On June 16, 2016, one week before the “Brexit” referendum in the UK, Jo Cox was murdered on the street outside of a library in a village in West Yorkshire.
Cox, a member of Parliament who opposed Brexit, was shot three times and stabbed repeatedly by a Nazi sympathizer and supporter of the far-right, fascist Britain First party who was shouting white supremacist slogans while he killed Cox and stabbed a 77-year-old local man who tried to stop him.
Helen Joanne Cox was 41 years old. She worked for the charity Oxfam before she was an MP. She was a wife and the mother of two children, a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old at the time of her murder.
I was sure at the time that this horrifying, brutal act would have an impact on the final week of the referendum campaign and on the vote itself. The naked bigotry, ignorance, and lethal hate of Cox’s killer, I thought, would damage the reputation of people like Nigel Farage, whose ideology marketed that same bigotry and hatred in an only slightly more tactful package.
But none of that happened. The xenophobia and anti-neighbor enthusiasm of the Brexiteers was unchecked and the referendum passed — one of the most infamous acts of national self-destruction in our lifetime. Perhaps the second worst of the 21st century.
In 2016, I briefly imagined that I understood how explicit fascism and political violence would affect public opinion. Then I quickly came to understand that I did not understand that at all.
I do not now imagine that I understand this any better in 2025 than I did in 2016.
One thing that Emo Philips taught us is that if someone gets pushed off of a bridge and it turns out that person was a member of a Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912 church, then the assailant will probably turn out to be someone from a Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 church.
Freud called this the “narcissism of minor differences.” The idea is that the conflicts people get most passionate are often those between nearly similar groups or nearly similar opinions — things that can appear almost imperceptible to outsiders seem, to insiders, to be of monumental importance.
The audience does not laugh at Philips’ joke because they’re fully versed in the intricacies of the dispute between the Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 and the Great Lakes Region Council of 1912. They laugh because most people do not know or understand or care what such intimate, obscure disputes might be about, and it’s funny to the rest of us to see someone furiously regard such things as matters of life or death.
All of which is to say that I am vaguely aware that there has been, for years, a heated feud between Turning Point USA and the Groypers, but I have not elected to devote many hours of my one brief life attempting to understand all of the ins and outs of that feud between two ultra-right organizations who seem to most of us from the outside to be otherwise indistinguishable. And also that it would not surprise me if that feud turned out to be relevant to recent news.
Both sides of that feud despised Martin Luther King Jr., primarily because he was a Black man who championed legal equality and civil rights for all and thus serves as a symbol for the opposite of all that their mostly shared movement desires.
But they also despised him because he was a champion for nonviolence, which they found incomprehensible and mocked as soft and weak. The leaders of both organizations publicly smirked when recounting how this advocate of nonviolence was gunned down by violence.
On the one hand, it is logically simple and not at all complicated to understand that a bad, harmful person is bad and harmful without therefore rejoicing in their death. But because of the evil that they have done — the harm that they are doing to others sometimes even right up until the moment of their death — it can be emotionally complicated to hear the news of that death.
Is this news good or bad? It is bad. Because “he is past relenting.” And because he is past repenting.
But it is also true that the merciless harm he has been inflicting has ended with him. And so, as Dickens describes it:
She hurried to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was careworn and depressed, though he was young. There was a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress.
He sat down to the dinner that had been hoarding for him by the fire; and when she asked him faintly what news (which was not until after a long silence), he appeared embarrassed how to answer.
“Is it good?” she said, “or bad?”—to help him.
“Bad,” he answered.
“We are quite ruined?”
“No. There is hope yet, Caroline.”
“If he relents,” she said, amazed, “there is! Nothing is past hope, if such a miracle has happened.”
“He is past relenting,” said her husband. “He is dead.”
She was a mild and patient creature if her face spoke truth; but she was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she said so, with clasped hands. She prayed forgiveness the next moment, and was sorry; but the first was the emotion of her heart.
“What the half-drunken woman whom I told you of last night, said to me, when I tried to see him and obtain a week’s delay; and what I thought was a mere excuse to avoid me; turns out to have been quite true. He was not only very ill, but dying, then.”
“To whom will our debt be transferred?”
“I don’t know. But before that time we shall be ready with the money; and even though we were not, it would be a bad fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in his successor. We may sleep to-night with light hearts, Caroline!”
Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter. The children’s faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier house for this man’s death! The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of pleasure.
In 2009, when announcing his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, President Barack Obama praised her for her wisdom and her “empathy.”
And suddenly, the word empathy and the thing itself became anathema for the white right in the United States. It was astonishing then — these people were lining up at microphones and in front of cameras to proclaim that they were opposed to empathy.
It was astonishing then. Sixteen years later it is simply par for the course, banal, routine. Expected.
But I think it is notable that dozens of the same people who have spent the past 16 years denouncing “liberals” for what they blasphemously refer to as “the sin of empathy” have now spent the past 16 hours denouncing liberals for an alleged failure to perform and display sufficiently extravagant empathy now.
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