Why are so many Democrats fond of wishing death on their opponents? That’s a question raised by two astonishing developments early this month. On Oct. 3, National Review’s Audrey Fahlberg revealed texts Jay Jones had sent, perhaps mistakenly, to Virginia state Del. Carrie Coyner, bemoaning the cordial remarks then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, a Republican, was delivering after the death of a Democrat.

“If those guys die before me,” Jones wrote, “I will go to their funerals to p– on their graves. Send them out awash in something.” Prompted, he goes on. “Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head. Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time.”

In a phone follow-up to his colleague, Jones told her he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her children die in her arms

Chilling stuff, especially read now in the month after the murder of Charlie Kirk by a leftist young man with a transgender lover. Not surprisingly, the Democratic nominee for governor, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, and the state’s two Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, condemned his words.

But neither Spanberger, Warner and Kaine, nor any Democratic officeholder or candidate, so far as I am aware, has withdrawn their endorsement or called on him to quit. He should be “accountable” for his words but not so accountable as to lose their endorsement for an office for which his words suggest he is temperamentally unsuited. Perhaps they hope he can still win the election and then will conveniently resign to be replaced by what seems likely to be a Democratic-majority legislature.

The more chilling possibility is that these politicians recognize that for many Democratic voters, for a large part of the party’s core constituency, his words weren’t repugnant at all.

Further evidence that a significant, if not majority, part of the Democratic Party is, in the words of radio talk host Erick Erickson, “a pro-assassination party” comes from a Maryland federal courthouse. There on Oct. 3, Nicholas Roske, convicted of attempting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was sentenced by Biden-appointed Judge Deborah Boardman not to the 30 years sought by the government and consistent with judicial guidelines but to only just over eight years.

Roske acted after a draft Supreme Court opinion overruling the abortion rights Roe v. Wade decision was leaked to Politico and published on May 2, 2022.

An investigation of Supreme Court personnel months later failed to identify the leaker. But obviously, the likely motive was to forestall what became the Dobbs v. Jackson decision handed down June 24, 2022.

The leak of a controversial draft opinion by someone in the Supreme Court’s service and the astonishing lenience of Boardman’s sentence, which the government is appealing, amount to encouraging and condoning political murder. They are steps along a dangerous road. The murder of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 deprived the nation of his unique leadership, the assassinations of Matthias Erzberger and Walther Rathenau in 1921-22 poisoned the ailing democracy of Weimar Germany and the repeated assassinations of peace-minded civilian leaders in 1930s Japan unleashed its army and navy to war. Every large political movement has violent supporters, and some violence directed against public figures turns out to be the doing of irrational individuals. Rhetorical excesses and improvident lawfare have been committed by both Trump opponents and supporters. But there is no question that the side in greater danger today of becoming the party of political murder is the one whose highly educated followers have long considered themselves uniquely tolerant.