Memo to Laura Ingraham and Fox News: If you’re going to condemn someone for a “repugnant attack on Ivanka Trump,” Ann Coulter, who publicly fantasizes about murdering people, is probably not your best spokesperson.
As a banner read, “WHY DOES THE LEFT GET A PASS ON HATE SPEECH?” Ingraham self-righteously cited Samantha Bee calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless c***” and old, incendiary blog posts by Joy Reid to rev up the conservative victimhood.
Yet Coulter not only got a pass on her own hate speech, she was introduced as “one of Reid’s targets,” as though Coulter were merely a victim of hate speech and not someone who has made it integral to her brand.
“This is what you and I have become accustomed to,” Ingraham whined. “Liberals can say anything they want about woman, minorities, Jews, and get away with it.”
Coulter could have used the moment to take a stand on behalf of free speech or at least had the decency to own up to her own rhetoric. Instead, she went along with the victimhood pretense, even as she descended into new hate mongering.
“She was wishing for you and me to be left in the public square in Iraq,” Coulter said about Reid, “which I think is interesting because I agree, I wouldn't want to go to a majority-Muslim country. I don't know why liberals want to turn this country into those countries.”
“And then in a separate post, I guess she liked or retweeted someone suggesting that, I don't know if it was just me or both of us, kill ourselves,” Coulter said accusingly.
OK, Bee’s use of the C-word was not the best way to express extreme disapproval of Ivanka’s behavior. But it’s not as though Bee “joked” that Trump or anyone else should be murdered. As for Reid, she has apologized for her old blog posts. While her “I was hacked” excuse is dubious, she has done nothing in her tenure on MSNBC to suggest she still holds those views.
Coulter, on the other hand, has publicly amassed quite a list of people she has longed to be slaughtered without apology, as far as I know:
In 2009, on Fox News, Coulter said about Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the ObamaCare architects, “Zeke Emanuel is on my death list. Hold the applause. I’m going to be on the death panel.”
In 2011, Coulter wrote about riots in London: "A few well-placed rifle rounds, and the rioting would end in an instant. A more sustained attack on the rampaging mob might save England from itself..."
In 2013, Coulter responded to a comment by then-MSNBC host Martin Bashir wondering if having a family member killed is “what it takes” to get a Republican to support gun control bill. “Let’s start with Meghan McCain!” Coulter quipped.
In 2002, Coulter was quoted as saying about the Oklahoma City bomber, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”
Media Matters has more of Coulter’s murder fantasies.
Attacks on women and minorities? Coulter has done that, too. The night that then-Governor Nikki Haley gave a rebuttal to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, Coulter tweeted that Haley, born in America to Indian immigrants, should be deported.
Trump should deport Nikki Haley.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 13, 2016
The next day, Coulter said she was joking but, "if we could, I’d be open to it, don’t get me wrong." The day after that, Coulter told Fox News Radio host John Gibson, "Um, no" she wasn't joking.
And let’s not forget her “f---ing Jews” tweets when she complained about debate comments by Republican presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio.
How many f---ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) September 17, 2015
Coulter has also said she would prefer an America that is all Christian.
This goes beyond hypocrisy. It proves that this whole discussion was little more than a trumped-up excuse to demonize liberals under cover of conservative victimhood.
Watch the poutrage below, from the June 1, 2018 The Ingraham Angle. Underneath, enjoy Jon Stewart’s brilliant GOP - Special Victims Unit from the July 27, 2011 The Daily Show. It’s as relevant as ever.
Little Annie is an aging, bitter spinster who is a failure with men. She goes through men like a revolving door. Who would want to marry this worthless broad?
Fortunately, she never gave birth to spread her hate to future generations.
NOTE TO LITTLE SPINSTER ANNIE
Give our regards to your plastic surgeon.
However, I do disagree with the hysteria over Samantha Bee using the c-word. Conservatives are trying to deflect attention from their hero Roseanne by playing lip service to a larger call for civility in our discourse. Yet, Trump has referred to women using the c-word and when you bring it up they grow silent.
But even if we, as a nation, decide that the c-word should be banned. There’s a huge difference between Roseanne’s racist rant than being a potty mouth. The fact that Trump and most Republicans seem to be downplaying Roseanne’s racism speaks volumes and only validates their linkage to the white identity movement.
There is a gigantic difference between what Samantha Bee did and what Roseanne Barr did, and it’s shameful of Right Wing bigots to try to muddy it up. Samantha Bee was discussing an outrageous situation being inflicted by the Pence White House at the border, where border crossers are now to be treated in a manner that is intended to make it viscerally unpleasant for them to come here. The whole point of separating the kids from the families is to get the word back to anyone else coming this way that maybe they don’t want to do this – maybe it’s so unpleasant and awful that they’d be better off going back to the violence they were fleeing. It’s the same idea that propelled the Right Wing into advocating that we set up a border processing station inside Mexico so that emigres would not be able to even enter the US and thus could be barred from any relief while waiting for their claims to be heard. It’s the same idea that prompted Right Wing pundits to champion attempted murderers Ramos & Compean for shooting a fleeing border suspect in the back 12 years ago. It’s born of hatred – hatred of the brown-skinned family that wants to come to the US whether the Right Wing wants them here or not. And for the first time, with the Pence White House in position, we have an American federal government that is openly practicing hatred toward immigrants and anyone else it can.
So Samantha Bee reacted to this situation with anger, and in her anger, she lashed out at the Tweeter-in-Chief’s daughter, asking her mother to mother if this is something she can stomach and demanding that Ivanka Trump who says she cares about this stuff DO SOMETHING about it. Unfortunately, by losing her temper and using a vulgar term (shouted from one white, privileged woman to another, so it’s not a matter of someone demeaning anyone’s race or gender or anything like that), Bee lost the moral high ground and was appropriately required to apologize for her behavior and acknowledge she’d crossed a line. And that’s really the end of it. It wasn’t hate speech. It was a mother losing her temper dealing with a group of people who have acted so hatefully and so smugly about their hatefulness that it doesn’t seem possible to reach them any other way. She shouldn’t have done it. But there we have it.
With Roseanne Barr, there’s a very, very different story. Barr has a long history of viciousness and abusiveness, going back to when her TV show was a hit back in the day. She’s long enjoyed using her position of power to attack other people in the meanest fashion available to her. She was notorious for demeaning her staff on “Roseanne” back in the 90s, to the point that the workplace was supposed to have been toxic at times. In more recent years, she’s tried to refashion herself as a “woman of the people”. She even had a show on KPFK in 2009 and tried to run a campaign as a Peace & Freedom candidate for President in 2012. But then she lurched far over to the Right Wing, followed by many other wingnuts. Her hatred of Hillary Clinton was so intense that she was willing to jump off the cliff for Trump and pretty much stated so publicly. And that doesn’t even get into the vicious comments she has regularly made about people of other ethnicities and religions from her own. Ever since we’ve had the fun of Twitter in our lives, Roseanne Barr has used it to insult and attack anyone she felt like demeaning that day. This has repeatedly included slurs against Muslims, against blacks, and pretty much anything she could get away with. Her latest salvo is the one that apparently has gotten her in hot water with ABC, and it is the reason her show has been cancelled. This wasn’t something where she just got upset that morning and unleashed an uncharacteristic comment in anger – as Bee did. This was part of a consistent pattern of hatred and bigotry. (Although it’s amusing to hear Barr try to blame the incident on Ambien…)
So the Right Wing can try to jump on their high horse, but they may find it difficult when that horse collapses under its own hypocritical weight. The Right Wing may well wish to think harder about whether they really want to shine this flashlight that brightly on their own bigotry.