The surge in political violence, and what to do about it.

This week on "Firing Line."

>> Charlie!

Charlie!

Charlie!

>> Trump administration officials are blaming left-wing ideology for the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

>> The data is clear.

People on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.

>> A lot of problems with the left, and they get protected, and they shouldn't be protected.

>> Kirk's murder is just the latest in a string of recent political attacks that include two assassination attempts against President Trump, the public killing of a health care executive, the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's home, and the murder of a Minnesota state representative.

It's hard to imagine the world we're in with the kind of violence that we're seeing without understanding social media.

Do the social media companies have blood on their hands?

They absolutely have blood on their hands.

>> Cynthia Miller Idris studies violent extremism.

She has written four books examining who gets radicalized and how.

What does Cynthia Miller Idris say now?

>> "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by... Robert Grenieri, the Tepper Foundation, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, and by the following.

>> Dr.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, welcome to "Firing Line."

>> Thank you for having me.

>> You're an expert on political extremism and how individuals become radicalized, especially online.

We are one week out after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, an assassination that has rocked this country and the world.

You have said this is the worst period of political violence since the 1970s.

Why is it happening now?

- You know, I think we're seeing a whole bunch of factors come together all at once.

We've had a sustained period of time where a lot of rhetoric is circulating that positions us versus them in existential threat ways, right?

So we see that from political leaders, we also see it across social media, this idea that the other group, whether that's an identity group or partisan parties, political parties, really represent a threat to the future of the nation, an existential threat that has to be fought against sometimes, even with violence.

And then we also have, of course, for the last 15 years at least, really sustained social media immersion.

And that has gotten only worse since the pandemic in terms of how much time people spend online, how isolated young men are, how lonely they are, how much they're forging communities online that sometimes take them way out of the path of reality.

Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin was charged with aggravated murder this week, among other charges, and the Utah County attorney who is prosecuting the case announced that he is going to seek the death penalty.

Now, we're still learning about the suspect, but his mother told prosecutors that he had become more pro-gay and trans-oriented in the last year.

And he had told his roommate, with whom he was involved romantically and is transgender, that he killed Kirk because, quote, "I had had enough of his hatred."

Now, based on what we know now, what similarities do you see between this incident and other recent acts of political violence?

- There are a lot of similarities.

I mean, so, first of all, as you said, we don't really know motive because he hasn't actually said other than this motivation around hate.

Vague, right?

This kind of sense of this is a person spewing hate, and so, therefore, he decided to attack him.

But he also was an extraordinarily highly online person and the kinds of things that he wrote on the bullet casings, which he admitted himself in court, were memes.

They were intended to really communicate back to an online audience much more than to a public audience.

And so we've heard some reporting that he found it funny that some of these memes are showing up on mainstream news, and adults are kind of confused by that.

So there is a kind of online irony, an irony-laden way of engaging that also is so desensitized of violence and positions this whole scenario as something that's sort of fun and countercultural.

President Trump has insisted that "the problem is on the left, not on the right."

Vice President Vance weighed in and said, "We have to talk about this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years and I believe is part of the reason why Charlie Kirk was killed by an assassin's bullet."

First fact check.

There are multiple studies that suggest that this is not true.

Based on your research, was this seen as, quote, "the emergence of left-wing extremism" growing up over the last few years?

-So, you know, as you said, fact-checked is that the trend line over the last several years is that, by far, the biggest percentage of harm and lethality is coming from groups and movements that are far-right in nature.

However, we have seen growth in left-wing extremism, and particularly in violence coming from the left as well, over the last few years.

And so they're not wrong that there's an increase.

It's just still not where the biggest threat sits.

- What is the risk of saying that political violence is only coming from the other side?

- Yeah, I think we have seen in history, after 9/11, we had a hyper-focus in this country on Islamist forms of terrorism.

We really took our eyes off of the ball when it came to white supremacist and far-right extremism, which started to grow in the data about 10 years after 9/11.

And we didn't pay attention to it until really 2019, 2020 is when you started to see public acknowledgement, including under the Trump administration in October, 2020, the first acknowledgement from the Department of Homeland Security that quote, "The biggest and most lethal threat was coming from white supremacist and unlawful militia groups."

That was October 2020.

And so, you know, I always point that out because I think it's important that the first Trump administration was the one to do it.

And we, by then, had had Pittsburgh, El Paso, Charleston, right, and then Buffalo eventually.

All of these terrible attacks from young men that were targeting ethnic and racial minorities, typically, led, finally, to that belated acknowledgment.

-Some conservative commentators have called for vengeance against the left for Kirk's assassination.

