Lest there be any doubt left about the dying news media’s complicity in a recent spate of political violence coming from Democrats, consider that The New York Times has not run a single story about the party’s nominee for a statewide office in Virginia, even as he admitted to privately fantasizing about the “pain” and assassination of an elected Republican.
That would be a national news story on any sleepy Sunday, let alone less than two weeks after ICE agents were shot at by a Democrat-motivated assassin, and less than a month after the public murder of Charlie Kirk by yet another leftist. The story of Jay Jones, a Democrat running to be Virginia’s top law enforcement officer, sending text messages to a former colleague, musing about “two bullets to the head” of the state’s Republican House speaker, broke Friday. As of Monday, The Times hasn’t said a word about it.
Naturally, the outlets that bothered covering the horrifying conduct by Jones did so with the same dispassion and neutrality that they demonstrate any time they can link a Republican to political vio — wait, never mind. When it’s a Republican whom the media can blame, regardless of the evidence, you get headlines like, “Trump’s History of Encouraging Violence” (The Times, 2016). When it’s a Democrat, you get exhausting explainers about why the story that’s about to follow is really no biggie, like, “Jay Jones’s 2022 text messages roil race for Virginia attorney general” (Washington Post, Saturday).
A random person gets popped in the face at a Trump rally for any number of reasons that might arise at a close gathering of thousands of people, and for days we’re treated to a national lecture from the media about the rise of right-wing violence. But a Democrat’s text messages are made public and in them he suggests he’d rather shoot a Republican than Hitler, and, well, the race is roiled! And those messages are a few years old, anyway, so what does it matter?
Like the Post, the nerdy Politico also ran a headline portraying Jones’ sadistic deliberations as though they were merely a bad poll for Democrats rather than a depraved and disqualifying revelation. “Democratic candidate’s ‘abhorrent’ texts threaten to shake up bellwether Virginia elections,” it said. The word “abhorrent” was apparently something that had to be attributed to someone in quotes — in this case, Jones himself — rather than standing on its own as an objective fact. And my, oh, didn’t the messages shake up the campaign in a bellwether state. We’ve got a nail-biter!
It’s simple. The media react one way when it’s political violence they can attribute to Republicans and a different way when it’s demonstrably coming from Democrats. They do that because they sincerely believe one form of political violence is justifiable. We know which one it is.
