The rise of political violence in America

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

Business, News

4.6 • 5.4K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the wake of yesterday’s assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Regina Bateson, a political science professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, joins Kimberly to unpack the rise of targeted political violence in the United States and what it means for the health of our democracy. Then, one of our listeners shares how digitizing her great grandmother’s WWII diaries helped connect her with her family’s past.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

"A new dark normal of political violence still shocks the nation" Politico
"Tracking Attitudes About Elections and Political Violence Over Time" from States United Democracy Center
"How Americans Justify Political Violence" from The New York Times Magazine
"Special Report: Key Political Violence and Resilience Trends From 2024" from the Bridging Divides Initiative
Check out Beth’s digitized diary project

Join us tomorrow for “Economics on Tap.” The YouTube livestream starts at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, 6:30 p.m. Eastern.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.
0:13.1	Look, we had a whole other conversation plan today, but as you can imagine, news happens.
0:19.8	Yesterday's shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk is just the latest in a string of violent acts against political figures.
0:28.6	And look, the show is called Make Me Smart and there's not a lot of sense to be made of senseless violence.
0:34.9	But what we can get smart about is what's happening in terms of
0:39.6	political violence in this country and political rhetoric and how that feeds into it. So here to
0:45.5	help us get smarter about that topic specifically is Regina Bateson. She's a political science
0:51.2	professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. And Professor Bateson, welcome to the show.
0:56.9	Thank you for having me.
0:58.7	I know this is a fast-moving and changing story, but when we are in moments like this,
1:05.2	what does that do to the way that we as a country talk about politics?
1:11.3	Well, I think that we've seen some really positive and really negative things over the past
1:16.4	24 hours or so. I think, you know, on the plus side, there's been a bipartisan uniform
1:23.4	condemnation of political violence, which is really important to emphasize and to stress.
1:30.1	I mean, less positively, you know, you do see sort of heightened rhetoric calls for retaliation,
1:35.9	which are very concerning. But, you know, overall, I am heartened to see that there's been,
1:41.9	of course, bipartisan condemnation of this type of political violence.
1:46.9	When President Trump was shot during the campaign, I feel like a lot of people were saying how, oh my gosh, we aren't a nation of political assassination and political violence or attempts like that.
1:59.6	Can we still say that? And was it ever really true?
2:06.6	So I think as a statement of values and an aspirational statement, you know, I would certainly agree with that,
2:14.0	that I think that's not most people's view of how American democracy should work.
2:20.9	But it is the case that there have been periods of heightened political violence in the U.S. in the past.
	...

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