-We're angry and we're resolute, and we're gonna avenge Charlie's death in the way Charlie would want it to be avenged.

-Vice President J.D.

Vance this week suggested that a crackdown is necessary.

-We're gonna go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.

-That message really stood in stark contrast to the Republican governor of Utah, Governor Cox, who encouraged people to choose a path other than political violence.

-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.

-Is it gonna get much worse if we continue to point fingers at the other side?

-I think unquestionably it will get worse if we don't tone down and de-escalate the rhetoric, because we see the rhetoric spurring people on.

And this sort of us-versus-them, the existential threat.

The use of violence to achieve a political aim or to seek revenge, I think, is something we really have to worry about.

The retaliatory calls and the sort of tinderbox effect that can happen is a huge risk right now.

>> Karl Rove, who is a well-known Republican operative and served at the highest levels of George W. Bush's White House, wrote in "The Wall Street Journal" this week, "Using Charlie's murder to justify retaliation against political rivals is wrong and dangerous.

It will further divide us and embitter our country.

No good will come of it.

>> Right.

>> You agree?

>> Absolutely agree.

I mean, I think we need de-escalation of rhetoric.

We also need more calls for unity.

I mean, one of the things that happened after 9/11 was a tremendous amount of unity.

When you have a tragedy, you actually want to see people coming together, and seeing that everyone agrees political violence is not the solution.

And instead, what we have seen -- I mean, there was a lot of bipartisan leadership who condemn the violence, which is useful.

But on social media, we also had a lot of celebration from the left, and we had calls for civil war from the right.

In both cases, those are really dangerous trends.

>> Critics have pointed to Kirk's own rhetoric at times, believing that he contributed to the atmosphere of hate and division that led to his death.

Do you agree?

>> I don't believe that anyone deserves to be shot, no matter what they've said.

And I think that no matter what, the most important thing to do is to condemn the violence.

He did say a lot of incendiary things, and especially in more recent years, I think, as he became more prominent on social media.

He was well-known for dialogue and for debate, and also said things on social media that were incendiary.

And I think where we're going wrong in the discussion on social media in particular is using anything that anyone has said to justify violence like that.

- This week, ABC indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel for comments that he made about Kirk's alleged assassin.

Reuters identified more than a dozen people who were fired or suspended from jobs because of online comments they made about Kirk.

Some have faced death threats.

I mean, is there a risk that actions like these create a backlash and then escalate a cycle of violence?

Yes, I think one, we don't want to see a reduction in freedom of speech.

We don't want to see suppression of political opinions that are different from one's own, right?

So if anyone's calling for violence, that should be called out.

But just disagreement and suppression or losing a job over that seems risky and seems like it sends significant signals to reduce the extent to which people feel free to express political opinions that our democracy is sort of built on, right, the freedom of speech.

But we also have seen the doxing.

I mean, so this list of sort of 20,000 individuals or more now circulating a list of people who had somehow celebrated or said positive things about the death of Charlie Kirk.

And so it's a doxing initiative that is trying to get them to get fired, put them on this list and then get people to write to their employers or but it sometimes releases their private information, their home addresses, that kind of information as well.

So there's a lot of risk involved in those kinds of initiatives that really are vigilantism rather than reliance on the rule of law or on the policies of employers or social media companies to take care of things that actually are in violation rather than making that determination oneself.

More than 100,000 people attended a far-right rally in London this week where Charlie Kirk was mourned and where Elon Musk spoke by video link.

Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you.

You either fight back or you die.

You either fight back or you die.

When you hear that kind of language, like, "You're going to have to fight back.

This is the moment," it's being used, I think, to mobilize, to motivate, to kind of deepen that fear that there are attacks coming or that there's going to be additional violence.

And so, again, the best thing we can see is people de-escalating that rhetoric and calling for not using violence as a solution, not actually doing the opposite and calling on people to fight.

>> The New York Times reported this week that state media and online trolls in Russia, Iran, and China have spread thousands of false and incendiary claims about the Kirk shooting to stoke division and undermine unity here in the United States.

Could this kind of interference actually impact political violence here at home?

>> It already has.

I mean, we see this kind of malign influence all the time, both profiteers, who are really just selling products or trying to get people to subscribe to things that peddle outrage and, you know, help them make a living off of it.

So we've seen that kind of thing.

But we also see foreign actors, bad foreign actors, creating false manipulative information, disinformation that circulates, that stokes division and that divides the population further because that weakens democracy, as we're seeing, and is in the interest of foreign actors who want to see a weaker state.

Kirk's assassination, as you have pointed out, is only the last in a series of politically violent attacks by young white men who have become isolated and radicalized online.

