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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.
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.
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