This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

We increasingly feel as though we’re in the scenario I’ve been worried about since the moment Charlie Kirk was shot: where his death, his assassination, is used by those in power to excuse a crackdown on those they have already seen themselves at war with.

Archived clip of JD Vance: You have the crazies on the far left who are saying: Oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech. No, no. We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence. That’s not OK. Violence is not OK in our system.

Archived clip of Stephen Miller: It is a vast domestic terror movement. And with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, homeland security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.

I think it’s a very dangerous moment. But it’s not inevitable. Leadership is always a choice. You can choose to use a moment like this to deepen our divisions, to pull us apart from one another, to make politics into something yet that much closer to war. Or you can use a moment like this to reduce those divisions — to try to take the country in a different direction than the one in which we’ve been going.

We have had, over the past week and change, an example of that latter kind of leadership, too. Charlie Kirk was murdered in Utah. The governor of Utah is Spencer Cox, a Republican, a conservative — one who is very concerned about the ways we’ve been coming apart as a country.

He didn’t come to this only on that day. For years now, he has been thinking about political de-escalation, thinking about the ways in which we disagree with one another and how we can do it in a way that does not tear us apart.

So I wanted to have him on the show to talk about what that day, that week, was like for him, what it has left him thinking about and what he thinks we should do now.

Ezra Klein: Governor Cox, welcome to the show.

Spencer Cox: Thanks for having me, Ezra.

So I want to start in 2023. You said back then that you felt we were “facing a toxic debate unlike anything that we’ve seen since the Civil War.” What were you seeing then that made you say that?