You never go full dogwhistle. But that's just what Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke did on Twitter on Tuesday, claiming in a rant that Black Lives Matter would soon "join forces with ISIS" to bring down America.
This isn't Sheriff Clarke's first rodeo with the ridiculous. He has been a constant gadfly for the Black Lives Matter movement, calling them "vultures on a roadside carcass" according to ThinkProgress. Clarke has also attributed police violence to problems with the black family and firmly denounced any suggestion that police could be even the least bit biased in their work.
Clarke's strong pro-police views come at odds with strong anti-government leanings, as he has called multiple times for armed revolution in the face of gun laws. To put it lightly, it is ironic that Clarke could be so firmly anti-individual rights when it comes to black lives destroyed by his own police machine and so firmly pro-rights when it comes to the same old talking points of guns and liberty. To put it less lightly, it is terrifying that a man so willing to say frankly absurd things just to rile supporters up leads a department policing a city with over 500,000 black residents.
Of course, deflection is an effective tactic. A real organization doing a good deal of terrorizing is Clarke's own Milwaukee police department, which according to Salon has been sued for dozens of illegal strip searches and has seen multiple officer-involved killings of unarmed black citizens during Clarke's tenure, including Dontre Hamilton in 2014 and Derek Williams in 2011. What do black citizens of Milwaukee have to fear from terrorists overseas when the threat of death hangs over them from their own police everyday?