Oh, So Now You Want To Talk About Texts?

Democrats are desperate to swap the Jay Jones scandal for someone else’s group chat.

POLITICS: By Walter Curt

If Democrats had any sense for self‑preservation, they’d mute the word “texts” on X the way your uncle mutes “reply all” at Thanksgiving. But no: the second a trove of ugly Young Republican group‑chat messages hit the internet, the left sprinted to the nearest microphone, waving screen grabs like HOA Karens measuring your grass with a ruler. Let’s be clear: the stuff in that chat was gross and juvenile, the digital equivalent of carving swastikas into a middle‑school desk. The national Young Republicans called it “vile and inexcusable,” Republican officials from New York to Vermont demanded resignations, and a state chapter even shut down. That’s how adults handle stupidity—quick condemnation, then accountability.

But if you insist on talking about texts, then we should talk about all of them—especially the ones that actually involve power. Because while Democrats play hall monitor over a private chat full of twenty‑somethings trying (and failing) to be edgy, their own nominee for Virginia attorney general, Jay Jones, is in a different category entirely. In 2022, Jones texted that then‑House Speaker Todd Gilbert should “get two bullets,” and he elaborated that it would take Gilbert’s wife “holding their dying children in her arms” before he’d back gun‑safety legislation. Jones has admitted sending the messages and apologized. That’s not a dumb meme in a closed chat; that’s a would‑be chief law‑enforcement officer fantasizing about the murder of a political opponent—and his children.

Democrats now urge us to focus on the group‑chat scandal because it’s safer ground. Private citizens, even young party activists, are easy targets. You can demand their resignations, score a few points, and pretend you’ve rescued the soul of the Republic. But the Jay Jones messages can’t be brushed away as “locker room talk.” Those weren’t anonymous randos swapping shock‑jock one‑liners. They were the private words of the man Democrats want to put in charge of prosecutions, police oversight, and the commonwealth’s legal ethics. That’s the difference between graffiti and a signed confession.

Spare me the ritualized demand that Republicans “disavow” every idiot with a Telegram handle. I can’t “dis‑avow” someone I never “a‑vowed” in the first place. Meanwhile, Democrats won’t fully disavow the person they actually did avow—their nominee. Many offered sternly worded statements, yes. But the party’s marquee names stopped short of asking Jones to step aside, even as the story swallowed their entire ticket. That moral calculus tells you everything: condemn the powerless kids; circle wagons around the powerful man.

And here’s the kicker: even the “let’s talk about texts” pivot is falling apart. Vice President JD Vance—after noting the young‑chat stupidity—pointed right back at the Jones messages and asked the obvious: which is worse, a juvenile private chat or a statewide nominee imagining “two bullets” and dying children? You don’t have to like Vance to concede the point. The left calls his posture “whataboutism.” I call it “context.” If words matter—and we’ve been lectured for years that words are violence—then surely these words matter most when they come from the man who wants to be Virginia’s top cop.

Democrats say Jones apologized. Good. Forgiveness is a virtue; forgetting is a vice. Elections are job interviews, not confessionals. When you’re hiring an attorney general, you don’t say, “Well, he did fantasize about shooting our coworkers and watching their kids die, but he seems really sorry.” You ask whether this person has displayed the judgment, restraint, and character we demand from the person with the badge and the brief. If that standard means the job goes to someone else, that’s not cruelty—that’s prudence. And Virginians will get to weigh that prudence directly at Thursday’s debate, which is now guaranteed to revolve around the one topic Democrats would rather replace with a thousand screenshots: Jay Jones’s own words.

None of this excuses the repulsive garbage in that private chat. Kick the offenders out of their posts; let it be a lesson to every young activist that the internet never forgets and irony isn’t a disinfectant. But let’s quit pretending there’s a “moral equivalence” between immature shock talk and a would‑be attorney general texting about bullets and dead children. In one case, you have knuckleheads who should be nowhere near public trust until they grow up. In the other, you have a party that wants to hand the keys of law enforcement to a man who typed out a little murder fantasy and hit send. That’s not equivalence; that’s an indictment.

So, by all means, let’s talk about texts. Let’s talk about the ones that tell us who a person is when the cameras are off. Let’s talk about the ones that reveal whether power will be used with self‑control or malice. And let’s talk about the ones Democrats are working overtime to bury under a pile of someone else’s embarrassing memes. Voters don’t need another lecture from the group‑chat police; they need a standard that starts at the top. If the party of “norms and decency” really believes what it says, it can start by holding its own nominee to the same bar it sets for anonymous twenty‑somethings. Until then, spare us the pearl‑clutching. We see whose texts you’re desperate to talk about—and whose you’re desperate to forget.