Why are so many Democrats fond of wishing death on their opponents? That’s a question raised by two astonishing developments early this month. On Oct. 3, National Review’s Audrey Fahlberg revealed texts Jay Jones had sent, perhaps mistakenly, to a Democratic colleague, bemoaning the cordial remarks the then-Republican speaker was delivering after the death of a Democrat.
“If these guys die before me,” he wrote, “I will go to their funerals to p— on their graves, Send them awash in something.” Prompted, he goes on. “Three people, two bullets. Gilbert” — the Republican speaker — “hitler, and pol pot. Gilbert gets two bullets in the head. Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time.”
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In a phone follow-up to his colleague, Jones told her he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her children die in her arms. When she hung up, Jones explained, “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”
Chilling stuff, especially read now in the month after the murder of Charlie Kirk by a leftist young man with a transgender lover. Not surprisingly, the Democratic nominee for governor, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, and the state’s two Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, condemned his words.
Some Jones backers withdrew their support. Anti-Trump conservative New York Times columnist David French and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said he should withdraw from the race.
Everytown for Gun Safety, which had contributed $200,000 to his campaign, scrubbed its Jones endorsement from its website.
But neither Spanberger, Warner, and Kaine, nor any Democratic officeholder or candidate, so far as I am aware, has withdrawn their endorsement or called on him to quit. He should be “accountable” for his words, but not so accountable as to lose their endorsement for an office for which his words suggest he is temperamentally unsuited. Perhaps they hope he can still win the election — he’s been ahead in polls — and then will conveniently resign to be replaced by what seems likely to be a Democratic-majority legislature.
The more chilling possibility is that these politicians recognize that for many Democratic voters, for a large part of the party’s core constituency, his words weren’t repugnant at all. Social media traffic rife with regret at the failure of the assassination attempts on President Donald Trump and the glee expressed at the successful assassination of Kirk suggests that some large share of core Democratic voters feel that way. If you really believe the other side’s leader is Hitler, you might be happy if he is shot dead.
An outsized appetite for political violence is suggested in the results of a Skeptic Research Center poll of 3,000 adults in August and September. An alarming 34% agreed that “violence is often necessary to create social change,” including 44% of those rated as very liberal and 27% of those as very conservative — a significant leftward tilt
Violence is likely to be seen as necessary more by the young than the old, more by men than women. Among the youngest Gen Z respondents, the gender difference almost disappears: 48% of male and 41% of female Gen Zers see violence as necessary for change. This seems in tandem with the plentiful visual evidence showing women prominent among anti-Israel and antisemitic violent protesters.
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A high-visibility Democratic candidate, wary of losing support or dampening turnout among party enthusiasts, might well hesitate to renounce a ticket-mate who relishes the idea of shooting an opponent and watching his children die in his wife’s arms, even if she sincerely finds these sentiments appalling. Maybe even especially if her campaign rallying cry has been, like Spanberger’s, “Let your rage fuel you.”
Further evidence that a significant, if not majority, part of the Democratic Party is, in the words of radio talk host Erick Erickson, “a pro-assassination party” comes from a Maryland federal courthouse. There on Oct. 3, Nicholas Roske, convicted of attempting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was sentenced by Biden-appointed Judge Deborah Boardman not to the 30 years sought by the government and consistent with judicial guidelines, but to only eight years.
Roske acted after a draft Supreme Court opinion overruling the abortion rights Roe v. Wade decision was leaked to Politico and published on May 2, 2022.
An investigation of Supreme Court personnel months later failed to identify the leaker. But obviously, the likely motive was to forestall what became the Dobbs v. Jackson decision handed down June 24, by changing one or more justices’ minds or ending their lives. The defendant Roske flew from California and appeared at Kavanaugh’s house on June 8, armed with the intent to kill, but recoiled at the presence of armed Secret Service and called 911 and turned himself in. That was perhaps a mitigating factor for the judge, although even an attempted political assassination is a grave offense.
The judge found further mitigation in Roske’s September 2024 declaration that he was transitioning to be a woman, and in the fact that Trump’s order would prevent him from being held in a woman’s prison and from gender-affirming treatment.
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The leak of a controversial draft opinion by someone in the Supreme Court’s service and the astonishing lenience of Judge Boardman’s sentence, which the government is appealing, amount to encouraging and condoning political murder. They are steps along a dangerous road. The murder of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 deprived the nation of his unique leadership in the years of reconstruction after the Civil War, the assassinations of Mattias Erzberger and Walter Rathenau in 1921-22 poisoned the ailing democracy of Weimar Germany, and the repeated assassinations of peace-minded civilian leaders in 1930s Japan unleashed its army and navy to war in China and the Pacific.
Every large political movement has violent supporters, and some violence directed against public figures turns out to be the doing of irrational individuals. Rhetorical excesses and improvident lawfare have been committed by both Trump opponents and supporters. But there is no question that the side that is in greater danger today of becoming the party of political murder is the one whose highly educated followers have long considered themselves uniquely tolerant.