- Learning to agree, to disagree.

This week on "Firing Line."

- I need to talk to the young people in our state, in my state, and all across the country.

- [Margaret] Utah Governor Spencer Cox leapt onto the national stage with this speech delivered after the murder of Charlie Kirk in his state, one year ago.

- You are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage.

(people yelling) It feels like rage is the only option.

And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp or it's going to get much, much worse.

- [Margaret] One year later, that message is a book, offering solutions to the divisiveness and isolation that he says is driving political violence.

- [Spencer] Politics has become a religion- - [Margaret] Yeah.

- To people.

And when politics becomes your religion, then anyone who disagrees with you is a heretic and evil.

And that leads to really terrible outcomes.

- [Margaret] As the nation marks 25 years since the attacks of September 11th and remembers the extraordinary unity that followed, what will it take to recover a sense of common purpose?

What does Governor Spencer Cox say now?

(upbeat music) - [Announcer 1] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Grenieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, and by the following.

- Governor Cox, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Thank you.

I'm so excited to be here, Margaret.

- This week marks one year since Charlie Kirk's assassination.

His murder did not ignite the tinderbox of violence that you feared, but neither did it create an off-ramp from polarization as you had hoped.

Why not?

- Well, I think there's several reasons.

I mean, first of all, we should acknowledge that it didn't get much worse, and that's a win.

I think Erika Kirk had a lot to do with that when she stood on stage and forgave his assassin, powerful moment.

All of the incentives right now, social media, I mean, everything is pulling us apart.

The conflict entrepreneurs make a lot of money dividing us.

And so it's going to take a while for us to heal as a nation.

But I will say, as I travel across this country, as I've heard from people in the past year, the vast majority of Americans are desperate for something different.

They want something different.

And I'm very hopeful that we're headed in a better direction.

- Charlie Kirk's assassination, Governor, thrust you into the national spotlight at precisely the moment you had spent years warning about where political contempt, as you describe it, became political violence in your state.

You captured the country's attention when you said to the world, "At some point we have to find an off-ramp or else it's going to get much, much worse."

That off-ramp is now the subject of your new book.

How do you define the off-ramp?

And of course, how do we find it?

- Sure.

Yeah.

So I started writing about political polarization in 2014.

But it wasn't perfect then.

It didn't start back then.

It started earlier.

You know, again, we've always had political polarization in our country, but this type of contempt is getting worse.

There's some research out there that shows that basically Americans, Republicans and Democrats, see each other the way that Israelis and Palestinians see each other.

That's the type of contempt that we're actually talking about right now.

The off-ramps, and there are lots of them, are things that are sometimes intuitive, maybe sometimes not.

Getting off of social media is a huge one.

The algorithm-driven polarization, the outrage that comes from those algorithms is incredibly addicting and incredibly damaging.

- Utah was one of 48 states that sued Meta over harm that Facebook and Instagram have done to children.

And that case was recently settled for $18 billion.

And you were very clear that if it had been up to you, you would've kept fighting.

How far, if it were up to you, would you have pushed and what more did you want to see from Meta and other social media companies to protect children?

- So I'm very proud of Utah.

We were the first state to work to hold these social media companies accountable.

They had to have these kids accounts.

- Yeah.

- They couldn't be scrolling at 2:00 AM in the morning.

Look, we got a lot of what we wanted, and I'm grateful for that.

I'm proud of that.

I think that if I could have done more, it would've been to completely eliminate algorithms for kids, collecting their data.

Look, if they want to engage, follow, you know, with one another, that's fine.

But this idea that we're going to use a machine that knows how long you're staring at something to get you addicted, to feed you, I would've turned those completely off.

- Yeah.

- But look, there are so many wins in there.

Getting rid of some of the most addictive features, turning off after midnight, making sure that random strangers can't contact our kids, having productive pauses after a certain amount of time.

All of those things are better and a step in the right direction.

Now we have to make sure that the other social media companies are held accountable as well, that they join in and it's not just Meta.

TikTok, Snap, we've got to hold the others accountable as well.

- I mean, you mentioned TikTok, but the truth is even though it's now owned by an American company, there's still no sense of the two billion lines of algorithmic programming that is likely still controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

- Yeah, this is devastating.

Again, China has certain restrictions on social media because they know how bad TikTok is for their kids, and yet they're injecting it into the veins of our kids.

- The introduction of your book is written by Jonathan Haidt, who has been a guest on this program.

He wrote the book, of course, "The Anxious Generation."

He is now focusing his attention on artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence is going to impact our children and the next generation.

Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, said recently, quote, "These models are getting superhuman in many of their capabilities, and we are just sailing in unknown waters."

So can we really trust these tech companies to develop and deploy advanced AI models responsibly?

