Thomas Mair, the right-wing "Britain First" yelling white supremacist who killed Jo Cox refused to talk in police interviews, then he refused to enter a plea or give evidence in his trial.
This cowardly refusal to explain himself hasn't left many people in doubt about his motivations. The masses of extreme-right propaganda in his house, his associations with extreme-right political groups, the fact that he gave his name as "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain" on the one occasion he did decide to speak ... These things all point to a man so filled with right-wing hate that he decided to plot and execute the assassination of a local MP to prove some kind of political point.
It's difficult to have any sympathy with a person so filled with hate that they consider the murder of their political opponents to be a legitimate tactic. It's also very difficult to have any sympathy with a person who is so much of a coward that they're unwilling to explain their actions, and just sit there in silence pretending that they're the victim.
This didn't stop hacks at the Daily Mail from attempting to downplay Thomas Mair's crime by relegating the story of his conviction for murder to page 30 of their hate comic. In fact two of their hacks (Chris Greenwood and Emine Sinmaz) even attempted to foster sympathy for Thomas Mair by speculating that he might have murdered Jo Cox because he was afraid immigrants were going to steal his council house!
Apparently Mair had been the single occupier of a three bedroom council house ever since his grandmother died in 1996. The Daily Mail theory goes that Mair had been asked by the local council to consider downsizing to a smaller property, he got enraged that immigrants were going to steal his house, then he went out and killed Jo Cox because she wouldn't help him.
The courtroom evidence showed that Mair had been plotting violent acts of right-wing terrorism for years (he bought his gun making manual from a US based neo-Nazi outfit in 1999), and that he had a printout of a pro-Remain article by Jo Cox in his house.
The Daily Mail totally failed to provide a single shred of evidence that Mair had ever approached Jo Cox for help with his council house situation (if he had had previous contact with the MP I'm pretty sure it would have come out during the trial).
Mair is too much of a coward to explain himself, but the evidence paints a picture of a right-wing extremist who had been determined to carry out a politically motivated attack since the 1990s. The fact that the local MP Jo Cox supported Remain while his extreme-right buddies (like the Britain First Northern Brigade) repeatedly described Remain supporters as "traitors" was apparently enough to trigger his violent urges.
It was bad enough that the Daily Mail tried to deflect criticism of white supremacist pro-Brexit extreme-right scum like Britain First by hiding the story of Thomas Mair's conviction for murder on page 30 of their paper (we all know their front page would have been shrieking about it for days if the killer had've been an Islamist fanatic, immigrant or "leftie"), but this effort to stoke sympathy for Thomas Mair by blaming immigrants and even his victim for his actions really is outrageous stuff.
One of the most disgusting things about it is that under normal circumstances the Daily Mail would undeniably be stoking hatred against an unemployed person under-occupying a council house. But somehow in the case of a murderous neo-Nazi they're suddenly so full of concern about him that they're prepared to completely fabricate a story that he approached his murder victim for help to protect him from the immigrants who were trying to steal his house, and that she turned a blind eye to him.
Imagine the sickening mentality of people who would sympathise with a white supremacist killer and attempt to shift the blame onto his victim with an invented story about how she refused to help protect him from immigrant bogeymen.
- The Daily Mail is an very harmful extreme-right propaganda rag owned by a tax-dodging billionaire called Jonathan Harmsworth. Don't read it and don't let anyone you love read it (if you can convince them to stop you'd be doing them a big favour).
- The Daily Mail has a long history of hosting homophobic content. A recent example being an article attacking a High Court judge for being "openly gay" because the Daily Mail didn't like his ruling that parliament is sovereign and Theresa May can't just make up the law as she goes along to suit herself.
- If you find a copy of the Daily Mail on the train or the bus, bin it. Don't leave it there in case someone else gets radicalised by their hateful extreme-right propaganda.
- You could also help to diminish the Daily Mail's toxic extreme-right influence by getting involved in the Stop Funding Hate campaign.
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