal takeover in Washington, and pointed to Memphis’ crime statistics as a key driver in the president’s decision — as well as the fact that he has the backing of some local and state Republicans who welcomed Trump’s announcement. Violent crime in Memphis has risen in the last decade, but like other large American cities, rates have decreased since pandemic-era spikes. The city’s police department said in a release this week that murder is at a six-year low, aggravated assault at a five-year low and sexual assault at a 20-year low.

“The president’s action in Memphis and what he has talked about in cities — dangerous cities around the country — is not about pushing back against a Dem narrative. It’s not about scoring political points,” said the official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It is something he has talked about for many, many years, dating back to when he first ran for president in 2015.”

The official called Memphis “a very dangerous city” adding, “so, of course, having the buy-in of local officials is great.”

On Friday, after Trump derided Memphis as “deeply troubled,” Republican Gov. Bill Lee said he was working with the White House on a plan to combat crime that leverages “the full extent of both federal and state resources.”

“This is politically smart of Trump, insofar as it lets him accomplish two goals at once. First, he gets to take away an opposition talking point — that crime is higher in many cities in red states than in DC or Chicago. He can say ‘Look, I take crime seriously everywhere,’” said Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor who served as a counselor to the undersecretary of defense for policy under President Barack Obama. “Second, he continues to normalize the once unthinkable use of uniformed military personnel in American cities.”

But even with the state’s Republicans on board, the deployment sets up a clash with local Democratic leaders. Memphis Mayor Paul Young said at a press conference on Friday that he did not request the National Guard, and he doesn’t believe it’s an effective way of driving down crime: “However that decision has been made — my commitment is to make sure strategically that we make sure this happens in a way that truly benefits and strengthens our city.”

Other Tennessee Democrats point to Trump’s military takeover of Memphis as an extension of his policies to stoke racial divisions and to make an example of the perceived ineptitude of cities that have a high number of Black elected officials.

“If he was interested in responding to his base, he would be in Utah,” state Rep. Justin Pearson said. “Immediately after Charlie Kirk is killed there’s a National Guard deployment to one of the Blackest cities in the United States of America?”

Pearson argued sending National Guard troops exposes the incompetence of Republicans who control all levels of power across the state.

“If indeed the problem is so bad here in Memphis, it shows the failure of our Republican-led statehouse and our governor…to do their jobs well,” added Pearson, who was briefly expelled from chamber after protesting in support of gun safety two years ago. “If all the money that is going to be spent on this political charade would instead be given to poor people in our cities and in our communities, we wouldn't have crime problems the way that we do.”

Others say Republicans, who enjoy a governing trifecta and a supermajority in both chambers of the statehouse, have overseen the steady roll back of state and federal resources that could help local officials tamp down on crime. This includes federal gun violence prevention funding that was cut under the Trump administration and the relocation of the FBI’s main field office last October across the state to Nashville during the Biden administration, despite Memphis ranking high on the FBI’s list of violent crimes per capita.

“I'm fearful [of] where this is going, and that we will not get the promise of zero crime,” Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris said at a press conference Friday. “Send FBI agents and law enforcement agents who can get guns off of the street. Don't send armored vehicles.”

Democratic leaders in New York and Illinois are bracing for Trump to follow through on his threats to deploy the Guard in New York City and Chicago. In Chicago, as ICE’s presence has grown in recent weeks, National Guard troops have yet to be deployed. Gov. JB Pritzker believes Trump may yet change his mind ahead of the midterms.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has insisted a federal deployment of the Guard is unnecessary given the progress made addressing crime. Hochul deployed the National Guard late last year to New York City’s subways, a move intended to.make New Yorkers feel safer when riding the nation’s largest mass transit system.

New York State Homeland Security and Emergency Services Commissioner Jackie Bray said city officials have been meeting multiple times a week to discuss preparations if Trump directs his attention to New York City next.

“My message as it has been from day one is: ‘We’ve got this,’” Bray said. “The NYPD is the best law enforcement entity in the country. It would be an insult to them if the federal government thinks they can do a better job.”

Nick Reisman and Shia Kapos contributed to this report.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk sparked a cacophony of condemnations and grief from leaders across the political spectrum. But missing from the din was the voice of a unifying political leader calling for calm.

No one appeared well positioned to play the soothing role that has fallen in the past to presidents and the nation’s faith leaders.

“I’m looking, but I can’t claim that I can identify that person,” former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels told POLITICO.

Daniels, a Republican from a more genteel time in American politics, was not alone in his assessment of the bleak landscape.

