Southwestern Utah is a beautiful part of the world. Edging towards the Grand Canyon and Arizona beyond, the scenery is spectacular.
For most people, thinking of the "American West" will conjure a landscape like that of the classic John Ford western movies. A landscape like the one Tyler Robinson grew up in.
The big wide open, the endless sky, room to roam and get close to nature. A place to be free, where they take the American ideology of freedom seriously.
A place where owning a gun - and knowing how to use it - is entirely normal. A culture of rugged self-sufficiency. The corollary of the freedom that comes with the big wide open is that the cops are never close by when you need them.
The same for ambulances and other emergency services. Mohave County, on the other side of the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona has one ambulance covering 2,200 square miles, including the 50-mile stretch of I-93 from the Hoover Dam to Dolan Springs, where tourists from Las Vegas turn off to get to the south side of the Grand Canyon.
It is probably the worst place in America to have a car crash (a thought that occurred to me when I nearly ran into a long-horned steer as it ambled across the unlit main street of Dolan springs last October).
The Robinson family lived in St George, the main town of Washington County, 2,400 square miles of southwest Utah. Built on the Mojave desert, the main road runs west to Las Vegas, the nearest big city. It sells itself on a high quality of life, year-round sunshine and the red walled canyons of those classic western landscapes. It is close to three national parks. It is also conservative country.
Donald Trump got 74.4% of the vote in Washington County, Utah. The last time the county voted for a Democratic Party president it was 1944, and Franklin D. Roosevelt had just won a fourth term.
Ronald Reagan got 86% in the 1984 Republican landslide. Mitt Romney, a Utah native, got 82% in 2012, running against Barack Obama. 92% of Washington county residents are Mormons.
It is not the type of place you would expect the assassin of a leading conservative activist to come from.
But St George is big enough to have decent enough internet. And Tyler Robinson appears to have been very online, part of the first "digital native" generation.
Naturally social media and video games have come under scrutiny as people search for motive.
But the history of political violence here - and everywhere else - long predates TikTok. RTÉ's office in Washington DC is not far from Ford’s theatre, where President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth: I’m pretty sure there was no social media in 1865.
Lincoln had founded the Republican party to campaign against slavery.
He fought the US civil war for its abolition - a war started by Democratic Party members in South Carolina, something Republicans today periodically remind the public of, especially when being attacked as racist. The Museum of African American History on the National Mall in DC - Oprah Winfrey was a big donor - has an exhibit on the Ku Klux Klan that notes that Republicans were frequent targets of Klan attacks in the 19th century, along with African Americans.
The normal expectation is that more will emerge about Robinson and the Charlie Kirk killing in the weeks and months ahead. A formal charging document is expected to be presented by Utah County prosecutors on Tuesday, with a news conference then expected to give some more details of the investigation.
The Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has said right from the beginning of the manhunt that the state would push for the death penalty.
Now that there is a young man in custody awaiting formal charging, the Governor checked his anger and rose to the moment during the news conference on Friday when he formally announced the arrest of Robinson. His remarks are worth quoting at length.
Mr Cox said: "I don't want to get too preachy, but I think it's important that we, with eyes wide open, understand what's happening in our country today.
"I've heard people say, well, why are we so invested in this? There's violence happening all across our country, and violence is tragic everywhere, and every life taken is a child of God who deserves our love and respect and dignity.
"This is, this is certainly about the tragic death, assassination, political assassination, of Charlie Kirk. But it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been and who we could be in better times.
"Political violence is different than any other type of violence for lots of different reasons, one because in the very act that Charlie championed of freedom of expression - that is enshrined in our founding documents - in having his life taken in that very act makes it more difficult for people to feel like they can share their ideas, that they can speak freely.
"We will never be able to solve all the other problems, including the violence problems that people are worried about, if we can't have a clash of ideas safely and securely, even especially, those ideas with which you disagree. That's why this matters so much.
"Over the last 48 hours, I have been as angry as I have ever been, as sad as I have ever been, and it was as anger pushed me to the brink, it was actually Charlie's words that pulled me back.
"I'd like to share some of those, and specifically, right now, if I could, I need to talk to the young people in our state, in my state, and all across the country, as President Trump reminded me, he said, you know, who really loved Charlie? The youths.
And he's right - young people love Charlie, and young people hated Charlie. And Charlie went into those places anyway. And these are the words that have helped me.
"Charlie said, when people stop talking, that's when you get violence. He said, the weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
"The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive without judgment, love without condition, forgive without limit.
"He said, always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.
"A few months ago, Charlie posted to social media when things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it's important to stay grounded.
"Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember - internet fury is not real life. It's going to be okay.
"He again said, when you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to commit violence.
"He said, what we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have a reasonable agreement, being able to have reasonable agreement where violence is not an option.
"Now, again, to my young friends out there, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage. It feels like rage is the only option. But through those words, we have a reminder that we can choose a different path.
"Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now, not by pretending differences don't matter, but by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations.
"I think we need more moral clarity right now. I hear all the time that words are violence: words are not violence.
"Violence is violence, and there is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody and will be charged soon and will be held accountable. And yet, all of us have an opportunity right now to do something different.
"I want to thank my fellow Utahns. You know this bad stuff happens, and for 33 hours, I was praying that that if this had to happen here, that it wouldn't be one of us, that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country. Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I had hoped for, just because I thought it would make it easier on us, if we could just say, 'hey, we don't do that here’.
