This country is sitting on a powder keg, and the president has decided his best chance at re-election is to start lighting matches and tossing them about. He's unleashed blatantly racist rhetoric towards a number of sitting members of Congress, most recently Maryland's Elijah Cummings. He has cast independent sources of information in our society—the free press—as enemies of the state. But his most virulent hate speech is often reserved for four congresswomen of color: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. The president will happily admit in private that he thinks doing racism is good politics, as he seeks to paint the four as The Other—foreign infiltrators trying to undermine America from within—and as standard-bearers of the Democratic Party.

His Republican colleagues, with a few exceptions, have been entirely complicit in these efforts. Sometimes, they'll take issue with the president's failure to use his inside voice, suggesting he merely tar his opponents as socialists who hate America. Talking about infestations of vermin is a bit far! In others—see: the reprehensible Lindsey Graham—they'll just go on television and start yelling that the four are Communists. But all of this is not just made-for-TV spectacle. When Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana got involved, for example, he characterized these sitting members of Congress as "the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." This was part of a long soliloquy about how they fundamentally hate the country, for which he quickly admitted he had no actual evidence.

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.@SenJohnKennedy: I believe the 4 congresswomen believe America is wicked in its origins & even more wicked now



CNN: What are you basing that claim on? Many of Trump's critiques of them have been outright false. Can you back it up?



KENNEDY: I don't have time to do that, sorry. pic.twitter.com/zzpzFJfFld — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 17, 2019

Well, it seems describing four prominent women of color as the Biblical personification of conquest, war, famine, and death has some consequences. People are listening. Just check out this billboard from Cherokee Guns, a North Carolina gun shop.

It seems a North Carolina gun shop has been listening to our political leaders. Cherokee Guns Facebook

It's past time for political leaders to digest that their rhetoric is not just fodder for the national political reality show, where everyone's trying to Win the News Cycle. The country is in a perilous place, and there are people on the fringes, looking for direction, who could funnel their instability towards dangerous ends without much of a push. There is a die-hard Trump supporter sitting in jail right now for sending pipe bombs to the president's Enemies in the Democratic Party and the Fake News Media. The vast, vast majority of the president's supporters would not turn to violence, but one did. That could have been enough to get people killed.

When the president smeared Omar by trying to tie her to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she saw a severe spike in death threats that led Democratic leaders to boost her security detail. In April, a New York man was arrested for telling Omar's staffer on the phone, "Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are you working for her, she’s a fucking terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her fucking skull."

The Islamophobia evident here, and that the president has played on relentlessly, is also a feature of the North Carolina billboard. In a Facebook post, the gun shop offered bumper stickers to match the billboard to anyone who came into the store, declared their allegiance to Trump, and ate a piece of bacon. Many Muslims, of course, do not eat pork. As the Washington Post found, this is part of a long pattern for Cherokee Guns and its owner, Doc Wacholz.

Cherokee Guns has a rich history of controversial billboards, especially ones that are overtly Islamophobic. In 2017, the store posted a picture of a different sign with “a great message.” “INFIDEL ARMAMENT” it read in block letters above Arabic script and a rifle. Two years before that, the Asheville Citizen-Times wrote, the shop put up a billboard that said, “Give me your tired, your poor . . . Keep your Syrian refugees.”

This week, the Citizen-Times reported that it spoke to the store’s owner, Doc Wacholz, who downplayed his billboard’s implications and sought to justify its message.

“They’re socialists, from my point of view,” he told the local paper, before adding, “I also feel a couple of them, being Muslim, have ties to actual terrorists groups."

”I’m not inciting any violence or being racist,” he added. “It’s a statement. It’s an opinion.”

This kind of thinking is the unmistakable result of spending years or decades in the right-wing infotainment vortex, where the Real Racists are people who talk about racism in our society. Folks operate from the basic premise that they do not—they cannot—harbor prejudice, and then are liberated to say anything. That's how Wacholz gets to the idea that calling all Muslims terrorists cannot be bigoted because it's his opinion. Also notice how he shifts seamlessly to the bigoted allegations from the notion the four are socialists. The details aren't particularly important: they are The Other, outsiders, not Real Americans.

The feedback loop between conservative media and Republican leaders is really humming now. Watching the Robert Mueller hearings and other proceedings, you get the impression that Republican members of Congress are now getting high on their own supply. Certainly, the president is—he seems to get an outsize share of his information about the world from Fox & Friends. The problem is that the undercurrents of resentment and fear of a changing world that have been stewing in the movement for decades are now coming to a boil.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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