domain:papyrusrampant.substack.com
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1m ago
Do you have evidence of republican politicians caught saying they'd like to murder their opponents' children?
There was that failed Republican candidate in NM who was convicted of doing drive-by shootings of several opponents' houses (which included children in the houses).
ZanarkandAbesFan
9m ago
Be honest and admit that these kind of "just joking" comments come from all sides.
I think we usually expect more from people running to be elected officials? Do you have evidence of republican politicians caught saying they'd like to murder their opponents' children?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
11m ago
As of now, no Democrat has pulled their endorsement of him, I saw one single local Democrat say he would stop campaigning with him, several groups have actively reaffirmed his endorsement still saying he's somehow better than your generic Republican.
WP:
The comments were made public by National Review in October 2025 during Jones' campaign for Attorney General, and received bipartisan condemnation, including by fellow Democratic nominees Abigail Spanberger and Ghazala Hashmi.
In particular, Spanberger said:
I made clear to Jay that he must fully take responsibility for his words. While Hashmi said: Jay must take accountability for the pain that his words have caused. We must demand better of our leaders and of each other.
There is a slight of hand here I want to address. I said no Democrat (minus one) has pulled their endorsement. This remains true, even with Democrats saying he really shouldn't have said those things. Despite the condemnation of his words, they still endorse the person for the position he's running for.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11m ago
Sure, it's open for everyone (though I suspect that right-wing content gets boosted by the algorithm), it's just bit rich at this point to say that right-wingers (let alone milquetoast right-wingers) have to do with "condemned self-hosted shitholes or bust".
ZanarkandAbesFan
11m ago
I didn't really appreciate it at the time, but I think Trump's general style in 2016 was a big part of this, penis size jokes in the primary,
IIRC, his only dick-related joke went something along the lines of "There was also a comment about if my hands are small, something else must be; I assure you, there's no problem" which I actually think was a pretty witty and non-offensive way of addressing that insinuation.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11m ago
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.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15m ago
I think that what Mr. Jones said was disgusting and should torpedo his chances of election. You’re still overreacting.
No, Democrats Don’t Really Want You Dead.
A Democrat joked about someone shooting one of his coworkers. He did not say he’d do it. He did not speak for his colleagues. He did not mention you and yours. He has not stood by his statements, or otherwise indicated that he actually wants anyone dead.
Now, you can assume the worst for some of those things. But for all of them? People say stupid shit all the time. What makes you say that this time is the one where he really means it?
faceh
16m ago
Oh yeah.
Lets leave aside how he's in a central 'position of trust' for the State.
I feel vaguely hypocritical on this point because I generally support the idea of using political power to make your ideological opponents uncomfortable enough to leave (I mean implement policies they don't like and would want to get away from, rather than policies specifically targeting them for their political associations) but having your state's executive branch have an unstated policy of leniency on violence against political opponents is a genuinely terrifying thought to me. Doubly so if your state's self defense laws are weak. Virginia is Stand Your Ground, at least.
Thankfully one that IS pretty handily solved by moving away and/or organizing a campaign to oust the problem candidates. But it does harken back to my Skin in the Game rant. If you want to support the idea of political violence against opponents, in the abstract, I would prefer if you, personally, or people you care a lot about, are at risk of getting targeted by it. Instead, what always happens is the political class circles the wagons and ups their levels of security and leaves everyone else to fend for themselves.
Would it be wrong to suggest that a Gentlemanly duel between the parties in question here might be a way to resolve the grievances?
quiet_NaN
16m ago
As of now, no Democrat has pulled their endorsement of him, I saw one single local Democrat say he would stop campaigning with him, several groups have actively reaffirmed his endorsement still saying he's somehow better than your generic Republican.
WP:
The comments were made public by National Review in October 2025 during Jones' campaign for Attorney General, and received bipartisan condemnation, including by fellow Democratic nominees Abigail Spanberger and Ghazala Hashmi.
