WASHINGTON (AP) — Utah Gov. Spencer Cox made an impassioned plea on Friday for Americans and young people to use the horror of conservative activist Charlie Kirk's public assassination as an inflection point to turn the country away from political violence and division.
“This is our moment: Do we escalate or do we find an off-ramp?” Cox said at a news conference in Utah as he announced authorities had a suspect in Kirk's killing in custody. “It's a choice.”
Throughout his political career, Cox, a two-term Republican governor, has issued pleas for bipartisan cooperation and at times drawn national attention for his empathetic remarks.
His speech on Friday was his most emotional and high-profile example yet, as he urged an appeal to common ground and humanity to forge a better society. It was a marked departure from the bellicose rhetoric often employed in recent years by U.S. politicians, especially President Donald Trump, who is known for provocative language and has blamed Kirk's killing on “radical left” rhetoric.
On Wednesday, after Kirk's killing, Cox made a similar plea.
On Friday, acknowledging he was running on only 90 minutes of sleep after days of the manhunt for Kirk's killer and heated rhetoric unfurling online, he went further.
His voice appearing to break at times, Cox said that the response to violence and hate can be more violence and hate. “And that's the problem with political violence,” he said. "It metastasizes because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point we have to find an off-ramp or it's going to get much much worse.”
“History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country. But every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us,” Cox said.
The 50-year-old governor, who has four children who are teenagers and young adults, directed some of his remarks to young people.
“You are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage. It feels like rage is the only option,” he said.
But, Cox said, there's a different path: “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.”
He said the 22-year-old suspect in Kirk's killing had become “more political” in the run-up to Wednesday's shooting on a university campus.
Cox also spoke of the harms of social media and said it was terrible that Kirk's slaying was “so gruesomely displayed” for everyone to watch online.
“We are not wired as human beings biologically, historically we have not evolved in a way that we are capable of processing those types of violent imagery," Cox said. “This is not good for us. It is not good to consume. Social media is a cancer on our society right now.”
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Associated Press writer Chris Megerian contributed to this report.
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