There Is No Israel For Most Of Us

And: Steve Skojec & Hesychasm; Dem Jay Jones Wants Dead Republicans

Signs that the Jews are leaving Britain. Here’s Ben Freeman, a British patriot, on how the rise of anti-Semitism in his homeland has compelled him to escape:

While our neighbors go about their business, Jews in Britain are making plans. They are working out what they would do, or where they would go, if the worst were to happen. At every meal, at every Jewish event, this is what we talk about. That such conversations are now routine should trouble not only Jews but also anyone who cares about the moral fabric of this country.

I am one of many making this choice. When a society makes clear that Jews will never be more than tolerated, history insists that we listen. And so all around me, Jews are applying to move to Israel, where, despite the war and rocket attacks, they feel they might be safer. At Shabbat tables, these conversations are no longer rare. For many, the question is not if they will leave, but when.

For me, that moment has come. I am going to Israel, the Jewish indigenous land. There I will not be a foreigner, a guest, or an unwelcome intruder. It is not perfect. It is not without danger. But it is ours.

Dominic Green, another British Jew, writes similarly, in the Wall Street Journal:

When Britain’s government and media promoted lies about the Jewish state, they gave a moral imprimatur to action against Jews everywhere. The British media that now decry the Manchester killings spread bogus pictures to accuse Israel of starving Palestinian babies. The Labour politicians who offer “thoughts and prayers” pandered to endemic antisemitism among British Muslims and the radical left. The police who promise extra protection ignored pleas from Jewish communal leaders as anti-Jewish assaults and vandalism reached record levels.

This lying, cowardice and cynicism abetted the global intifada. The blood of British Jews is on Labour’s hands—and the fate of Britain is in the balance. On Thursday, while Mr. Starmer bleated nonspecifically about antisemitism as a “hatred that is rising once again,” mobs of “pro-Palestine” protesters clashed with police outside 10 Downing Street and took over railway stations across the country. The government has lost control of the streets and surrendered control of the narrative.

The country is seething, but no one in power wants to admit the truth. A Muslim immigrant tried, and nearly succeeded at, committing mass murder against Jews. The leaders of a nuclear power are intimidated into silence and appeasement by a rag bag of amateur jihadists. The Jews might go quietly. But ordinary English people won’t.

He’s referring to the coming civil war, of which David Betz has lately been warning. It won’t be strictly between “ordinary English people” and Muslims. It will also be between Ordinary English People and these other English people:

As I began to learn about the Holocaust as a young man, it mystified me why so many Jews did not get out of Germany in the 1930s, when the signs of the times were so clear. But as I grew older, I understood how powerful normalcy bias is. It’s very, very hard to get people to believe that yes, it could happen to them too.

I’m not just talking about persecution. I’m talking about all kinds of things. You’ll remember my oft-told anecdote about the frustrating conversation I had with an Orthodox pastor a few years ago, on the subject of gender ideology. I warned him that it was coming fast into the schools, and for children, and that priests and pastors need to prepare their congregations for it. He got his back up, and said he would not introduce politics into the church. I told him this isn’t politics, this is basic Christian living, and that this gender ideology stuff is a major threat. He insisted that as long as his congregation kept coming to church and saying their prayers, All Would Be Well.

Well, I got this in an e-mail from a cousin in Louisiana the other day:

Seriously, I never thought I would see some of the things in schools, especially in [N.] Parish, with all the rednecks there. They put litter boxes in the bathrooms for the children that identify as furries. What? Seriously? [My grandson] had a boy in school last year that identified as a dog and barked throughout the class, licked his “paws”, etc. I told [my grandson] if he came home identifying as anything other than a male child, he would be chained outside like a dog, and he could eat dog food.

I know the parish (county) of which my cousin speaks, and yeah, it’s pretty rednecky over there. I just checked the vote totals for 2024 in that parish: Trump got 84 percent of the vote. And yet … they are accommodating furries in public school there! But you know … normalcy bias. It can’t happen here. Maybe in San Francisco, but not here, in deepest Trumplandia.

But it is happening. Lots of things are happening, even if you don’t want to see them. Jews are a canary in Britain’s coal mine.

In Houellebecq’s novel Submission, the protagonist François’s Jewish girlfriend Myriam sees the coming Islamist government, and says goodbye to François: she’s emigrating with her family to Israel:

“But what about you? What will you do? What do you think’s going to happen at school?”

We were standing at the door. I realized that I hadn’t the slightest idea, and also that I didn’t give a fu*k. I kissed her softly on the lips, and said, “There is no Israel for me.” Not a deep thought, but that’s how it was. She disappeared behind the elevator doors.

Thank God Jews have a state to which they can retreat to (relative) safety. But there is no Israel for the rest of us. So, prepare while there is time.

Last word from the UK Christian Aaron Edwards. Excerpts:

For most of Britain’s population—even myself—it is remarkably easy to block it all out and pretend it’s not really happening. But it is happening. And it shows no signs of stopping happening anytime soon. Why do we pretend it’s not happening?

It’s hard to watch when you feel you can do nothing about it. … And then there are those endless reports and pictures of boat after boat after boat after boat of arriving on the coasts.

It seems manifestly obvious that if Britain does not get serious about stopping the boats, Britain will cease to be Britain. This may seem like dramatic hyperbole but it’s simply logical. The illogical thing would be to allow what’s currently happening to continue and then to expect anything different than the abolition of Britain as Britain.

Rupert Lowe, currently the only MP in the House of Commons who seems willing to speak up for Christian Britain and to directly oppose Islamism in Britain, recently said:

“I look at these pictures and videos of the boats coming in - almost exclusively young men, as we know - and just think, how the HELL can anyone see that and think they’re actual desperate asylum seekers? Are they that deluded? Are they that mad on woke that they believe it? Or is it one big practical joke? Because it certainly feels that way. Nobody in their right mind can think that, surely?! If you tell yourself a lie, over and over and over, I guess maybe you start to believe it…I just cannot get my head around it. They are men. Young men. Fighting-age men. Almost all of them.”

Edwards points out that Christians are often patsies for multiculturalism, which he earlier in the post identified (correctly) as “an open drawbridge for cultural Islamism” into Britain. It’s true.

The Latest From Steve Skojec

I know that at least some of you follow the former Catholic writer Steve Skojec. I know this because he has come up in face-to-face conversations we’ve had, and also correspondence. We worry about him. For those who don’t know, Steve — whom I’ve never met — was a fierce Catholic traditionalist who started a website called One Peter Five, that focused critically on the Church and society.

Steve is also an exceptionally gifted writer, and had zero tolerance for the b.s. going on in the Church around sexual abuse, liturgical shenanigans, and suchlike. He reminded me a lot of myself in my last few years as a Catholic. At one point, I wrote him out of the blue, told him how much I sympathized with him, but warned him that if he didn’t find some way to balance out his anger, he was going to lose his faith. As his personal crisis deepened — Steve is an even more confessional writer than I am, if you can believe it — I did what I rarely do: begged him to try Orthodoxy, because I had become afraid that he was going to lose Jesus entirely.

Well, he did lose Jesus. He’s an atheist or an agnostic now (not sure which), but he’s a CATHOLIC atheist/agnostic. I’ve never stopped praying for Steve to return to Christ, in part because I know precisely the pain that drove him away.

Well, things just keep piling up on Steve. He discovered that he is almost certainly on the autism spectrum (I could have told you that, just from reading him) … and his marriage came to an end when his wife kicked him out recently. He wrote heartbreakingly about it, blaming himself for being so damn hard to live with. He is also financially broke, and appealed to readers for help. I’m sure I’m not the only one who kicked in to help a brother out. He’s now on the road for a bit, staying with friends, trying to figure out what to do next.

