He'd Kill Us if He Had the Chance

[The Conversation spoilers below]

The whole Critical Race Theory panic is laughable on so many levels (they have no idea what it is, it isn't even taught at the K-12 level, and the "concerned parents" turn out to be GOP activists), but it also has a deeply scary side. As we've all known for a long time, with conservatives everything is 100% projection. So when we read something like this:

Several people emailing me, in good faith, believe that white Americans are in the position German Jews were in the 1930s. They think that CRT is an exterminationist ideology that has taken over institutions and white Americans are in literal deadly peril. They are afraid.

— Jason Stanley (@jasonintrator) June 17, 2021

...we have cause to be concerned.

And when Charles Murray is speculating about a race war on Tucker Carlson's show:

The situation is this, you have 13 percent of the population, that's the proportion of Blacks in the U.S. population, who are accusing 60 percent of the population, which is the proportion of non-Latino whites, of being bad, evil people. That's kind of a self-defeating strategy, and what I'm scared of is that whites are going to start adopting identity politics themselves....[U]ntil recently, I was very skeptical of comparisons with the 1850's. You know, you hear them occasionally. “This is like the run-up to the Civil War,” and I said “Nah, it's nothing like that”....And I am less inclined to say that these comparisons with the 1850s are far-fetched. I think that the possibilities for an undeclared civil war are greater than they used to be, and here's where the scenarios can get very -- unlikely, but possible.

...it's cause to be very afraid.

Eventually they're going to put liberals in camps because they think we want to put them in camps. https://t.co/AXmAnmtS9e

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) June 17, 2021

When Harry Caul catches the guy saying "he'd kill us if he had the chance", he thinks it means the couple are in danger from his client. Instead, the line is their rationalization for killing him first. This is where conservatives are going. Their fear is our danger.