- Absolutely not.

If we've learned anything- - [Margaret] Yeah.

- It's that we cannot just hand over our kids, our attention- - [Margaret] Yeah.

- Our very human nature, our agency to large tech companies.

- And yet you've started sort of a pilot program in Utah, a digital sandbox, as I understand it, which is a place where chatbots and AI companies can test their products- - Yes.

- First before they go out to market.

How does it work?

- Yeah.

So look, we launched the Pro-Human AI Initiative.

That's the name of it, literally pro-human.

We think that the computer should work for us, not us for the computers.

And so by launching the sandbox, what we're actually doing is encouraging companies to come in and work with us, work with government so that we can test these products together.

And then we work on legislation to put those guardrails in place.

Companies like it because they're less likely to get sued for doing something wild and crazy.

We like it because we're actually having a conversation and trying to work towards, again, we're protecting people.

We think this is the model.

The problem with tech and government is we're always too far behind, right?

- Right.

You mean regulation is always- - [Spencer] Yes.

- Trailing innovation in the private sector.

- And as quickly as these models are changing- - [Margaret] Yeah.

- Government's never going to be able to keep up.

- Right.

- I mean, we meet, our legislature meets 45 days out of the year, like once a year, and I'm glad it's not more.

There's been three new models- - Yeah.

- By the time that the legislature comes back to me.

- Yeah.

- Took us 10 years to realize that social media had destroyed our kids and start trying to fix it.

AI is now starting and we're already having these conversations that took way too long.

- Do you think we're ahead of the curve now?

- Well, we're probably still behind- - [Margaret] Still behind.

- The curve, but we're way ahead of where we were with social media.

- So we've learned a lesson.

- We have learned a lesson.

- Okay.

In 2023, when you were the chairman of the National Governor's Association, along with your Democratic counterpart, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, the two of you started a program called Disagree Better, which had the aim of making political disagreement more constructive.

How do you measure the success of the Disagree Better movement?

- Yeah.

Look, the most important part about Disagree Better is the disagree part.

We're not telling anybody that they need to go along to get along, that they need to compromise their values.

We want people to be passionate about what they believe, but to do so in a way that's respectful, and again, not shoot each other.

- Can I just interject?

- Sure.

- I mean, Governor, you modeled this behavior yourself in your own campaign for governor when you reached out to, I mean, a very unlikely move, reached out to the opponent, your Democratic opponent in the race, and you decided to film an ad together, modeling exactly that.

- I'm Chris Peterson.

- And I'm Spencer Cox.

- We can debate issues without degrading each other's character.

- We can disagree without hating each other.

- And win or lose in Utah, we work together.

- So let's show the country that there's a better way.

So that's where all this started.

- [Margaret] Yeah.

- We were really worried, this is 2020, think about what was happening then.

- Yeah,.

- Summer of discontent, right?

George Floyd's murder.

- [Margaret] Okay.

- Riots in the street, COVID dividing us.

We had an election that was being contested before the election started.

And so my opponent and I decided to get together.

We filmed this ad.

It went viral.

Stanford studied it.

And what they found is it had a profound depolarizing effect on both Republicans and Democrats.

Democrats were more likely to support the Republican, Republicans more likely to support the Democrat.

What we found was you can actually win elections with a positive message without just constantly tearing down your opponent, making up lies about them, or trying to just destroy them.

Argue about the things that you're passionate about, but treat them with respect and the voters will respond positively.

- You're really... I mean, what you're really talking about is sort of a sickness in the American mind because of these factors related to social media and how we're seeing our neighbors.

- Yeah, I do think it's a sickness.

We've moved away from the virtues that are so important.

Look, at the core of this- - [Margaret] Yeah.

- Is, I believe, is loneliness.

People stop going to church, volunteer organizations, rotary clubs.

Like, most people don't know what a rotary club is.

- Yeah.

- All of those iconic institutions that brought us together, we got rid of them.

And what have we replaced them with?

The healthy tribes left, and now people just have politics.

- [Margaret] And sports.

- And sports.

You're right.

- Yeah.

- Politics and sports.

But when you lose those and you replace it with an unhealthy tribe, like politics, then people who disagree with you become the others.

They become the, again- - Become far more of a blood sport than sports actually is.

- Well, politics has become a religion- - Yeah.

- To people.

And when politics becomes your religion, then anyone who disagrees with you is a heretic and evil.

And when you see your fellow American as evil because they disagree on a policy, that leads to really terrible outcomes.

- You just referenced loneliness as the core, one of the core problems in our society, and it's certainly something that leads directly to political violence.

You cite the expert Cynthia Miller-Idris in your book, who was actually my guest on this program the week after Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

And, you know, her thesis is that isolated individuals, overwhelmingly men, retreat from their connection to society, find belonging in online communities, and eventually become radicalized online and turn to violence.

