\n<\/p>\n
Yesterday morning, Governor Spencer Cox stood behind a podium in Orem, Utah, to announce the end of the 34-hour manhunt for Charlie Kirk\u2019s killer, and to plead for peace in a nation that seemed at risk of spiraling into further violence. \u201cTo my young friends, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,\u201d he said. \u201cYour generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shortly after he finished, Cox\u2019s phone rang. The president was calling.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, the type of person who would do something like that to Charlie Kirk would love to do it to us,\u201d Cox says Trump told him. Trump went on to recite statistics suggesting that the presidency was \u201cone of the most dangerous jobs on the planet.\u201d Fifteen percent of the men who\u2019d held his office had been shot; 8 percent had been killed.<\/p>\n
Cox understood Trump\u2019s concern\u2014after all, the president had narrowly escaped assassination himself just a year earlier. And Kirk\u2019s murder was the latest grim turn in a season of political violence that has terrified America\u2019s elected officials. \u201cPeople are scared to death in this building,\u201d a member of Congress told NBC News this week. But as Cox and I spoke yesterday evening, he didn\u2019t seem especially focused on his own safety. He had something else on his mind.<\/p>\n
We were talking via Zoom. Cox looked exhausted; he told me he hadn\u2019t slept in 48 hours. And though he was relieved that an arrest had been made, he also seemed unnerved by the alleged killer\u2019s identity: a 22-year-old man who\u2019d grown up in a Mormon family in the southern-Utah town of Washington.<\/p>\n
Cox had admitted in his news conference that he\u2019d been quietly hoping for a different outcome. \u201cI was praying that if this had to happen here that it wouldn\u2019t be one of us\u2014that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country,\u201d he\u2019d said. \u201cBut it did happen here, and it was one of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2014the bullet, the blood, the screams\u2014play out in the heart of a county so cartoonishly friendly and wholesome that Utahns refer to it as \u201cHappy Valley.\u201d For people like Cox, who have devoted themselves to realizing a certain idealized vision of Utah\u2014the city on a hill, the beacon to the world\u2014the assassination had a shattering effect.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt does feel like there\u2019s a bit of our innocence lost,\u201d Cox told me last night. \u201cWe\u2019re kind of sheltered here in these mountains and these valleys, and we push the world out. But the world is certainly here. It\u2019s at our doorstep.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cYou find us trying to live peaceably,\u201d Young told the writer. \u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
More recently, Utah\u2019s political leaders have sought to position their state as a model of cooperation and consensus-building. \u201cThe Utah Way,\u201d they proudly call it. They\u2019ve 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 \u201cDisagree Better,\u201d focused on improving America\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Cox is the ideal pitchman for this brand of Utah politics\u2014affable and smiley, temperamentally averse to the confrontational style that has taken over so much of politics. \u201cWe\u2019re weird,\u201d he declared at his State of the State address last January. \u201cThe good kind of weird. The kind of weird the rest of the nation is desperate for right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s politics had remained idiosyncratic enough to create space for Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney and Cox\u2014a 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\u2019s bloomed across the country began leaching into Utah.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cThere are deranged people among us,\u201d he later told me, noting that, in Utah, \u201cpeople carry guns.\u201d 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: \u201cMaybe you just hate that I don\u2019t hate enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
As he slogged through a bitter campaign, one marked by conspiracy theories and uncharacteristically heated rhetoric, Cox realized something had changed in his state. \u201cThere\u2019s kind of been a breach in the stronghold,\u201d he told me at the time.<\/p>\n
Cox looked for ways to close the breach. He launched \u201cDisagree Better.\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Cox told me he had no doubt the alleged shooter\u2019s worldview had been warped in some very dark corners of the internet. And watching the online discourse around Kirk\u2019s murder this week only underscored the damage done by algorithmically incentivized ghoulishness. \u201cDiscord, 4chan, Twitter, Bluesky\u2014these things are really hacking our brains and hijacking our agency,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe worst of humanity is in our pockets.\u201d Even the most carefully constructed sanctuary can\u2019t withstand an onslaught like the one generated by Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n
And yet, as our conversation wound down, Cox made clear that he wasn\u2019t ready to let go of his Utah exceptionalism. He spoke of candlelight vigils and touching conversations with Democrats who were devastated by Kirk\u2019s death. \u201cMaybe, just maybe, there\u2019s a path forward for our country that comes through the great people of Utah,\u201d he told me. I sympathized with his reaching for optimism. The dream of an American Zion doesn\u2019t easily die.<\/p>\n
In the days since Kirk\u2019s assassination, I\u2019ve found myself repeatedly humming a strange old Mormon-pioneer hymn.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn our lovely Deseret, <\/p>\n
Where the Saints of God have met, <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a multitude of children all around \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Deseret was the name first given to the territory that would become Utah. The word, borrowed from the Book of Mormon, means \u201choneybee,\u201d 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\u2019s Zionic ideal\u2014a place of peace and comity, of safety.<\/p>\n
The students who gathered at a campus amphitheater this week to listen and debate and protest\u2014the ones who wound up fleeing in terror as a speaker bled out onstage and a sniper slipped away into the woods\u2014were old enough to no longer be \u201ca multitude of children.\u201d Nor were they likely blind to the problems in their state. But they\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s not a harbinger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday morning, Governor Spencer Cox stood behind a podium in Orem, Utah, to announce the end of the 34-hour manhunt for Charlie Kirk\u2019s killer, and to plead for peace in a nation that seemed at risk of spiraling into further violence. \u201cTo my young friends, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[4973,8755,81,312],"class_list":{"0":"post-21144","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-cox","9":"tag-spencer","10":"tag-trump","11":"tag-warning"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}