A recent James Wolcott article notes that the radical rightwingers in this country are more and more agitating for actual violence against those with whom they disagree:
More and more the rightwing militant “anti-idiotarians” (as they deludedly think of themselves)have been relishing the prospect of antiwar figures undergoing the Daniel Pearl treatment. They keep bringing it up as the retribution that’ll deliver certain choice heads on a platter… The Islamic terrorists serve as proxies and stand-ins in this imaginary theater of cruelty, enacting what they (the warbloggers) would like to mete out to us (their domestic adversaries).
There is no doubt that the online radical rightwingers are encouraged by the appearance of eliminationist rhetoric (a term coined by David Niewert) in the mainstream media. There is, of course, Ann Coulter’s infamous line: “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.” And Bill O’Reilly, ever the voice of sanity, recently demanded that “They ought to hang this [George] Soros guy.”
The examples of radical rightwingers wishing actual physical harm on those who oppose their views are easy to find. Descend into the slimy intestines of any rightwing site’s comments pages, and the creatures that infest those bowels will regale you with endless odes to the violence they desperately want to see meted out:
from Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler:“This Nucklenuts needs to meet with a fatal accident …like …well you know Ward ol’ chum, those dreadfull accidents that happen when a small piece of lead hits you in that void ‘tween your ears that passes for a brain cavity at ohhhh I dunnno…somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 feet per second…??”
from FreeRepublic:“Somewhere, two ropes and prison cell are being wasted.”
“I’d like to see some hangings, imprisonments, some printing presses (and servers) destroyed, and general terror and gnashing of teeth among the traitorous left.”
from Kender’s Musings:“I want to read this in the paper monday morning… Michael Schiavo found dead, called suicide.”
...and a comment that Kender left on this site:
What does this tell us about the radical rightwingers?
- They often choose not to engage in rational debate. If your position in a debate is that your opponent should be killed, you are not using a rational argument. You are, in fact, not making an argument at all.
- They’ve run out of ideas, or perhaps never had any to begin with.
- Their long-proclaimed desire to protect the “American way of life” is a sham. America has never been a society in which political differences are routinely settled by violence—but that seems to be exactly what the radical rightwingers want.
It’s easy to believe that these verbal grenades are just some hotheads “blowing off steam”, that nothing would ever come of this. We know this isn’t true—people are killed in America for their political views. The mainstream media is more and more a home for the eliminationist rhetoric of rightwing pundits, which has the effect of “normalizing” such expressions of latent violence.
We ignore and minimalize such talk at our peril. We can have a society like that which we see evolving in Iraq—where murder has become an everyday part of political discourse. Or we can shine the light of day on such behavior and call it out for what it is: a direct threat to civil order and rational debate.
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