Jeffrey Blehar writes for National Review Online about Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones’ recently revealed texts.
He declared that if he was trapped in a room with a gun and two bullets, alongside Hitler, Pol Pot, and Todd Gilbert (then the Republican speaker of the state house), he would shoot Gilbert — twice. Again, you might say: This is merely but a variant on an old and crude joke.
But lest you think that Jones merely sent a bad text in haste — okay, make that a series of bad texts — he then called Coyner, explaining himself all too clearly. You see, Jones was not speaking lightly. … No, he proceeded to make an impassioned argument in defense of the slaughter of innocents. In his call with Coyner, he declared that he thought at least some Republicans deserve to die for their politics, and he extended his death warrant to their children as well — for punitive, persuasive, and societally hygienic reasons. …
… This is not the behavior of a psychologically healthy person. A normal person — if we are being charitable, a ruinously drunk person — who has texted something so barbarous would eventually follow up by saying something like, “My God please forgive me I was just making a sick joke.”
He would not call to further argue the point. He would not specify that not only should his political enemies die but that their children should as well. …
… My darkest fear is that this argument has a certain kind of appeal to the sorts of deranged activist northern Virginia Democrats that I know. (They are very much a “type,” more rabidly clawing than the gentry liberals I grew up with in Montgomery County, Md.) “Are you an angry, progressive voter? Believe me — this guy is just as angry as you, and then some.”
Anyone who has spent time in progressive spaces (at bars, over beers, and especially among the younger generation) has heard language a lot like Jay Jones’s.
