| With the arrest of a suspect in the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the question before the nation now is, what comes next. A trail of blame and vitriol from the left and right spread across social media in the wake of the killing. Among elected officials, there were calls for unity mixed with finger-pointing from some of Kirk’s allies at what they called leftist extremists. In an interview this morning on Fox News, President Donald Trump acknowledged there are radicals on the right but suggested they are motivated by concerns about crime and immigration. “The radicals on the left are the problem,” he said, calling them “vicious.” But he also said that Americans shouldn’t live in fear of political violence and said his supporters should seek “revenge at the voter box.” Read More: The increasingly polarized nature of society has resulted in members of both political parties blaming the other for extremist attacks, which could exacerbate the problem, according to Riley McCabe, an associate fellow of warfare, irregular threats and terrorism at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. McCabe authored a study published by CSIS last October that found the number of domestic terrorist attacks and plots against government targets motivated by partisan political beliefs in the past five years is nearly triple the number of such incidents in the previous 25 years combined, though they remain rare. “In our response to flashpoint events, these extremists should not be used to characterize entire political movements,” McCabe told me. “Lots of people hold extremist views, what some may consider extremist views; a tiny, tiny fraction of those people actually act on them. Republican strategist Maura Gillespie said the nation needs to hear a unifying message like then-President George W. Bush delivered after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “to remind us that we are all Americans.” Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, said it’s imperative for the nation to find a way past anger and blame. “We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate,” he said at a news conference where the arrest of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson was announced. “And that’s the problem with political violence, is 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.” | 
