Eliminationist rhetoric and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords

Eliminationist rhetoric and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords: There were plenty of precursors | Crooks and Liars David Neiwert is the best current writer on the effects of eliminationist rhetoric. Today's horror in Tuscon is not some random act of a crazy loner. It's the consequence of the increasingly violent messaging by the right wing in the U.S.

I don't want to say much more about this except that I am horrified by what happened and I hope those who survived the attack and those who survive the dead are able to find some peace.

Read Neiwert please-

This is video of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on MSNBC on March 25, 2010, after her offices were vandalized, talking about the need for civility in our democratic discourse.

There will be a lot of hand-wringing in the coming days over the shooting of Rep. Giffords this morning at a constituent event -- some of it, almost certainly, from the folks at Fox, who will wonder aloud how this kind of thing could happen.

It can happen, in fact, because conservatives so thoughtlessly and readily use violent eliminationist rhetoric when talking about "liberals" (to wit: anyone who is not a conservative). They will adamantly deny it, of course, but the cold reality is that this kind of talk creates permission for angry and violent people to act it out.

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