The young man’s voice quivered as he spoke, almost at breaking point, as he explained how he had been feeling since the conservative activist, Charlie Kirk, was shot dead on September 10.
“There is a part of the population that hates my very existence,” said the student, a white male conservative Christian in his 20s. “They want to dance on your grave. They hate your existence, and they want to murder your children.”
Another young man – of a similar age and demographic, and a member of a far right militia group – spoke of the same sense of fear and despair, invoking biblical language as he shared his concerns that the US was in a slow spiral towards civil war.
“I don’t think anyone can deny that we are at a point in history where there are people who are calling evil things good and good things evil,” he said.
In his mind, American conservatives were on the side of good, and those on the left were evil. But I can imagine the same points being made by a person at the other end of the political spectrum.
Most striking was the genuine fear among the people I spoke to. Many were deep in social media echo chambers, being fed endless TikTok clips of insensitive liberals celebrating Kirk’s death, from which they extrapolated a broader left wing conspiracy to rid the world of conservative white men.
“They call a lot of people Nazis – they say ‘you have to kill the Nazis’. That puts me on edge and scares me. It’s frightening,” said the student.
As is often the case in politics, the gap between perception and reality is huge. A new study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows that in 2025, for the first time in more than 30 years, attacks by the far left outnumber those by the far right. Police have said that Kirk’s alleged killer was “indoctrinated with leftist ideology”.
But the research also noted that in the past decade, 152 far right attacks killed 112 people, while 35 attacks by groups and individuals with left wing ideologies killed 13 people.
You wouldn’t know that from listening to Donald Trump, who has told the country that “most of the violence is on the left”, and admitted that he “couldn’t care less” about far right extremists because they “are radical because they don’t want to see crime”.
“The radicals on the left are the problem,” he continued, speaking to a Fox News host who had dared to ask about reconciliation, “and they are vicious, and they are horrible”.
Since Kirk’s death, this language has become commonplace among the MAGA faction; they speak of enemies, battles and crusades against a nebulous “they” on the left whom MAGA Republicans claim are seeking to destroy the country.
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There was one voice of reason amid the rage after Kirk’s death: his widow, Erika, told a memorial service that “the answer to hate is not hate”. Just after her moving speech, however, Trump came on stage and ended the conciliatory tone: “I hate my opponents. And I don’t want the best for them,” he told the crowd, confirming that bringing the country together in a time of crisis was not on his to-do list.
Right now, that view is echoed across the political spectrum. Many of the progressive and liberal people in my social circles are so disgusted with Trump’s policies that they don’t want to talk to anyone who voted for him.
Some of the people on the conservative right that I spoke to said they were open to reconciliation, but said they saw no platform on which that could happen, so instead they retreat to social media.
Fear is a powerful tool in politics, as Trump well knows. But it also makes people do dangerous things. In my research into the causes of extremism, it was clear that fear and rage are a toxic combination that can lead people down the path to radicalisation.
It’s painful to say, but Trump and his allies have a point when they accuse Democratic politicians of stoking political tensions with rhetoric that paints Trump and MAGA as fascists and Nazis: if they are an existential threat to the future of democracy, what do they want people to do about it?
That leaves the Democrats in a Catch-22: if they call out Trump for policies that lean towards authoritarianism, then they are accused of inciting violence. But it’s their job as an opposition party to speak out when they see threats to democracy in America.
My fear, after many conversations across the political spectrum, is that no one is trying to understand the other side’s fears, and without basic human empathy, the country will remain trapped in the inevitable spiral towards more political violence.
Charlotte McDonald-Gibson is a journalist and author of Cast Away: Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis
