The far right’s violent speech is not a series of slips. It is a method that prepares audiences for extraordinary measures by reclassifying enemies as contaminants and emergencies as permanent.
By Matthew A. McIntosh
Public Historian
Brewminate
Introduction
Rhetoric is not mere ornament. It arranges reality, sets the moral temperature, and draws the circle of who counts as human. On the far right, historically and today, speech has often carried a latent instruction: that certain enemies are threats to be neutralized, sometimes physically. What follows traces how violent cues get baked into language, from fascist mass politics to contemporary American talk radio and social feeds, and how those cues travel from slogans to streets. The pattern is not incidental to the ideology. It is a feature that recurs across movements, media, and generations.1
Genealogies of Violent Speech
Fascism’s Grammar of Enemies
Interwar fascisms taught a template: a nation imagined as a body under attack, enemies defined as pathogens, and politics cast as purgation. The “conquest of the streets,” as historian Tim Wilson has noted, was both a tactic and an idiom that authorized force in public as restorative rather than criminal.2 The frame normalized vigilantism long before any specific order to kill.
White Supremacy’s Sacralization of Coercion
American white supremacist traditions developed a parallel liturgy: racial hierarchy defended as providential order, extralegal punishment translated as civic hygiene, and intimidation recoded as guardianship. Ku Klux Klan rhetoric continually held up violence as chastisement rather than aggression, creating what philosophers call a “justification script” that reduces moral friction in the perpetrators themselves.3
Mechanisms: How Language Performs Violence
Dehumanization
Words like “vermin,” “infestation,” “invasion,” and “animal” have a dual function: they degrade status and signal allowable remedies. When the target is reduced to a pest, extermination becomes a metaphor that only barely conceals a prescription. Social-psychological research links such framing to greater acceptance of political aggression.4
Catastrophism and Emergency
Apocalyptic talk hardens time. If defeat is imminent and permanent, then norms that forbid violence look like luxuries of the naïve. Far-right movements repeatedly generate “last chance” narratives that convert persuasion into mobilization and mobilization into attack.2
Conspiracy as Warrant
“Replacement,” “global cabal,” and similar constructs arrange disparate grievances into an explanatory totality. Conspiracy is not just a story about power. It is a story about permission. If the enemy is both omnipresent and hidden, then ordinary politics cannot suffice, and irregular force becomes proof of seriousness rather than an offense.5
Historical and Contemporary Repertoires
Single-Issue Violence as Movement Bridge: Anti-Abortion Attacks
The modern anti-abortion underground illustrates how moral absolutism plus militant rhetoric yields real violence against clinics and providers. Decades of murders, bombings, arsons, and assaults in the United States and beyond trace a pattern scholars and security agencies have labeled single-issue terrorism.6 The persistent claim of “justifiable homicide” functions as an interpretive key that invites self-designation as rescuer rather than killer.7
“Right-Wing Terrorism” as a Category
Comparative work on right-wing terrorism shows recurring stylistic elements: leaderless resistance, street confrontation, and spectacular attacks aimed at visibility.8 The category is not merely taxonomic. It reflects an empirical cluster of tactics and targets that repeats across national contexts.
U.S. Timeline since the 1990s
From militia-era bombings through Charlottesville to January 6, non-state far-right violence has ebbed and surged, but its rhetorical predicates stayed consistent: delegitimizing political opponents as traitors, casting pluralism as invasion, and praising “patriots” who enforce order. The Council on Foreign Relations’ chronology documents the steady drumbeat and periodic spikes.9
From Words to Deeds: Evidence
What the Data Say
A large comparative study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzing U.S. and global datasets finds that, across both, radical acts by left-wing adherents are less likely to be violent, while U.S. right-wing cases show comparable propensities for violence.10 The authors emphasize that ideological ecosystems differ in how they valorize aggression and in how media attention shapes what we count, but the core result persists across methods.
A Historian’s Through-Line
Wilson’s synthesis underscores continuity: the far right’s “low road to power” often marries electoral projects with routinized intimidation, treating street force as pedagogy for followers and message for foes.11 This is not an accidental byproduct of heated talk. It is a technique of rule rehearsed in advance by language that names enemies and pre-forgives harm.
Case Focus: Anti-Abortion Violence as Rhetorical Praxis
One reason the anti-abortion case matters for understanding the broader right is its clarity. There is a direct pipeline from absolutist discourse that equates abortion with murder to the classification of violent sabotage and assassination as rescue. In the United States alone, counts since the 1970s include murders, bombings, arsons, and thousands of acts of harassment against providers, mapping a durable subculture in which violence “protects life.”6 These acts both arise from and further normalize a linguistic world where care workers become executioners and clinics become abattoirs.
