Welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman.

Before I get to today's guest, I want to say a few words about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

It should go without saying that killing someone because of their political beliefs,

even if you find those beliefs to be evil, is never justified.

And if you had posed that question in the abstract a few days ago, most Americans, I think,

would have agreed. But something was revealed on social media when Kirk was killed, something

very ugly, which is that a disturbing number of people disagree. A disturbing number of Americans

celebrated his death, especially on left-wing spaces like

Blue Sky. To be clear, I have no doubt that if the politics of this assassination were reversed,

if someone revered on the left were killed, then we'd be seeing the worst elements of the right

celebrating as well. It may be that the propensity to violence is equal

on both sides at this moment, or it may be that the left is worse than the right now.

I would need to see data to actually answer that question. But what's clear is that the norm

against political violence of all kinds is on thin ice. We shouldn't be too alarmist, though. We saw more

assassinations in the 1960s than we do today. We saw more political violence in the 1970s than we

see today, and the country survived that era. But neither should we be complacent. When I was researching my book, The End of Race Politics,

I read pretty much everything Martin Luther King ever wrote and said. And what struck me is just how much

energy Dr. King had to spend persuading people to be nonviolent. He wasn't like, we want equal rights, but we should do it nonviolently.

It was a lot more like, here's a 10, 15-minute speech laying out the affirmative philosophical case

for why non-violence is the best way to get what we want. And he gave that speech over and over and over again, because it wasn't obvious.

He argued that people assume your means are the same as your ends. So if your means are violent,

they'll assume your ends are violent, and they'll reject your whole policy program. I think he was

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