I haven’t heard a lot of other people say this, but in my humble, but absolutely correct opinion, Ann Coulter has been one of the most influential figures in the modern style of political discourse. Coulter, like Rush Limbaugh before her, combines a genius-level intellect, with brilliant research skills, a wicked sense of humor, and a knack for telling offensive and mean-spirited jokes that always seem to have her on the verge of being canceled by somebody on the Left or Right, even though her fans seldom seem to mind.
Once you get beyond her presidential endorsements (you know, I love you, Ann, but oof), Coulter has a magnificent brain, a savage tongue, and a gift for picking apart liberalism that has been frequently imitated, but that has yet to ever quite be duplicated. Read these quotes and you’ll see what I mean.
40) "Just as we're always told that schoolyard bullies are actually deeply insecure, liberals rationalize their own ferocious behavior by claiming to have been wounded somehow. What about the little guy our poor, insecure bully is beating the living daylights out of? How's his self-esteem coming along? That is the essence of liberals: They viciously attack everyone else, while wailing that they are the victims."
39) "What liberals mean when they complain about 'attacks' is simply that it is unfair to point out the things the Democrats believe."
38) "Someone has got to make liberals stop telling us their 'lives were threatened.' Every public figure’s life has been threatened. If more than fifty people know your name, you have been proposed to, propositioned, and insulted and have had threats on your life."
37) "When your party is controlled by a billionaire rootless international financier who expresses 'no sense of guilt' for collaborating with the Nazis, you might want to ease up on lecturing the rest of us about the evil rich."
36) "Looking at the line-up of speakers at the (Democratic National) Convention, I have developed the 7-11 challenge: I will quit making fun of, for example, Dennis Kucinich, if he can prove he can run a 7-11 properly for 8 hours. We’ll even let him have an hour or so of preparation before we open up. Within 8 hours, the money will be gone, the store will be empty, and he’ll be explaining how three 11-year-olds came in and asked for the money and he gave it to them."
35) "Liberals become indignant when you question their patriotism, but simultaneously work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy."
34) "Liberals seem to have hit upon a reverse Christ story as their belief system. He suffered and died for our sins; liberals make the rest of us suffer for sins we didn’t commit. Their claims of how awful 'we' are never seems to encompass themselves in the 'we.' Saying America is a racist nation is never meant to suggest that the speaker is a racist — it's his neighbors who are the racists."
33) "Political debate with liberals is basically impossible in America today because liberals are calling names while conservatives are trying to make arguments."
32) "A favorite liberal taunt is to accuse conservatives of clinging to an idealized past. Poor, right-wing Americans vaguely sense the world is changing and now they're lashing out. What about the idealized past liberals cling to? They all act as if they were civil rights foot soldiers constantly getting beat up by 500-pound southern sheriffs, while every twenty-year-old Republican today is treated as if he is on Team Bull Connor. At best, the struggle for civil rights was an intra-Democratic Party fight. More accurately, it was Republicans and blacks fighting Democrat segregationists and enablers."
31) "It’s an obsession with the Democrats to nationalize everything: healthcare, welfare, the speed limit, abortion, the drinking age — so there’s no escape. Like all totalitarians, the Democrats' position is: 'We thought up something that we know will work better than anything anyone else has done for the last 30,000 years. We don’t know why no one else has thought of it. We must be smarter.' This is why the history of liberalism consists of replacing things that work with things that sounded good on paper."
30) "It’s a perverse world when the most aggressive people are always wailing about their victimhood. In what other place or time have people boasted about how wretched they are? Isn’t it more natural to claim to be better than you are than to claim to be worse than you are? But instead of falsely claiming to be rich or of royal lineage, in modern America people seek rewards by falsely asserting they are victims."
29) "But all liberals only have empathy for the exact same victims — always the ones that are represented by powerful liberal interest groups."
28) "Liberals don’t believe there is such a thing as 'fact' or 'truth.' Everything is a struggle for power between rival doctrines."
27) "Americans cannot comprehend how their fellow countrymen could not love their country. But the left’s anti-Americanism is intrinsic to their entire worldview. Liberals promote the right of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and communists. They instinctively root for anarchy against civilization."
26) "In the corporeal world, international law is whatever the United States and Great Britain say it is."
