Hate in the Mainstream

"We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."
— Mississippi Gov. HALEY BARBOUR, quoted in a Dec. 27 Weekly Standard article, arguing that the white supremacist Citizens Councils founded in the 1950s to battle school desegregation were a good thing that kept the Klan out of his hometown

"They are animals, yes, but a lower form than the dog, as they won't learn to change their behavior for a carrot or a reward."
— Columnist DEBBIE SCHLUSSEL, characterizing Muslims in a Jan. 14 blog post

"A sexual degenerate, an America-hating communist and a criminal betrayer of even the interest of his own people."
— BRETT REESE, a member of Colorado's Greeley-Evans District 6 Board of Education, reading on his radio show an editorial on Martin Luther King Jr. by neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom on repeated occasions in the weeks prior to the Jan. 17 King holiday

"[W]hat the Supreme Court has set up is the greatest civil war between the church and the gay community."
— Rev. ANTHONY EVANS of Washington, D.C., reacting on Jan. 20 to the Supreme Court's refusal to hear a case challenging the D.C. City Council's decision to legalize same-sex marriage

"The superstition, savagery and sexual immorality of native Americans [made] them morally disqualified from sovereign control of American soil."
— BRYAN FISCHER of the American Family Association, in a Feb. 8 blog post that was later taken down

"Use live ammunition."
— Indiana Deputy Atty. Gen. JEFF COX, who was later fired, in a Feb. 19 tweet on the best way to clear pro-union demonstrators out of Wisconsin's Capitol building

"Leftists and jihadists have thrown in together … not because they have anything at all in common other than that they hate conservatives and they don't care that much for Christianity."
— U.S. Rep. LOUIE GOHMERT (R-Texas), repeating a conspiracy theory popularized by Fox News' Glenn Beck, in a March 9 appearance on American Family Radio

"If shooting these immigrating feral hogs works, maybe we have found a [solution] to our illegal immigration problem."
— Kansas State Rep. VIRGIL PECK (R), in remarks during a March 9 House Appropriations Committee hearing for which he later apologized at the insistence of Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback

"I wish we had a Siberia so we could ship them all off to freeze to death and die."
— Freshman New Hampshire State Rep. MARTIN HARTY (R), 91, referring to the mentally ill in remarks he later described as "kidding" but for which he resigned, as reported in the Concord (N.H.) Monitor on March 11

Quotes on this page were compiled from media accounts, web pages, e-mail groups and Media Matters for America, a group that monitors the far right.