The Jay Jones Misdirection

National Review Online

Sunday, October 05, 2025

 

Desperate politicians will say desperate things, but Democratic attorney general candidate Jay Jones outdid himself in response to our own Audrey Fahlberg’s scoop on his text messages about his Republican opponents.

 

Jones fantasized about shooting Todd Gilbert, the Republican who was then-speaker of the Virginia house; talked of pissing on the graves of Republican officeholders if they predeceased him; and expressed his belief that Republicans would only change their views if they experienced personal pain, and allegedly gave as an example the wife of Todd Gilbert watching her child die in her arms.

 

Rather than slinking away somewhere upon the revelation of these disqualifying messages, Jones responded with defiant misdirection.

 

“Like all people,” he said in a statement, “I’ve sent text messages that I regret.” Yes, who among us hasn’t hoped to see people we disagree with get shot or suffer the loss of loved ones via text message? Most of us regret text messages with embarrassing autocorrects, not passionate explanations of why we want to see our political opponents die.

 

“Let’s be clear about what is happening in the Attorney General race right now,” he continued, “Jason Miyares is dropping smears through Trump-controlled media organizations to assault my character and rescue his desperate campaign.”

 

The only things wrong with this sentence are that Fahlberg’s report was not the product of an oppo dump by Miyares; the report wasn’t a smear, since it was entirely accurate as Jones himself has conceded; and we aren’t a Trump-controlled media organization, or a media organization controlled by anyone else, as perusing our content for about five minutes would make abundantly clear.

 

Since his initial statement, Jones has struck a more apologetic note, yet there’s no unseeing what he said. Unlike Jones’s attitude toward Republicans in those messages, everyone should wish him and his family personally the very best — as he pursues some other line of work.