"Wingnut" is used in United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 politics

Politics

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...

 as a political epithet

Epithet

An epithet or byname is a descriptive term accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage. It has various shades of meaning when applied to seemingly real or fictitious people, divinities, objects, and binomial nomenclature. It is also a descriptive title...

 referring to a person

Person

A person is a human being, or an entity that has certain capacities or attributes strongly associated with being human , for example in a particular moral or legal context...

 who holds extreme political views. According to Merriam-Webster

Merriam-Webster

Merriam–Webster, which was originally the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, is an American company that publishes reference books, especially dictionaries that are descendants of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language .Merriam-Webster Inc. has been a...

, it is analogous with the word "radical." In American politics, the term is more often aimed at members of the political right

Right-wing politics

In politics, Right, right-wing and rightist generally refer to support for a hierarchical society justified on the basis of an appeal to natural law or tradition. To varying degrees, the Right rejects the egalitarian objectives of left-wing politics, claiming that the imposition of equality is...

 than those of the political left

Left-wing politics

In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...

. The New York Times' David M. Herszenhorn has defined a "wing nut" as "a loud darling of cable television and talk radio whose remarks are outrageous but often serious enough not to be dismissed entirely."

The term is generally considered disparaging. Responding to its use in an essay by Peter Coyote

Peter Coyote

Peter Coyote is an American actor, author, director, screenwriter and narrator of films, theatre, television and audio books. His voice work includes narrating the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Apple's iPad campaign. He has also served as on-camera co-host of the 2000 Oscar...

, Sean Parnell of the Center for Competitive Politics wrote:

Moreover, you're [sic] use of the term "wing-nut minorities" is interesting for one who decries the incivility of political discourse today. I haven't read the new and updated Miss Manners for Politics yet, but I'm guessing I'm not going to find a section in there approving of the use of pejorative namecalling and broadly delegitimizing and demonizing your opponents.

Coyote responded with an apology of sorts:

Okay. I've been rightly taken to task by Sean Parnell for my rudeness in calling people with whom I disagree "wing-nuts." He's right and I'm wrong. But, what would you call people that believe that fully automatic weapons and cop-killer bullets should be freely available; who bomb abortion clinics and advocate the murder of doctors who perform abortions; who believe that anyone who is not a Christian is doomed to Hell, and people who would elevate Creationism to the status of science? Give me a polite name and I'll use it.