Over the last week or so, observers—mostly on the right—have made a great deal of noise about the musings of Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for Attorney General in Virginia. Jones, as I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, openly and enthusiastically discussed killing a political opponent—the former Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates—and, more disturbingly, hoped this opponent’s children would die so that he could watch their mother suffer as she held them in her arms.
Understandably, most of the commentary on Jones and his ghoulish desires has focused on his crass exhortation to violence and the ghastly cruelty of his repeatedly expressed desire to watch children die while relishing their mother’s pain. Jones is, almost inarguably, a twisted man with a moral compass that points straight downward. That he remains his party’s nominee and that no high-profile members of that party have withdrawn their endorsement of him tells you all you need to know about the moral condition of the nation’s ruling class.
All of that said, for me, the most interesting part of Jones’s exposed texts is the justification he gives for wanting Todd and Jennifer Gilbert to suffer as they hold their dying children. When confronted about that statement, he replies, “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”
Everything else in Jones’s rant can be dismissed as the overheated rhetoric of a disturbed man, the bizarre fantasies of someone unfit to mingle with normal people in civil society, much less serve them as their chief law enforcement official. It is, as I said, twisted.
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