Criminalizing Flagburning is Trump’s Racist Dogwhistle

Look, let me spell something out for you. The media isn’t picking up on this angle because as we all know the media is feckless in the department of critical thinking. But some of us have been studying how hate moves across the internet for years now and this one’s obvious.

This is a message to his base, the ones who read Drudge Report, listen to Limbaugh and retweet each other’s genocidal frog memes. These Nazi-enthusiasts take every bait. They share every rumor. They wallow in hate.

All year long, they’ve been screaming for #blacklivesmatter activists to be deported, shot and tortured because Black Americans have the audacity to demand that cops stop killing them.

Defending the cops over Blacks? Well, that’s white supremacist logic. Cops are outed as KKK members every year. A decade ago, the FBI released a report stating that the KKK was infiltrating police departments all over the country. “If you think that racism and white supremacy is not involved in police departments, you better check yourself. Because the KKK has been involved with law enforcement from when it just about started,” said one Missouri Police Chief last year.

The entire Blue Lives Movement is a racist gambit trying to stop Blacks from gaining public sympathy. If it was known how many cops are wearing hoods after work, well, shit, that’d be terrible PR for the police. So instead, racists take to Twitter and insist that all these statistics about police brutality are “Black lies.” They further insist — often in the same tweet — that Black lives don’t matter.

This is something liberals have to understand and understand quickly: the actual truth doesn’t matter to these people. All they want is the whiff of a reason to terrorize Black people. That’s *all* they want. They don’t want your facts. They don’t want your opinion. What they want is any reason whatsoever to be taken off the leash. That’s why you have to understand Donald Trump’s call to criminalize flag-burning is a dogwhistle.

Black Lives Matter didn’t even exist as a social movement in 2001. That doesn’t matter. These assholes don’t need truth. Racism is what they actually believe. Headlines are just fuel for the fire. They orgasm at the thought of genocide. The flag-burning is just the hint of an excuse they need to unleash fury on a marginalized people.

These are the same assholes who think Colin Kaepernick is some kind of terrorist hellbent on destroying America:

Again — facts don’t matter. They just seize any excuse imaginable to legitimize their underlying bigotry. That’s really all this is about. Of course Bannon understands this. This is the entire memetic logic behind Breitbart.

Now, here’s the scary part. Fascism is just barbarism outfitted with modern tech. With the benefit of cheap photoshop and video editing tools, any zealot can make practically anyone look like a legitimate target for vigilante justice. The next terrorist attack doesn’t need to happen. Hate-fueled zealots just need to make each other think one has.

They’ve been priming each other to see BLM protestors as terrorists all year long. They’re just waiting for someone to whistle. Every day, Donald Trump is just testing the audio.