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Yes, you gloss over the most distressing part like that somehow makes it better. That makes it worse. Far, far worse. Virginia Democrats saw a candidate espouse that you should murder you political opponents children to make an example of them, and they went, enthusiastically, "That's our guy!" I live among them. Trust me. They are telling you exactly who they are. They want you (well probably not you, but definitely me) dead. The only thing they can't agree on is the order in which my family should be murdered to cause the most anguish to the survivors in their last moments.
If it were one bad guy, maybe the next guy won't be so bad. Maybe there will be electoral backlash. But when voters go "No, we actually want the guy that wants to murder you", that's civil war territory.
As I said before:
Of the 53% who voted for him, you have perhaps 1% (e.g. lizardman level) who expect him to engage in a purge of Republicans. The other 52% voted for him because they did not actually believe that he would engage in any murders.
I think that there is a tiny but loud minority on either side of the CW who honestly thinks political murder is good idea. Actually, I think the risk is a bit hard to judge.
On the one hand, most of the time, nothing ever happens. On the other hand, widespread murder of civilians, especially women and children, is mostly not an election winner, and the people who might enact such things will not say so openly on the campaign trail.[^1]
If you are claiming that 53% of voters are willingly voting for a candidate who wants to murder you, you are imitating the professional victims who claim the same about Trump voters. "I am Hispanic/LGBTQ*!@#, and it is common knowledge that Trump wants to kill me for that. So all the people who voted for him are fine with me getting killed." It is pathetic when they do it, and it is just as pathetic when you do it.
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[^1]: The best studied example of people voting for a party who then killed a lot of citizens is probably the rise of the NSDAP. They did not campaign on gassing any Jewish kids. Of the 37% percent who voted for them in free elections in 1932, I don't think all or even most were pro murdering their Jewish neighbors. Perhaps a third of the 1932 NSDAP voters would have been enthusiastic about the Shoa. Another third might have been indifferent. The last third might have been horrified. "When Hitler called them a parasite race, I did not think he was literal. I thought it was just empty words, and at most he would deport the Jews to Madagascar. I only voted for him because I felt he was the only one who could stop a commie takeover / I wanted to teach the other parties a lesson! I thought the police would stop him from murdering anyone!" Of course, they also lacked the lessons learns from the rise of the Nazis.
I think that there are a few different risk factors to consider.
(1) dehumanizing language. This is required, but not sufficient. It will mostly not be unambiguous, "And therefore we should kill all the Jews, including their kids." Instead, it will leave it to the listener to connect the dots or not. "The Jews are a parasite sickening the body of the German nation." If someone says "killing Nazis is good", does he mean "killing right wing extremists who are violently opposed to democracy is good" or "killing anyone who is half of a standard deviation to my right is good"? It gets even more ambiguous if you go towards symbols. A Confederate flag could mean anything from "I want to go back to the days when the only Blacks we suffered to live were slaves" to an apolitical endorsement of the South. Likewise, the motive of a Klansman getting strangled by a Confederate flag could mean anything from "I violently oppose the reintroduction of slavery" to "any white person with a Confederate bumper sticker is an irredeemable racist who should be summarily executed". If someone describes illegal immigrants as rapists and murderers, that could be the rhetoric of someone who plans to round them up and murder them at the earliest convenience, or someone who is mostly interested to bait the left into pearl-clutching about irresponsible language (which is certainly is!).
(2) nonpublic language is not especially relevant, when its interpretation is ambiguous. When someone writes in his diary how he is looking forward to rounding up and shooting all his opponents, that is concerning. If a 'Young' Republican group posts Hitler memes, that does not automatically mean that they want to bring back Auschwitz. If Jay Jones makes a joke about shooting some Republican (plus his kids), that does not mean he plans a Soviet-style purge. (Either still calls into question the suitability for public office of the posters, though.)
(3) Empirically (arguably), traditional movements are less of a danger than revolutionary ones. Traditional conservatives like GWB (bless his black little heart) may invent new American past-times like torturing foreigners, but they can mostly be relied upon to not radically change their society. "Round up all the people from the other party, declare martial law" is an idea foreign to Obama or W, for whom the struggle between R and D has been going on for a long time, but also follows certain rules both sides agree on. Beware of the outsiders who do not respect the mos maiorum. I would also argue that for the most part, Social Justice Progressivism is in fact not very revolutionary, methods-wise. The dominant ideology among 40yo woman rarely is. While there are certainly murderous proponents, I don't think they are coordinating with the big political groups (e.g. the Democrats). (The same feels also true about MAGA). If you get killed while SJP is in power, it is likely by some rioting criminal whom the SJ people did not want to oppose (because he is part of a minority and that would be racist or something) instead of a death squad directly orchestrated by them.
