Are you Joe? Are you going to grab your “musket?”
I hope he does.
I hope Joe Walsh actually has a smoothbore, flintlock, musket. And I hope the former Congressman attempts to personally recreate the battle of Bunker Hill. The Illinois State Police could play the part of the redcoats.
Except, you know, with guns that don’t require you to manually spark a small fire before discharging a solid lead ball.
Wait, how could Joe be a minuteman when he’s bayoneting fellow Americans?
I guess the analogy doesn’t hold up.
That’s what’s so damn vexing about the far right in this country. They’re inconsistent. Or, actually, the far right is pretty consistent. They hate minorities, welfare, Muslims, and democracy.
It’s more the squishy middle part of the so-called right wing that gives me conniptions.
How do you--in a single afternoon--manage to post both a #BlueLivesMatter meme, and then advocate for the violent overthrow of the federal government? How do you post pictures of flag draped coffins with a “share if you love the troops” tagline--and then say you’d be the one willing to put them underground?
That’s the dissonance.
That’s the danger of refusing to accept the outcome of an election.
That’s how civil wars start.
Not accepting the outcome of a presidential election is literally how the last one started.
I am one of those strange Southern liberals that have appeared as of late. This gives me an odd vantage point from which to observe our politics.
My social media landscape is equal parts Anti-Fascist league, and Ku Klux Klan winter-formal.
And I have noticed a hair-raising trend among the pointy-hoods and red carnation crowd.
I won’t link to any of them here--I believe that would be irresponsible--but many alt-right bloggers are furiously click-clacking away at clarion calls for the violent rejection of the inevitable outcome of this god-awful election.
But when an absurdly divisive presidential candidate refuses on national television to accept the result, when his vice-presidential candidate is asked point-blank at a televised town hall if “patriots” should be prepared to spill blood, and when armed militias predict civil war should the other side win--perhaps we should pay attention.
Now, don’t be mistaken--I’m an alarmist, but not a five-alarm-fire kind of alarmist.
Donald Trump can’t organize a national political campaign--and he isn’t going to organize a national revolt, either. He doesn’t want to.
Those billions of dollars of his are printed on Federal Reserve bank notes, after all.
No, Donald’s a Trojan horse that doesn’t know he’s hollow.
The alt-right has latched onto him not because he genuinely represents (or understands) their ideas, but because he’s the first person in a long time that can stand in front of a camera and say the things he’s said and inexplicably get away with it.
It won’t be Donald Trump, or even Milo or Moldbug, it’ll be their principled disciples who Timothy McVeigh some shit.
And it only takes a few--we’ve learned that lesson, and hard.
Should that happen, the Government will have to respond.
This response will be the proverbial other shoe--the coming to pass of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Gun-nuts say the government is coming for our guns. Gun-nut candidate loses. Gun-nuts gun nut people. Government forced to disarm gun-nuts.
More gun-nuts gun nutting all over.
Should such a thing come to pass—and God willing it won’t—we won’t have to ask Presidential candidates where Aleppo is.
Because it’ll be in Houston, Texas.
And Detroit, and Omaha, and Des Moines.
That is another deeply disturbing aspect of this whole notion. You constantly brow beat us about the dangers of international terrorism. We should be scared of Russia*, China, Iran, and on and on and on—you refuse to reduce defense spending, when it’s half the federal budget. You call the Iran deal the worst agreement ever struck. You scream until red in the face that Secretary Clinton let those boys die in Benghazi—and yet, of all the people in the world who would benefit most from Americans killing one another; it is the aforementioned parties who would likely applaud the loudest.
But somehow it is my patriotism that is always in question.
Well, I have worn the Union blue before--and I will wear it again. Go grab your musket, Joe--and while we’re in the realm of historical analogy, I’ll teach you who William Tecumseh Sherman was.
*Unless the ruskies are hacking the Democrats, then they’re a-okay.