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The assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk marks a watershed moment in a surge of US political violence, one that some experts fear will inflame an already-fractured country and inspire more unrest.
”This event is horrifying, alarming, but not necessarily surprising,” said Mike Jensen, a researcher at the University of Maryland, which has tracked such violence in a terrorism database since 1970.
In the first six months of the year, the US experienced about 150 politically-motivated attacks — nearly twice as many as over the same period last year, said Jensen. “I think we are in a very, very dangerous spot right now that could quite easily escalate into more widespread civil unrest if we don’t get a hold of it,” Jensen said. “This could absolutely serve as a kind of flashpoint that inspires more of it.”
Experts in domestic terrorism cite a convergence of factors for increased violence in the US: economic insecurity, anxiety over shifting racial and ethnic demographics, and the increasingly inflammatory tone of political discourse. Traditional ideological divides — once centered on policy disagreements — have morphed into a deeper, more personal animosity. That anger is amplified by a mix of social media, conspiracy theories and personal grievances.
Reuters identified last year at least 300 cases of political violence across the US between the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the 2024 presidential election, marking the most significant and sustained surge in such violence since the 1970s.
“Extreme political violence is increasingly becoming the norm in our country, and the shooting of Charlie Kirk is indicative of a far greater and more pervasive issue: acts of violence are becoming more common, even without any clear ideology or motive,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.
“There’s really a concern about what the blowback to something like this will look like.”
Other experts who study political violence agreed. “People are reluctant to engage in violence first, but they’re much more willing to engage in violence as retaliation,” said Lilliana Mason, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. “No one wants to be the one to start it, but lots of people want to be able to finish it.”
Kirk, a close ally of US President Donald Trump and founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA, was addressing an outdoor crowd of about 3,000 at Utah Valley University when a gunshot rang out, sending him tumbling from his chair and attendees fleeing in panic.
Authorities had not yet publicly identified a suspect by Wednesday evening, nearly six hours after the shooting. FBI Director Kash Patel said an unnamed “subject” had been detained for questioning and then released.
Kirk, 31, was a pioneer in the conservative movement and harnessed the power of social media to lure millions of young Americans into Trump’s MAGA base.
“No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States better than Charlie,” Trump said in a social media post announcing Kirk’s death.

“Vicious spiral”
Trump himself was the subject of two assassination attempts last year. In one, the shooter was killed by authorities seconds after he fired. In the other, a man was arrested carrying a rifle and scope near a Palm Beach golf club where Trump was playing. His trial began this week.
In addition to those, two recent high-profile attacks by right-wing conspiracy theorists this year shook lawmakers and government workers across the country. In June, a Christian nationalist murdered a senior Democratic state lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota, and wounded a second Democrat. In August, a gunman obsessed with COVID-19 conspiracies sprayed gunfire at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, killing a police officer.
Since January, at least 21 people have been killed in political violence incidents, 14 of them in a car bomb attack in New Orleans by a jihadist claiming loyalty to the Daesh group early on New Year’s Day.
In May, a pro-Palestinian activist murdered two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, and told police after his arrest, “I did it for Gaza,” according to court documents.
In July, a group of at least 11 militants in black military-style clothing attacked an immigration detention center in Texas, the Justice Department said. The group set off fireworks, spray-painted “traitor” and “ICE Pig” on vehicles, and shot a responding police officer in the neck, wounding him, while another sprayed gunfire at detention guards, the FBI said.
Since returning to office, Trump has scaled back efforts to counter domestic extremism, redirecting resources toward immigration enforcement and citing the southern border as the top security threat.
Jensen, the University of Maryland researcher who tracks violence for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, said the future appears grim.
“This is an administration that, whether you agree with it or not, has made profound changes to this country in the eight months it’s been in office,” he said. “Some people love it, some people hate it. The people that hate it are starting to act out. People who love it are going to act out against those people that hate it, and it becomes a vicious spiral that could lead us into something really, really bad.”

STOCKHOLM: Executive overreach and foreign aid funding cuts during US President Donald Trump’s first six months in office have hurt international democratization efforts and encouraged populist leaders around the world, an intergovernmental democracy watchdog said on Thursday.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance  said it issued 20 alerts between January and April 2025 — twice as many as in any of the previous two full years — documenting instances in which the US government eroded rules, institutions and norms that shape the country’s democracy.
It named efforts to restrict academic freedom, criminalize protest activity, question the legitimacy of certified elections, selectively restrict media access to the executive and circumvent normal due process.
“In less than six months, US domestic political institutions have also lost much of their symbolic sheen, increasingly serving as a reference point for executive overreach and offering more encouragement to populist strongman leaders than to pro-democracy hopefuls,” IDEA said in its annual Global State of Democracy report.
The Trump administration has frozen and then cut back billions of dollars of foreign aid since taking office, saying it wants to ensure US taxpayer money goes only to programs that are aligned with Trump’s “America First” policies.
The cutbacks have effectively shut down the US Agency for International Development, a move that could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to research published in The Lancet medical journal.
IDEA’s report also showed its global democracy index declined for a ninth consecutive year in 2024. Some 54 percent of countries went backwards in 2024 versus five years earlier in at least one of the IDEA’s key indicators, which range from credible elections to freedom of expression.
Last year’s electoral “super-cycle” — when around 1.6 billion people globally cast ballots — saw the indicator for credible votes fall to its worst in 30 years, with declines in a fifth of the 173 nations surveyed.
“To fight back, democracies need to protect key elements of democracy, like elections and the rule of law, but also profoundly reform government so that it delivers fairness, inclusion and shared prosperity,” the IDEA said.