After scaling two divisions to outclass Canelo Álvarez for the undisputed super-middleweight championship before a record crowd on Saturday night, Terence Crawford wasted no time calling it the defining performance of an already brilliant career.

“This is definitely a signature win,” Crawford said. “Moving up two weight classes, being the B-side, fighting a guy that’s been undefeated in the division, undisputed, taking all his titles, doing everything that I said I was going to do. Of course this means a lot.”

Asked when he knew he would beat Álvarez, the laconic Crawford didn’t miss a beat. “When he signed the contract,” he said, drawing laughter from the room. But the one-liners were accompanied by a deeper insistence that this result was no accident. “When I set my sights on doing something and I know what I’m capable of, it’s not like a surprise to me,” he said. “It’s a surprise to y’all, because y’all didn’t believe me. But for me, I knew I could do it. I just needed the opportunity.”

Crawford described the first few rounds as controlled rather than cautious. “I felt like I was in control,” he said. “I think he was trying to figure me out.” When Álvarez did get through with punches to the body, Crawford brushed them off. “He wasn’t hitting the body or anything. He was hitting my elbow because I was blocking it.”

The sixth round, when Crawford began to stand his ground and land sharp left hands, marked the moment he felt the balance shift. “Around like the sixth round, I felt like I needed to step it up a little more and get more control of the fight, because the fight was going like a seesaw effect,” he said. From there he grew more confident, even smiling at Canelo’s best shots in the late rounds.

Much of the buildup had focused on whether Crawford, who had fought at 147lb or below in all but one of his 41 previous fights, could handle Canelo’s power. He was dismissive. “I’ve been hit harder,” he said, citing Egidijus Kavaliauskas, who hurt him briefly in 2019. “[Kavaliauskas] hit harder than Canelo, to me, to be honest.”

When told that Álvarez appeared to fade in the later rounds, Crawford refused to diminish his opponent. “He was 1,000% prepared. I just think I was the better man today.”

Álvarez, for his part, offered no excuses after turning up for a press conference that most would have understood if he’d blown off. “We knew Crawford is a great fighter … I tried my best tonight, and I just couldn’t figure out the style. You need to take the loss and accept everything,” he said. Later he added, almost ruefully: “Sometimes you try and your body cannot go. That’s my frustration … my body just didn’t let me go any more.”

The win made Crawford the first male boxer in the four-belt era to become undisputed in three divisions, an achievement previously matched only by Henry Armstrong in 1938. “It means a lot to me, because anybody can be a nobody,” Crawford said. “That’s all they say I’ve been fighting is nobodies. So what can they say now? Somebody tell me, what can you say now?”

Crawford insisted he had nothing but respect for Canelo. “He’s a great champion. He’s a strong competitor,” he said. “Like I said before, I’ve got nothing but respect for Canelo. I’m a big fan of Canelo and he fought like a champion today.” Álvarez even returned the compliment with a striking admission: “I think Crawford is way better than Floyd Mayweather.”

As for his own place in history, Crawford pushed back against the inevitable comparisons. “Floyd was the greatest in his era. I’m the greatest in my era. It ain’t no need to compare me to Floyd or Floyd to me.”

And then, the fighter who has built a career on being understated, finished with a reminder that the vindication was as much about the doubters as the believers. “The ones that doubted me, they know,” he said. “I don’t have to say I told you so or rub it in their face. This right here is I told you so.”

A local government official in Iowa has said he would refuse to comply with orders from the Republican state governor to fly flags at half-staff in honor of rightwing political activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot on Wednesday.

Jon Green, the chair of the Johnson county board of supervisors in Iowa, announced on Thursday on social media that he would not follow governor Kim Reynolds’s directive to fly flags at half-staff for Kirk through Sunday evening.

“I condemn Kirk’s killing, regardless of who pulled the trigger or why,” Green, who is a Democrat, wrote. “But I will not grant Johnson county honors to a man who made it his life’s mission to denigrate so many of the constituents I have sworn an oath to protect – and who did so much to harm not only the marginalized – but also to degrade the fabric of our body politic.”

Green told the Gazette newspaper that his stand was motivated by Reynolds’ failure to issue a similar order after other prominent cases of gun violence. For instance, Iowa did not honor Minnesota’s Democratic house speaker Melissa Hortman when she was shot to death alongside her husband, Mark, at their home in June in what investigators suspect was an act of political violence.

