The Rest of America Comments on Jones’ Murderous Texts
by Donald Smith
“Why are so many Democrats such hateful, ‘I hope people die’ bastards?”
That’s the headline on the “Irons in The Fire” blog on October 6th. I won’t recap what the blogger, “Firehand,” wrote. We’ve all seen it before, over and over the past few days. It’s about Jay Jones.
What’s noteworthy is not what Firehand said. It’s where he said it from—Oklahoma. He’s not a Virginia blogger—at least according to his personal profile. Lots of people outside of Virginia have heard of the Jay Jones scandal. And they are watching how Virginia Democrats, journalists and voters respond.
I found Firehand’s blog post through Glenn Reynolds, the “Instapundit.” Reynolds isn’t a Virginian either. He’s a University of Tennessee law professor. But he’s following Jay Jones’ antics—and Virginia Democrats’ response to those antics.
Reynolds created and runs the “Instapundit” blog, one of the most popular sites in the conservative blogosphere. He also writes a weekly column for the New York Post. This week he wrote about Jones, and how Democrats are reacting. “Major national Democrats are keeping quiet about Jones’ comments, and there’s no move to force him to withdraw. Virginia Democrats, [gubernatorial candidate Abigail] Spanberger included, are circling the wagons around him after issuing token messages of disapproval.”
Then, Reynolds dropped the real bombshell. He mentioned the real reason that the Jay Jones story is grabbing serious attention far from the Old Dominion: “Why should they oust him? This sort of violent rhetoric has become the leftist norm, with Democrats habitually calling their opponents Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and the like.”
Glenn Reynolds, and Firehand, and many, many other people have come to expect this kind of thinking from progressives. This clinical contempt for those who disagree with them. THAT’S the shocking thing here. Most of us are disgusted by what Jones said—but few of us are surprised. And now, in Virginia, we are seeing it play out in public. Our worst fears about the thoughts and humanity (or lack thereof), of a not-insignificant percentage of Democrats and progressives, seem to be being confirmed in front of our disbelieving eyes.
“I don’t like to assume a lot of people think this way, but too many sure seem to say this stuff casually, in this case TO A REPUBLICAN.” That’s from Mary Katherine Ham. Ham is a longtime moderate GOP political commentator, so she’s not speaking from a purely objective viewpoint. But, she’s not the type of Republican who reflexively hates Democrats. For four years she was married to Obama advisor Jake Brewer. They had two children together before Brewer died in a bike accident in 2015.
While Mary Katherine Ham has had many positive things to say about Donald Trump, David French has not. Formerly a prominent writer at the conservative flagship National Review, French is as anti-Trump and anti-MAGA as they get. And yet, here is what he said about Jay Jones and his defenders: “Jay Jones should drop out of the race. And if you’re on the left and say, ‘But the Republicans are worse,’ then you’re part of the problem. We can normalize calls for physical violence, or we can step back from the brink.”
John Hinderaker, one of the founders of the Powerline blog, weighs in from up in Minnesota. Hinderaker and the other Powerline founders are GOP, but they are not professional politicians or activists. They’re lawyers, who led the investigation by bloggers of Dan Rather’s attempt to tar George W. Bush in the Texas National Guard memos scandal. While one MSM stalwart derided Hinderaker and his cohorts as (I’m paraphrasing from memory here) “amateurs blogging in their pajamas,” the Powerline crew brought Rather down. (Hollywood and the MSM will never forgive them).
Here’s what Hinderaker wrote, in a piece titled “Another Democratic Party Scandal in Virginia:” “My sense is that Democrats say things like Jay Jones did to each other, all the time. Thus, [people] were not shocked when his disgraceful texts came out. The mistake Jones made was telling a Republican legislator what he really thought.” That Republican legislator then told the world. And Virginia Democrats have been scrambling ever since.
Just east of Hinderaker is one of National Review’s most colorful (and curmudgeonly) writers, Chicago’s Jeff Blehar. He says that The Jones Affair gives all of us a “Frightening Peek into A Bleak Moral Worldview:”
…the voters of Virginia are faced with a legitimate choice: Retain the respectable, scandal-free incumbent [Miyares], 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 [the following] 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 [Jones] 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.
In Virginia, the Washington Post, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Virginia Public Media and other MSM stalwarts will lay down a smokescreen for the state Democrats. Much as 20th century destroyers did to shield the wounded battleship they were protecting.
But smokescreens aren’t opaque. You can see through them. The world is seeing through the smoke and getting a good look at Virginia’s politics, journalists and people. What would you think of a crew of people who, when they learned that one of their leaders had spoken approvingly of watching an opponent’s child die, just rolled their eyes? When people reach conclusions about other people, they tend to rely on their own lying eyes, instead of what political “experts” (and the experts’ allies in the media) tell them they should conclude.
I’ll leave the last word to Mary Katherine Ham: “Blackface for Northam, now this. It’s wild what you can do as a D in VA.”
Donald Smith is a graduate of the University of Virginia. Raised in Chesterfield County, his mother was born in a log cabin outside of Lexington, which her grandfather built after the Civil War. The cabin, now restored, is still occupied by family members.
Republished with permission from Bacon’s Rebellion.
