Conservative commentator Ann Coulter spoke Friday at Whittenberger Auditorium in an event organized by Turning Point USA and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Buckley Society. She showed up 12 minutes late, timeliness apparently not being a conservative value.
In a lecture titled “Conservatism. Let’s Review the Evidence,” she took an hour and fifteen minutes to lie about the American and French revolutions, the Cold War and Soviet Union, crime and about the left by repeatedly using strawman arguments that a 5-year-old could refute.
For Coulter, conservatism has three central tenets: freedom, safety and normality.
Let’s review the evidence.
Coulter began by contrasting the American and French Revolutions, praising the former as the embodiment of Anglo-Saxon, deeply Christian values, and describing the latter to be “if Antifa took over a country.” She likens the American Revolution to conservatism and the French to liberalism.
She conveniently ignores how the architects of the revolution were slave owners — many of whom weren’t actually Christians. The American revolutionaries created a free society for enslavers.
Coulter decries the “godless” terror of the French Revolution, while praising her hero Ronald Reagan. She ignores the “evidence” of his administration’s illegal funding of the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, his devastating economic policies that decimated the middle class and his negligence during the AIDS crisis which resulted in innumerable deaths.
She also praises Joseph McCarthy, a U.S. Senator who was bent on destroying anyone even associated with communism, costing them their jobs and livelihoods.
We can only devote so much space to her idolatry of Rudy Giuliani, which may have been defensible in post-9/11 New York City, but now reads as reverence for Donald Trump’s lunatic personal lawyer — she ironically dismissed and condemned Trump throughout her speech.
Coulter had much to say about Giuliani and his approach to crime, praising him and Michael Bloomberg for reducing crime in New York City. As expected, she did not say anything about “Stop and Frisk,” the city’s policy of detaining individuals and searching them for weapons or drugs, which was ruled unconstitutional in 2013 due to its indirect racial profiling.
How free is America, and how safe is it for Black people, Ann?
This is not to mention her repeated fear-mongering about rising crime in America being a major issue, despite the fact that only violent crime is higher — crime rates in general have been low for the past 30 years.
Aside from the blatant lies embedded within her arguments, her main points sounded so much like arguments against liberalism, it makes you wonder how much evidence she actually had to support conservative policies. Coulter’s conservatism essentially boils down to a hatred of the “left” which for her is a spectrum ranging from liberals to Marxists, whom she called “dogs.”
She bookended her statements with fringe remarks that resembled Fox News talking points with no factual value. These ranged from comments suggesting our criminal justice system is setting murderers loose in the streets with, “If we could just get the smart ones,” regarding immigration policy to claiming “woke culture” — which she failed to define — is ruining our national discourse.
It was a cycle of inventing absurdities and then triumphantly refuting them.
We won’t stoop so low as to address any more of these purposefully misleading claims — which, as Coulter said, you can read into if you wish to learn more. We must note that her claims served only as dog whistles to rile her conservative base, whom we’re not sure even knew what they were occasionally cheering for.
These comments did not contribute to any sort of constructive dialogue at all. Instead, her focus was to forcefully in tone, but feebly in argument, push false information cherry picked to support her “vision of conservatism” that disorients even those who agree with her.
The event ended with a situation as bizarre as you would have expected, answering audience questions mostly genuinely before abruptly walking out after mocking a student’s attempt to ask a “gotcha” question, which the student couldn’t even verbalize before being cut off.
Little information was gained in the time spent listening to Ann Coulter. But we’re sure many could have assumed that before reading this.