The announcement from Green did say that Johnson county flags would fly at half-staff on Friday in remembrance of those killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks 24 years earlier. And he also paid tribute to two students at a high school in Evergreen, Colorado, who were shot and wounded at their campus by a peer who died by suicide on the same day of Kirk’s killing.

“Johnson county flags will fly as usual,” Green added. “I will accept any consequence, whether legal or electoral, for my decision. It is mine alone.”

Reynolds responded by criticizing Green’s decision on social media, saying that it was “disgraceful that a locally elected official has chosen to put politics above human decency during a time like this”.

In a statement given to the Des Moines Register, Democratic Iowa state senator Zach Wahls, who represents parts of Johnson county, said he disagreed with Green’s decision to not lower the flags.

“I don’t think that’s the appropriate decision,” Wahls said, adding: “I think they should comply with the governor’s instructions on this topic.”

However, supervisor Mandi Remington, another Democratic member of the Johnson county board of supervisors in Iowa, supported Green’s decision. She told the Des Moines Register that “while I condemn political violence, lowering our county’s flags is an honor that should reflect our community’s values”.

“Charlie Kirk spent his career working to marginalize LGBTQ+ people, undermine women’s rights, and divide our country along lines of hate and exclusion,” Remington said.

“Johnson county is home to a diverse community, including many who were the direct targets of Kirk’s rhetoric. To honor him with our flags would be to dismiss the harm he caused to our neighbors and constituents.

“Supervisor Green’s stance affirms that our county will not elevate voices that work to strip others of dignity, freedom, and belonging. I believe this decision is a principled one, rooted in respect for the people of Johnson county and the constitutional values we are sworn to protect.”

Green’s defiance of Reynolds came amid a coordinated effort to clamp down on critical commentary about Kirk, leading people across the US to either be fired from or disciplined at their jobs.

According to what Green told HuffPost, he is “entirely confident” he has acted within his rights, saying has not satisfied any of the conditions under Iowa state law which could enable Reynolds to oust him from his post.

“The governor has no authority to remove me from office,” Green remarked to the outlet. “I’m sure if she thought she had some legal basis to do anything to me, she wouldn’t have posted on [social media]. She would’ve sent the law for me.”

On Saturday, the Kirk-founded Turning Point USA announced that a memorial service would be held for him on 21 September at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, where the NFL’s Cardinals play their home games.

Charlie Kirk’s killing came amid a rise in political violence in the US, the kind now so frequent that it moves swiftly out of news cycles it would once have dominated.

The list is long and growing. From the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump during his campaign last year to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home burnt in an arson attack in April and the Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband gunned down by a man dressed as a police officer in June, to name a few.

In the first six months of 2025, more than 520 plots and acts of terrorism and targeted violence occurred, affecting nearly all US states and causing 96 deaths and 329 injuries. This is a nearly 40% increase over the first six months of 2024, according to data from the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

Mass casualty attacks, where four or more victims were killed or wounded, increased by 187.5% in the first six months of 2025 compared with the same period last year. Michael Jensen, the research director at START, wrote on LinkedIn in late August that “the warning signs of growing civil unrest in the US are evident” in the group’s data.

The killing of a high-profile Trump ally at a public event on a Utah college campus this week could serve as a turning point for political violence – but it’s not clear in which direction. As the right declared war on the left following Kirk’s murder, prominent politicians canceled events over safety concerns and historically Black colleges went on lockdown over threats.

“I absolutely believe this is a watershed in American history,” said Spencer Cox, Utah’s Republican governor, at a press conference on Friday. “The question is, what kind of watershed? That chapter remains to be written. Is this the end of a dark chapter in our history or the beginning of a darker chapter in our history?”

Those who study political violence say the current moment looks similar to the US in the 1960s, when assassins killed John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr amid a time of massive social change and backlash. But two key differencesmake this era more dangerous: social media and widespread availability of very lethal weapons, said Amy Pate, the acting director and executive director at START.

Increased adoption of conspiracy theories and online networks where those theories thrive mean that radicalization is “speeding up”, giving people less time to intervene when someone is on the path toward violence, she said.

The roots of political violence

A host of factors play into the rise of political violence, and the public’s support for said violence, which has been increasing in surveys over the past year.

