Spencer Cox Wants to Pull Our Politics Back From the Brink
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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We increasingly feel like we're in the scenario I've been worried about since the moment Charlie Kirk was shot, where his death, his assassination, is used by those in power to excuse a crackdown on those they have already seen themselves at war with.
You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they're gonna go after constitutionally protected speech. No, no, no, we're gonna go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence. That's not okay. Violence is not okay in our system. It is a vast domestic terror movement With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.
I think it's a very, very, very dangerous moment. But it's not inevitable. Leadership is always a choice. You can choose to use a moment like this to deepen our divisions, to pull us apart from each other, to make politics into something yet that much closer to war. Or you can use a moment like this to reduce them, to try to take the country in a different direction than the one we've been going in. We have had over the past week and change an example of that kind of leadership too. Charlie Kirk was murdered in Utah. The governor of Utah is Spencer Cox, a Republican, a conservative, but one who is very, very concerned about the ways we've been coming apart as a country. He didn't come to this on that day.
He's been thinking about political de-escalation, thinking about the way we disagree with each other and how we can do it in a way that does not tear us apart for years now. So I wanted to have him on the show to talk about what that day, that week was like for him, what it has left him thinking about and what he thinks we should do now.
Governor Cox, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Ezra. So I want to start in 2023. You said back then that you felt we were, quote, facing a toxic debate unlike anything we've seen since the Civil War. What were you seeing then that made you say that?
Well, I was taking over as chair of the National Governors Association. And as chair, you get to do an initiative. Everybody gets to do something. And I was looking at healthcare cost escalation. I was looking at critical minerals and energy production. And we had this conversation with my team and just decided that we couldn't solve any of the biggest problems facing our country if we all hated each other. And so one of my team members had this idea, what if we focused on kind of the toxic polarization as our initiative for the NGA? spend a year working with experts across the country trying to figure out if there's real research around how we could de-escalate what was happening. In one of those first convenings, we were in New Hampshire actually on a college campus, and we had an expert who came in from the Carnegie Foundation who had done some research,
around this type of political violence that we were seeing in our country. And the report came back that we were kind of blowing through all those checkpoints towards some very serious division, you know, potential for a catastrophic decline in kind of Western civilization and a serious increase in political violence. And just led us to believe that we were on the cusp of something pretty dark.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:25
2
Why does Spencer Cox say the U.S. is in a “dangerous political moment” after Charlie Kirk’s assassination?
5:25–12:47
3
What did Cox see in 2023 that made him label the national debate as “toxic” and comparable to the Civil War?
12:47–21:51
4
Which specific warning signs and checkpoints did the National Governors Association research uncover about rising political violence?
21:51–30:16
5
How did Governor Cox experience the day Charlie Kirk was murdered and what were his immediate reactions?
30:16–37:07
6
Why does Cox argue that political violence is different from other crimes and why does it threaten democracy?
37:07–44:11
7
How do cable news, social‑media algorithms, and online loneliness amplify polarization, according to Cox?
44:11–51:58
8
What policies and community‑building actions does Cox propose to de‑escalate politics and restore civil discourse?
51:58–57:05