Utah's Governor Wrote a Book About Contempt. The Timing Is the Argument.
In the aftermath of the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox emerged as a prominent voice calling on Americans to step back from the political hatred and violence gripping the country. PBS reports that the Republican governor is now expanding on that message in a new book, 'Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt,' and that he sat down with Geoff Bennett to discuss it. A governor writing a book is not news; a governor building a public identity around depolarization at a moment of political violence is at least a claim worth watching.
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The book title is doing a lot of work: 'an age of contempt' treats the temperature of politics as the disease. Cox's own prominence came from a moment when the temperature turned lethal, which suggests the fever is a symptom of something else.
Maybe. But someone with standing in his own party telling Americans to step back from political hatred and violence is cheap to mock and expensive to do. The interesting test isn't whether the message is sincere — it's whether anything follows it.