In your new book, "Man Up," you explore several dimensions of gender in political violence.

And I want to ask you specifically about the, quote, "crisis of connection among men and boys" that we're seeing in our culture and how it's contributing to political violence.

How so?

I mean, the data is terrible right now about how lonely many young men are.

Twenty-five percent of young men under the age of 30 now say they don't have a single friend.

I think 50 percent of American men say their online lives are more rewarding than their offline lives.

So when you have situations like that, when people start spending so much time in communities online, that that feels more rewarding, they can lose touch, first of all, with reality, with how likely they are to have a conversation with someone they disagree with, for example, because the disinhibition effect of online worlds can really reduce the likelihood that someone uses more collaborative language or engages in a conversation with someone with kindness or empathy, right?

They're so used to trolling and jumping right on and being a kind of "angry reply guy," if you will, in those contexts, because that's normalized.

And so that fuels the whole situation as well.

There's a clinical professor of marketing at New York University Stern School of Business, who's also a popular podcast host, Scott Galloway.

He has identified that part of the problem this way.

Take a look.

We have young men in this country who are sequestering from society.

They're sequestering from relationships in guardrails.

You have literally the amount of time young men are spending with their friends has been cut in half.

They're not attaching to work.

They're not attaching to school.

They're not attaching to relationships.

And they're increasingly vulnerable to be radicalized online.

response?

Yeah, absolutely agree.

I mean, I think what we're seeing is the isolation, the loneliness, create vulnerabilities to to propaganda, often and often propaganda that scapegoats someone else for very real or even sometimes perceived grievances that they face.

The problems of boys and young men are very real right now.

Three quarters of the deaths of despair, that's suicides, overdoses and alcohol fueled deaths.

and 40% of university graduates at this point.

So there are a lot of factors that are leading young men to not be thriving.

>> One of the things we do know about Kirk's alleged assassin is that he spent an enormous amount of time online, as you've discussed, and he played video games.

And as you mentioned, there were markings on his ammunition that referenced gaming culture.

You write about how gaming can be a gateway... >> Yes.

>> ...into the darker parts of the Internet.

It's not that playing video games radicalizes people but it is a it is a portal into the dark recesses of the Internet where radicalization can then happen.

Explain what that pipeline looks like.

Yeah and first of all I think it's really important to say I think like a third of the world's population are gamers right like there's it's in a tremendously effective socially positive experience for most people.

I think what people who don't game might not understand is that gaming today involves live chat communication with strangers and with lots of strangers who may or may not be who they say they are and in in-game chats that are often extraordinarily toxic and so really well documented to be incubators of misogyny of racism and of gender policing of boys too.

So it puts them in contact with people who as I said may not be who they say they are maybe predators in some cases but also can be extremists who are eager to recruit them and offer them URLs to an encrypted chat room or invite them into a discord server or another space online where then they can continue to explore and incubate into ideas that are harmful.

You also write in your book about the impact of memes and short-form video sites.

This week House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has invited the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch and Reddit to testify on radicalization of online forum users, including instances of open incitement to commit politically motivated acts.

Explain how social media and these specific sites contribute to radicalization.

I mean it is it's hard to imagine the world we're in with the kind of violence that we're seeing at the mass violence level without understanding social media.

It creates communities of people who in some cases gamify violence.

So you know thinking it's funny, thinking it's countercultural, thinking it's just for the jokes right.

So you see things like in the white supremacist world I mean this is just terrible to even say but their scorecards right, kill counts right.

They use the words saint and disciple so they're not a group per se in the way that we have traditionally understood extremes groups, but they're communities online that spur each other on and then they think they're being martyrs, right?

So they can go down these rabbit holes and spend time with other young men and lose sight entirely of kind of humanity and think that these attacks are heroic in some way.

- Do the social media companies have blood on their hands?

- They absolutely have blood on their hands and we live in a world where they have no liability for that because they have successfully argued that unlike other media companies, print magazine and others, they are not actually producers of content.

They're just housers of content.

And so the argument has been that they shouldn't be liable for what users generate and upload.

And I think we're seeing the repercussions of that now.

How would you appeal to Meta?

How would you appeal to the social media platforms if they were here right here today to modify their current content policy?

I find actually the best way to appeal to anyone is to talk to them as a parent, as a sibling, as an aunt or an uncle of a young person.

And once you do that, you find that a lot of tech executives don't allow their children to have phones at all.

They don't allow them to have social media accounts, even though they work for companies that that produce those social media platforms.

I think they know how damaging it is.

And yet, they also know how profitable it is.

>> You write about how the masculinity crisis is evolving into a misogyny crisis.

