“The Kind of Event I Was Warning About": Charlie Kirk and Our Era of Political Violence

In June, after the assassination of a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota, Robert Pape , a leading expert on political violence as the director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats at the University of Chicago, warned in a New York Times op-ed that “we may be on the brink of an extremely violent era in American politics.” The killing of Charlie Kirk, on a college campus in Utah Wednesday, was "tragic, but predictable," Pape told VF Wednesday. “This is exactly the kind of event I was warning about."

Pape is one of the most prominent voices warning about the dangerous climate in the country over the last several years. “We are on a dark road as a country,” he says.

Kirk, the prominent right-wing activist and key ally of Donald Trump , had just begun a speaking engagement b