My question is, how much of the political violence that we're seeing do you really think is a crisis of polarization or a crisis of alienation?

- Yeah.

So I think the crisis of polarization stems from the crisis of alienation.

I absolutely agree with that.

Again, isolation, it's people looking for belonging and finding it in- - In a political tribe.

- In a political tribe.

Right?

So I don't have any real friends, but at least we can hate the same people together on Facebook.

So that's what I'm going to do.

So that's one issue.

Then you have this subset of that, which are these young men who are getting radicalized, who are now committing acts of violence to, in their minds, solve a problem, right?

The healthcare problem.

Instead of working with Congress to solve healthcare, I'm going to kill the CEO of a major insurance company, right?

Or, I disagree with Charlie Kirk and some his, some of the things that he's saying, and so I'm going to end his life, right?

That is a very radical and extreme version of that polarization.

- [Margaret] Yeah.

- Possibly because of isolation.

Now, I want to be careful that we don't just say, like, society's responsible for the decision of these young men.

They are responsible for those decisions.

- [Margaret] Yeah.

- And they have to be held accountable.

And we as a nation have to decide that we're going to care about young men again, that we're going to start providing them opportunities, places where they can find belonging in ways that are healthy, in ways that lead to positive outcomes.

- [Margaret] Yeah.

- And that make sure that this is America for all Americans.

- You write in your book that you didn't support Donald Trump in 2016 or in 2020, but after President Trump's assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, you wrote that Donald Trump was spared, and that it was a miracle, and that you prayed about what to do and ultimately decided to support him.

You told McKay Coppins, "Supporting Trump has become a litmus test for being on the team."

It seems that in order to be as successful of a governor of Utah as you could be for the people of Utah, you needed to be on the team.

I think the question is, is there a cost to accepting the litmus test?

And what is it for you?

- Well, that's a good question and certainly something I've wrestled with.

- And you write about wrestling with it.

- I do.

- [Margaret] Yeah.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

I try to be very transparent- - [Margaret] Yeah.

- About that.

And look, I do have a very good relationship with the president, and he knows I didn't support him for eight years.

As for my willingness to support him, I said, I wrote him a letter, and in that letter, I make the case to him that he has an opportunity to work to heal the nation, that he could do something very, very special in bringing both sides together.

Charlie Kirk's memorial, there's this powerful moment that we mentioned where Erika Kirk says, "I forgive the assassin."

I mean, unbelievably powerful.

- And then Donald Trump, of course, comes on the stage and says.

- He did not hate his opponents.

He wanted the best for them.

That's where I disagreed with Charlie.

I hate my opponent and I don't want the best for them.

I'm sorry.

I am sorry, Erika.

- He comes in and says, "I can't do that.

That's not how I'm wired.

That's not how I do this."

So this is one area where he and I are always going to disagree.

- Yeah.

- And yet, and this is the case I'm making for personal relationships.

Can you still have a relationship with someone like that?

Can you work with someone who disagrees with you passionately?

And we're doing it.

We're trying it and it's working and I'm grateful for the relationship that I have with him, and we'll see where we go from here.

- You write about urging President Biden to pardon Donald Trump, arguing that it would be, quote, "a generous act of goodwill."

And in 1974, months before President Nixon resigned, William F. Buckley Jr.

welcomed then Vice President Gerald Ford on the original "Firing Line," and he asked him about pardoning Nixon post Watergate.

Take a look.

- In the event that you become president, would you grant amnesty to everyone involved in the so-called Watergate affair?

- I'm not sure, Bill, that I ought to undertake to respond to a question of that kind.

The first place, I don't anticipate becoming president.

And to speculate in such a sensitive area without knowing who might be convicted and who might be acquitted, I think, would be presumptuous and ill-advised.

- So after becoming president, of course, Ford does pardon Nixon.

In retrospect, was Ford right to pardon Nixon?

- Yes.

- That pardon was an off-ramp.

- I absolutely believe it was an off-ramp.

- There are those who have been on this program and sat in that chair- - Yeah.

- And argued that all it did was reinforce this notion that presidents are above the law.

- [Spencer] Right.

- What do you say to that?

- Well, I just disagree with it.

I do think it had an impact.

And, you know, I think there are lessons we can learn from those experiences.

- President Biden did not take your advice, but President Trump was spared from federal prosecution by the Supreme Court.

Many Democrats argue that to hold him accountable is exactly why he has behaved so brazenly, some would say illegally since returning to office.

- One of the cases that I make in the book is that the founders did not want the presidency to be the most important position.

They believe that the legislative branch should be the most powerful branch.

- [Margaret] Yeah.

- And the president was not supposed to matter that much.