His latest post — and I strongly recommend subscribing to his Substack; he’s really a fantastic writer — is about re-connecting with a couple of old Catholic friends from his high school and post-high school days. This passage jumped out at me:

After a few drinks, I finally opened up. They listened, asked questions, and told me stories about people in their own lives who had or were still going through similar things. More people than I would have guessed. Some of them people I also knew. Heartbreaking stories. Stories of loss even greater than my own.

Oh friends, let me tell you what, is this ever true. So many of us who thought we were doing the right thing, living by the code — for many of us, the Christian conservative code — who found that life smashed us and our illusions to bits. My best friend from college, his wife up and left him and the kids a few years ago, because she was tired of being married. Nothing wrong with him, and no other man in the picture — she was just bored, and having a mid-life crisis. So she blew up her family. A couple of weeks ago, I re-connected with an academic I knew from the past, but had lost touch with. Solid conservative Christian, and a gentle soul, in town for a conference. He told me his wife had left him and the kids recently. He told me why, and … it resonated.

“You wouldn’t believe how many of us this is happening to,” he said, and by “us,” he meant conservative Christian men who hate divorce.

“Actually, I would,” I replied. “They write to me. Something terrible is going on in this culture.”

Well, Steve’s situation is different, by his own admission. I only bring it up in this context to say that for whatever reasons, people’s marriages are cracking left and right, even when adultery is not a factor.

I bring all this up this morning to highlight this passage in Steve’s latest post:

At one point in our conversation, Paul explained his own approach to faith. It’s not my story to tell, but he focused on the idea of simplicity.

Understand that Paul was the valedictorian of our high school class. He’s an incredibly intelligent man who really thinks things through, and has deep insights about many things.

But explained to me that he believed that if he approached things the way I do, if he tried to make sense out of the suffering he sees in the lives of people he loves who have tried to live their lives the right way, it would drive him crazy. He told me that when his kids come home from college and sit around the table debating theology, he enjoys it, but feels no need to join in. To him, what matters is to believe, to prioritize the things that are most important — his responsibilities as a provider and his family — and to leave the rest up to God.

I found myself wondering why I have to question everything. Why I so desperately need things to make some damn kind of sense. I found his explanation to be a nearly-perfect encapsulation of the childlike faith Christ commended his followers to adopt…and yet, and yet, I knew even as I tried to cement this concept in my own mind as a better way that it was something I could never do. Or at least, something I could not do anytime soon. My search for meaning amidst the suffering is far from its conclusion. And yet it still felt like an important piece of the puzzle I’m trying to assemble along this pilgrimage towards whatever comes next.

Maybe someday, if God decides to answer my prayer and give me real faith, a time will come when I can live that way. I already know that any return to the faith, if it should come, will carry the temptation to return to old habits: theological debates and prooftexting documents and making the perfect the enemy of the good.

But I also know that this is no real way to live. The mysteries I find so hard to accept are surely part of the deal. And if I really do want to ever believe again, accepting that I can only know what I can know and leave the rest as open questions will be the only way I’ll likely survive the tension between skepticism and belief. It seems an odd thing to believe that something is more true than any other thing, but also to understand that to look at it too closely and try to square its many circles is a path to madness and disbelief. I am already in the latter state. Is the former state achievable for a man like me?

I wrote to Steve and told him that this sounds a lot like the man I was — and that I found relief in Orthodoxy. From my letter to him:

As an Orthodox, I learned how to turn off my analytical mind. I would have thought in the past that was about making myself stupid for the sake of pietism. But I learned that no, my overanalytical mind was making me sick, spiritually and physically (when it turned to trying to make sense of the fact that my Louisiana family rejected me). Orthodoxy doesn’t tell you to stop thinking about things. It rather orders the thinking, and teaches you how not to let obsessive analysis ruin your life. It’s a hard thing to learn, especially when it goes against one’s nature (and this must be 100x more true for you, given that you seem to be much more spectrummy than I). But you can learn it, and it can reconcile you to God, and bring you peace.

At bedtime last night, I dipped into a book that an Orthodox friend gave me on my recent trip to the US, Hesychasm: The Bedewing Furnace Of The Heart. The author is Archimandrite Zacharias Zacharou, abbot of the monastery in Essex, England. I couldn’t find it on Amazon; the link takes you to the monastery bookshop (where you can buy an e-book version). My friend bought it for me at his parish bookshop. He told me that it’s one of the most important books he’s ever read, and that it’s so spiritually intense that he can only take in a few pages at a time.

I started reading it last night, and I can see what he means. The book is written in very simple, clear prose, but with such power that the words feel almost radioactive (in a good way). “Hesychasm” (pron. “hezz-ah-kazzum”) is an Orthodox style of prayer that involves creating inner stillness through recitation of the Jesus Prayer (short version: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”). It’s similar to the rosary prayed by Catholics, but differs chiefly in that with the rosary, one focuses on particular events from the lives of Jesus and Mary; in hesychastic prayer, one clears the mind (which is a real struggle, but a necessary one). It’s the simplest thing you can imagine — just sitting there in stillness, praying this simply prayer — but also one of the most difficult, because acquiring inner stillness is a real battle.

Hesychastic prayer was key to healing me from chronic mononucleosis over a decade ago. It wasn’t a miracle, but it was certainly of God. I write about it like this in Living In Wonder:

In the summer of 2012, doctors diagnosed me with chronic Epstein-Barr, which is to say a case of mononucleosis that would not go away. A rheumatologist blamed it on deep and abiding stress having to do with a severe crisis in my relationship with my Louisiana family. There is no medical cure for Epstein-Barr; the disease simply has to run its course. The specialist said I should move away from the source of my anxiety, my family situation. I told him that wasn’t possible.

“Well, you better find inner peace some way,” he warned, “or you will never get better.”

I started seeing a therapist, and I started reading Dante’s Divine Comedy, which had unforeseen therapeutic benefits. At the same time, my parish priest prescribed praying the Jesus Prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner”—five hundred times each day.

This was a difficult ascetic exercise. Why? Because, for us Orthodox, praying the Jesus Prayer properly requires achieving inner stillness. It’s not simply a matter of repeating the words. To do what the Father ordered meant that I would have to calm my mind for an hour each day and focus on deep, rhythmic breathing and the words of the prayer. It requires attention.

If you think this sounds easy, try to do it for five minutes. Thoughts will fly around your head like bullets in a combat zone. To fulfill the daily obligation requires immense effort simply to create a zone of stillness inside. It would have been easier for me to have walked six miles daily, even in my weakened condition, than to do what my priest suggested. I would have preferred to read books about inner healing, or anything, frankly, but mastering the chaos inside my head.

But I was really sick and had no choice but to give it a try. It was agonizingly difficult at first. But after some weeks it became easier. The calm that emerged within me from saying the prayers for an hour each day was a fresh experience. Over time, I could feel myself growing stronger. Eventually, I was healed.

“How did you know that’s what I needed?” I asked the priest.

“Easy,” he said. “I saw that you had to get out of your own head.”

Get out of your own head. Focus my attention on something other than the frenzy between my ears. This is a chronic problem for me. My priest’s point was that my attention had become stuck in an internal feedback loop. I had imprisoned myself in near-obsessive thoughts about a problem that I could not solve. The practice of the Jesus Prayer, he correctly theorized, would help break the cycle.

It turns out that attention—what we pay attention to, and how we attend—is the most important part of the mindset needed for re-enchantment. And prayer is the most important part of the most important part.

It’s like this: if enchantment involves establishing a meaningful, reciprocal, and resonant connection with God and creation, then to sequester ourselves in the self-exile of abstraction is to be the authors of our own alienation. Faith, then, has as much to do with the way we pay attention to the world as it does with the theological propositions we affirm.

