Say what you will about Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, but you can’t call her a fair-weather friend. In her recent debate with her Republican opponent, Winsome Earle-Sears, Spanberger lashed herself to her fellow Democrat, Virginia Attorney General candidate Jay Jones, despite his recently exposed homicide-fantasizing text messages. Jay Jones is now an anchor on the Democrat Party, and Spanberger may soon see her poll numbers plummet accordingly as the Earle-Sears campaign has unleashed a devastating campaign ad highlighting their exchange.
Just to recap quickly. Text messages from 2022 were revealed in which former Virginia House Delegate Jay Jones told a Republican colleague, Delegate Carrie Coyner, that he wished that former Republican House Speaker Todd Gilbert would receive two bullets to the head. He also called Gilbert a “POS,” said Gilbert and his wife were “evil,” and were raising their two children to be “little fascists”. Then, in a follow-up phone call to his Republican colleague, Jones said he wished one of the Gilberts’ children would die in his mother’s arms, apparently trying to make a political point about gun violence. (I discussed the case at greater length in my last column, available here.)
The full hour-long debate between Spanberger and Earle-Sears was something to behold, but if you can’t commit that much time to a political debate, at least watch the four minute clip in which the debate moderators tried four times to pin Spanberger down as to why she has not simply asked Jay Jones to drop out of his race, following the revelations of his murder-laced text messages. Kudos to the debate hosts for not letting Spanberger off easy.
The fact is that Ms. Spanberger is not a “friend” of Mr. Jones, or at least that is not the basis for her stubborn refusal to disown him as a fellow Democratic candidate on Virginia’s electoral slate this fall. Rather, Spanberger has analyzed the political situation and concluded that denouncing Mr. Jones at this point in her race would do more damage to her prospects for victory in the gubernatorial race than standing by her man. (I can’t help thinking of Hillary Clinton sticking by Bill Clinton in 1992 when revelations in his presidential campaign about his affair with Gennifer Flowers came out. But I digress.)
Ms. Earle-Sears nails it at the 12:55 mark of the debate, where she says to Spanberger, “What you have done [in not calling on Jones to drop out], is you are taking political calculations about your future as governor.” Yep, that pretty much sums it up.
Ms. Spanberger would similarly dodge and weave when the hot-button issue of men pretending to be women being allowed to shower with girls and play on their sports teams came up in the debate. Her performance could be used in an instructional seminar for aspiring politicians on rhetorical spinning.
Jay Jones, take note. In a remarkably similar case in New Jersey, a Democratic candidate for public office just did the correct thing when his violent text messages regarding a Republican political opponent were revealed. Democratic candidate for school board in Marlboro, New Jersey, Scott Semaya, dropped out of his race when he was found to be posting to a group chat with the charming name “ThisBitchNeedsToDie”.
As reported in the New York Post, photos of Semaya texting to the group, reportedly taken in July during a school board meeting, show Semaya (allegedly) typing about Republican school board member Danielle Bellomo, an avid Trump supporter, “Bellomo must be cold – her nips could cut glass right n”. He suddenly stopped typing, mid-sentence.
Shortly after the text messages were revealed, both Semaya and his Democratic running mate, Melissa Goldberg, dropped out of the race for the Marlboro Board of Education.
The Post article continued, “Bellomo said she’s seen several other images of the messages exchanged by the group including ‘very specific actions that they want to do to me and what their intention is. These text messages are the first time I was able to see they don’t want me alive,” although she declined to share the additional images.
The Post report notes that 38-year-old Semaya, an accountant and one of the five candidates running for three open seats on the school board, “has voiced progressive liberal views.” In an unusual twist in the story, Bellomo had previously been Semaya’s daughter’s Girl Scout leader. As Bellomo told the press, “This is heartbreaking for me. This is what he was thinking when I was volunteering with his children – it’s a hard pill to swallow.”
Indeed, the apparent trend among Democrats and “progressives” generally toward dehumanizing their opponents and advocating for, or seemingly accepting, violence as a reasonable arm of political discourse in the United States is much more than “a hard pill to swallow.” It is an alarming national security concern.
Jay Jones should take a lesson from Scott Semaya and do the right thing by dropping out of his race for Attorney General.