There is a line in the sand between polemics and hatemongering. If the line were demarcated by sand castles, Ann Coulter would strike it with a drone.

Coulter, the conservative commentator, syndicated columnist and eight-time, best-selling author, spews vicious hyperbole that would get anyone not employed by Fox News or the Westboro Baptist Church sanctioned.

On Wednesday, the College Republicans are bringing Coulter’s evangelical circus to Syracuse University. She will attack the left as not just ideologically misguided, but as a grave threat to the American way of life. Like a Fascist, she wants to eliminate or perfect everyone who is not like her.

Unless you are white, Christian and conservative, Coulter is an equal-opportunity offender.

In 2003 she told The Guardian that America “would be a much better country if women did not vote.” In 2007, she told CNBC’s Donny Deutsch, “We [Christians] just want Jews to be perfected.”

In 2010, Coulter told a University of Western Ontario student to “take a camel” when the student questioned Coulter’s belief that Muslims should not be allowed on airplanes.

But the wicked witch of the far-right saves her most bellicose vitriol for liberals.

In July 2002, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Coulter likened “liberalism” and “terrorism” as the “same disease.” A month later, she told The New York Observer, “My only regret with (Oklahoma City bomber) Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to The New York Times building.”

I guess she had a change of heart about terrorism.

In Coulter’s utopia, everyone is conservative, blindly patriotic, white and Christian. She is one of many far-right media personalities to advertise this worldview. Media stars like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity don’t just criticize liberals, they arguably advocate for their elimination.

When rhetoric graduates from cantankerous to discriminatory, it becomes dangerous in the mainstream lexicon. Radical right-wing media have proliferated since Limbaugh’s national rise in the late 1980s. Its booming popularity shows that the most successful public voices are the ones who stereotype the loudest.

Limbaugh is the most popular talk radio host in the country, averaging at least 15 million listeners per week, according to Talkers Magazine. Hannity is broadcast on more than 500 stations nationwide. Beck has written numerous best-selling books.

The College Republicans are legitimizing this rhetoric among impressionable college students. It will be hard not to feel galvanized after Coulter’s lecture. Her success is no accident. For students who fit Coulter’s ethnocentric labels and are not sure where they stand politically, the lecture could help radicalize their worldviews.

While America’s economic problems are not dire enough to inspire a revolution, the seeds of hate have been planted if the problems continue to get worse.

As proud Americans, we are afflicted with idealistic ignorance. Fascism could never happen here, not in a country with checks, balances and free elections.

But when democratic hegemony breaks down, the public is vulnerable to scapegoating. Someone needs to be blamed for a depreciated economy and poor living standards that accompany its fall. This opens the door for a bellicose leader to rally support for a national rebirth around a unitary, ultra-national and ethnocentric majority.

Elimination-laced anti-liberalism is not going anywhere. It is contingent upon the radical right’s enablers to make it go away. Yet organizations like the College Republicans continue to give prejudiced voices like Coulter the floor.

Jarrad Saffren is a junior television, radio and film and political science major. His column appears weekly. He can contacted via email at jdsaffre@syr.edu and on Twitter at @JarradSaff.

Published on April 24, 2013 at 1:06 am