Hey reader, a few weeks ago I asked you to ask me questions. In the meantime, I’ve done some globetrotting, both physical and intellectual: mentoring a workshop in northern Greece (shoutout to the terrific folks at Rosemary’s House) and keeping tabs on the wildly oversold ceasefire in Gaza (which Israel has predictably violated now at least 80 times).

Now it’s time to dive into the mailbag. But first, I want to address a question that came up after I asked for submissions — a question I wish more political media were asking.

A Bluesky user asks:

This question is about Virginia’s attorney general race — a pivotal contest with the potential to shape the governor’s race and influence national politics. (Because of Virginia’s large and politically divided population, its off-year elections are widely regarded as bellwethers.)

As early voting opened, the National Review published opposition research targeting Democrat Jay Jones. They highlighted a text Jones sent a few years ago to a Republican colleague about then-GOP House Speaker Todd Gilbert: “Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot (sic). Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.”

The story was a lay-up for national media: Jones — a young Black Democrat — had seemingly been caught threatening a GOP politician and equating him with infamous dictators. This fed into the ongoing (orchestrated) national freakout about Donald Trump’s (empirically false) claims that the left is mounting a wave of political violence, a (fictitious) wave that can only be stopped by a neo-McCarthyite/War on Terror-style crackdown from Trump and his federal goons. And, indeed, polls show the “text scandal” is doing real damage to both Jones and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger’s campaigns.

Yet one major detail seems to have gone unmentioned: “Two bullets, two dictators, and a guy I don’t like” isn’t just an obvious absurdist joke¹ — it’s an exceptionally well-known one. This line has been used for decades in sitcoms, documentaries, and major newspapers. Never once, to my knowledge, has it appeared in any context where it was meant to be taken even remotely seriously as a statement of political intent.

Here was an extended treatment of the joke on The Office back in 2010:

The real joke there is that everyone knows this joke. And you can find endless riffs on it online: versions making fun of lawyers, a Pakistani cricketer (trolled by his own fans), and a Russian soccer referee. One nerd put Hitler and Bin Laden in a room with the equally long-dead philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (Rousseau gets the bullets.) There’s even a subset of meta-jokes in which the teller turns the metaphorical gun on themself. The specifics change, but it’s always the same format: Hitler (always Hitler), another dictator/political villain, and the obviously-less-evil-but-still-shitty-guy-we-don’t-like, who inevitably gets shot twice.

The ur-version seems to be one from the 1950s involving Hitler, the recently deceased Joseph Stalin, and the butt of the joke: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers owner who infamously moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958. (Brooklyn hates O’Malley more than the two greatest geopolitical enemies in recent American history! Get it????) Here it is featured in the documentary Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush, told matter-of-factly by Brooklyn Borough Historian Ron Schweiger:

Possibly the biggest fan of this form of the joke is New York Times journalist Clyde Haberman (that’s right, Maggie’s dad), who likes it so much he repeated it on Twitter/X no fewer than ten times over the last decade:

Calling on Jones to drop out of the race for this is like arresting someone for conspiracy to kidnap because someone heard them say, “Take my wife, please.”

I tried writing political journalists to point this out. Those who responded, called out for missing such an obvious reference, pivoted: “Yeah, but he also joked about killing Gilbert’s kids!” (No, he didn’t.) “He also said he’d piss on his opponent’s graves!” (If you think that’s inflammatory, wait until you hear how American politicians have been talking about each other for the last two hundred and fifty years.)

Look, it was extremely dumb for Jones to put a joke like that in writing, much less in a text to a Republican colleague. Not the kind of judgment one might want from the potential head of a state justice department. But then again, compare him to the other options: We’ve got Jones’ opponent — sitting Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares — who, the Washington Post editorialized in 2022: “… sent a message to police last week: Don’t hesitate to shoot a civilian if you are exasperated, angry or feeling disrespected in the course of any encounter.” (Miyares had, in real life, just thrown out a grand jury’s charges against two U.S. Park Police officers who had shot and killed an unarmed driver in Northern Virginia. A bit more consequential than an off-color private joke.)

And then there’s GOP gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears — the ultimate beneficiary of the smear campaign — who said to pro-choice advocates that same year: “Murder is murder, and one day it's gonna be your turn.”

So, yeah. That’s the context.

1996. If Dole had won, we would have mostly gotten Clintonism in its purer, more Republican form. Butterfly effect and all that, but the main legacy of that election was some good Simpsons jokes and convincing Gen Xers and elder Millennials that elections don't matter — an idea I hope they've since abandoned.