The Red Cell series is published in collaboration with the Stimson Center. Drawing upon the legacy of the CIA’s Red Cell—established following the September 11 attacks to avoid similar analytic failures in the future—the project works to challenge assumptions, misperceptions, and groupthink with a view to encouraging alternative approaches to America’s foreign and national security policy challenges. For more information about the Stimson Center’s Red Cell Project, see here.

Charlie Kirk’s killing last month has sparked fears that the United States is headed to an all-out second civil war or revolution. According to a YouGov survey earlier this year, “more Americans than not believe it is likely that the United States will see a civil war over the next decade,” while several hundred political scientists and historians in an April 2025 survey saw the United States slipping into authoritarianism with Trump’s second term. Trump’s deployment of military and National Guard forces at home, combined with his vow to suppress “the enemy within” while his domestic advisor, Stephen Miller, labels the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization,” can easily be seen as setting the stage for an authoritarian takeover. Revolutions don’t come out of nowhere. Yet, the how and the when often come as surprises.

Even before the Kirk killing, the number of assassinations was climbing, according to the academic Peter Turchin’s US Political Violence Database (USPVDB). The five years from 2020 to 2024 saw seven assassinations, higher than the previous peak during the 1960s, although only half as large as that of the late 1860s.

Violent threats against lawmakers hit a record high last year. Since the 2020 election, state and local election officials have become targets of violent threats and harassment, as have federal judges, prosecutors, and other court officials. As of April, there have been more than 170 incidents of threats and harassment targeting local officials across nearly 40 states this year, according to data gathered for the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University.

The Capitol Police investigated over 9,000 threats against members of Congress in 2024, a sharp rise from previous years. The Department of Homeland Security reported a rise in threats and harassment aimed at election workers during the 2024 election cycle. As fears of a political violence contagion grow, House leaders announced after the Kirk killing that Congressional members will get “$10,000 per month to cover personal security costs,” doubling the $5,000 currently available. The White House has also recently asked for “an additional $58 million in security funding for the executive and judicial branches.”

Both government and academic research have shown that the majority of extremist violence since 1994 has been linked to right-wing extremists. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Extremism indicated in its 2024 report that “All the extremist-related murders in 2024 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds.” In recent years, there has been a drop-off in Islamist-fueled violence domestically.

Yet, according to CSIS’s Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program, the first half of 2025 “was marked by an increase in left-wing terrorist attacks and plots.” Although less deadly historically than right-wing violence, recent left-wing killings—Luigi Mangione’s assassination of United........

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