Political violence isn’t new in America. But the reaction to it today feels different.

After the killing of Charlie Kirk, the country didn’t rally around a message of restraint. Instead, key leaders treated it as ammunition. That shift, combined with a rise in tit-for-tat attacks and a politicized security apparatus, points to a more dangerous phase in our politics.

Barbara Walter is a political scientist at University of California San Diego and the author of How Civil Wars Start. She studies how democracies slide into instability — and how they pull back. I invited Walter onto The Gray Area to talk about what makes this moment distinct, why lone-actor violence is rising, how leaders’ rhetoric can normalize force, and what it would actually take to lower the temperature.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

We’ve seen a lot of political violence over the history of this country, and certainly there have been more violent periods than this one. But you’ve said this moment still feels different — and more dangerous — than earlier waves of violence. Why?

There are three big differences. The first is how our leaders are responding. Historically, when tragedy struck — whether it was an assassination, a terrorist attack, or a domestic bombing — the instinct among political leaders was to unify the country. That’s especially important in a place as diverse and heterogeneous as the United States. After events like 9/11, after the Oklahoma City bombing, after political assassinations in the 1960s, you saw Democrats and Republicans stand together, condemn the violence, and reassure people that we were one nation.

This time, that didn’t happen. Within hours of Charlie Kirk’s killing, key figures on the right used it as a political weapon. Instead of calls for peace or restraint, it became a rallying cry. We saw people like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon go straight to “civil war” language. Even the president spoke about “going after them,” even though, as we later learned, this was a lone actor — a young man radicalized online. The immediate response wasn’t unity. It was vengeance. That’s new, and it’s dangerous.

You have a useful phrase — “violence entrepreneurs” — to describe people who take chaotic or random events and weaponize them for political gain.

That’s what we’re seeing. A single act of violence becomes propaganda. Instead of treating these as isolated crimes, political actors fold them into a broader narrative of existential threat: “They’re out to get us.” That language radicalizes faster than any ideology.

You’ve also written that violence is no longer one-sided and that this shift makes the situation even more volatile. Tell me about the dynamic that emerges once we get caught in a spiral like that?

It does make the situation more volatile. For a long time, political violence in the US came overwhelmingly from the far right. Now we’re starting to see incidents from the other end of the spectrum. It’s still fewer, but the rise is real and significant.

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