College campuses are in turmoil with fiery debates over social issues and international conflicts. The tension between Left and Right, wealthy and impoverished, young and old is nearly existential, as the nation deals with deep political and cultural division, aggravated by political assassination.

Sound familiar? Turn back the clock six decades.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, said Mark Twain.

Back then, the contentious issue was the Vietnam War. Both women and the LGBTQ community were fighting for equal rights. The youth, disenchanted with their parents’ values concerning drugs, fashion, and music, were deeply involved in counterculture, particularly in universities. Sadly, during this time, America’s leaders, both politically and socially, faced violent attacks.

Similar scenarios are visible today: replacing the Vietnam War with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, extreme transgender ideology taking the place of the struggle for equal rights, and the radicalism of the 60s transitioning into a vast generational divide, worsened by an unyielding digital era and growing financial disparity.

The shocking assassination of conservative movement leader Charlie Kirk, 31, is yet another disturbing marker.

Dr Robert Pape, Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, had warned in June the US might be on the brink of an ‘extremely violent era in American politics.

After Kirk’s death, Dr Pape told the Daily Mail: ‘This is a dramatic watershed moment. This is exactly the kind of political violence I have been concerned about. I predicted this months ago and what I feared would happen has happened.’

If, as Pape and others fear, America is indeed entering an increasingly violent new era the 1960s provided a frightening precedent.

President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963 is a defining moment in US history but it was only one of myriad political killings.

Civil rights activist Medgar Evers was killed five months earlier, fatally shot by a fertilizer salesman and member of the segregationist White Citizens’ Council, as he exited his car outside his Mississippi home.

Revolutionary Malcolm X was gunned down two years later in New York City’s Washington Heights. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted for the murder (although two were later exonerated).

1968 was a particularly bleak year, claiming the lives of both minister and activist Martin Luther King Jr (shot on the balcony of his Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee) and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy (at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles) within two months of each other.

Is that history so different from the past five years?

‘We are going through what I call an era of violent populism,’ Pape told the Washington Post. ‘It is a historically high era of assassination, assassination attempts, violent protests and it is occurring on both the right and the left.’

He added: ‘This is way beyond the usual minor ebb and flow of militia group violence we have seen for 20 years. This is a different level, a different historical period of political violence, and that is what you see. This is a demonstrable fact.’

As political divisions have become more pronounced and rancorous, so inevitably is animosity between supporters of the two main parties.

A Wall Street Journal survey in July found more than 80 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Republicans hold not only an unfavorable view of the opposing party but a ‘very unfavorable’ view. In contrast, a similar survey of voters in 2020 found only 50 percent of Republicans and 40 percent of Democrats held ‘very negative’ views of the other party.

A particularly relevant factor is that voters increasingly feel that losing an election isn’t just a defeat for their party’s policies but for a particular way of life.

NBC News asked people in 2022 if the opposing party’s agenda would ‘destroy’ America if enacted – 79 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Democrats agreed that it would.

Given they feel so much is at stake, perhaps it’s little surprise that Americans have become markedly more favorably-inclined towards the concept of using political violence. Previous polling has suggested less than 10 percent of the population – a similar percentage on both Left and Right – support the idea of political violence.

However, Dr Pape says polling by his organization has found a market increase in this area. Its national study in May found that about 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Trump from office, while around 25 percent of Republicans supported using the military to stop protests against the president’s agenda.

These numbers were more than double what they were this time a year ago when Pape’s project asked similar questions. Meanwhile, he noted, the more public support there is for political violence, the more often it happens.

In 2024, nearly 9,500 threats and ‘concerning statements’ were leveled against Congress members, families and staff, and Washington DC’s Capitol complex, up from about 8,000 the year prior, the U.S. Capitol Police reported. In 2017, the number was less than 4,000.

Judges and prosecutors are also increasingly targeted. Compared with 2021, threats against federal judges doubled to 457 in the fiscal year that ended in September 2023, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

The violence hasn’t always targeted politicians but has still been political in nature.

The rioters pelting Immigration and Customs agents with rocks and bottles, ditto the vandalism of Tesla cars and dealerships, recognized as proxy attacks of former Trump adviser Elon Musk.

The same could be said of Luigi Mangione whose alleged message was heard loud and clear when he gunned down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Today, it is easy to see shadows of Mangione in the figure of the man who assassinated Kirk earlier this week.

Dressed in black, moving with purpose and apparently careful planning – focused, armed and lethal. 

Mangione was just 26 when, in December, he allegedly shot Thompson at point blank range in a Manhattan street.

The young man now in custody, suspected of ending 31-year-old Kirk’s life with a single bullet to the neck, is just 22.

According to Governor Spencer Cox family members of Tyler Robinson reported that he had mentioned the conservative leader’s upcoming visit to the University of Utah Valley’s campus in Orem. He had of late, they said, become ‘full of hate and spreading hate.’

For his part, prosecutors allege that Mangione was driven by a loathing of corporate America – crystallized, for him in large health insurance companies’ practice of delaying claimants pay outs.

Mangione perversely became an icon of sorts for many – hailed as some sort of ‘hero’ and heartthrob. Will the same happen with Robinson? That remains to be seen, as do the details of what lay behind Kirk’s killing.

But it is impossible not to see young men like these – apparently well educated, from good families, with every opportunity and yet still so radicalized they’re ready to kill for their beliefs – as a manifestation of a deeply troubling moment in America’s political history.

Then there are the high-profile killings.

In June, Democratic Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot dead in their home in a ‘politically-motivated’ double killing in which the shooter was reportedly dressed as a police officer.

Vance Luther Boelter, their alleged killer, is also accused of wounding state Senator John Hoffman in another targeted shooting at his Minneapolis home.

While Boelter’s motive is still uncertain, (although his targets were all Democrats) he reportedly displayed signs of mental illness.

Two months earlier, in April, there was an arson attack on the home of Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. The assailant claimed – according to police – that he believe Shapiro’s position of the war in Gaza was leading to the deaths of Palestinians.

President Trump, of course, survived two alleged assassination attempts last year – once when a bullet clipped his right ear at a Pennsylvania rally in July and a second in September when a gunman allegedly lay in wait for him at his West Palm Beach golf course, armed with an assault rifle.

Recent years have also seen kidnap or murder attempts on Michigan Democrat governor Gretchen Whitmer and conservative Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, while in 2022 a man broke into the home of the then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and bludgeoned her husband with a hammer.

Kirk was fond of justifying his combative public appearances by saying that ‘when people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.’

Now in the wake of his killing, calls for curtailing hyperbolic speech have risen even as prospects for that sort of mutual rhetorical disarmament have withered. Many of Kirk’s political opponents greeted his death online with undisguised glee, just as twisted fanatics on the other end of the spectrum have greeted attacks on Democrats.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Trump blamed ‘radical left political violence’ for his ally’s killing without a suspect even being in custody.

Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren was equally uncompromising, responding to requests to tone down the rhetoric by saying: ‘Why don’t you start with the President of the United States, right? And every ugly meme he has posted and every ugly word.’.

If there is a lesson to be learned about Kirk’s death it doesn’t seem to be getting through yet to all concerned.