average Americans: Trump’s populist base. When he’s elected, according to the Wall Street Journal, the PC crowd will no longer be able to use their litany of self-righteous cant to intimidate the real America and coerce social conformity:
Identity, gender, gender-neutral, diverse, inclusive, patriarchy, workplace harassment, multiculturalism, dead white males, sexism, racism, organic, “privileged,” hate speech, speech codes, prayer in schools, affirmative action, respecting our differences, micro-aggressions, trigger warnings.
deportation force: Trump’s SS.
do whatever is necessary: Donald Trump’s wild card, his get out of jail free card, his pretext for authoritarianism or worse.
the European Sickness: tolerance for immigrants.
getting tough with terrorists: the long-awaited and much-needed return to waterboarding and other forms of torture.
gun rights: integral to the American way of life.
injustice: a law of nature toy can’t fight.
Mexicans, Muslims and Syrians: the enemy hoards pouring across the border to take over America. Stopping the invaders at the border will bring back American jobs, end the threat of Radical Islamic Terrorism, and restore America’s standing in the world–in short, end eight years of American decline, stagnation, hardship, and depression. Resorting to an ersatz ethnonationalism to supposedly combat an entirely fictional immigrant crisis –and an entirely fictional sense of national hopelessness and fear–is the classic rhetorical technique of offering fake solutions to fake problems
the people: anyone opposed to the federal government–in other words, Tea Partiers. (see also, “average Americans,” above. Note that when the Malheur Militia claim that federal land actually belongs to the people, they exclude Native Americans, who “owned” the land before white settlement.
reality-based correctives: inconvenient truths that undermine Dems’ narratives of a peaceful, just, clean, and compassionate world, with no bad guys. Muslim and Mexican rapists, for example. Putin, ISIS, and the Chinese, etc. Assumes that only the Tea Party knows the “correct” version of reality. By definition, then, the Tea Party defines reality.
until we find out what the hell is going on: what’s going on in Trump’s America is a resurgence of fascism, xenophobia, and racism. The “we” in this sentence of course only refers to Trump supporters. By the time the rest of us “find out,” we’ll have been stripped of our civil liberties.
you can disagree with….: you can disagree with the methods of the Malheur Militia, or with Donald Trump’s positions on immigration and border controls, but not with their principles. They’ve made their point, and they’ve succeeded in having us talk about federal land grabs, illegal immigrants, and the very real threat of fundamental Islamic terrorism. Apparently in this classic rhetorical mode, the ends justify the means, even if the means are illegal, seditious, exclusionary, bigoted, based on false premises, paranoid, or demagogic. Beginning a rhetorical attack by conceding ground is a classic technique, replete with such phrases as “I may not agree with all his facts”, “it’s not the way I would have gone about doing that”, or “of course we don’t condone those specific policies or statements”, etc. These false concessions and qualifications are always followed by a “but”, the telltale conjunction in the demagogue’s arsenal.