October 7, 2025

JEFFREY BLEHAR: Jay Jones’s Texts Are a Frightening Peek into a Bleak Moral Worldview.

And it turns out that he is also a moral monster of the first degree — and an eerily familiar degree at that. National Review’s own Audrey Fahlberg broke the story nationally with her blockbuster reporting about texts and phone conversations Jones had with state Republican delegate Carrie Coyner back in 2022. (Jones had already retired at this point — he was shooting the breeze with an ex-colleague from the opposing party.) Jones’s friendly chit-chat about how – should his opponents predecease him – he would “go to their funerals and piss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something” was eyebrow-raising, but also nothing a historically-minded reader would have put past Lyndon Johnson.

It was when he continued to muse out loud to Coyner that he revealed the scorpions lurking inside his brain: He declared that if he was trapped in a room with a gun and two bullets, alongside Hitler, Pol Pot, and Todd Gilbert (then the Republican speaker of the state house), he would shoot Gilbert — twice. Again, you might say: This is merely but a variant on an old and crude joke.

But lest you think that Jones merely sent a bad text in haste — okay, make that a series of bad texts — he then called Coyner, explaining himself all too clearly. You see, Jones was not speaking lightly. He wasn’t even “kidding on the square,” in that joking-but-not-really-joking manner people often use to passive-aggressively voice their true thoughts. No, he proceeded to make an impassioned argument in defense of the slaughter of innocents. In his call with Coyner, he declared that he thought at least some Republicans deserve to die for their politics, and he extended his death warrant to their children as well — for punitive, persuasive, and societally hygienic reasons.

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. . . .

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.”

This is not the behavior of a psychologically healthy person. A normal person — if we are being charitable, a ruinously drunk person — who has texted something so barbarous would eventually follow up by saying something like, “My God please forgive me I was just making a sick joke.”

The left circling the wagons around Jay also speak volumes about their priorities in 2025 as well:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll