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Is it lost on everybody that he was basically quoting the office? As in: the most normie of normie network tv shows from the early 2000s?
The quote “if I was in a room with Hitler, Bin Laden, and Toby, and I only had two bullets, I would shoot Toby twice.”
These were private text messages. He was trying to be funny. I don’t think this is in any way an indication of some secret desire to kill anybody, the jokes just weren’t landing.
I really hate this trend of taking conversations from one context, putting them into another context, and pretending that the person meant something they didn’t.
It was the same two weeks ago with libs hyperventilating over Trump saying “I hate my enemies”, just clearly him trying to be funny, and not the major escalation people seemed to want it to be.
Just absolutely stupid rage searching. This is nothing. There are plenty of examples of libs engaging in legitimately dangerous speech, like publicly calling Trump and his supporters “fascists” and “Nazis”, for instance. This was a guy having a private conversation that should have stayed private.
Also: it shouldn’t be lost on the people here that none of us are posting with our full names. The point of a place like this is to be able to pick up an idea and argue it even if you don’t agree with it. If somebody doxxed everybody here, and implied this was their true beliefs that they keep hidden, would they be right? (I don’t think so). The same is true of a private text message chain.
Once again, I guess I have to post plaintext of what he said to verify that you are comprehending what everyone is trying to convey. I have no idea if you're just not reading carefully and reacting to a headline, or if you're saying that what he actually said was just a The Office joke. It's really weird to me that more than one person here honestly came away thinking it was just a The Office joke?
In response to "You were talking about hopping that jennifer Gilbert's children would die":
And yes, then The Office joke, which has a bit of a different context if you've just established you actually want to do it.
The more important point to me is the privacy part. How many of us would really come out unscathed if all our private convos were unearthed? (In general too many people want to chalk up to extra horrible malice what is better explained by the new information environment.)
I mean, sure, but also, how retarded were we when it happened?
This was a conversation he had when he was already a sitting state representative, with another sitting state representative for the opposite political party.
There are private conversations... and then there are conversations that are conceivably FOIA'able, and this, if not the latter, is really fucking close to it. To say nothing of it just being fucking stupid. In a world where "private conversation" summons up the image of signal chats being leaked, or pre-political career SMS messages or group chats, this is about as far away from that as possible, while still, maybe, and only maybe, being covered by the umbrella of "private conversation".
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Now that I'm seeing more news networks pick up this story, if they aren't going full "Republicans pounce after Jay Jones 'alleged' comments", they are leading with the joke, omitting everything else, and then including his apology. I imagine people who still trust the media are reading their trusted sources that lie by omission, charge into this thread thinking they are informed, skim my top post, and then blast out the ignorant rebuttal they've been primed to make.
I can't believe the news networks could stoop so low, seriously. They are playing an extremely dangerous game here, and for what?
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I want to see the full thing. Every site I could find was interleaving the two screenshots with partial quotes and “according to a source…” nonsense.
I don’t think this is the right order.
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If it had JUST been the office joke I would be 95% of the way there with you (not 100 though, because jokes like that are often the outer tendrils of real belief), but the full context of saying his opponent should be shot, their kids should be shot in front of them, and then doubling down on that when called out means that no, this is not OK. Focusing on the office joke is obfuscation.
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Norm Macdonald Voice Note to self: When I write my manifesto, open with a joke.
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