So much captured in a single photo

Looking at Nate Gowdy’s photo from the Trump rally in Loveland, Colorado, I feel the need to point out a couple of quotes:

“Trumpism stunned America with its exhibition of a substantial, revanchist slice of white working class voters who experience politics as a zero-sum game — a group that would rather burn the house down than witness the economic and cultural ascendancy of other identities.”

— Khan Shoieb, How Trumpism Threatens Silicon Valley, October 20, 2016

Of course, the practice of appropriating or big footing an identity slogan like “Black Lives Matter,” especially to trash it, is an automatic fuck you. What makes a phrase like this so scintillating to the haters, and so toxic to everyone else, however, has to do with every other meaning it dredges up.  The first and most inflammatory one that comes up for me is the most literal one. That’s the reference to (or “the matter of”) guns out there in the hands of blacks. Along those lines, it  incorporates the racist stereotype of violent black dudes and how the white man, with his family to protect, can’t just sit there idle. … As if “WHITE GUNS DON’T.”

— Reading the Pictures, Trump Rally Wear Update: Black Guns Matter, October 27, 2016