(4) Institutions, especially ones which serve as checks on power. While Trump might dream of getting crowned King of the US and subsequently persecute all of the people who make fun of him for lèse-majesté, the danger of that seems slim because the US has a strong institutional culture against such things. Toothless as Congress is for the most part, even his allies there would not agree to that. And while the SCOTUS is generally very friendly towards Trump, they are also not afraid of unamiously denying his claims on occasion. Likewise, the US military is very democracy-aligned (at least as far as the US is concerned). They have a long streak of not attempting any coups, and I don't see them willing to break that streak. Compare and contrast with the military in Weimar. Voting for Hitler in the US is thus a lot less bad than voting for him in Weimar, because in the US he will be much more constrained in what he can do. (Of course, I recommend neither).
Have you read Jay Jones’s texts? I don’t think complaining, “This guy actually said he wanted to see me and mine murdered, we have the receipts, he doesn’t deny it, and yet people elected him to office anyway,” is the same as complaining, “MSNBC called this guy a fascist, the Nazis were fascists, the Nazis murdered people, ergo this guy wants to murder people, and yet people elected him to office anyway.” In the one case, we are relying on what the guy actually said. In the other, we have to make several massive leaps to arrive at that objection.
Come on. The form "If you are in a room with ${BADDIE1}, ${BADDIE2} and ${JOKE_SUBJECT}, and you have a gun with two bullets, you would shoot ${JOKE_SUBJECT} twice" is a well known joke template which I have heard first around 2000 or so. Anyone who reads this as "Jones is clearly threatening to unearth Pol Pot and Stalin (or Hitler or whomever) to enact a bizarre situation in which he kills Gilbert with an almost empty handgun" is clearly misreading this on purpose.
You can tell this pretty well from how the recipient of the message reacted. It was not "OMG, Jones has threatened to kill Gilbert, even provided a specific method ("shoot twice"), better get the police involved before he does it." It was "WTF, Jones is joking about killing Gilbert. Cringe, terminally poor taste. Better keep that on file, might come useful later."
Also, going from "he threatened to kill Gilbert (and his family), Gilbert is a political opponent, I am also his political opponent, ergo he wants to kill me" is not following a path of valid logical inference.
You’re ignoring his follow-up phone call, the one where he said he wanted Gilbert’s children to be shot and die in their mother’s arms, so that he and his wife would change their minds on gun control. He then followed it up by texting
He then went even further, saying
He also previously told her that it would be a good thing if more police officers were shot, because then they’d be more reluctant to shoot others.
None of those follow standard joke templates, at least not where I’m from. The lady he was talking to also didn’t see any humor in those heated calls and texts, and she cut him off shortly thereafter.
For the most part, this rhymes with "I hope one of the immigrants you love so much rapes your daughter so you will realize how they are". Certainly a vile sentiment, but also not threatening violence, merely condoning.
Of course, referring to the kids as "little fascists" carries for me a strong connotation of "they do not deserve to live", which is an even worse statement than "in the grand utility sum, updating the beliefs of their father weighs more than their lives". Kinda rhymes with "the way that slut dresses, she is asking for it anyhow".
TIL. This is actually the most damning of all the scandal in my mind for an AG candidate. Not that he thinks that more cops should get shot, that is merely vile.
But that he seems to think that cops live in a magic happy world where they are detached from gunshot violence, the way the operator of a predator drone might be detached from the reality of explosions, and that therefore getting them more exposure to gunshot violence will increase their empathy and make them more reluctant to rely on firearms.
I may be talking out of my armchair from the other side of the pond, but to me it sounds like this guy is out of his fucking mind. I think that even without any cop getting shot, they likely have far more exposure to gunshot violence than I would wish upon anyone. I would expect that most cops have found themselves rendering first aid to a gunshot victim, trying to stop them from bleeding out from a gut shot while waiting for the EMTs to arrive whose job it is to deal with that particular kind of shit. No cop who shoots someone will do so in the expectation that they will simply de-spawn like in some kid's video game.
While I am sure that there are cops who have shot civilians in cold blood, the central case of an unjustified police shooting to my mind is a traffic stop where the young black suspect suddenly reaches into the glove compartment to get his license, and is shot because a cop thinks he is reaching for a gun. The question if the incidence of this will go up or down if more cops are shot on the job is something which could be answered by any five-year-old.
That’s exactly the issue. I don’t think anyone expects Jones to go on a shooting spree at the closest Republican daycare, but I think it’s fair to say that he wouldn’t mind if someone else were to. That’s completely poisonous for an AG. He has given every indication that he will slow walk or prevent the prosecution of his ideological allies, even (or especially) if they commit violence against his ideological opponents.
That isn’t a theoretical fear. The members of the Weather Underground committed campaigns of terror, bombings, murder, robberies, etc., but they were given slaps on the wrist, pardoned, and ended up with cushy jobs in academia. At least one mentored a future US president. Similarly, the south had a long history of government officials overlooking, tacitly encouraging, and refusing to prosecute violence against blacks. I think it’s reasonable for the Republicans of Virginia to have the same disquiet at Jones’s election as the black residents of Virginia would have at the election of a Klansman as AG. The Klansman AG wouldn’t go out lynching people himself, but it seems like a pretty good bet that he’d try to prevent any other lynchers from facing prosecution and punishment. So also Jones.
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