Bill Daley, former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, said in an interview that President Donald Trump “is the only one who can do it, because he represents everyone.”

Rep. Don Bacon, the iconoclastic Nebraska Republican, told a reporter he hoped the president would step up to the challenge, adding, “But he’s a populist, and populists dwell on anger.”

In a video statement recorded from the Oval Office late Wednesday, Trump denounced the violence on a Utah Valley University campus that led to the death of the 31-year-old conservative fixture. The president, who survived two attempts on his own life, spoke of the scourge of “demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.”

But he also laid blame at the feet of the "radical left," who he said compared Kirk to "Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals.”

Trump has either actively refused or begrudginly — and then only briefly — embraced the role of consoler- or uniter-in-chief. He has routinely demonized his opponents on social media and threatened to withhold federal dollars from causes with which he ideologically disagrees. His previous rhetoric has included boasting he could stand “in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters and he recently ordered the National Guard to patrol cities whose Democratic leaders he argues let crime get out of control.

For some, Trump himself is part of the problem. As president, he has the power to ease an already tense situation — or inflame it.

“There is a violent undertow, and we have to be very careful about unleashing it,” said William Barber, an influential pastor and civil rights activist who co-chairs the Poor People’s Campaign, which advocates for the nation’s lowest-income residents. It was founded by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

He suggested perhaps one person alone can’t fill the role of cooling the temperature.

“Does the president have a responsibility at this moment? Yes,” Barber added. “But I'm saying that in our history there has never been one person. So it’s the president, pulpits and politicians that hold key leadership positions that must step into this moment.”

Asked whether he could be the country’s lead uniter, a White House spokesperson highlighted the following portion of his Wednesday night remarks: “Tonight, I ask all Americans to commit themselves to the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died. The values of free speech, citizenship, the rule of law, and the patriotic devotion and love of God. Charlie was the best of America, and the monster who attacked him was attacking our whole country. An assassin tried to silence him with a bullet, but he failed because together we will ensure that his voice, his message and his legacy will live on for countless generations to come.”

And asked how he would like his supporters to respond to Kirk’s assassination, Trump told a reporter, "He was an advocate of nonviolence. That's the way I like to see people."

But to another question he replied, “We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”

Few know how to sew back together a civic fabric that seems irreparably torn.

“There's no one trusted broadly enough to play that role,” said Mike Ricci, former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s communications director. Ricci crafted Ryan’s remarks in the minutes after Rep. Steve Scalise was shot at a congressional baseball game practice in 2017. “And in the absence of that kind of voice, it just leaves people retreating more into their own camps: They're more likely to share what Megyn Kelly says about it than they are the president.”

Trump still has room to seize the mantle, said Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s former spokesperson.

Back when the former president climbed a pile of rubble in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, Fleischer said, “We were still a polarized nation where many Democrats thought George Bush was an illegitimate president because of the Supreme Court ruling in the recount. What changed everything was the fact that America was attacked and our nation rallied."

"I don't agree that it's impossible for leaders to bring people together, because I saw it happen,” he added.

Indeed, FBI Director Kash Patel, a MAGA faithful, attended the anniversary ceremony Thursday alongside New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, an establishment Democrat, in a sign that a few moments and places remain to bridge the partisan divide.

Former presidents looked to offer their own way forward for the nation using the only megaphone they had: social media.

“Violence and vitriol must be purged from the public square,” Bush said in a statement through his presidential center, and Obama posted,“This kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.” Former President Bill Clinton vowed to "redouble our efforts to engage in debate passionately, yet peacefully."

But no one can quite find the words — or the credibility or moral authority — to quell the molten anger of this American moment, an anger that shows no signs of receding ahead of the pivotal midterm elections next year.

Trump is as much an ailment to the body politic as he is a symptom. Declining trust in politicians, a fragmented and siloed media, and decades of waning social and religious institutionsare all colliding.

There’s no Rev. Billy Graham to speak to broad swaths of the faithful and call us to Americans’ better angels. The Pope — an American — hasn’t yet addressed Kirk’s death, though U.S. bishops did, urging for a national reckoning that rids “us of senseless violence once and for all.”.

“Billy Graham … spoke as someone who had something to offer to everyone, as opposed to someone who was speaking on behalf of a tribe— and that's what we've lost,” said Michael Wear, Obama’s former faith outreach adviser.

At its core, Wear said, Kirk's assasination — and the lack of a unifying leader to emerge in its aftermath — reveals something about American politics in 2025.

