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So, I totally understand why there are so many threads lately about what's going on in Minnesota; that's obviously some serious shit, and significantly worse than I'd personally seen coming. I think we're currently significantly closer to civil war in the US than most realize, and if that risk is realized, Minnesota is clearly a key hotspot for where it goes off. But I think Virginia is overlooked as a similarly risky hotspot for where US political tensions might break down. And that's because, as of this past weekend, the Attorney General of Virginia is Jay Jones. It was common in the last month of the campaign trail for uncomfortable Democrats to rationalize that he could simply step down as soon as he'd won, but that notion of compromise died rapidly as time passed, people learned to stomach it by familiarity, and common knowledge was created that Democrats collectively had no problem with Jones.
So for the next four years, if any Republican is accused of a crime in the state of Virginia, Jay Jones will be in charge of prosecuting them. Should Republicans accept the legitimacy of a state AG who explicitly and sincerely advocated that they and their children are scum who it is morally obligatory to exterminate in a campaign of revolutionary terrorism? For the next four years, if any serious episode of left-wing political violence occurs in Virginia, Jay Jones will be in charge of prosecuting it. Will Republicans trust in the process of such a prosecution?
There are two specific boys in the single-digit age range living in Virginia right now who Jay Jones, the current Attorney General of Virginia, explicitly advocated for assassinating as a form of propaganda of the deed, because their father is a minor retired state politician in Virginia. Do those children have a Secret Service-level security detail? (And I mean an actual Secret Service-level security detail, not whatever the fuck Trump got on the 2024 campaign trail.) How about every single young child of every single Republican state politician in Virginia? Do they all have a Secret Service level security detail?
Now, to head off the obvious rejoinder: no, obviously it wouldn't be in Jay Jones' political interest to have Todd Gilbert's sons murdered, or any similarly plainly awful political murder in Virginia. But it would be extremely destabilizing to the United States. A state-level actor - Russia, China, hell, North fucking Korea - could easily arrange for some culture-war-bait crime to happen on Jay Jones' doorstep that Jay Jones and company can't solve. Remember, Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk's assassins almost got away, and as far as I can tell they were just random idiot dipshits. Would Jay Jones step down, or be forced to step down, if something on the level of Todd Gilbert's sons getting murdered by an unidentified assassin happened? I doubt it. If he had that sense of shame, or the Democratic party had that sense of shame, we wouldn't be here right now.
Oh, by the way, Jay Jones also has two sons in the single digit age range. Is the potential for devolution of the United States into an ethnic revenge cycle between the Republicans and the Democrats not glaring to everyone else?
For the past couple of months, I've been obsessing over a scenario I cooked up in my head in which the US has collapsed into a state of open civil war by the end of 2026, and one of the biggest dominoes there is that Jay Jones' presence turns Virginia into Bleeding Virginia. It's a pretty crazy and specific series of far-fetched events and I never literally expected it to play out exactly.
But in my scenario we weren't nearly this far off the rails by January 19th.
I was curious how one does become AG in Virginia, so that we find ourselves in this unfortunate situation. Appointed by some evil corrupt Democratic governor? Or the coastal elites or Illuminati or Jews? Buying the post? Murdering the previous AG?
It turns out that he simply got 53% of the votes.
Now, if you are arguing that America has a systematic problem with voting for sleazebags whose (public knowledge) past statements should utterly disqualify them in the eyes of the voters, I am likely to agree with you there. I am not even going to argue that Jay Jones does not belong in that set.
His texts were strategically leaked after he had won the primaries but before the general election. But that backfired when Virginians decided that they still preferred the Democrat sleazebag to someone more aligned with Trump.
I know this is confusing language-wise, but both the Democratic and the Republican party have historically been in favor of this concept called "democracy". This means that the legitimacy of an elected official is decided by vote in accordance with the relevant constitutions. If the good citizens of Virginia decide to elect fucking Hannibal Lecter as their AG, that would make Lecter their legitimate AG. It does not make him fit for office, and you are free to believe that he will be the fox guarding the chickens. You are also free to say so as much and as loud as you want, and campaign for him to be impeached over his campaign against vegetarianism or whatever. Urge people under his command to remember that they should refuse any illegal orders of his, especially when extrajudicial killings of citizens are concerned.
I would also challenge your understanding of the adjective "sincerely". A common defense of Trump is "you can not take what he says literally", even when what he says is a carefully crafted statement for public consumption. Nobody remotely sane is believing that Jones will engage in a campaign of murder against Republicans and their children. Not Republicans in general, not Gilbert in particular either. If he had published an op-ed "How to heal the rift in America by having death squads kill Republicans and their offspring" in the NYT, I would concede that he was serious. There is no indication that he contemplates killing anyone with the same sincerity as Trump contemplating an invasion of a NATO ally. My strong prediction is that his office will investigate any homicides of children, no matter who their parents are. Perhaps he will decline to investigate ambiguous, politically charged shootings where self-defense is a plausible claim, just like Pam Bondi declines to investigate the shooting of Good. But if you believe that a random gas station robber will get off the hook by just pointing out that the clerk they shot was actually a kid of a Republican mother and therefore deserved to die, you have lost all connection to reality.
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.
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