Yesterday morning, Governor Spencer Cox stood behind a podium in Orem, Utah, to announce the end of the 34-hour manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer, and to plead for peace in a nation that seemed at risk of spiraling into further violence. “To my young friends, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,” he said. “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.”
Shortly after he finished, Cox’s phone rang. The president was calling.
“You know, the type of person who would do something like that to Charlie Kirk would love to do it to us,” Cox says Trump told him. Trump went on to recite statistics suggesting that the presidency was “one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet.” Fifteen percent of the men who’d held his office had been shot; 8 percent had been killed.
Cox understood Trump’s concern—after all, the president had narrowly escaped assassination himself just a year earlier. And Kirk’s murder was the latest grim turn in a season of political violence that has terrified America’s elected officials. “People are scared to death in this building,” a member of Congress told NBC News this week. But as Cox and I spoke yesterday evening, he didn’t seem especially focused on his own safety. He had something else on his mind.
We were talking via Zoom. Cox looked exhausted; he told me he hadn’t slept in 48 hours. And though he was relieved that an arrest had been made, he also seemed unnerved by the alleged killer’s identity: a 22-year-old man who’d grown up in a Mormon family in the southern-Utah town of Washington.
Cox had admitted in his news conference that he’d been quietly hoping for a different outcome. “I was praying that if this had to happen here that it wouldn’t be one of us—that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country,” he’d said. “But it did happen here, and it was one of us.”
The comment drew some criticism from people who accused him of seeking a politically convenient scapegoat. But I understood what he meant. I was born in Orem, where Kirk’s shooting took place. And though I grew up on the other side of the country, I chose to return to the area after high school, attending college just 15 minutes from the now-infamous campus of Utah Valley University. It is difficult to overstate just how surreal it was to watch the macabre scene—the bullet, the blood, the screams—play out in the heart of a county so cartoonishly friendly and wholesome that Utahns refer to it as “Happy Valley.” For people like Cox, who have devoted themselves to realizing a certain idealized vision of Utah—the city on a hill, the beacon to the world—the assassination had a shattering effect.
“It does feel like there’s a bit of our innocence lost,” Cox told me last night. “We’re kind of sheltered here in these mountains and these valleys, and we push the world out. But the world is certainly here. It’s at our doorstep.”
From its inception, Utah has aspired to be a sanctuary from the strife and sin and violence that scarred the rest of the country. The Mormon pioneers who settled the territory had been driven into the desert by a campaign of state-sanctioned persecution, and at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains they set out to build an American Zion. A civilization sprouted; a mythology took root. In 1864, when a writer for The Atlantic visited Utah, he found Brigham Young, the governor and prophet, presenting his state as an idyllic haven from the Civil War. “You find us trying to live peaceably,” Young told the writer. “When your country has become a desolation, we, the saints whom you cast out, will forget all your sins against us, and give you a home.”
More recently, Utah’s political leaders have sought to position their state as a model of cooperation and consensus-building. “The Utah Way,” they proudly call it. They’ve made headlines with bipartisan compromises on LGBTQ rights, religious freedom, and immigration. In 2023, as the chair of the National Governors Association, Cox launched an initiative he called “Disagree Better,” focused on improving America’s political discourse. Leaders of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, meanwhile, have oriented much of their preaching in recent years around the Christian call to be peacemakers.
Cox is the ideal pitchman for this brand of Utah politics—affable and smiley, temperamentally averse to the confrontational style that has taken over so much of politics. “We’re weird,” he declared at his State of the State address last January. “The good kind of weird. The kind of weird the rest of the nation is desperate for right now.”
The reality, of course, was always more complicated than the picture Cox painted. Utah politics has seen its share of corruption and scandal, of demagogues and frauds. Still, in an era of radicalization, the state’s politics had remained idiosyncratic enough to create space for Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney and Cox—a genteel breed of Republican that had lately become scarce elsewhere. But at some point in the past decade, the sense of hostility and menace that’s bloomed across the country began leaching into Utah.
In 2021, then-Senator Mitt Romney was booed at a Utah Republican convention with such viciousness that he found himself wondering if he was safe. “There are deranged people among us,” he later told me, noting that, in Utah, “people carry guns.” Last year, when Cox was running for reelection as governor, he received a similar response at the same convention. Dismayed and exasperated, he scolded the jeering members of his party: “Maybe you just hate that I don’t hate enough.”
As he slogged through a bitter campaign, one marked by conspiracy theories and uncharacteristically heated rhetoric, Cox realized something had changed in his state. “There’s kind of been a breach in the stronghold,” he told me at the time.
Cox looked for ways to close the breach. He launched “Disagree Better.” He filmed ads alongside his political opponents making earnest appeals for democracy and decency. Convinced that young people in his state were being poisoned by radicalizing content on the internet, he signed a first-in-the-nation law designed to limit children’s access to social media. (Social-media companies sued, so the law, tied up in court, has not gone into effect.) Still, the breach widened. Nothing seemed to reverse the torrent of nasty, feral politics flowing in from the rest of the country.
Cox told me he had no doubt the alleged shooter’s worldview had been warped in some very dark corners of the internet. And watching the online discourse around Kirk’s murder this week only underscored the damage done by algorithmically incentivized ghoulishness. “Discord, 4chan, Twitter, Bluesky—these things are really hacking our brains and hijacking our agency,” he told me. “The worst of humanity is in our pockets.” Even the most carefully constructed sanctuary can’t withstand an onslaught like the one generated by Silicon Valley.
And yet, as our conversation wound down, Cox made clear that he wasn’t ready to let go of his Utah exceptionalism. He spoke of candlelight vigils and touching conversations with Democrats who were devastated by Kirk’s death. “Maybe, just maybe, there’s a path forward for our country that comes through the great people of Utah,” he told me. I sympathized with his reaching for optimism. The dream of an American Zion doesn’t easily die.
In the days since Kirk’s assassination, I’ve found myself repeatedly humming a strange old Mormon-pioneer hymn.
“In our lovely Deseret,
Where the Saints of God have met,
There’s a multitude of children all around …”
Deseret was the name first given to the territory that would become Utah. The word, borrowed from the Book of Mormon, means “honeybee,” and it was meant to convey the pioneer values of hard work and self-reliance. But the name eventually came to evoke the broader vision of Utah’s Zionic ideal—a place of peace and comity, of safety.
The students who gathered at a campus amphitheater this week to listen and debate and protest—the ones who wound up fleeing in terror as a speaker bled out onstage and a sniper slipped away into the woods—were old enough to no longer be “a multitude of children.” Nor were they likely blind to the problems in their state. But they’d taken for granted that they lived in a place lovely enough to allow for a free exchange of ideas without bullets ripping through the air above their heads.
That they had to be disabused of that belief is a tragedy. Cox, and all of us, are left clinging to the hope that it’s not a harbinger.