In particular, Spanberger said:
I made clear to Jay that he must fully take responsibility for his words. While Hashmi said: Jay must take accountability for the pain that his words have caused. We must demand better of our leaders and of each other.
Someone should probably double check my math, but it seems to me that these are two democrats who seem to have diplomatically suggested that he drops out of the race.
While I agree that his messages are beyond the pale, this also seems like a fuck-up on so many different levels.
Someone who has such ideation should not be elected to any office, but AG seems like a particularly bad fit.
Someone who thinks it is wise to text their Republican colleague these ideations should not have any job where any amount of personal judgement is required. Even a fucking unsolicited dick pick would have been less of a lapse.
Someone who knows that these messages exist and still decides to run for office has proven beyond any doubt that he cares nothing for his party.
the casual genocidal bloodlust the average Northern VA Democrat has
In your link, you mostly talk about people wanting to kill Trump, with the exception of "his supporters really don't deserve any sympathy either" and "rant about how great it is that the unvaxed are all going to die".
This is not genocidal by any definition, because Trump is not an ethnicity. Saying that your outgroup does not deserve sympathy is unfortunately normal (MAGA is very much without sympathy wrt illegal immigrants, for example). Celebrating the anticipated death of the unvaccinated seems in poor taste, but is also very different from calls for murdering them.
I will not pretend that I do not think that our world would be better if Trump had died of natural causes halfway through his first term. I also think that getting murdered would be a much greater contribution to his movement than anything he could possibly do with his remaining lifespan, and also do not think that Trump is succeeding in dismantling the constitutional order (which would justify killing him), so I am very much opposed to killing him or his henchmen.
While the lefty celebrations or Kirk's death were disgusting, I think most of the initial reactions were deluded about the political motive. Basically, the left heard "oh, he was shot by a gun nut raised in a Mormon family".
I think that if Greta Thunberg was fatally stabbed by a MS-13 illegal immigrant for whose prison release she had campaigned, parts of right-wing twitter would probably celebrate. "Seems like the woke college student problem is starting to solve itself", "FAFO" or something. If it then later emerges that it was not outgroup-on-outgroup violence, but that the culprit was acting on behalf of the ingroup, this would be at least awkward.
I'm gonna be honest, I'm fairly distressed over this. This is how Pogroms work.
Frankly, it is not. The example from Russia you cite is different because these were random Jews who were killed for being Jewish.
Even if that fuckwit Jones had personally killed that speaker and his kids, that would be political violence, which is a different beast.
From Rome to Weimar, we had a lot of societies where internal political violence was a thing, often employed by different actors. It is bad (also because it makes totalitarianism look like a good option), but it is different from genocide.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
21m ago
Kimmel basically victim-blamed the right. His “punishment” was a week of leave and a ton of media attention and the full support of the rest of Hollywood.
There was an organic campaign to cancel Kimmel that would probably have succeeded (not least because Sinclair would have dropped him even without administration pressure). It failed because Trump ran his mouth in a way which made it an undeniable 1st amendment issue.
yofuckreddit
22m ago
I heard a theory that his character was about the inability of the old guard to communicate with the new wave of leftism, and the latter's insistence on specific language as a prerequisite for collaboration. See also his confusion at pronouns etc.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
30m ago
/pol/ isn't a self hosted 4chan offshoot, it's just 4chan. And the correct comparator to reddit isn't even 4chan, it's twitter, where people are happy to issue calls for the death of whoever you'd like, unabated.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
32m ago
Based on reviews I've seen of those two works, I was planning at stopping with TSH.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
33m ago
There fundamentally aren't enough "Won a medal at an international olympiad" people each year worldwide to fill the whole Ivy League even if you are exceptionally broad with how you construe "international olympiad". These sorts of people don't want to be full of "The best" fundamentally but rather there are other reasons.
