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With Trumpism mainstream where do professional right wing haters have to go?

Published by digby on December 10, 2015

With Trumpism mainstream where do professional right wing haters have to go?

by digby

I wrote about the latest wingnut dilemma for Salon today:

When you’ve got an extremist candidate like Donald Trump running at the top of the polls and turning fever swamp ideology mainstream, where does it leave talk radio and the far right? They can’t keep their audience if they don’t push the envelope and with Trump out there endorsing torture, deportation, and banning all Muslims from coming into the country, it doesn’t leave much for a wing-nut to say. But that doesn’t mean a right wing zealot can’t use his or her imagination.
Trump may be promising to round up undocumented immigrants and deport them “Operation Wetback” style, but will that really solve the problem he seeks to solve? Ann Coulter doesn’t think so. Sure, she’s thrilled that Trump is promising to deny entry to the U.S. to all Muslims. That goes without saying. In fact, she considered it a perfect birthday present:

But even the proposal by the far-right hate group VDARE didn’t go quite far enough:

Coulter is taking a slightly different tack than most right wingers on this subject. She’s arguing for a complete ban on all immigration from everywhere. And she’s using a typically offensive but clever rationalization to do it:
As I went to press with this column, the San Bernardino shooters were unknown, but I had a pretty good inkling they weren’t white men. Days earlier, in response to Robert Dear Jr.’s murder of three people at a Colorado Springs shopping mall last week, The New York Times exulted:
“Even as politicians and those in Congress pump up public fears at the supposed threat of refugees fleeing Syria, every day in America people — mostly white men — are walking into movie theaters, restaurants, churches, grade schools and health care centers armed to the teeth, determined to take as many people out as they can.”
Mostly white men???
I know it didn’t happen here, but is the Times really going to ignore the murder of 130 people in Paris two weeks ago?
Here at home, an Oregon Community College was shot up in October — by a mixed-race, half-black immigrant, Chris Harper-Mercer. Nine people were killed. It’s hard to remember every sensational crime, but that was just two months ago.
Last year, another mixed-race immigrant, Elliot Rodger, committed mass murder at a sunny college campus in Santa Barbara, killing twice as many people as Robert Dear did — in half the time! That seemed like a pretty big story to me, but the media passed over it pretty quickly. The Times has airbrushed it from history.
In 2013, two Chechen immigrants — also allegedly fleeing persecution — blew up the Boston Marathon.
In 2012, Haitian immigrant Kesler Dufrene murdered as many people in Miami as Robert Dear did in Colorado Springs. One of Dufrene’s victims was a 15-year-old girl. Dufrene had already been convicted of a felony in the United States, so he should have been deported, but our “Deporter in Chief” Obama had blocked his return to Haiti. As the murdered girl’s mother said, “Because of immigration, my daughter is not alive.”
Have you ever heard of Dufrene? I don’t think his murders got as much press as the “Planned Parenthood” shooting.
I’m sure you’ve heard of Jared Loughner. But have you ever heard of Eduardo Sencion?
In 2011, nine months after Loughner’s shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona, Sencion, a Mexican immigrant, shot up a Carson City, Nevada, IHOP, killing four Americans, including three National Guardsmen and a 67-year old woman.
Eduardo was a Mexican immigrant. The Times ran two stories on his mass murder — on Pages 17 and 18. By contrast, Loughner’s shooting got dozens of write-ups in the Times, including at least three front-page articles, three editorials and 10 op-eds.
The media are tickled pink whenever they have a white perpetrator because it happens so rarely in a country that is majority white.
She does have a lively mind, you have to admit.  Trump hasn’t managed to put his Muslim and Mexican bashing together so neatly, but it’s not hard to imagine him making Coulter’s case down the road. After all, the “illegals are all rapists” argument was lifted directly from her book, “Adios America.”
But credit where credit is due: At least Coulter doesn’t engage in the lugubrious whining of Rush Limbaugh, who somehow managed to turn San Bernardino into an attack on conservatives. It’s a very laborious (and embarrassing) argument, but the gist of it is that it’s all unfair because the “drive-by” media is trying to understand why the children of immigrants would become Islamic terrorists, but they are always mean to Republicans and never try to understand them.
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