moonbat

English

Etymology

From moon +‎ bat, first used in the 1940s by the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, then used in the term “barking moonbat” coined in 1999 by Perry de Havilland of “The Libertarian Samizdata”, a right-libertarian weblog. This originally referred to both left-wing and right-wing crazy people. Sometimes wrongly claimed to be a corruption of Monbiot (from George Monbiot, British environmentalist and Guardian columnist).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈmuːnˌbæt/

Noun

moonbat (plural moonbats)

1. (informal, derogatory, politics) A liberal (someone with a left-wing ideology).

   Synonyms: (derogatory) leftard, (derogatory) libtard

   Coordinate term: wing nut

   • 2005, Michele Malkin, Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, Washington, DC: Regnery, →ISBN, page 108:

     So, what do moonbat professors do when they're not attacking military recruiters, the Bush administration, cameramen, and College Republicans?

   • 2006 May 11, Eric Boehlert, Lapdogs: How the Press Lay Down for the Bush White House, New York: Free Press, →ISBN, page 216:

     As nervous Bush supporters watched the president's approval rating slide, they unleashed their wrath on Sheehan, labeling the mourning mom a “crazy,” “anti-Semite,” “left-wing moonbat,” “crackpot” whose behavior bordered on “treasonous” and who was nothing more than a “hysterical noncombatant.”

   • 2009 October 13, Steve Eubanks, Downforce, New York: Harper, →ISBN, page 255:

     Your job is to separate the media from the moonbats before some industrious cub reporter starts looking into our land deal.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:moonbat.

Derived terms

• moonbattery
• moonbatty

Further reading

• The Samizdata glossary