#1669 A Conversation About Political Violence in America

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah, Clay asked his good friend Beau Breslin of Skidmore College to join him in a conversation about political violence in America. Political violence is nothing new in America. We were born in an armed revolution, we’ve had waves of political violence throughout our history, and we seem as a nation to be in love with violence, at least in our popular culture, and beyond. The program includes discussion of slave revolts, violent brawls on the floor of Congress, the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and JFK, the rash of violence in the 1960s, and the growing polarization of America. Professor Breslin believes firmly that we can bring down the political temperature in the U.S. but only if we sit down together and grant each other legitimacy, even when we very seriously disagree. Prompted by popular demand, in the third segment of the program, Clay offered an op ed statement about our need to have a serious, respectful, and civil national conversation about the Second Amendment and gun violence in America.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to this introduction to this week's podcast. I'm Clay Jenkins, and I'm home. I'm home. I'm in my kitchen. Well, dining room, well, office. After the whole summer on the road, I was on the road from April something to yesterday. I arrived home about 5 p.m. yesterday after driving across the state of Montana. And, of course, I in two days, heard an enormous amount of news and commentary
0:25.3	about the killing of Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah on Wednesday, and I have satellite,
0:33.2	XM, satellite radio, or Sirius, whichever it is, and I was able to listen to commentary on across
0:39.0	the political spectrum. And the common thread was, uh-oh, we may be about to precipitate
0:45.9	something really, really, really crazy, violent, spasmodic. This may, this is more than a political killing. This one has a,
0:59.3	has the possibility of really unleashing some of the darker energies in the nation. And
1:05.1	frankly, I have not heard our national leaders on the right at least saying calm down everyone some are doing it but right at
1:14.0	the top we're hearing retribution and blame we need national leadership that consoles us
1:21.3	urges us to lower the temperature urges us to avoid violence urges us to take a deep breath
1:27.3	urges us to step back and look in the mirror.
1:31.0	We need that.
1:32.1	It's essential that we get that.
1:33.9	We're not getting that.
1:35.8	And there's a lot of craziness on the left, too.
1:39.0	If you've been watching on Twitter, on X,
1:41.7	the people crowing and cheering saying, there's a start.
1:46.3	That kind of obscene nonsense.
1:49.1	Really, really, really upsetting.
1:50.7	And great historians, John Meacham, Douglas Brinkley, they're all saying something very similar,
1:59.7	which is this is an inflection point and we need to brace ourselves.
2:05.1	Now we can hope that with the short attention span of the American people,
2:09.0	football season starting and school starting and Jeffrey Epstein and all the other stuff,
	...

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