Earlier this week, I spoke with MSNBC’s Alex Witt about the growing dangers to our democracy with the rise of violent political rhetoric and extremism online. Roughly 10 percent of Americans believe violence is justified to restore former President Donald Trump to the White House, according to research conducted by University of Chicago professor Robert Pape. As we saw from the attack on the Capitol on January 6th and in attempts to rationalize and justify it afterwards, the danger of political violence further infecting our democracy is a serious threat. In the five days leading up to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago for classified national security documents, the phrase “civil war” went from being used an average of 500 tweets per hour to 6,000 in the first hour after President Trump released a statement on the search in which he falsely claimed his residence was “under siege, raided, and occupied” by FBI agents. He went on to compare the incident to the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee in at the Watergate Hotel, call the U.S. a “third-world country,” and baselessly accused the Justice Department of being “weaponized.” Later that evening, the rate at which “civil war” appeared on Twitter peaked at 15,000 tweets per hour.

Fundamentally, the disturbing surge we’ve seen recently in political violence and rhetoric calling for it must serve as a reminder of the need for us to come together as a nation in rejecting political violence and the extremism intertwined with it. While those responsible for the violence of January 6th must be brought to justice, more broadly, we must work to find common ground with our fellow citizens through our commitment to our democracy, and our shared values as Americans.