Hate on the Right: Right-Wing Political Groups and Hate Speech
James L. Aucoin · Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly · 2015
Waltman, Michael. Hate on the Right: Right-Wing Political Groups and Hate Speech. New York: Peter Lane, 2015. 264 pp. $40.95.Michael Waltman examines a range of right-wing political communications to determine whether a linguistic exists that works to bring together the disparate conservative groups in the United States. Moreover, he argues that the arc of rightwing hate speech reaches into mainstream conservative discourse, an arch more easily identified by studying the themes found in racist novels, producerism literature, rightwing Christian film, and patriot/militia web sites. Indeed, he finds consistent themes presented in various genres, produced by radical zealots with little direct relationship to one another. More importantly, many of these themes can also be found in current conservative political and social campaigns.Waltman uses grounded theory to identify the themes and interprets his findings using linguistics. By applying the logic of homological critique, he concludes there is a linguistic of formal, repetitive, and forceful themes reaching across discourses thought otherwise to be distinct.The specific texts examined include the racist novel White Apocalypse by Kyle Bristow, published in 2010; Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, published in 1957; the Left Behind film trilogy, which was based on the novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, released between 2000 and 2005; and web sites operated by The Republic for the united States of America (which lower-cases the u) and the National Rifle Association.The themes resonating through the novels, films, and web sites are remarkably similar and resulted in a homology of exclusion, according to Waltman. The three main themes are:1. There are superior ideas/beliefs about the social and political world to which people subscribe.2. Stigmatized identities can be known by their inferior beliefs.3. The worthy are invited to imagine a world segregated from the stigmatized.White Apocalypse argues a theory that white people were the first to populate North America, thousands of years before Amerindians crossed the Bering Strait. The Amerindians, the novel argues, committed genocide against the whites, driving them from North America until European whites returned to reclaim the land. Atlas Shrugged prioritizes entrepreneurs who build factories and produce wealth. Once again, egalitarianism is demonized. In the Left Behind films, only born-again Christians are worthy of inclusion. Likewise, the patriots/militias and the American Rifle Association embrace nativist conspiracy theories that pit true patriots against all others.Indeed, each publication employed an array of literary and visual devices to separate the chosen from the unwanted, often dehumanizing the other and declaring that the nonsuperior beings are unworthy of being included because of their inferior beliefs and attitudes. …