Ann Coulter descended on USC campus to promote her new book last week as part of the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s “Islamo-Facism Awareness Week.” While speaking to a crowd of about 230 fans at the Annenberg School, she offered equal doses of anti-liberal tirade and inflammatory discourse on the world beyond these amber waves of grain.
incendiary – n.: a person who excites factions, quarrels, or sedition: agitator.
When I asked David Horowitz whether he thought Coulter made incendiary remarks mostly just as PR for her media personality and books, he ducked the question. Instead, he focused on the Deutsch interview that spawned her comments on perfecting the Jews. The fact that that episode was just the latest in the long history of Coulterisms to me at least partly makes the point. She’s incendiary. She practically defines the word.
“Eschewing debate, I would turn to inflicting horrible physical pain. That seems to change people’s minds,” Coulter said when asked during the Q&A if she believed that “very vigorous intellectual debate could perhaps change [Islamo-Fascist's] views against using violence to spread religion?”
“Who would have thought the Japanese were governable? A few well-placed nuclear bombs and they’ve been gentle little lambs ever since,” was how she followed-up the “horrible physical pain” plan for Islamo-Fascists.
Everything about her is calculated to inflame. From the titles of her books (If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans), to her appearance (gaunt, bleached blonde, thigh-length black cocktail dress with hip-slits, stiletto heels), to her sweeping generalizations about belief systems (political or otherwise), all aspects of Ann Coulter are designed to incite.
To incite uncontrollable, feverish hatred in the “liberals” and “democrats” that she mocks so profusely. To incite confusion in males regarding her contradictory appearance of both cheerleader and ball-breaker.
She is a massively efficient, sound-byte spewing, ideologue.
Even one of her adoring fans, who were omnipresent at Annenberg (the Young Republicans, who sponsored the event, must have chosen their guest-list wisely), asked her if she thought the facts of her speeches got lost in the heat of her rhetoric.
“No,” she said smugly.
Coulter is adept at fighting fire with fire, at spewing venom to combat “liberal” vitriol.
But what caught her off-guard was the overwhelmingly conservative crowd that greeted her. Seems that receiving a standing-o at a college appearance is not exactly par for the course. Instead of being tossed barbs by left-leaning questioners, she was asked sincere questions by supporters who simply wanted to know more about the topic she purportedly came to speak on.
She couldn’t cite any figures when asked “What percent of the world population of Muslims [could be called Islamo-Fascist] ?” by a man who simply wanted to “get a clearer idea of the extent of the terrorist problem throughout the world.”
“I couldn’t talk about specific numbers. I don’t know off the top of my head… what I can tell you is generally way too many. That’s the answer. Way too many.”
Hmm. Thanks, Ann.
When asked “Why is it that the media and the president are turning a blind eye to the Assyrian population in Iraq?” The Assyrians are the indigenous Christians of Iraq. Coulter: “Oh yes, I’ve heard about this and I have no idea. I do not know what the answer is.”
Asked twice by a reporter for the university newspaper to define fascism, she floundered. The first time she offered a roundabout response that mentioned Communism, Nazism, and nihilism, saying it was the “total control of people’s lives” and so in this respect “every government is to some extent fascist.” As unsatisfied as everyone else in the room, the reporter, reminding her that she was invited to speak for Islamo-Fascism week, pressed again for a definition. Visibly uncomfortable or perturbed, she told him to consult a dictionary.
More than unprepared, she seemed uninterested. Christopher Hitchens, for example, hasn’t shied away from the pretty basic and important question.
Alas, Coulter managed to steer the discussion back to her interests. She used “homosexuality” and “soddomy” interchangeably when answering a question about Ahmadinejad and Iranian homosexuals. She then suggested we repeal the portion of the Constitution that grants citizenship to people born in the U.S. so that a pregnant Mexican woman doesn’t hop across the border with “a lifetime of free welfare checks” in her belly. Then she insisted that most gender and race activist groups are “a front for the Democratic Party.”
If there is one thing Ms. Coulter has mastered, it’s the ability to divide and polarize to the point of rendering opinionated discourse irrelevant.
In this respect, the most even-keeled, non-partisan criticism that can be leveled at her is that she is utterly and recklessly irresponsible.
She spoke in broad terms, presumably meant to deliver a one-note, clear-cut message on the dangers of Islamo-Fascism to American society. But without the ability to provide proper context and the requisite extensive historical background needed to understand, she makes the leap from ideologue to demagogue, from blindly partisan to her own system of beliefs to someone who uses the pre-existing prejudices of her audience to gain power and exert influence:
There is no question that the enemy we face is a fascist movement. Whether or not they are true Muslims isn’t for me to decide. That’s not any of my business. I just know that the terrorists—before disemboweling innocent men, flying planes into buildings, and beheading Daniel Pearl—claimed to be practicing true Islam… so, ok, I’ll take them at their word.
The danger is not that the greatest superpower in the world won’t be able to defeat a bunch of head-chopping savages. The problem is, there are some Americans— we call them liberals—who have no desire to. As in all great battles against Fascism in the past century—Nazism, Communism, and so on—liberals are once again eager to surrender. They’re ready to drop the white flag. Usually the nonsense liberals spout is kind of funny, we all get a good laugh out of it. But in wartime, their instinctive idiocy is life-threatening.”
Coulter openly claims not to care enough to distinguish between radical elements and the great majority of law abiding peace loving Muslims. She can’t be bothered as a public speaker and current events commentator to attempt to unravel even this much of the faith she calls out, this much of the culture she mockingly advises nuking. It’s too much. It plays to conservative prejudices against both Muslims and liberals, making the term “terrorist” synonymous with both. Which is her point and why no one should confuse what she does with anything more than show biz. She’s the Andrew Dice Clay of current events.
“I think it’s really important not to lump in moderate or, you know, the average Muslim—conservative, liberal, it doesn’t really matter—with the rational, peaceful Muslims,” said Matt Donnellan, the Vice-Charmain of the College Republicans at the University of San Diego, after the speech.
“She had a lot of punchlines. You can’t reduce the War on Terror to a little sound-byte, but I think she does definitely know what she was talking about,” said another young Republican who wished to remain anonymous.
“She doesn’t try and spin facts, she kind of lets things speak for themselves,” said Donnellan.
And therein lies the utter irresponsibility of Ann Coulter. She has ascended to a precipice of public awareness that few people can attain. But she reduces herself to a caricature— the Tasmanian Devil of Conservativism.
“I’m tired of seeing things from their perspective. How about they see it from mine,” she said referring to the “Islamo-Fascists.”
She is a woman that fosters not intellectual curiosity, but withdrawal. She is an isolationist of the mind. She affirms the bigotry at the ethnocentric core of every American who confuses nationalism with patriotism. She props up a belief system that her fans recognize must be reserved only for situations where the social climate is favorable. It felt like a right-wing Shangri-La in the auditorium as she spoke, people laughing jovially, even at the comment about the two “well-placed nuclear bombs” the U.S. dropped on Japan. I guarantee that every person who laughed at that comment would look over the shoulder and whisper while repeating it in public. What is the intellectual worth in that?
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Chris Nelson is a staff writer at P+P and a graduate student at the USC Annenberg School.
