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When Republicans won the top three elected positions in Virginia in 2021, Democrats were shocked. Now, they haven’t just set out to win back those positions in the formerly reliably blue state; they have set out to bring radicalism back to the Commonwealth.
The Democratic Party has not learned its lesson from the 2024 election results, taking more radical positions that are out of line with the general public. Virginia Democrats have been doing the same thing since their 2021 election losses, and the next slate of statewide Virginia Democratic candidates has become more radical in both rhetoric and policy.
Jay Jones
Attorney General Candidate Jay Jones is in the midst of a scandal entirely of his own making, after it was revealed that he fantasizes about political violence against Republicans and their children. The leaked text messages showed James saying that, if he had two bullets and was in a room with Republican Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert and dictators Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot, he would shoot Gilbert twice. He also called Gilbert’s children “little fascists” and said that he hoped they would die in their mother’s arms so that their parents would change their views about gun control.
BY STANDING BY JAY JONES, VIRGINIA DEMOCRATS GIVE PERMISSION SLIP TO THE VIOLENT LEFT
Gilbert has resisted calls to drop out of the race, and Virginia Democrats continue to support him. Sen. Tim Kaine said that Jones should stay in the race and shrugged off his comments because he has known him for 25 years. He may even campaign for Jones. Rep. Eugene Vindman called for voters to “send a message” to Republicans by voting for Jones along with the rest of the Democrats on the ballot. Don Scott, the Democrat who succeeded Gilbert as the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, said that Republicans wanted Democrats to be “distracted” by the text messages where Jones fantasized about children being murdered. Scott said that from the pulpit of a church.
Message received.
A Republican state legislator has added that Jones allegedly told her in a phone call that maybe police would stop shooting people if a few of them got shot instead. Jones denies this, but his violent fantasies about his GOP opponents and their children raise several more questions. For example, most Virginia high school students and staff support school resource officers being present in their school. But Jones said in 2020 that “a goal for a lot of us is to ensure that we have as few SROs in our schools as possible.”
At best, Jones is taking a position that is radically out of step with how people feel. (That aforementioned poll from 2020 found that, along with students, 85% of school staff said SROs made them feel safer and 90% agreed they make positive contributions to the school environment). At worst? A man who has admitted that he wants children to die to advance his political agenda wants to remove school resource officers from schools. Make of that what you will.
Abigail Spanberger
Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate for governor, has likewise stood by Jones with her silence. She has repeatedly ducked any questions about whether she thinks Jones should drop out, dismissing the questions by arguing that “We are all running our individual races.” Spanberger is instead trying to flip the script, accusing her Republican opponent, Winsome Earle-Sears, of “violent rhetoric” on abortion and of being “extreme” and “out of touch.” (We will come back to that).
But Spanberger has been inciting the very same hatred for her political opponents that she claims to condemn. Spanberger told her supporters to “Let your rage fuel you,” an interesting piece of advice at a time when left-wing political violence is spiraling out of control. A Spanberger supporter, motivated by rage, held a sign at an Arlington rally that addressed Earle-Sears (who is black) as follows: “Hey Winsome, if trans can’t share your bathroom then blacks can’t share my water fountain.” Combine that with Jones’s comments, and Spanberger has to spend a lot of her time telling her extreme supporters to cool the extreme rhetoric driven by their “rage.”
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Spanberger’s policies
Spanberger’s attempts to paint Earle-Sears are the real extremist candidate are a conscious choice, because Spanberger is out of step with voters on a number of issues. Spanberger wants to roll back restrictions and allow Democratic localities to let men into women’s locker rooms. This has become a particular problem in Fairfax County, where Democrats are allowing a registered sex offender to strip naked in front of women and girls because he claims to be transgender. (I have included a picture of this transgender “woman” for you, so you can judge for yourself).
Spanberger has repeatedly dodged on this question, even during her debate with Earle-Sears. Spanberger is ideologically captured by transgenderism, clinging to the wildly unpopular position that boys should be able to play in girls’ sports and men should be able to change in women’s locker rooms if their local Democratic government approves of it (as Fairfax County does).
While the transgender issue and the case out of Fairfax have been the focus of criticisms of Spanberger, it is not the only issue where she is more extreme than the typical Virginian. When the Biden administration was floating a ban on gas stoves, Spanberger (then in Congress) voted against two bills that would prevent the Biden administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission from going forward with their regulations. Banning gas stoves is a wildly unpopular position that an increasing number of Democrats have embraced, and Spanberger has signaled she is one of them.
Spanberger wants to reverse Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order that requires Virginia law enforcement to cooperate with federal deportation operations, even as a majority of people support deporting all illegal immigrants, let alone deporting the ones with criminal records who the Trump administration is currently targeting. Spanberger also voted against the Laken Riley Act in Congress, named after the woman murdered by an illegal immigrant in Georgia. The bill, which later became law, requires federal authorities to detain and deport illegal immigrants charged or convicted of theft-related offenses. Riley was killed by an illegal immigrant who had been arrested but released.
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While Spanberger tries to paint Earle-Sears as radical on abortion, Spanberger is radical in the pro-abortion direction. In Congress, she even voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would establish requirements for abortionists to attempt to save the life of a baby born during a failed abortion. The necessity of such a law stems from Virginia and its last Democratic governor, who argued that, in a failed abortion, a baby would “be kept comfortable” and “resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired,” and then “a discussion would ensue” between abortionists and the mother about what to do with it.
These are the extreme positions Spanberger is bringing to the table, along with the extreme rhetoric of Jay Jones and his politically motivated hatred of all parents and children he deems to be his political enemies. The new slate of statewide Democratic candidates in Virginia doesn’t just want to return the Commonwealth to Democratic control; those candidates want to turn the state into as extreme a left-wing state as you can find.
