OPINION:
After prominent conservative Charlie Kirk was assassinated last month by a deranged leftist, many Democrats tried to say the correct things. Sure, most of them stupidly implied that Kirk deserved his fate, but they made it sound like they believed that political violence is unacceptable.
Those were the old days, about a month ago, when Democrats didn’t have a statewide candidate in Virginia who wished for the grisly murder of political adversaries, including children, because it would help him achieve leftist policy goals.
With Election Day less than a month away, news is out that three years ago, former state legislator Jay Jones, now the Democratic candidate for attorney general, sent text messages to a Republican colleague that displayed his thirst for political blood. I’ve paid specific attention to this story because I’ve called Virginia home for decades, so this election affects me directly.
In August 2022 texts with Delegate Carrie Coyner, Mr. Jones aggressively called for the murder of Todd Gilbert, the Republican speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates at the time.
“Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, Hitler and Pol Pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head,” Mr. Jones wrote. “Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time.”
After Ms. Coyner challenged him on these shocking statements, Mr. Jones called her — not to apologize or backpedal, as one might expect, but to cement his point. Perhaps if the speaker’s wife were forced to watch her own children die, he said, it would cause Republicans to shift on gun control legislation.
“You were talking about [hoping] Jennifer Gilbert’s children would die,” Ms. Coyner texted, once the brief call had concluded.
“Yes, I’ve told you this before,” Mr. Jones responded. “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”
Ms. Coyner has since revealed that this was not the first time Mr. Jones expressed a desire for the deaths of innocent people to further his policy goals. She told the Virginia Scope publication that Mr. Jones expressed to her in 2020 that he believed that “a few” police officers needed to be killed to stop what he thought were unjustified shootings of suspects by police.
“He said, ‘Well, maybe if a few of them died, that they would move on, not shooting people, not killing people,’” Ms. Coyner told the Scope. “And I said, ‘That’s insane.’”
Mr. Jones denied this, but he did not dispute the authenticity of the text messages, which the conservative National Review first reported. Ms. Coyner says she did not leak the texts but has verified that they are real.
What do those words tell other disturbed leftists, like the one who shot Kirk? Imagine if Mr. Jones were to become attorney general. How could any Republican ever believe they were being treated fairly?
No, there’s no doubt that Mr. Jones should withdraw from this race.
Additionally, this is where we should hear from all those prominent Democrats who said violence “has no place” in politics after Kirk’s murder. We should hear them agreeing that their attorney general candidate should drop out.
They won’t do that because it’s too close to Election Day, early voting has already started, and it would be too politically messy and inconvenient for them to do the right thing.
The Democratic candidate for governor, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, should demand that Mr. Jones step aside, but she hasn’t and won’t.
The party’s candidate for lieutenant governor, Ghazala Hashmi, should also do so, but she has not and will not.
National Democrats, all of whom mouthed the words about political violence after the Kirk shooting, should also call on Mr. Jones to quit, but there’s no way they will do that.
The whole sorry episode calls to mind 2019, when, one by one, the three statewide Democratic elected officials were each engulfed in their own scandals. When it was just the governor and lieutenant governor, fellow Democrats were happy to call for their resignations because there was a Democratic attorney general who would then rise to the top job. When that attorney general had his own scandal erupt, the calls for resignations stopped because it meant the Republican speaker would become governor if all the chips fell.
Politics is always the limiting factor for Democrats to do the right thing. This has been proved by the basic fact that Democrats can’t wholly oppose political violence because the radical leftists who run their party actively support it.
So now, after the Kirk assassination, when you see Democrats condemning violent attacks on their political opponents, remember that the Virginia election proves two things: They didn’t mean it then, and they don’t mean it now.
• Tim Murtaugh, a Washington Times columnist and founder of Line Drive Public Affairs, served in senior positions on the 2020 and 2024 Trump campaigns. He began his career as a journalist in Virginia and has worked on many state and federal political campaigns in the commonwealth.
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