Similarly there are also too many excellent law students each year to overwhelm the spots at the Top 3 (or is it 5 or 10 or whatever?) law schools everyone wants to go to in the US, and yet they are able to come up with an admissions system that is still widely seen as being a meritocracy (modulo affirmative action), at least to a greater degree than their undergrad complements.
oats_son
35m ago
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?
I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil? And that they're breeding little fascists? Yes
In response to "You were talking about hopping that jennifer Gilbert's children would die":
Yes, I've told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy
If those guys die before me
I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves
Send them out awash in something
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.
Three people, two bullets
Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot
Gilbert gets two bullets to the head
Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
37m ago
and approximately zero chance of being caught and punished for it
Well I mean, given that he's running for AG, he gets to decide by a large degree who gets caught and faces punishment for what. And we've seen AG's use a lot of "discretion" in this regard. And so the question is, after statements like these, is there even a fig leaf of equal protection under the law?
DelendaEst
39m ago
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.
faceh
40m ago
This man isn't going to commit violence against anyone. Give him a gun, a bag of candy, and unfettered access to those kids and the worst you'll get are some tummy aches.
I will push back on this and suggest that if you give him a gun, access to a high-value political opponent, and approximately zero chance of being caught and punished for it, he is somewhat likely to pull the trigger.
That's closer to how I measure the virtue of a person. What they will do when given an opportunity to inflict harm under the belief they will not suffer consequences themselves. That is, how strong are your personal principles, and can you hold yourself accountable for following them.
I think we end up arguing over how much the person has the personal capacity to inflict violence vs. whether they find violence actually reprehensible. The former is a bit of a misdirect from the latter. That is, just because someone lacks the fortitude to pull the trigger themselves doesn't mean they don't want to see that trigger pulled.
Now the scenario I proposed up there is far from realistic, and will not come to pass, so I accept all the various objections and caveats to my argument. My position is best articulated as "in my experience only people who have a stated commitment to avoiding violence are serious about not wanting it. In contrast, people who can excuse violent acts easily are usually just in want of an opportunity commit it themselves."
So I don't think this guys 'private' texts reflect well on him at all.
hydroacetylene
52m ago
I mean, Ivy League admissions cant be meritocratic, because there are enough students with perfect everything to overwhelm the spots. Class shibboleths are how every society resolves that.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
53m ago
Norm Macdonald Voice Note to self: When I write my manifesto, open with a joke.
hydroacetylene
57m ago
So do left wingers. There’s still progressive Twitter, the lolcows just left for blue sky.
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.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
58m ago
Memory is such a weird, non intuitive thing. Something can live inside your memory for eternity, for no reason whatsoever, but if everything did that, we would not even be able to function. Why is it that I will forever know the name of, and be able to pronounce, the state fish of Hawai'i, but I can't recall my mother's middle name?
(I'll save you the google search, it's the humuhumunukunukuapuaa)
DTulpa
1hr ago
Along with eveybody else from any political corner. And that is solely due the intervention of one eccentric manchild billionaire. I guess I'm fortunate that things progressed that way given the way the stars were aligning.
I don't really care if toxic sentiment is spilling out in some free-for-all arena - or at least don't care as much. I do care when spaces (often de facto Left-ruled) make a big song and dance about rules and decorum, deploy them maliciously against their opponents, and spare themselves. This is sanewashing what got many other subs monitored and eventually banned, and allows users to acclimate to a norm.
Find me the mainstream right-wing Reddit easily downloadable and accessible from the IOS store and I'll take these comparisons seriously.
"erosion of norms" is just DNC speak for "refusing to play the loveable loser to our obviously more virtuous candidate."
I freely admit I was part of it in my stupid college days, but frankly the DNC has been demonizing conservatives for a lot longer than Trump has been relevant, he was just the first one to fling the shit back in any effective manner.
If you want to point to a specific moment the norms really started to collapse, I would suggest the Johnson administration for the most recent cycle.
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