Digital Amplification and the Aesthetics of Irony
The internet has not invented violent rhetoric, but it accelerates its travel and mutates its tone. Irony and meme culture give plausible deniability, while repetition supplies familiarity that blunts shock. “Just joking” becomes a solvent that eats away at prohibitions, until literal calls to “fight like hell” read as the natural end of a long season of winks. Platform incentives reward outrage, forming feedback loops that privilege content which reduces opponents to targets and turns fantasies of cleansing into shareable kitsch.5
This Week: A Killing and a Shrug
On September 11, 2025, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed onstage during an event at Utah Valley University. Within roughly thirty-three hours, Utah authorities announced the arrest of a 22-year-old suspect, Tyler Robinson, citing digital messages and recovered weapon evidence.12 Whatever one thinks of Kirk’s politics, the event belongs to the rising curve of explicitly political violence that now punctuates American civic life.
The national response illustrated the contest over narratives. While many leaders called for calm, former President Trump, asked in a Fox News interview how he would bring the country together, replied that he “couldn’t care less”.13 That line is not neutral. From a head of state and party leader, it signals that reconciliation is not a priority, and it leaves a vacuum that the loudest voices, frequently the most punitive, will fill. The rhetorical environment that follows is permissive of escalation, not its antidote.
Law, Norms, and the Gray Zone
Democratic law draws a careful line between protected, even caustic speech and unlawful incitement. That line is vital. It is also exploited. The far right’s most effective rhetoricians rarely issue direct commands. They narrate emergencies, praise “defenders,” and describe outcomes as inevitable if “real Americans” do not act. The result is a climate in which self-appointed guardians mistake violence for civic duty, while leaders claim clean hands. That climate, observable across a century of cases, is the point of the exercise.2 8 9
Counter-Rhetorics
Refutation must be factual and unflinching, but it must also be diagnostic. It should name the moves (dehumanization, catastrophe scripts, conspiracy warrants) and rehumanize targets with particularity. In teaching, journalism, and organizing, specificity is an antiseptic. Where violent speech uses archetypes, counter-speech uses people with names and histories. When platforms reward rage, institutions can respond with friction: slower, verified formats and clear penalties for exhortations to harm. Research and reporting should continue to differentiate real-world violence across ideologies without false equivalence.10 9
Conclusion
The far right’s violent speech is not a series of slips. It is a method that prepares audiences for extraordinary measures by reclassifying enemies as contaminants and emergencies as permanent. History shows how quickly that method can move from the microphone to the street. So our task is double: to insist on the legal line against incitement, and to disrupt the moral grammar that makes violence feel like virtue long before a trigger is pulled.11
Appendix
Notes
- Katarzyna Jasko, Gary LaFree, James Piazza, and Michael H. Becker, “A Comparison of Political Violence by Left-Wing, Right-Wing, and Islamist Extremists in the United States and the World,” PNAS 119, no. 30 (2022), https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122593119.
- Tim Wilson, Rightist Violence: An Historical Perspective (The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, 2020), https://icct.nl/sites/default/files/import/publication/Rightist-Violence-An-Historical-Perspective-Tim-Wilson.pdf.
- See discussion in Right-wing Terrorism, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_terrorism.
- Jasko et al., “A Comparison of Political Violence.”
- Ibid.
- “Anti-abortion Violence,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence.
- Ibid.
- Right-wing Terrorism, Wikipedia.
- Council on Foreign Relations, “Timeline: Far-Right Terrorism in the United States,” https://www.cfr.org/timeline/far-right-terrorism-united-states.
- Jasko et al., “A Comparison of Political Violence.”
- Wilson, Rightist Violence.
- Reuters, “Trump Says Suspect in Charlie Kirk Murder in Custody,” September 12, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-suspect-charlie-kirk-murder-custody-2025-09-12/.
- Yahoo News, “Trump: ‘Couldn’t Care Less’ About Bringing Country Together,” September 12, 2025, https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/trump-couldnt-care-less-bringing-131536446.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall.
Bibliography
- Council on Foreign Relations. “Timeline: Far-Right Terrorism in the United States.” https://www.cfr.org/timeline/far-right-terrorism-united-states.
- Jasko, Katarzyna, Gary LaFree, James Piazza, and Michael H. Becker. “A Comparison of Political Violence by Left-Wing, Right-Wing, and Islamist Extremists in the United States and the World.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 30 (2022). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122593119.
- Reuters. “Trump Says Suspect in Charlie Kirk Murder in Custody.” September 12, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-suspect-charlie-kirk-murder-custody-2025-09-12/.
- Wilson, Tim. Rightist Violence: An Historical Perspective. The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, 2020. https://icct.nl/sites/default/files/import/publication/Rightist-Violence-An-Historical-Perspective-Tim-Wilson.pdf.
- Yahoo News. “Trump: ‘Couldn’t Care Less’ About Bringing Country Together.” September 12, 2025. https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/trump-couldnt-care-less-bringing-131536446.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall.
- “Anti-abortion Violence.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence.
- “Right-wing Terrorism.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_terrorism.
Originally published by Brewminate, 09.15.2025, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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