People are getting restless now the presidential-election-slash-reality-TV-show is coming to an end.
Alt-right people, white supremacists and conservatives seem to have come out of hiding and have been one of the most adamantly vocal spectrums of this election.
One such group of right-wing conservatives has even built and is training a small militia to ready for unrest if Hillary Clinton becomes president.
First, they want to send a message, in their form of manic assembly, that they do not want Clinton to take their guns away. Second, which is scary and “The Purge-” like, they are actually inciting and entertaining the idea of going to war against Clinton and minorities if their leader, Donald Trump, isn’t elected.
I only want to slightly touch on the notion of Clinton taking guns away from Americans since the former of the two goals is more dire.
The ideology that Clinton is going to single-handedly send the Second Amendment into oblivion is both far-fetched and illogical. Amendments are cumbersome to come to fruition and equally dense to change. That’s why we only have 27 of them.
Based on technicalities, while amendments can be repealed, it is not a simple process especially for the limited power of any one president. Even if Clinton wanted to repeal the Second Amendment, it would be close to impossible for her to do so because of the Republican majority in the House.
Now, onto their second goal of threatening other Americans.
The notion of waging war is not new, especially if you operate between the realms of political Twitter and Black Twitter. Going back to July, when the Dallas police shootings occurred, social media was in a frenzy as the event was updated in real-time and on the ground.
This was the perfect moment for conservative propagandist media to spin this as a direct attack from the Black Lives Matter movement. For me, the loudest and most misguided voice was that of Joe Walsh, talk show host and former Illinois congressman.
Walsh’s loaded and hyper-confident tweets spewed many different forms of hate speech-filled rhetoric. However, the one that was most noticeable was when he penned the now-deleted tweet, “… This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.”
Let’s deconstruct this tweet. Saying “This is now war” is clearly a declaration of a race war. Secondly, and more importantly, telling the president to “watch out” is an actual felony.
Many people believe, or more so flirt with, the theory of life imitating art and vice versa. However, when it comes to movies like “The Purge,” some people are starting to think that such addled ideas could actually be closer than ever expected.
This quasi-militia is publicly and adamantly targeting a specific group of people. I can only hope that the high concentration of bigotry and venomous hate will either be contained in the slightest, or completely dismantled by the forces that protect the country and its people.
Opinion columnist Dana Jones is a print journalism junior and can be reached at [email protected]
Hopefully it won’t come to that.