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Miyares and Jones Debate
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Miyares and Jones Debate

Two words for Virginia Democratic attorney‑general hopeful Jay Jones: suck it. That’s the blunt verdict resonating after last night’s debate with incumbent Jason Miyares — and for reasons that, on the surface, are both simple and devastating.

Jones walked into a forum where character matters, where the job is to protect the vulnerable and uphold the law, and he arrived carrying a political albatross: private texts from 2022 in which he allegedly wished death on then‑Speaker Todd Gilbert and his family, hoped Gilbert’s children would be shot to change his stance on guns, and expressed desire for more police deaths over a fight about qualified immunity. Those are not campaign gaffes. They are detonations.


There’s no elegant pivot out of this kind of moral crater. You can’t rebuild credibility in real time when your own words are the ammunition. Democrats face a dilemma: demand accountability and jettison a damaged nominee, or double down and risk being seen as endorsing threats and rage as political currency. History, incentives, and the party playbook suggest they will choose the latter — but choosing politics over principle is a long game the party keeps losing in the court of public opinion.

Miyares didn’t dally. He made the obvious prosecutor’s point with surgical precision: if you advocated for children to die as a means of political leverage, how could you possibly serve as the commonwealth’s top law enforcement officer? The line landed because it probed the job’s core requirement — trust. A top prosecutor must be able to stand in courtrooms and community meetings and credibly argue for the protection of children, the enforcement of laws, and the preservation of public safety. Words that celebrate violence against kids are disqualifying by any reasonable standard.


Jones’ response strategy — hitting the Trump button ad nauseam — felt like a badly timed theatre tech cue: loud, obvious, and irrelevant to the core scandal. Name‑calling the president cannot cleanse the record of threats against children or the police. Repeating a partisan talking point while the public weighs whether you belong anywhere near a badge or a gavel is political theater, not mitigation.

If Democrats want to survive the optics — and the ethics test — they must either hold Jones accountable or accept the branding that comes with defending him. That choice will ripple beyond a single race. Voters don’t just remember policy platforms; they remember whether a party stands for lawful governance or for the normalization of political fury that tips into calls for violence.

Written by Arthur Higgens - October 17, 2025