Complicit Media Covers Up Political Violence Scandal in Virginia

Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (C), marches in the 54th Annual Buena Vista Labor Day Festival parade with Democratic Nominee for Lieutenant Governor, Senator Ghazala Hashmi (R), and Democratic Nominee for Attorney General, former state Delegate Jay Jones (L), on September 01, 2025 in Buena Vista, Virginia.

After years of accusing Republicans of promoting political violence and extremism, the corporate media is now entirely ignoring a glaring example of actual political violence that is rocking the Virginia Attorney General’s race.

Last week, National Review released a bombshell story detailing text messages from Democrat Attorney General nominee Jay Jones to a Republican member of the House of Delegates fantasizing about murdering a former colleague and his children. But according to new data from the Media Rating Council, ABC, PBS, and CBS have devoted exactly zero seconds of coverage to the story, while NBC has dedicated a measly 63 seconds to it.

Suffice to say, had this been a mainstream Republican statewide candidate implicated in such a scandal, Americans could expect wall-to-wall coverage from all the major networks.

Screenshots of the texts, which were sent in 2022 to GOP Delegate Carrie Coyner, show Jones expressing outrage that former Republican House Speaker Todd Gilbert had honored the memory of a recently deceased longtime Democrat legislator. Jones said that if Gilbert and other Republicans died before him, “I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something.”

Despite pleas from Coyner to stop the violent rhetoric, Jones’s comments only get darker from there. He says that if he were in a situation where he had two bullets and was faced with Hitler, Pol Pot, and Gilbert, Gilbert “receives both bullets every time.”

“It really bothers me when you talk about hurting people or wishing death on them,” Coyner responds, urging Jones to walk back his disturbing comments. But Jones doubles down, saying that he hopes Gilbert’s children die in their mother’s arms because “only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

Subsequent reporting alleges that Jones also told Coyner in a phone call that it would be a good thing if police officers died since they would be able to kill fewer people. After Coyner told Jones that police officers would get killed without qualified immunity, Jones allegedly responded, “Well, maybe if a few of them died, that they would move on, not shooting people.”

This scandal comes on the heels of another where Jones was charged with reckless driving for going 116 mph down a Virginia interstate. As a local ABC affiliate reported, many drivers in Virginia have faced jail time for similar offenses. But Jones escaped with only community service. He then told the court that he performed 500 hours of community service in a single year for his own Political Action Committee – raising more serious ethical concerns about his conduct.

Following the release of these reports, Jones astonishingly claimed that he was the victim, lamenting “smears through Trump-controlled media organizations.” Only after the story began blowing up on social media did Jones actually offer any sort of apology.

Despite all of this, not a single high-profile Democrat, in Virginia or elsewhere, has called on Jones to drop out of the race. Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat nominee for governor, has done the bare minimum in condemning the comments (she says she “spoke frankly” with Jones), but has stopped short of calling on him to withdraw – even after she publicly and forcefully called on former Democrat Governor Ralph Northam to resign over decades-old racist yearbook photos in 2019.

Spanberger herself should be facing tough questions of her own about her role in promoting political violence. Video shows the former congresswoman telling supporters to “let your rage fuel you” at campaign stops – even as multiple Virginia Republicans have faced death threats.

How are Democrats able to get away with this? Because the corporate media is doing its very best to pretend like none of it ever happened. They know that it’s impossible to spin, and so they’re simply choosing to not cover it.

Even in Virginia, where it’s impossible to ignore the story, the leading papers are attempting to downplay it. An editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Thursday calls Republicans “hypocrites” for their “hysteria” over the texts. Columnist Michael Williams calls Jones’s texts a “joke” and compares them to Trump’s famous comment that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

But as is obvious to anyone who read the texts, Jones is not “joking.” He really does want his political opponents to die, and he really does believe that dead children are a good way to achieve political goals. Trump’s statement – a generalized assertion of support – was an actual joke. Jones’s comments were very specific and sinister death wishes on people he knows personally.

Williams then states that “America, from Day 1, has been exactly the place for political violence,” citing the examples of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr’s duel, the caning of Charles Sumner, and assassinations on sitting presidents. But this argument is absurd. Citing duels and assassinations from centuries past as an excuse for a candidate fantasizing about killing a colleague’s children isn’t “context” – it’s moral collapse. Past instances of violence are a warning, not a permission slip.

The bottom line is this: if political violence can be rationalized away when it comes from Democrats, then the standard no longer exists. The media’s silence is complicity. Virginians and all Americans should remember exactly who looked the other way.

Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.