“Politicians used to be valued by their most strident supporters for their ability to speak and persuade others who were not among their core supporters,” he said. “Now, the common definition of a good politician is someone who excels at channeling and mobilizing anger among their core supporters against an enemy.”

Last week, during an event at the National Press Club, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore quoted a common rule for governors: “If you have not faced a tragedy," Moore said, "just give it a second. Yours is on its way.”

Moore’s tragedy was the Key Bridge collapse last year, he said. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, sitting next to Moore, shook his head and offered his condolences. "I haven't had to face anything quite like that,” Cox noted.

That tragedy for Cox came Wednesday afternoon, when conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, thrusting Cox’s state into the national spotlight. The Utah governor offered a forceful rebuke Wednesday evening, calling it a “political assassination” and vowing justice against the killer.

But he also made an emotional plea, noting the assassination of a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband in June and the attempted killings of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, and President Donald Trump. “Our nation is broken,” he said, pleading that “all of us will try to find a way to stop hating our fellow Americans.”

Cox, the second-term Republican governor of Utah, has made such efforts at depolarization the central theme of his governorship. As chair of the National Governors Association, his initiative — “Disagree Better” — focused on building cross-aisle collaboration with blue states. He partnered with Moore and other Democratic governors on solutions to issues from teenage social media use to housing.

He is so seriously committed to the cause that after the Butler assassination attempt last year, despite years of criticizing Trump, Cox endorsed him — committing to "help (Trump) try to lower the temperature in this country," Cox explained.

The Kirk killing Wednesday, though, posed the largest trial yet for Cox’s vision — and made Cox’s state the epicenter for the political divide he has long warned against.

“It's going to be a challenge, but an important one, to lead out to say, ‘This is not Utah, this is not the Utah way, this is not the American way,’” said Maury Giles, CEO of Braver Angels, a New York-based nonprofit that works to bridge partisan divides.

Wednesday’s shooting occurred as the 31-year-old Kirk addressed thousands of onlookers during the first stop of a planned nationwide tour of college campuses. Kirk, sitting under a tent that read “Prove Me Wrong” and engaging in debate with ideological and political rivals, was shot in the neck midway through the event. The thousands of attendees, including children, fled in horror. Trump announced Kirk’s death later Wednesday afternoon.

In an act of caution, Utah Highway Patrol officials were dispatched to the homes of prominent Utahns in the vicinity, including former Gov. Gary Herbert, who lives near the Orem campus and has an office at the university.

“I think the jarring part was it happened in our own backyard,” Herbert, a Republican, said. “I think we expect more from ourselves than what we saw today.”

“It's clearly not the Utah way,” added Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) on CNN on Wednesday evening.

The “Utah way,” as Cox frequently puts it, is “disagreeing better, not disagreeing less.”

Cox’s tenure as National Governors Association chair, which ended last year, carried that message to the national stage, where Cox led in forging partnerships with national nonprofits and Democratic statewide leaders.

“I just realized that we can’t solve any of the biggest issues if we all hate each other,” Cox told POLITICO last year. “And I’m deeply concerned about the polarization in our country and our inability, especially in Congress, to work together and solve problems.” To Cox, it is as much a religious effort as a political one: He credits the teachings of Russell M. Nelson, president of Cox’s faith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as his inspiration.

Tami Pyfer, co-creator of the Dignity Index, a tool for analyzing the contemptuousness of political rhetoric, said Wednesday’s act of violence was “sickening” and a reminder that her mission is still very much incomplete.

“It's discouraging to look at the work that so many bridge-building organizations are doing across the country, literally hundreds of groups addressing this problem — we’re working our hearts out,” Pyfer said, her voice breaking. “We’re working our hearts out to try to turn a corner on this.”

Pyfer, like Giles, is a Utah resident, and has worked closely with Cox on depolarization efforts. Both applauded Cox’s speech Wednesday night, as did Scott Howell, a former Democratic state senator and Utah minority leader.

"Spencer really did hit the point,” Howell said. “It would have been so easy for him to have said, ‘Democrats are the dregs of the earth’ or whatever. I give him big kudos. I really do.”

Cox’s message was one of peacemaking. “If anyone in the sound of my voice celebrated, even a little bit, at the news of the shooting, I would beg you to look in the mirror and to see if you can find a better angel in there somewhere,” Cox said Wednesday.

“I don’t care what his politics are,” Cox added about Kirk. “I care that he was an American.”

Herbert — who said Cox’s speech was “outstanding, considering the circumstances” — said his former lieutenant governor’s biggest challenge lies ahead.

“The question, ultimately, is how effective is what we say?” Herbert said. “How does it impact what we do?”