Wingnut (politics)
[1] Lexico, an online dictionary whose content comes from Oxford University Press, gives the political definition of "wing nut" as "A person with extreme, typically right-wing, views.
The examples Avlon gives of this "craziness" include the actions, beliefs and behaviors of those involved in the Oath Keepers, Posse Comitatus and other groups in the American militia movement, the Tea Party, "Obama derangement syndrome", the birth of "White-minority politics", the rise of right-wing media and the Republican echo chamber, Sarah Palin and the "Limbaugh brigades" of right-wing talk radio hosts, the Birther and Truther movements, and the GOP's "hyperconservative kamikaze caucus" in Congress.
The only extended sections about "wingnuts" on the left deal with Keith Olbermann's news broadcasts, and the search by both sides for "heretics" within their respective parties, i.e Republicans in Name Only and Democrats in Name Only (RINOs and DINOs).
Krugman did not claim to have come up with the term, and did not know who did,[notes 1] but he explained it as describing "the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on [which] provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear.
"[12] In 2021, Krugman reiterated his use of the phrase in another column, in which he wrote: [F]or a long time conservative cohesiveness made life relatively easy for Republican politicians and officials.
Loyalty would be rewarded with safe seats, and should a Republican in good standing somehow happen to lose an election, support from billionaires meant that there was a safety net — “wing nut welfare” — in the form of chairs at lavishly funded right-wing think tanks, gigs at Fox News and so on.
[15] In 2021, writer Charles P. Pierce, the author of Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free described the career of one Texas political lawyer by saying "His CV reads like a road map through the wingnut-welfare legal terrarium".
After describing some extreme applications of the Laffer curve made by Jude Wanniski, an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s, specifically in his book The Way the World Works (1978), Chait writes "Republicans did not find these obvious signs of wingnuttery troubling.
