Yesterday morning, Governor Spencer Cox stood behind a podium in Orem, Utah, to announce the tip of the 34-hour manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer, and to plead for peace in a nation that appeared susceptible to spiraling into additional violence. “To my younger buddies, you might be inheriting a rustic the place politics looks like rage,” he mentioned. “Your technology has a chance to construct a tradition that may be very totally different than what we’re struggling by proper now.”
Shortly after he completed, Cox’s cellphone rang. The president was calling.
“, the kind of one who would do one thing like that to Charlie Kirk would like to do it to us,” Cox says Trump instructed him. Trump went on to recite statistics suggesting that the presidency was “some of the harmful jobs on the planet.” Fifteen p.c of the lads who’d held his workplace had been shot; 8 p.c had been killed.
Cox understood Trump’s concern—in any case, the president had narrowly escaped assassination himself only a yr earlier. And Kirk’s homicide was the newest grim flip in a season of political violence that has terrified America’s elected officers. “Individuals are scared to demise on this constructing,” a member of Congress instructed NBC Information this week. However as Cox and I spoke yesterday night, he didn’t appear particularly centered on his personal security. He had one thing else on his thoughts.
We have been speaking by way of Zoom. Cox seemed exhausted; he instructed me he hadn’t slept in 48 hours. And although he was relieved that an arrest had been made, he additionally appeared unnerved by the alleged killer’s id: a 22-year-old man who’d grown up in a Mormon household within the southern-Utah city of Washington.
Cox had admitted in his information convention that he’d been quietly hoping for a unique final result. “I used to be praying that if this needed to occur right here that it wouldn’t be certainly one of us—that any individual drove from one other state, any individual got here from one other nation,” he’d mentioned. “Nevertheless it did occur right here, and it was certainly one of us.”
The remark drew some criticism from individuals who accused him of in search of a politically handy scapegoat. However I understood what he meant. I used to be born in Orem, the place Kirk’s taking pictures passed off. And although I grew up on the opposite aspect of the nation, I selected to return to the realm after highschool, attending faculty simply quarter-hour from the now-infamous campus of Utah Valley College. It’s tough to overstate simply how surreal it was to observe the macabre scene—the bullet, the blood, the screams—play out within the coronary heart of a county so cartoonishly pleasant and healthful that Utahns check with it as “Glad Valley.” For folks like Cox, who’ve devoted themselves to realizing a sure idealized imaginative and prescient of Utah—town on a hill, the beacon to the world—the assassination had a shattering impact.
“It does really feel like there’s a little bit of our innocence misplaced,” Cox instructed me final night time. “We’re form of sheltered right here in these mountains and these valleys, and we push the world out. However the world is actually right here. It’s at our doorstep.”
From its inception, Utah has aspired to be a sanctuary from the strife and sin and violence that scarred the remainder of the nation. The Mormon pioneers who settled the territory had been pushed into the desert by a marketing campaign of state-sanctioned persecution, and on the foot of the Wasatch Mountains they got down to construct an American Zion. A civilization sprouted; a mythology took root. In 1864, when a author for The Atlantic visited Utah, he discovered Brigham Younger, the governor and prophet, presenting his state as an idyllic haven from the Civil Struggle. “You discover us making an attempt to reside peaceably,” Younger instructed the author. “When your nation has develop into a desolation, we, the saints whom you forged out, will neglect all of your sins in opposition to us, and provide you with a house.”
Extra not too long ago, Utah’s political leaders have sought to place their state as a mannequin of cooperation and consensus-building. “The Utah Method,” they proudly name it. They’ve made headlines with bipartisan compromises on LGBTQ rights, non secular freedom, and immigration. In 2023, because the chair of the Nationwide Governors Affiliation, Cox launched an initiative he referred to as “Disagree Higher,” centered on bettering America’s political discourse. Leaders of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in the meantime, have oriented a lot of their preaching lately across the Christian name to be peacemakers.
