This 2005 post by David Neiwert was prescient.
I’ve been talking for some time about the course that eliminationist rhetoric on the right would eventually take by the force of its own nature: pretty soon we’d go from talking about liberals as traitors to overtly wishing for violence to be visited upon them and discussing locking them up, followed in due course by such violence and incarceration becoming a reality.
Neiwert succinctly describes how the Ann Coulters and Michael Savages fit into the picture.
Now, you won’t hear this talk on the upper levels of the conservative movement. People like William Bennett will call for a “national renewal” aimed at enforcing a new moral code, while Ann Coulter will explain to her readership, a la the title of her most recent “bestseller”, that the “preferable” way to address a liberal is with “a baseball bat.” [Ha ha. Whatsa matter, you don’t think that’s funny? Someone should beat you up.]
And if you talk to supposedly “reasonable” conservatives, who will claim that talk like this remains relegated to the fringes and is just so much “hot talk.” I’ve been hearing this for a long time, but I keep hearing more and more of the eliminationist talk.
You hear it when conservatives — especially those red-state cultural conservatives from the working class who are most likely to vote against their own self-interest, and then blame liberals for how lousy their lives are — get together among themselves for their communal liberal-bashing hatefests. They’ll say it when they think no one else is listening. You can hear it from “fringe” radio figures like Michael Savage. Or you can read it in the unpublished letters to the editor that most publications choose not to run.
It will probably get worse at Obama continues to lead in the polls, and “cultural conservatives” feel more an more helpless and at odds with the mainstream of American thought. As Neiwert points out, violence is the natural result of the kind of rhetoric we’ve gotten from the national conservative punditry. Simmering with rage and comforted by their guns, the Republican underclass is inarticulate but increasingly willing to act out the violent fantasies that Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter have been pimping for the past ten years.