And we've made a big mistake in giving the president too much power.

The idea that the presidents govern via executive order.

I'm always grateful when the Supreme Court finds an executive order unconstitutional, whether it's my team or the other team even if it's because I want- - Because it's a check on the executive branch.

- Because it's a check on the executive branch.

And these things should go through Congress.

That's where they get rounded out.

- Yeah.

- That's where you build coalitions, you bring people together.

Look, if the entire country is going to become like California, if Kamala Harris is elected, I'm going to do everything I can to stop that from happening.

- [Margaret] Yeah.

- And it leads to very extreme behavior.

If the entire country's going to become just like Florida, if Donald Trump's going to get elected, that's going to get people very angry and very upset.

It's not supposed to be that way.

It just isn't.

And so I believe that in returning to the constitutional order- - [Margaret] Yeah.

- Is one way that we can significantly depolarize and fix what's broken in our country.

And so I think whoever runs next can run on these very issues and likely be successful.

- Okay.

You, Governor, were lieutenant governor in 2015 when a really historic legislative compromise between religious leaders and the LGBT community was passed in Utah.

It was called the Utah Compromise.

- The ability that we found for people to come together at a time in 2014 when the nation was very divided- - Yeah.

- Indiana, Arkansas.

They were- - Marriage hadn't passed.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- It was, I mean, very divisive.

And we have the religious community, like, all the religions in the state came together and we elevated religious protection.

You remember the lawsuits about you have to bake a cake, even if it's against your religion, you have to do that.

We said, "No, no, no."

Like, "We're going to protect religious freedom and we're going to make sure that you don't just get fired because you're gay."

And it was the first time that those two groups had come together.

There's this moment, this signing of the bill in the rotunda of the state capitol.

When you see these adversaries standing shoulder to shoulder, hugging, tears, we had never seen them in the same room, and here they are celebrating a victory.

It's one of the most patriotic moments I've ever experienced.

I say it's a high worth chasing.

I think, I truly believe that that's what Americans want.

They just want to solve problems.

- The political climate on these issues has changed dramatically since 2015.

There's been a major backlash nationally against transgender Americans.

Do you still believe there is a middle path to be forged for these issues?

And what does that look like today?

- Yeah.

So on some issues, yes, on other issues, no.

Sometimes it is a zero-sum game.

There's an example that I write about, and that is when it comes to transitioning for minors.

- Yeah.

And you have signed two bills, 2023 and 2026, that prohibits medical transitioning for children before they're adults.

- Correct.

So here's what we did.

Said, "Look, this is going to pass and I'm going to support it because I believe in it," right?

I'm not going to compromise my belief here.

And yet, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to invite transgender families over to the governor's mansion with the people who are running the bill, and we're going to sit down and we're going to look at each other face to face so that we understand that we're real human beings.

And this isn't just a piece of paper, this isn't a TV show, this isn't a game, this is real life.

We did that.

And the bill still passed.

The LGBTQ community was angry that it passed.

I totally understand that.

And yet, our legislature stepped up.

They provided funding for therapy for kids who would not be transitioning now.

And here's maybe the most important point.

If you go back and look at the debates in Utah versus the debates in any other state on that issue, the debates were so much more respectful.

People were treated with dignity instead of just cheap political tear downs that can often happen.

The grandstanding that you see, the preening for social media didn't happen.

And I think that stuff matters.

Again, if you disagree, build a coalition, you know, share your message, win some elections, and you can come back, and... That's the Madisonian version.

If we get it wrong, then the voters respond.

- Yeah.

- And we have to keep building, we have to keep doing that, but we can do it in a right way, a better way.

And I think we did that, even though one side won and one side lost.

- This week also marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

Perhaps the last moment where Americans were deeply unified, set aside their political differences, and really came together as a country in ways that we haven't seen since then.

What did we understand about one another then that we seem to have lost now?

- Well, there was an intense pain that everyone felt, but I think we understood that we were Americans first, that there's nothing more on American than hating your fellow Americans.

Abraham Lincoln, you know, famously said that this nation would never be destroyed from without, but that we might commit suicide.

- [Margaret] Yeah.

- We could be destroyed from within.

And I think he would recognize that.

Of course, we had bad times.

600,000 Americans killed each other during Lincoln's presidency, and certainly we're not there, and I hope we never get there.

I will say though about things that bring us together, just have to give a shout out, that the passing of Dolly Parton seemed like the closest we've come.

- It's been a long time.

- [Spencer] Where everybody felt something similar.

- Yeah, - And I think she's an incredible example of what makes America special and what makes Americans special.

And I would love if we could all channel a little Dolly over the next few weeks and months.

- Governor Cox, thank you for joining me.

- Thanks for having me.

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