Cox is the perfect pitchman for this model of Utah politics—affable and smiley, temperamentally averse to the confrontational model that has taken over a lot of politics. “We’re bizarre,” he declared at his State of the State tackle final January. “The nice form of bizarre. The form of bizarre the remainder of the nation is determined for proper now.”
The fact, after all, was at all times extra difficult than the image Cox painted. Utah politics has seen its share of corruption and scandal, of demagogues and frauds. Nonetheless, in an period of radicalization, the state’s politics had remained idiosyncratic sufficient to create area for Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney and Cox—a genteel breed of Republican that had currently develop into scarce elsewhere. However sooner or later previously decade, the sense of hostility and menace that’s bloomed throughout the nation started leaching into Utah.
In 2021, then-Senator Mitt Romney was booed at a Utah Republican conference with such viciousness that he discovered himself questioning if he was secure. “There are deranged folks amongst us,” he later instructed me, noting that, in Utah, “folks carry weapons.” Final yr, when Cox was working for reelection as governor, he acquired the same response on the identical conference. Dismayed and exasperated, he scolded the jeering members of his occasion: “Possibly you simply hate that I don’t hate sufficient.”
As he slogged by a bitter marketing campaign, one marked by conspiracy theories and uncharacteristically heated rhetoric, Cox realized one thing had modified in his state. “There’s form of been a breach within the stronghold,” he instructed me on the time.
Cox seemed for tactics to shut the breach. He launched “Disagree Higher.” He filmed advertisements alongside his political opponents making earnest appeals for democracy and decency. Satisfied that younger folks in his state have been being poisoned by radicalizing content material on the web, he signed a first-in-the-nation legislation designed to restrict youngsters’s entry to social media. (Social-media corporations sued, so the legislation, tied up in courtroom, has not gone into impact.) Nonetheless, the breach widened. Nothing appeared to reverse the torrent of nasty, feral politics flowing in from the remainder of the nation.
Cox instructed me he had little question the alleged shooter’s worldview had been warped in some very darkish corners of the web. And watching the web discourse round Kirk’s homicide this week solely underscored the harm completed by algorithmically incentivized ghoulishness. “Discord, 4chan, Twitter, Bluesky—these items are actually hacking our brains and hijacking our company,” he instructed me. “The worst of humanity is in our pockets.” Even essentially the most fastidiously constructed sanctuary can’t face up to an onslaught just like the one generated by Silicon Valley.
And but, as our dialog wound down, Cox made clear that he wasn’t able to let go of his Utah exceptionalism. He spoke of candlelight vigils and touching conversations with Democrats who have been devastated by Kirk’s demise. “Possibly, simply possibly, there’s a path ahead for our nation that comes by the good folks of Utah,” he instructed me. I sympathized along with his reaching for optimism. The dream of an American Zion doesn’t simply die.
Within the days since Kirk’s assassination, I’ve discovered myself repeatedly buzzing an odd outdated Mormon-pioneer hymn.
“In our beautiful Deseret,
The place the Saints of God have met,
There’s a mess of kids throughout …”
Deseret was the identify first given to the territory that may develop into Utah. The phrase, borrowed from the Guide of Mormon, means “honeybee,” and it was meant to convey the pioneer values of onerous work and self-reliance. However the identify ultimately got here to evoke the broader imaginative and prescient of Utah’s Zionic ideally suited—a spot of peace and comity, of security.
The scholars who gathered at a campus amphitheater this week to pay attention and debate and protest—those who wound up fleeing in terror as a speaker bled out onstage and a sniper slipped away into the woods—have been sufficiently old to now not be “a mess of kids.” Nor have been they probably blind to the issues of their state. However they’d taken without any consideration that they lived in a spot beautiful sufficient to permit for a free alternate of concepts with out bullets ripping by the air above their heads.
That they needed to be disabused of that perception is a tragedy. Cox, and all of us, are left clinging to the hope that it’s not a harbinger.