People are dissatisfied with the government, the two major political parties and their ability to actually make change. There’s also a loss of trust in institutions, said Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism. Of the terrorist incidents in the first half of 2025, 35% were directed at government targets, up from 15% in the first half of 2024, START’s data shows.

Media ecosystems are fragmented, and social media algorithms prioritize polarization.Prominent voices can attract people by creating black and white scenarios, said William Braniff, the executive director at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) in the school of public affairs at American University

“We’re constantly being fed a stream of information that’s meant to make us feel righteous anger, and especially at someone else, at some other community,” Braniff said.

The plots and attacks categorized as terrorism this year fell across ideologies: 32 had some nexus to antisemitism; 20 targeted entities carrying out immigration enforcement; 13 targeted peaceful protests of the administration; 22 targeted the LGBTQ+ community; seven targeted Muslims; and six targeted people believed to be immigrants. Of those targeting lawmakers, 21 plots and attacks targeted Republicans, and 10 targeted Democrats.

If you zoom out over time, political violence is more commonly done by the far right, Baumgartner said, but today’s violent actors are “much more ideologically diffuse, and they don’t strictly adhere to a single ideology”.

“People don’t start their journey as a violent extremist expert on a given ideology,” Braniff said. “There are underlying risk factors in their lives. Those risk factors go unaddressed. … Ideology is often a lagging indicator for someone who’s gravitating towards violence.”

How politicians of all political backgrounds respond to incidents of political violence, no matter the motive, can help cool the rhetoric or inflame it.

Condemning the violence is helpful, Pate said, but the context of those condemnations matters. “Do you take this as a moment to point out and decry the degree of polarization within the country, or do you condemn it as a way to benefit from that polarization?” she said.

The motives of the shooter are still being parsed after he was captured on Friday. Authorities said he had written on gun casings phrases common to online gaming communities. Regardless of his political aims, and before a shooter was publicly identified, prominent voices on the right declared war, and Trump vowed to go after the “radical left”.

On Friday, on a Fox program, Trump was asked how to fix the country, given there were radicals on the right as well.

“I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble but I couldn’t care less,” Trump said. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. … The radicals on the left are the problem. And they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”

Calls on the right for war, revenge or retribution could lead to more violence, Baumgartner said. “All it takes is somebody with a grievance and a gun or a grievance and access to some sort of weapon, and you have a recipe for more violence. It doesn’t take an army to inflict violence on people,” he said.

Prevention programs could help

Shannon Watson, founder and executive director at Minnesota nonprofit Majority in the Middle, works to promote civility in politics. She said despite a broad amount of ideological diversity in the two major political parties, people tend to associate the other side with its worst actors. “We don’t compare our best to their best. We compare our best to their worst,” she said.

For those who are really politically active, it can be harder to get out of the mindset that their side is morally right and the other is morally wrong, Watson said. When she’s talking to people about polarization, she rarely tries to get them to challenge their assumptions and instead spends more time encouraging people to create relationships that don’t have anything to do with politics.

“Once you see somebody is multifaceted and less of a caricature, it’s easier to get along, it’s easier to try to work through some of the differences, as opposed to just dismissing the person,” she said. “It’s really hard to hate up close.”

Braniff, of PERIL, led the federal government’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships until March, when he resigned in protest over staff cuts. Grant programs to local jurisdictions across the country have been cut, he said, and the federal government is no longer investing in prevention programs that could head off acts of terrorism and targeted violence.

Prevention programs can assess risk factors – a breakup, a termination, unaddressed trauma, access to harmful online social networks, access to weapons – and seek to intervene. Pate advocates for a public health approach to the crisis that provides people who are vulnerable with off-ramps to prevent violence, which can include counseling services or treatment for substance abuse.

Researchers that tracked some of these online networks have been targeted by Republicans, who have claimed their work runs counter to free speech. Resources that focused on this tracking have been diverted to other places, Pate said.

“When these attacks happen, part of me always wonders, is that because the intelligence analyst was tasked or moved to a different priority, and so they didn’t see maybe some chatter that this was about to happen,” she said.

It is not inevitable that there will continue to be more violence, Braniff said. The country has reversed tides on other public harms by investing in prevention like seatbelts or fire alarms.

“It’s only inevitable if we do nothing about it, which is what we’re currently doing at the federal level,” he said. “But if we do nothing about it, yes, the frequency and severity of violence will likely increase.”