"And indeed, Utah is a special place. We lead the nation in charitable giving. We lead the nation in service every year. But it did happen here, and it was one of us. But I want you to look at how Utahns reacted the last two nights.
"There was no rioting, there was no looting, there were no cars set on fire. There's no violence.
"There were were vigils and prayers and people coming together to share the humanity, and that, ladies and gentlemen, I believe, is the answer to this.
"We can return violence with violence. We can return hate with hate, and that's the problem with political violence - 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.
"But see, these are choices that we can make 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, we get to make decisions.
"We have our agency, and I desperately call on every American, Republican, Democrat, liberal, progressive, conservative, MAGA, all of us, to please, please, please follow what Charlie taught me.
"I'll just conclude with words I share often from a friend and author....who was asked if he was optimistic about our country, and he said, 'I'm not optimistic'.
"He said, 'I hate optimism'. God, that sounds bad.
"But he said, optimism is a vice. It's this idea that good things are just going to happen. And he said, in the history of the world, good things have never just happened. He says, 'I'm not optimistic, but I am hopeful'. And hope is the virtue that sits between the vices of optimism and pessimism.
"Hope is the idea that good things are going to happen because we can make them so. I still believe in our country, and I know Charlie Kirk believed in our country, I still believe that there is more good among us than evil, and I still believe that we can change the course of history. I'm hopeful, because Americans can make it so."
'This is not time for kumbaya'
But in the older end of the MAGA republican online spectrum, the governor's words were immediately denounced.
Steve Bannon, the campaign chief for Mr Trump’s first victory, was speaking on his daily 'War Room' podcast and radio show as the governor’s press conference ended.
His guest was Matt Boyle, the political correspondent of Breitbart News (which Bannon also leads), who decried Governor Cox’s call for unity: "This is not time for kumbaya - this is the time to treat Antifa like we treated Communism in the fifties or Al Qaeda after 9/11 - the fact is we need to crush the ideology of Antifa: We need congressional leaders, law enforcement leaders, government and political leaders, cultural leaders, to actually do something about this, and aggressively go after the people who are spreading this hate.
"We need Watergate-like commissions, the Mc Carthy hearings going after communists - we cant do kumbaya; these people, they are shooting people and justifying it by falsely calling us Nazis."
Mr Bannon replied: "Because they know it works, and nobody is stopping them. Of course they aren't going to stop: it works.
"We are heading for civil war. They just gunned down one of the most gentle, spiritual, applied-Christianity, good men in this country - one of the few leaders in this country who is a super solid guy who always said let's debate it out.
"Did you see that conference there (with Cox)? If I am one of these demons I’m saying you know what? ‘We're winning lets do a couple or three more!’ Cox - is that what your giving me? ‘I got my law enforcement partnerships here’ - I am so sick of these press conferences - they’re jerking each other off with partnership."
Matt Boyle replied: "One thing the Governor said was right - it feels like the late 60’s after MLK and RFK were assassinated. We have to confront these people in this radical, hateful ideology."
Steve Bannon said: "Charlie Kirk was assassinated - excuse me - executed in cold blood. We’re not in a dark time because of our side: were in a dark time because the forces of chaos, the forces of evil, demons (like) that guy who thinks they can win by gunning down a good and decent man in front of thousands and on global television - they know they’re winning by doing that: this is only going to stop when we make it stop.
"Your group hugs and all - you’re just being led to slaughter (by) Cox - he's just the false guy that leading lambs to slaughter. Is that what you want?
"Well guess what - in the War Room were not going to be led to slaughter, we’re going to fight back with every ounce we have in our body."
Mr Bannon’s next guest was the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who claimed the next attack will be at a rally protesting against Mr Trump’s use of National Guard troops in big cities as part of a clampdown on crime and illegal immigration.
Naturally, Jones used his favorite term "false flag" and accused a section of the Democratic Party leadership of plotting such attacks to stir up a civil war.
While a section of "new media" tries to draw connections between Robinson and Luigi Mangione, the Maryland man awaiting trial for murdering a health insurance company CEO, and Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who tried to kill Donald Trump at an election rally in Butler Pennsylvania last year, "old media" has broadened the list of targets of recent political violence to include democratic politicians, like Melissa Hortman - the speaker of the Minnesota State Assembly who was shot dead with her husband last July, and Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Pennsylvania, who had to be evacuated along with his family from the Governor's mansion when it was firebombed in April.
American newspapers are a contributor to and beneficiary of this country's free speech tradition, codified in the first amendment to the constitution (the first of ten amendments that form the Bill of Rights, added in 1789 to ensure the Constitution was ratified. The second amendment is the right to bear arms).
Ezra Klein, himself a product of "new media", wrote in the New York Times on Thursday: "Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics. It is supposed to be an argument, not a war; it is supposed to be won with words, not ended with bullets.
"I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project. The same is true for Shapiro, for Hoffman, for Hortman, for Thompson, for Trump, for Pelosi, for Whitmer. We are all safe, or none of us are."
This is America now. A shocking act of violence causing deep reflection on one of the things that makes America the America of worldwide inspiration and admiration: free speech.
The first amendment makes the possibilities of and from free speech virtually limitless. The second amendment simultaneously protects and threatens those possibilities. The tension between them is the electricity animating this country’s eternal internal debate.
Its the age-old, never-ending argument about what is America - and it is as American as the Grand Canyon itself. The gap in understanding between partizans on both sides of the argument is sometimes just as wide. This is America now - same as it has always been.
