And the Rise of Deadly Enemies
By J. Jeff Toler for Shenandoah Christian Alliance j.toler@sca4christ.org
- “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” —William Butler Yeats
Surely by now, you have heard of Jerrauld Charles Corey Jones, who prefers to go by Jay Jones. He once served as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates for the 89th District from 2018 until early 2022. He is a Democrat.
It’s now three years later, and Jones is running for Virginia’s Attorney General, having won the Democratic nomination in June. He faces the Republican incumbent, Jason Miyares, in the general election. Among the highlights of Jones’s résumé was a charge of reckless driving—he was clocked at 116 mph. Avoiding jail time through a plea deal involving community service, it was later discovered that half of that service was performed through his own PAC, drawing tepid criticism.
Recently, text messages from 2022 surfaced in which Jones fantasized about the violent assassination of Republican political figures. In particular, he targeted Todd Gilbert, then Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates—saying he wanted to put two bullets into his head and watch his children die in his wife’s arms. Jones has yet to apologize for these messages—which, reportedly, were intended for someone else.
Source: National Review
If I were Jason Miyares, I wouldn’t consent to any debates with Jones without being surrounded by a phalanx of armed security guards.
While it’s being reported that both parties have criticized him, only Republicans rightly see these controversies as outrageous and disqualifying. A mere handful of Democrats have urged him to fully address them, while—individually and through party organizations—the majority continue their “full-throated” endorsement of him.
Before 2020, this kind of story—which was largely ignored by the media at the time—would have been all but unthinkable. By any measure, it would have been an outrage. Twenty years earlier, William J. Bennett grimly chronicled its demise, writing about the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal in The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals (Free Press, 1999).
You might be tempted to think this is a political story because it involves politicians. It’s not. It’s much worse.
It’s a raw example of just how incredibly swiftly evil is overwhelming us—as a nation, as a society, as human beings.
We can only hope that the murder of Charlie Kirk will galvanize the best among us to condemn and ostracize those who would murder others simply because they disagree with them. But it’s no longer about disagreements. That term is utterly inappropriate now—if for no other reason than that decency, along with outrage, has already perished.
The game of politics, among other things, has now become a blood sport.
Ben Shapiro
The corporate media is performing its customary magic—sanitizing the story and downplaying it as best it can. Ben Shapiro, writing in The Daily Wire, quoted this excerpt from Politico, demonstrating the madness of the legacy media with this pull quote:
“A string of text messages from Jay Jones, Virginia’s Democratic nominee for attorney general, where he mused about violence directed toward a political rival, is triggering widespread backlash and threatening to shake up the state’s November election.”
Shapiro writes, “And this is how it always works with the legacy media. If Democrats do a bad thing, the story is, ‘Republicans pounce.’ If Republicans do a bad thing, the story is ‘Republicans did a bad thing.’”
You really have to love the language Politico used—how Jay Jones merely “mused” about calling for someone’s murder, as though we all do that every now and then. Right? No. Much more accurately, what all decent people really need to muse upon is why Democrats and the Leftist media have such a soft spot in their hearts for murder and violence. It’s becoming increasingly obvious with each passing day.
Why is this so? One answer might be the madness of self-hatred cultivated generation after generation since the mid-twentieth century. Now that a new—or perhaps reawakened—conservative movement has emerged in Western culture, the recruits of neo-Marxist rhetoric are growing desperate, and literally going out of their minds.
“Just as Donald Trump’s rallies would come to be a few years later,” writes David Marcus, “[Charlie] Kirk’s TPUSA events were a high-energy party for people who had so long felt ostracized, silenced, and cowed… To the Left—and let’s be honest here, for much of the Democrat Party and much of the mainstream media—Charlie’s success was unforgivable. They spent over a decade painting him as a racist, a bigot, and finally as an actual, real-life fascist.”
William J. Bennett
Bennett added this in an opinion piece for Fox News titled, “What Charlie Kirk’s Murder Tells Us About the American Mind”:
“Let me advance an unconventional thesis: Charlie Kirk died because we have forgotten how to hate properly. G.K. Chesterton observed that ‘the true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind [or next to] him.’ We fight not for hatred of our enemies but love of our fellow soldiers and the ideals of our country. We have inverted this wisdom. We teach our young people to hate their opponents rather than love their own principles. We have made politics a blood sport precisely because we have drained it of transcendent meaning. When you believe in nothing greater than your own righteousness, the only thing left is to destroy those who challenge your certainty.”
John Henry Newman once wrote about the university that once was—before it was replaced by the kind where Kirk died. Newman imagined a university where “a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.”
These institutions have now become factories of fragility, extorting tuitions averaging $70,000 a year only to have, as Bennett tells us, “their prejudices confirmed and their triggers avoided.”
The evil one has always offered the most alluring promises of what no one will ever truly attain. Our blind efforts to acquire them—only to be continually denied—are sure to drive young men and women certifiably insane.
Politics. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride: “I don’t think that word means what you think it does.” In a moment of rash honesty, I believe far too many leaders in our most precious mediating institutions have lost the plot when it comes to politics, evangelism, and sacrifice. Many seem to think they can’t even be spoken of in the same sentence.
I also honestly believe that only those like Charlie Kirk, who was martyred for all of those things, will be equipped to confront the evil that is now fully out in the open. But we must confront it. And for this reason: Christ promised those who do total victory.
Jesus, speaking to Peter, declared:
- “And I tell you, you are Peter (Πέτρος), and on this rock (πέτρα) I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” —Matthew 16:18
