Early Friday morning, after two snipers shot 12 police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, killing at least five of them, Twitter reached a fever pitch. A vocal and largely conservative faction of the internet insisted Black Lives Matter was responsible for the deaths of these officers, despite clear, photographic evidence to the contrary: Numerous reports showed that the protest — a response to this week's shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile — had been peaceful until gunmen outside the event opened fire.

Someone please show these images to former one-term Illinois congressman and current radio host Joe Walsh. In response to the police shootings, Walsh tweeted a thinly veiled, implicitly racist threat to Black Lives Matter and President Barack Obama:

"3 Dallas Cops killed, 7 wounded. This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you."

After about a half hour, he deleted it. I screengrabbed it from Tweetdeck.

Joe Walsh's tweet Twitter

Walsh clearly hasn't learned his lesson from the 2014 incident in which he was temporarily kicked off his own radio show for using racial slurs.

Or maybe he has: He called people of color "punks" this time, rather than the N-word. And, hmm, I wonder what he means by "real America." Unless he's talking about Native Americans forming a warring militia and "coming after" Black Lives Matter and Obama, it sure seems like Walsh is talking about white people taking back their country from everyone else.

So is this the most racist tweet a former congressman has ever sent? Per Betteridge's law, it's probably not — but if you can spot a more heinous message, we'd love to see it.

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