“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” Jay Jones, the Virginia Democrat running for state attorney general, said Monday in an X post. It was an ironic post, coming 10 days after National Review reported numerous violent text messages Jones sent to a colleague in the legislature about a Republican lawmaker. Jones fantasized about urinating on the graves of political opponents as well as shooting then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert with “two bullets to the head.”

He also texted that he hoped Gilbert’s wife, Jennifer, would one day hold one of her children as they died.