One of the advantages of gun blogging: you develop a sensitive ear for “background chatter.” If a trend’s developing amongst gun control advocates’ media enablers, I get a sense of it early. For example, last week Vice published a documentary sounding the alarm on America’s citizen militias. Today, The Washington Post published Patriots at the gate: The Americans preparing for battle against their own government. A harbinger of gun owner vilification to come? Definitely. Check out the bits of the article linking “extremists” to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump . . .
President Obama’s progressive policies and the tough economic times have inflamed anti-government anger, the same vein of rage into which Donald Trump has tapped during his Republican presidential campaign, said Potok and Mark Pitcavage, who works with the Anti-Defamation League and has monitored extremism for 20 years . . .
The group members are conservatives, do not like former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and generally support Donald Trump. Soper said he would prefer just about anyone over Clinton but would not cast a vote for president this year. He said he thinks casting his vote is “a waste of time” because Oregon’s politics are dominated by Democrats.
MacNab, the George Washington University researcher, said Trump has been a powerful recruiting tool for groups angry at the government. “The tea party built little bridges between the fringe and the mainstream,” she said. “With Trump, it’s an 18-lane superhighway. He’s literally telling them they’re right.”
One of the men indicted in the Bundy ranch case is Gerald DeLemus, who was New Hampshire co-chair of Veterans for Trump and was named by the Trump campaign as a New Hampshire alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
WaPo scribe Kevin Sullivan’s “bridge” between armed militias and Donald Trump may be rickety — and overshadowed by the rest of his enormous attempt to portray Constitution-loving militia members as domestic terrorists — but there it is.
We’ve seen this exact strategy before, in the run-up to Mitt Romney’s rout: journalists painting gun owners as porto-insurrectionists (relying heavily on the entirely dubious Southern Poverty Law Center creators of a media-friendly “hate map“).
The end goal: ostracize law-abiding gun owners as the enemy inside the gates. The WaPo smear piece is particularly galling example, but it’s not the first. Nor will it be the last. The Clinton candidacy’s outspoken advocacy for “gun reform” has given the media the green light to bring out the big guns. And so they have. And so they will.
The danger: a Clinton Administration could make a massive move against the militias — especially if a militia member or one its members causes an “incident” (for lack of a better word). Perhaps incited by one of the many federal moles inside their ranks. And from there? Assault weapons ban? Something. Something not good.
At the risk of sounding like a proto-insurrectionist (which I am not), keep your powder dry. Meanwhile, a note to the militias: do NOT speak to the media. No good has ever come of it. And hats off to the WaPo’s video team for creating a balanced video — that stands out like a sore thumb in this blatant hit piece.