“Attention changes the world,” says Iain McGilchrist. “How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognize (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is ‘firmed up’—and brought into being.”

In the years since, whenever I have fallen out of the habit of praying the Jesus Prayer on my prayer rope, my head once again fills with frenzied thoughts.

Hesychastic prayer isn’t magic or anything. It is premised on the fundamental Orthodox idea that God is primarily to be known through participation in His life. And the most ordinary way to do that is through prayer. Notice that hesychastic prayer is not petitionary, except in asking Jesus for mercy. You don’t make a list of the things you want or need from God. The point is simply to place yourself in His presence, and stay there. This is a participatory form of knowing Him — and, for Orthodox Christians, the only way to know Him. Orthodoxy distinguishes knowing about God from knowing God. It is good to know about God, through reading, study, etc. — but the point of life is to know God in one’s heart, and to create in one’s heart a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit.

Like I said, I’ve never met Steve, but boy do I ever relate to that mode of life in which you are constantly questioning, intellectually, and questing for answers. This is not the way, and not The Way, though it’s hard for intellectuals to grasp. Christianity is not a System; it is a way of life in which one is drawn ever more deeply into participating in God’s life, and being transformed by His grace. If you stick with it, hesychastic prayer opens up that channel. I know this not only because of the testimony of the saints who pray this way, but also from my own experience. I prayed a round on my prayer rope last night as I was falling asleep, and when I woke up this morning, I immediately began to spontaneously praise God; He felt so near.

Again, I am not a proselytizer. Maybe I should be, but having been something of one as a Catholic, and crashing and burning as a Catholic, I know I don’t have any authority to tell people what they should do with their spiritual lives. All I can do is to tell you what God has done for me through the Orthodox life. Like Steve’s Catholic friend Paul, I no longer feel the need or have the desire to sit around arguing about theology. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily, but it’s not the same thing as prayer, and in any case, you can tell yourself that you’re being a good Christian by debating theology, and you can actually be undermining yourself with false assurance.

How I regret those years I spent as a Catholic, talking for hours with other conservative Catholic friends, usually bitching about the failures of the Church. We weren’t wrong in our criticism, but rarely if ever did we talk about the Lord, or the good things He gave us in the Church. We analyzed and critiqued everything, and imagined ourselves to be loyal sons of the Church. Don’t misread me: I’m not at all saying that one shouldn’t analyze and critique. Pietism is no virtue when it is used as an escape from the responsibility of criticizing and critiquing (though one should do so constructively, from a place of love). I’m just saying that intellection is no substitute for deep prayer. And in my own case, I learned the hard way that the habit of overanalyzing everything (not just the things of religion) is a serious spiritual pitfall for me, as I believe it is for Steve.

I suggested to Steve that while he’s on the road sorting his mind out before returning to live as near to his kids as he can — something I would like to do myself, but you who know me personally know why that is not possible yet — he should visit Holy Cross monastery in West Virginia. It’s an Orthodox one. I’ve never been, but I’ve heard so many good things about it. I emphasized to Steve that I’m not trying to convert him, and that he won’t get a hard sell on conversion if he visits there; that’s not how Orthodox monks roll. He will be able to find rest in a place where God dwells, and where prayer is valid. Maybe the Holy Spirit will speak to him, and calm his restless mind.

If you are one of those people like Steve and me, with a restless mind, I commend to you the practice of the Jesus Prayer. You don’t have to convert to Orthodoxy to do it, heaven knows. You don’t even have to get a prayer rope, but it helps. (You can find them all over the Internet; try to get one straight from a monastery, because that’s how monks and nuns make their living; no need to spend a lot of money on one — a simple woolen one will do.)

