In November 2017, a scandal quickly ensnared Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore regarding allegations that he sought romantic relationships with high school girls when he was in his early thirties, roughly forty years earlier. Within a week, Republican leadership demanded he be removed from his race despite the election being less than a month away.
Roy Moore went on to lose his race to Democrat Doug Jones, and eventually won an $8.2 million defamation suit against a Democrat Super PAC.
In October 2025, text messages belonging to Virginia Democrat Attorney General candidate Jay Jones made headlines, in which he fantasizes about a Republican political leader being shot twice in the head. When a member of the text thread suggests his rhetoric went too far, he repeatedly emphasizes his point, where he expresses his desire to see the children of VA Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert killed because, “[o]nly when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.” He went on to call Gilbert’s wife “evil” and his school-aged children “little fascists.”
Democrat leaders have continued to stand by Jones’s candidacy and, at the time of this writing, he is still the betting favorite to claim the title of the state’s top legal officer.
The purpose of this comparison is, of course, not to portray one party as saintly and the other evil. The very same Republican leaders who condemned Roy Moore, including Paul Ryan, John McCain, and Mitch McConnell, played direct—if not leading—roles in some of the most odious policies to emerge from the imperial city during their political careers. Instead, it speaks to the extent to which, historically, political institutions have operated to condemn behavior they deem disqualifying of leading candidates in high-profile electoral contests, and the lack of such action in this circumstance.
To simplify it, it is a clear demonstration that a major American political party has readily accepted the dehumanization of its opposition and a willingness to rationalize the justification of violence to achieve political ends, not only for political leaders, but for their families, including small children.
This explicit acceptance of bloodlust as justified in the pursuit of political victory is, in a way, clarifying. Politics is war by other means; democracy is conquest by ballot. In communities that share a standard system of morality, at least some pretense of justice can be appealed to to wind down the excesses of wielded power. America is no longer such a polity, so we should not be surprised to see the wielding of violence as an increasingly accepted means to achieve political ends.
While the lack of meaningful condemnation of Jay Jones’s homicidal views from national leaders is illustrative of a broader change in this nation’s politics, the seat he is seeking to obtain is a state-level position. This invites secondary questions, such as how political opponents of Jones can view him as a legitimate civil authority, knowing the personal feelings he harbors in a position as crucial as Virginia’s Attorney General?
Recent hot-button issues, including state-by-state covid-related policies, culture war battles involving schools, concerns over law enforcement, and city-enabled rioting over “social justice issues,” have already seen the 2020s as a period of significant political migration within the country. Once again, if one seeks to find a silver lining in our latest high-profile “mask-off moment,” perhaps recognizing the extent to which political leaders truly despise those who are not politically useful to them will result in a new wave of “voting with your feet.”
As political leadership at the national level, from both parties, has attempted to escalate the use of federal forces to force opposing states into compliance with their preferred party platform, there are reasons to question the effectiveness of their efforts. As chaos and incompetence have come to define Washington, it is strengthened leadership at the state level that has provided the most meaningful political victories. Hopefully, it will encourage more significant conversations about the future of political decentralization.
It is said that a political gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. While we should hope the sociopathic worldviews of Jay Jones will not manifest themselves in Virginia state policy, perhaps his candor will require Americans to take him seriously.
