If Hillary Clinton is elected president, you can bet one of her first orders of business will be making sure that “basket of deplorables” that caused her campaign so much trouble are discredited and demonized.
For a newly elected President Clinton, a large population of Americans supporting small government, self-reliance, free markets and anti-interventionist attitudes will simply cause too many headaches. After all, everyone remembers how much trouble that “vast right wing conspiracy” caused her husband.
But based on the trajectory of the 2016 election season, Clinton and her handlers know that if she is elected— whether rightfully or by deceit— there is a massive group of Americans who will never accept her as commander-in-chief.
Of course, Clinton knows a thing or two about shutting down political opposition from a position of power. And after three decades as a Washington insider she has the resources to make it happen.
Consider for a moment how the initial Clinton Administration dealt with any group that dared reject federal power. It wasn’t pretty. Think back to the pre-9/11 world of the 1990s. Can you remember what the Clinton Justice Department promoted as the biggest terror threat facing the U.S.?
That’s right, so-called right-wing extremism. Officials like Attorney General Janet Reno painted pictures of dangerous deplorables lurking in secluded bunkers throughout the U.S., heavily armed and ready to overthrow the government.
And the Clinton Administration made examples of some of them. Massacres at Waco and Ruby Ridge come to mind.
While Randy Weaver and the Branch Davidians at Waco were undoubtedly living on the fringe—enough so that many Americans accepted their fates as something that only happens in the rarest of cases.
But a new Clinton administration is poised to push government crackdowns on detractors much further.
Clinton has already declared that a massive portion of her opponents supporters are extremists who want to tear down government protections for minorities and favor theocratic mandates over women’s rights.
This, of course, probably doesn’t fit the profile of any Trump supporter you’ve met— the average working Americans who simply see that big government has failed them. But it doesn’t matter, because pundits and Democratic talking heads have already heard the dog whistle.
That’s where we end up with headlines like this in The Washington Times: “Democrats warn of a racist uprising if Donald Trump loses election.”
From the piece:
In Democratic circles, the talk about the presidential election has increasingly turned to fears of a violent uprising by white supremacists and neo-Nazis if Donald Trump loses.The nervous talk holds that Mr. Trump’s alleged racist followers are being primed to take to the streets to challenge election results should Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton prevail Nov. 8. They say Mr. Trump’s followers reveal their revolutionary fervor at rallies by chanting “lock her up” about the former secretary of state.“Should we take the concern seriously? I think so,” said Ben Manski, a liberal activist leading the group No More Stolen Elections, which was formed in reaction to Republican George W. Bush’s win in the contested 2000 election.“I don’t take neo-Nazis lightly. I have encountered them, and I am a Jew,” he said. “They don’t operate by the same set of rules that the rest of us do.”Lynn Joslyn, a former member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, said the topic bubbled up in conversation at a recent dinner party at her home.“People think there are going to be some riots,” said the 85-year-old Democrat. “Is [Mr. Trump] putting this information out to the news subtlety that if he doesn’t get elected, all this chaos will ensue? I wonder.”
Clinton has put the word out: Trump supporters are violent, racist and unreasonable. They’re going to revolt.
What better way to reignite that conversation about the assault weapons ban. And that’s probably just the beginning.