The point is to get outside of your head. In a recent post here on John Vervaeke’s work, I quote the cognitive scientist (“da’ath,” he explains, is an ancient Hebrew term for “knowing,” and is the verb the Old Testament uses for the knowing a husband and wife experience through sexual union):

The identity relationship between knowing and participating is a fundamental Axial idea, and it is central to understanding the religious nature of the ancients and their symbolic way of experiencing the world. “Knowing” is not the apprehension of facts, seen dispassionately from the outside. It is nothing you could acquire from a distance. You know something by assuming its identity, by becoming it. Your becoming it somehow changes it, reveals it, makes it real.

When you are making love with someone, you are participating in them, identifying with them, empathizing and resonating with them. You are changing them as they are changing you, and this process of change rises—forgive me the pun—to a climax, after a turning point and before the resolution. You may begin to see why, in so many religious traditions, sexuality is a perennial symbol for our sacred union with reality. Da’ath describes our participatory knowing in the course of its unfolding.

This idea of knowing is critical for our project because it changes the way we interpret religious ideas of faith and belief. In ancient Israel, faith did not mean having incredible beliefs without evidence. That is a recent, very modern idea. Faith was Da’ath. It described this symbolic relationship you had with the world and with your existence. It was your sense of living in this reciprocal realization.

Similarly, to the hesychast, faith is living in reciprocal communication with the Holy Spirit, in contemplative prayer. Like I said, saying the Jesus Prayer is the easiest thing in the world … but also really difficult, because to do it right, you have to clear your mind. Don’t be discouraged when this doesn’t come easy! It will come if you persist. More from Living In Wonder:

Like an athlete who trains daily and a pianist who practices regularly, people who persevere in serious prayer gradually grow better at it. Frederica Mathewes-Green, who sometimes prays hours daily, describes prayer as “cultivating a mental habit of being attentive to God’s presence [which] gradually creates a steady place inside”—a clear pool where one can rest and be refreshed within flow.

As you progress in prayer and the Christian life, gradually your nous becomes clearer, and you can recognize disturbing thoughts coming and deflect them, keeping your attention focused on God. This is a sign that the soul broken in the fall is being healed. Don’t underestimate the nature of the challenge: this training in mental self-control, this exercise in attention will be a lifelong struggle. As Mathewes-Green writes:

You’ll encounter real inward resistance because the broken nous prefers to prowl about uncontrolled. It does this motivated not only by pleasure, but by fear and loneliness as well. Not all tempting thoughts are attractive; they could be self-hating, fearful, or disgusting instead. We end up flapping around after loose thoughts all day like a spooked chicken. One day after another passes in this way, and a whole life can be squandered in aimless wandering. People take up this admittedly difficult spiritual path when they become convinced that it is worth it. They become convinced that being able to abide steadily in God’s presence will not only transform their own life, but also enable them to pray with increased clarity and effectiveness for those they love.

One more passage:

There is general agreement among spiritual fathers on how to begin practicing the Jesus Prayer. The praying person usually uses a woolen prayer rope made of knots, but this is not strictly necessary. You find a calm place, sit quietly for a few minutes to gain inner stillness, then begin to say, aloud, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Soon you can move on to praying this silently (in fact, silence is how I was taught to say the Jesus Prayer from the beginning, but not all spiritual fathers agree). Breathe in deeply and regularly as you pray:

Lord Jesus Christ [inhale],

Son of God [exhale],

have mercy on me [inhale],

a sinner [exhale].

Don’t rush; go slowly, and allow the rhythm of your slow breathing to make you tranquil.

The hardest part of this is to clear your mind during the prayer. You have to do this by acts of the will. The monks teach that one’s consciousness should be free of any extraneous thoughts—even images of Jesus. This is incredibly difficult at first. As I mentioned earlier, when I prayed it during my chronic illness, thoughts flew across my conscious mind like bullets on a battlefield. But I persisted in resisting them, and because I had been warned about this by my priest, I did not get discouraged through these trials.

