Democrats chose to shut down the government rather than support a clean continuing resolution, all because they’re desperate to keep funding some of their most radical pet projects, including free health care for illegal immigrants. But if you listen to them talk, you’d think the real national emergency is a few sombrero memes. Their outrage over harmless jokes has been louder than their outrage over their own failures. And what happened last week blew that hypocrisy wide open, revealing just how fake and selective their moral outrage really is.
You know how Democrats are. They turned “words are violence” into a political doctrine in order to silence speech they disagree with. Yet last week, we learned that Jay Jones, the Democrat running for Virginia attorney general, sent vile text messages back in 2022, in which he fantasized about shooting former Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, saying he’d pick Gilbert “every time” and that “Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.” He even wished that Gilbert’s wife would have to watch her child die in her arms to change Gilbert’s politics.
The outrage from Democrats has been slim to none. Aside from perfunctory condemnations of the language, without calling on Jones to drop out.
On this week’s episode of Meet the Press, former Trump White House official Marc Short called out Democrats for their selective outrage. When he brought it up, the reaction from Democrats and the media class was tepid at best, an uncomfortable shrug from people who usually lose their minds over sombrero memes and “microaggressions.”
“In your interview with Leader Jeffries,” he told moderator Kristen Welker, “if we stop with the pearl-clutching about the mean tweets, and sombrero tweets – that this week it came to light that a Democratic candidate for Attorney General in the state of Virginia called for the assassination of a political opponent, called for the assassination of that political opponent’s family, and there’s not one national Democrat calling for him to step aside, not one. It’s disgraceful.”
He’s absolutely right. The same Democrats who treat a meme of a sombrero as an act of cultural violence suddenly can’t muster a single word of outrage when one of their candidates talks about actual violence.
Welker quickly turned to former Biden official Neera Tanden for damage control. “Neera, let me let you respond to that,” Welker said, calling it “a big story” in the coming days.
“I mean, I absolutely think people should criticize that, 100%,” Tanden replied, before adding a bizarre qualifier. “I think it was a private conversation he had, but still awful and disgusting.”
That one sentence says it all. For Democrats, “private” hate is somehow more forgivable. If you tweet a joke that offends their woke sensibilities, your career should be over. But if you privately call for someone to kill your political opponents — and their children? That’s “awful and disgusting,” sure, but apparently not a deal-breaker.
Related: Yes, Support for Political Violence Is Mainstream Within the Democratic Party
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell chimed in with the obligatory “And it should be—” before Tanden echoed, “And it should be condemned.” But rather than focus on the substance, she immediately deflected: “Then you should condemn when the president calls the Democratic party the party of Satan.”
In other words: “Yes, our guy called for murder, but Trump said mean things.”
Obviously, the two things aren’t comparable, and Short didn’t let them off the hook. He reminded the panel that Republicans have condemned violent rhetoric within their ranks, even when it came from their own: “The fact that not one Democrat has said that when he called for a political assassination in this moment of political violence is crazy.”
📺 MUST WATCH @marctshort throws Meet The Press panel into CHAOS when he asks why national Democrats aren’t condemning @jonesjay for his texts suggesting shooting a GOP colleague AND his children pic.twitter.com/zfgSLJrN8M
— Jonah Wendt 🦬 (@jonah_wendt) October 5, 2025
For years, Democrats have preached that “words are violence” and that they must stamp out anything they find offensive in the name of “safety.” But when one of their own openly fantasizes about killing Republicans — and even their families — the outrage machine suddenly goes silent. The same people who’ve canceled comedians and destroyed livelihoods over harmless memes now insist that we show “understanding” because, apparently, it was just a “private conversation.”
That’s the moral compass of today’s Democratic Party: completely upside down. Democrats don’t actually fear violent rhetoric. They fear losing power.
