Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast.

I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark.

And this week, we ended up switching things up a little bit because we are taping the show

on Thursday the day after Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist, was murdered

at a public appearance in Utah. And it just didn't feel right to do just a regular show. But I have

a couple of other things for this show that I think will be worthwhile as we all kind of, you know, think through and grapple with the news

of Charlie Kirk's assassination, even though at the time of this recording, they do not yet have

a suspect in custody. So first, I'm going to bring you a brief chat with a friend of mine who is an expert in political violence.

Rachel Kleinfeld, she is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and nobody knows more than her about political violence, both in America and abroad.

And then we're going to listen to some

sound from across the political spectrum over the years, mainly since the last two or three

years, that we've heard in focus groups because one of the things that we have found

is how scared people are. I hear expressions of fear all the time in the focus groups.

It comes up more and more, and it is especially prominent when there has just been a big,

violent event of some kind. And unfortunately, there have been a great many of those over the years

I have been doing focus groups. I won't go through all of them right now, but there has been a lot of

political violence, whether it was January 6th or the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

In Minneapolis, you had the Democratic legislator Melissa Hortman who was murdered.

There has been just general violence, mass shootings, school shootings.

There was a school shooting the same day that Charlie Kirk was shot.

It's just becoming this background noise that we're all living with, but it is doing real damage,

I think, to people in their psyches and how they feel like they can live and exist in the world.

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