Orthodox spiritual practice calls these unwanted thoughts logismoi and trains Christians, both in prayer and in ordinary life, how to refuse them. Eventually you gain sufficient control of your mind such that logismoi—even wicked ones, like temptations—are a threat more easily handled.

After some time—the length depends on your progress in prayer—the heart and mind begin to work together to say the Jesus Prayer. This is something that comes with experience. It happened to me during the first months that I prayed the Jesus Prayer devoutly, shortly after my conversion, but I carelessly put the practice aside. Even more foolishly, years later, I stopped once again after my body was healed from chronic illness. We mortals are weak and waste our gifts in scattering.

If it happens, though, you feel as if the prayer emanates from deep within your heart. It brings with it an inexpressible sweetness of communion with the Holy Spirit.

And then, if one is especially devout, the prayer becomes rooted in the heart and begins to hum like a generator of light, running on its own. This mystical experience has been widely attested to by monks and others who are advanced in the Jesus Prayer.

Again: the Jesus Prayer is not a mere technique, like sit-ups. If it is not said with total attention to Christ, it amounts to what Scripture condemns as “vain repetition.” And if it is not part of an overall life of practice toward holiness, it won’t do you much good. But for those who have the patience to learn the practice and live by it, integrating it into an overall life of fidelity, the Jesus Prayer is a potent means of allowing oneself to be drawn into union with Christ and into peaceful resonance with the world he created.

Along these lines, even though we correctly see monastics as spiritual athletes, it is emphatically not the case that monks and nuns guard esoteric secrets deep inside themselves or keep hidden chants or formulas concealed from the uninitiated. If you visit a monastery with that in mind, the amused monastics will quickly set you straight. No, the monastic way of prayer is all about the hard work of methodically dying to oneself so the light of God’s grace and presence can dwell within. That’s how it is with us too.

More on all this in Living In Wonder. If you are like Steve and me, prone to being imprisoned in your head, there is no better spiritual medicine than hesychasm, which is the way to achieving inner stillness, so that the Holy Spirit can do his work of restoration.

Dem Dreamed Of Killing Republican, Wanting Kids Dead

National Review had a scoop the other day about Jay Jones, a black Democrat running for Attorney General of Virginia, who, in a series of 2022 texts with a colleague, fantasized about murdering a GOP colleague. Excerpt:

“If those guys die before me,” Jones wrote, referencing the Republican colleagues who were publicly honoring the deceased Johnson’s memory, “I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something.”

Jones then suggested that, presented with a hypothetical situation in which he had only two bullets and was faced with the choice of murdering then-Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert or two dictators, he’d shoot Gilbert “every time,” prompting pushback from his former colleague:

Jones: 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

Coyner: Jay

Please stop

Jones: Lol

Ok, ok

Coyner: It really bothers me when you talk about hurting people or wishing death on them

It isn’t ok

No matter who they are

The private messages offer a disturbing glimpse into how Jones — who is looking to oust incumbent Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares this fall — describes his political adversaries in private conversations.

Jones later confessed to having sent those messages, and expressed “regret.” More from NR:

Coyner’s alarm at her former colleague’s violent rhetoric toward Gilbert prompted Jones to call her and explain his reasoning over the phone, a source familiar with the exchange told NR.

According to the source, the Democratic former legislator doubled down on the call, saying the only way public policy changes is when policymakers feel pain themselves, like the pain that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence. He asked her to provide counterexamples to disprove his claim.

Then at one point, the source said, he suggested he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views, prompting Coyner to hang up the phone in disgust.

Afterward, Jones continued his barrage of text messages, saying he was just asking questions. Coyner dismissed his excuse via text and chastised Jones for “hopping [sic] Jennifer Gilbert’s children would die.”

Rather than deny that he had wished death on the children, Jones responded by saying, “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

Think I’m making this up? Look:

This mainstream Democratic politician actually wished death on the children of a Republican colleague! There are no words. And you wonder why Charlie Kirk was shot to death! The great Virginia Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears responds.