The most alarming of all the words in the Jay Jones text-messages scandal is “Yes.”
It comes after Jones’s interlocutor, the moderate Republican House Delegate, Carrie Coyner, reminds Jones that he had been “talking about hopping [sic] jennifer Gilbert’s children would die,” and that this is outrageous. “Yes,” Jones replies. “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”
Why does this part, in particular, matter? I’ll tell you: Because it was considered, deliberate, malicious. Sometimes, people get carried away. Sometimes, people entertain angry thoughts that, once fed back to them, are abandoned in a puff of regret. Here, though, Jones confirms those thoughts, and then calmly explains their logic. By the point at which Jones writes “Yes,” he has already been admonished for fantasizing about murder via text message and on the phone, and he has already said aloud that he hopes that his political opponent’s children will be murdered in front of her. Taken within this context, Jones’s “Yes” isn’t a rash indiscretion or a lazy misstatement; it is a confirmation.
Of what? Of a worldview — that’s what. I have talked before on my podcast about the two types of bigots. On the one hand, you have the unthinking types, who say awful things about particular sorts of people, but who, having never really thought those things through, will back away or soften when challenged. While I dislike them, these people do not worry me a great deal. On the other hand, you have people whose bigotry is the product of an earnestly held, well-thought-through ideological framework. These people terrify me. In my experience, there is a big difference between the guy at the bar who says ugly things after a few drinks, and the guy with the website who has charts, historical narratives, and an inexhaustible patience for proselytizing. One is a casual idiot; the other is a committed zealot. And it is zealots, not idiots, who tend to change the world for the worse.
The same distinction applies here. That guy in the political argument whose language gets a little overheated? He doesn’t particularly bother me. Jay Jones? He bothers me. Jones is a professional politician, and he was talking to one of his colleagues, about one of his colleagues. To suggest that it would be a good thing if that colleagues’ children were murdered in front of her is psychotic in and of itself. But to explain it? To say “Yes?” To say “I’ve told you this before”? To say “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.” That’s an approach. It’s a philosophy. It’s a theory of political action.
More specifically, it’s a theory of political action that cannot coexist with the American constitutional order. “I hope your children are killed so that I can get my way on policy” is not an opinion; it’s a rejection of the social compact. There is simply no way that, having repeatedly expressed and defended such an idea, Jay Jones can serve as the attorney general of a U.S. state. Were he a random user on Twitter, perhaps it would be different. But he’s not — he’s a politician, seeking political power, and he has demonstrated beyond doubt that he can not be trusted with that charge.