Playbook: “The anger is colossal today, visceral. And understandably so. Charlie Kirk was loved and admired by millions of people — he built a movement, from the ground up. You may have embraced his worldview or you may have vehemently disagreed with everything he said, but his approach was to persuade, to use charm and charisma and provocation and the power of argument to convince people of the righteousness of his cause.”

“And he had courage, taking his arguments out into the country, out to wherever his fans and his critics were. As so many people have already said — including his fiercest critics — this has to be the right approach. This is what we want from our politics. Yet this is also what put him in harm’s way. So where does our politics go from here?”

“It’s hard to be optimistic this morning about the road ahead. The sight of Congress erupting into another angry shouting match last night — in what should have been a solemn moment of reflection — was the most depressing, and revealing, reaction of all.“

“Even before the assassination of Charlie Kirk, an influential right-wing activist, there were signs of a looming political crisis. Rising polarization and the coarsening of public discourse left little room for shared understanding. Acts of violence, targeting figures on the left and the right, had begun piling up,” the New York Times reports.

“But the killing of Mr. Kirk on a Utah college campus on Wednesday — shortly after he began speaking to a young crowd on a sunny afternoon — raises the possibility that the country has entered an even more perilous phase.”

Politico: America searches for a way back from the edge.

Punchbowl News: “Much of the behavior that we see from national political leaders themselves would be deemed unacceptable for grade-school children.”

“Many – if not most – members and senators see the other party as their mortal enemies out to destroy the country, not just good-hearted yet wrong-thinking political rivals. That mindset makes each day an existential struggle between good and evil rather than a contest between competing political ideas or policies…”

“The rise of social media has fed into growing extremism on both sides of the aisle. Passing legislation or making bipartisan deals is seen as far less valuable than someone who can pound their opponents on TikTok or X. In fact, bipartisanship is a sign you’ve been compromised and fallen prey to the other side’s malevolent machinations.”