By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, October 07, 2025
I assume that I don’t need to rehearse the disgusting
revelations about Jay Jones for you, but I am going to anyway. Jones is the
Democratic nominee for Virginia’s attorney general in November’s off-year
election, running against incumbent Republican Jason Miyares. Jones, a former
member of Virginia’s House of Delegates (he retired after two terms in 2021),
is running as a camera-friendly, blue-branded cipher for a revanchist
Democratic Party intent on reclaiming Virginia’s major statewide elected offices.
And it turns out that he is also a moral monster of the
first degree — and an eerily familiar degree at that. National Review’s
own Audrey Fahlberg broke the story nationally with her blockbuster reporting
about texts and phone conversations Jones had with state Republican delegate
Carrie Coyner back in 2022. (Jones had already retired at this point — he was
shooting the breeze with an ex-colleague from the opposing party.) Jones’s
friendly chit-chat about how – should his opponents predecease him – he would
“go to their funerals and piss on their graves” to “send them out awash in
something” was eyebrow-raising, but also nothing a historically-minded reader
would have put past Lyndon Johnson.
It was when he continued to muse
out loud to Coyner that he revealed the scorpions lurking inside his brain: 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. He
wasn’t even “kidding on the square,” in that
joking-but-not-really-joking manner people often use to passive-aggressively
voice their true thoughts. 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.
According to the source, the
Democratic former legislator doubled down on the call, saying the only way
public policy changes is when policymakers feel pain themselves, like the pain
that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence. He
asked her to provide counterexamples to disprove his claim.
Then at one point, the source
said, he suggested he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in
her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views, prompting Coyner
to hang up the phone in disgust. . . .
Rather than deny that he had
wished death on the children, Jones responded by saying, “Yes, I’ve told you
this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”
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. He would not follow up later to add that he was
justified in his desire to see a mother punished for her politics by the death
of her children because she was “breeding little fascists.” (Jones resigned as
delegate to spend time with his soon-to-be-born baby boy. He was effectively on
paternity leave when he texted and phoned Coyner. Ponder that for a moment.)
Over this weekend, Jones mounted a flailing response to
the story, saying that he felt “revolted” to have the texts read back to him,
denying neither that he had sent them nor the sentiments expressed therein. By
rights, they should be read back to him as his political epitaph. But they may
not be.
Given natural trends, Virginia’s upcoming elections look
grim for the incumbent Republicans. Governor Glenn Youngkin is term-limited.
The GOP gubernatorial nominee, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, has
struggled to respond to the political moment in a state stocked with secular
liberal-leaning federal government employees. (These people were already
disgruntled about DOGE, and now they’re sitting at home because of the
government shutdown.) Meanwhile, the current Republican nominee for lieutenant
governor has been rocked by scandal.
But Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares has a
fighting chance of retaining his office. Things did not look good recently,
given national political trends in a state increasingly defined by its
relationship to the federal government. Now, however, the voters of Virginia
are faced with a legitimate choice: Retain the respectable, scandal-free
incumbent, or choose a man who has boldly revealed himself to have the soul of
a psychopath — a progressive-branded psychopath. Is that all Virginia
Democrats need to persuade them?
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. Maybe you dismissed it — although, if it was as insane as
what Jones said, I would hope you did not — but anyone who argues that this is
somehow new is either hopelessly sheltered or engaged in one form of
deceit or another. The language of leftism is soaked in the romanticized,
violent rhetoric of early-20th-century revolutionary or anarchist movements
(“Bella Ciao!”), and this pervasive sludge inevitably permeates the filter of
everyday decency until it forms a hard layer of sediment — the new foundations
for a revived culture of political killing.
With the understanding that it is dangerous to speak of
“the left” or “the right” as a whole — these movements are infinitely more
complex in their particulars than any one simple categorization can capture —
it is undeniable that the language of leftist radicalism is steeped in the
color red. Every political defeat is an apocalyptic catastrophe. The dark cloud
of fascism forever threatens to descend. The only answer is “direct action” and
the “propaganda of the deed.” Only when evil people are made to suffer and die
— these are Jones’s thoughts near verbatim, mind you, not mine — might they
possibly change their ways and agree with you.
Again, I emphasize: Jay Jones did not let slip a few
errant thoughts. He made a passionate appeal to a bleak moral worldview that,
alarmingly, is consistent with other rhetoric and violent slaughter we have
seen come from the left in recent months and weeks. And he wants to be the
attorney general of the commonwealth of Virginia. Let the voters decide.
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