Frightwingers Normalize Violence Against Everyone Else

If you haven't read David Neiwert's The Eliminationists, you've missed the best analysis to date of the violent mindset behind the modern right wing.

Fortunately for us, he continues to document eliminationist rhetoric and its move from the political fringe to the mainstream:

It's becoming evident that conservatives no longer consider open advocacy of violence against other people anything more than a mild social faux pas, an embarrassing slip of the tongue, if those people happen to be their "enemies" -- liberals, Muslims, immigrants, gays and lesbians, anyone who fits the description of The Other.

That's been made evident in two recent incidents involving violent eliminationist rhetoric from right-wingers in high-profile positions -- cases that, had roles been reversed and the targets instead were Republicans, would have certainly aroused not just the wrath of the right-wing talk machine but numerous "centrists," and the persons who uttered them would have been summarily fired.

The first involved a math teacher in Jefferson County, Alabama, who helped illustrate a geometry problem for his students by having them figure out the shooting angles for assassinating President Obama. Initially, everyone in town, including school officials, were happy to make excuses for him and let him off easy.

It wasn't until there was broad national outrage over the story that they wound up giving him a suspension:

SNIP

Last week in Houston, a talk show host named Michael Berry -- who at one time was the city's Mayor Pro Tem -- went on his regular show and, during an exchange with a Muslim man named "Tony", declared that if Muslims dare build a mosque in the near vicinity of the World Trade Center site in New York City, then he hopes someone blows it up.

SNIP

This, of course, comes only a short while after someone in Florida actually did try to blow up a mosque.

At what point does this become outright incitement?

SNIP

Right-wingers like Berry, and Pam Atlas, and Michelle Malkin, and on and on, want everyone to just declare all of Islam our "Enemy" and be done with it.

SNIP

You see, in the minds of guys like Michael Berry, all Muslims are guilty of having caused the 9/11 attacks. They're wired to think that way, and nothing, not even reality, will shake them out of it.

SNIP

In essence, mainstream conservatives now condone this kind of talk -- because, evidently, they see nothing wrong with it.

One can only imagine what would have happened if someone had said similar things about Catholics or Baptists, or if a liberal geometry teacher had taught students how to shoot President Bush -- the nonstop outrage at Fox, the breathless denunciations on talk radio, the hand-wringing by Beltway Villagers.

Funny how it never seems to work in the other direction, isn't it?

Click here to see the video and read the whole thing.