And your book documents how an underlying common denominator of the majority of acts of recent political violence is misogyny and sexism.

>> Yeah.

>> How so?

>> Well, it's one of the top three predictors, and in some cases, the top predictor of support for political violence and willingness to engage in it across seven countries at this point.

So I'm often asked, you know, "What can we do to prevent political violence?"

And one of the things I often say is, "Well, maybe we should look at the top predictor, right?

What if we actually address something like hostile sexism or misogyny?"

-You have founded the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.

And you have found that there are successful interventions that work for radicalization from any extremism, not just white supremacist extremism.

What are the most compelling ways of cutting it off at the pass?

- And what we find with teenagers in particular, but also with adults, the absolute most effective thing to do is point out the manipulative tactics of bad actors and of harmful content.

So we focus on media literacy, digital literacy.

As we say, we teach kids how to think, not what to think, right?

So it's really important to show kids in particular that people might not be who they say they are, how manipulative tactics work, how profiteers are trying to get them to subscribe to things.

And what the research shows is that teenage boys in particular change their behaviors more when they are trying to avoid manipulation than when they're trying to improve an outcome in the long run.

So we know this from public health research about healthy eating and health classes.

Teenage boys do not change their behavior about what they eat based on cholesterol or diabetes, but they do change it when they realize that fast food companies are successfully getting them to make choices through advertisements that are not in the interest of their own bodies or well-being, but line the profits.

So they don't want to find out they're being manipulated.

In 1973, William F. Buckley Jr.

hosted Huey Newton.

Newton, of course, was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, which called for using arms to defend the rights of Black people.

And Newton was convicted of killing a police officer.

That conviction was later overturned, and then he himself was assassinated in 1989.

Listen to this exchange about the American Revolution.

>> I have a friend who's almost dying for me to ask this question.

During the revolution of 1776 when the United States of America broke away from England, my friend would like to know what side would you have been on during that time?

I think probably I would have been on the side of George Washington.

I'm not absolutely sure.

On the whole, I'm against revolutions.

I think - I think how revolutions go, that was a pretty humane one.

Yeah, you're not such a bad guy after all.

>> The American Revolution is often cited as justification for political violence.

Shockingly, new polls, including FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, announced a survey of college students that shows one in three students now saying violence is justified to solve political differences.

Yes.

I mean, it's a terrifying trend that we're seeing.

I've even seen statistics that show it's something like over half of Gen Z recently has said, under some circumstances, it's acceptable to use political violence to achieve a goal.

Why is this?

One of the things we're hearing is they're hearing things like there is no political solution, whether it's about climate change or about immigration reform.

Right.

So it's on the left and the right that younger generations actually believe now this hasn't worked.

And they're not wrong about, you know, things looking rather dire for their generation.

So they see that.

But they also haven't really very much seen it modeled very well among political leaders to see that political solutions are successful.

And so I also think it's on the rest of us to show them that political dialogue can lead to change, can lead to effective collaboration, and instead of just the fighting that we're seeing that kind of flip-flops policies every several years.

How then do you persuade a generation of young people that we can both lower the temperature and still confront the seriousness of our times?

The thing that gives me the most hope actually, and I spend a lot of time talking to high school and college students, what I find is they don't want to live like this.

They don't want to live in a world that offers them no solutions.

They don't want to see this kind of fighting.

And so they are either moving toward apathy in some cases or toward the sense that political violence is the solution.

But they also want adults to tell them that there's another possibility and another world available to them.

- I've heard you say that there really is hope in cutting off the pipeline to extremism and violence.

What can all of us do?

- Yeah, I mean, I often say, you know, I work in a dark field, but I also work in the most optimistic part of the field.

Parents usually know when something is wrong, they might not know what's wrong.

And so they can tell something's off with a child, a personality, they don't know if this might be drugs, if there might've been a, you know, a friendship disrupture, right?

They're all kind, but they can tell when the personality, when the kid becomes a little more isolated, is stopping seeing friends, wants to drop off a sports team, is spending too much time online, is starting to say things like, maybe women shouldn't have the right to vote, right?

So like something that indicates that they're spending a lot of time online.

And then they have to know where to go with that information.

And so I will say that other countries often provide these resources to communities.

Canada's got networks, Germany's got networks.

We have treated this whole problem as a security problem rather than as an education one.

And I often say, like, if our best measure of success in preventing another attack is how good we've become at barricading the doors, I think that's a world nobody wants to live in.

And so we have to be able to work on the prevention and education side, too.

- Cynthia Miller Idress, thank you for joining me on "Firing Line."

- Thank you for having me.

- Firing Line with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Grenieri, the Tepper Foundation, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, and by the following.

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