25) "Democrats are at an advantage in the 'should the U.S. go bankrupt or not?' debate because, based on their economic policies so far, they obviously favor bankruptcy. This allows them to sit back and demand that Republicans propose all the spending cuts and then turn around and scream that Republicans have declared war on the poor and disadvantaged."
24) "In response to skyrocketing gas prices, liberals say, practically in unison, 'We can’t drill our way out of this crisis.' What does that mean? This is like telling a starving man, 'You can’t eat your way out of being hungry!' 'You can’t water your way out of drought!' 'You can’t sleep your way out of tiredness!' 'You can’t drink yourself out of dehydration!' Seriously, what does it mean? Finding more oil isn’t going to increase the supply of oil?"
23) "Liberals don’t mind discussing who is more patriotic if patriotism is defined as redistributing income and vetoing the Pledge of Allegiance. Only if patriotism is defined as supporting America do they get testy and drone on about 'McCarthyism.'"
22) "If it were true that conservatives were racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist, stupid, inflexible, angry, and self-righteous, shouldn’t their arguments be easy to deconstruct? Someone who is making a point out of anger, ideology, inflexibility, or resentment would presumably construct a flimsy argument. So why can’t the argument itself be dismembered rather than the speaker’s personal style or hidden motives? Why the evasions?"
21) "We get lots of overwrought predictions about racist Americans, but we never get the admission, 'Okay, I overreacted.'"
20) "As French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel said of the left, while most regimes are judged on their records, only communism is judged by its promises. Similarly, modern liberals are judged on their motives; conservatives are judged on what liberals claim we really meant."
19) "The reason any conservative's failing is always major news is that it allows liberals to engage in their very favorite taunt: 'Hypocrisy! ' Hypocrisy is the only sin that really inflames them. Inasmuch as liberals have no morals, they can sit back and criticize other people for failing to meet the standards that liberals simply renounce. It’s an intriguing strategy. By openly admitting to being philanderers, draft dodgers, liars, weasels, and cowards, liberals avoid ever being hypocrites."
18) "If white people could be shorn of all racism overnight, it’s not clear how that would improve the black condition. On the other hand, if all black people woke up tomorrow with the cultural predilections of Korean Americans, all sociological disparities — income, crime rates, out-of-wedlock births — would vanish within ten years. Both thought experiments are unfair, but one at least has a practical resonance to it."
17) "Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago."
16) "Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots and on the matter of America’s self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant."
15) "Much of the left's hate speech bears greater similarity to a psychological disorder than to standard political discourse. The hatred is blinding, producing logical contradictions that would be impossible to sustain were it not for the central element faith plays in the left’s new religion. The basic tenet of their faith is this: Maybe they were wrong on facts and policies, but they are good and conservatives are evil. You almost want to give it to them. It's all they have left."
14) "While the form of treachery varies slightly from case to case, liberals always manage to take the position that most undermines American security."
13) "It never occurs to anyone to simply return to the original rule: Unless a man is married to a woman when she gives birth to his child, he has no rights to that child, and unless a woman is married to a man when she gives birth to his child, she has no right to his paycheck or his time."
12) "'Diversity' is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought."
11) "Liberals never argue with one another over substance; their only dispute is how to prevent the public from figuring out what they really believe. Meanwhile, it is a source of constant alarm to conservatives that the public will not understand what they really believe."
10) "Isn't food important? Why not 'universal food coverage?' If politicians and employers had guaranteed us 'free' food 50 years ago, today Democrats would be wailing about the 'food crisis' in America, and you’d be on the phone with your food care provider arguing about whether or not a Reuben sandwich with fries was covered under your plan."
9) "Government employees are even worse than welfare layabouts. In a triple-whammy for the taxpayer, they are: (1) hideously expensive, (2) impossible to fire, and (3) doing things you don’t want done at any price."
8) "Now liberals compare their every riot, every traffic blockage, every Starbucks-window-smashing street protest to the civil rights movement — which was only necessary because of them."
7) "To call racism the main problem in America would be like calling cholera the main health concern. The less we have of it, the more journalists claim it’s a crisis."
6) "Back in the prelapsarian fifties, women worked if they happened to fall into the .01 percent of the population who are able to have interesting jobs or they retired in their twenties to raise children and, incidentally, do what all serious people would like to do anyway — be a dilettante in many subjects. As far as I’m concerned this was a division of labor nothing short of perfect. Men worked and women didn’t. So, when our benefactors come under attack as 'patriarchs' and 'oppressors,' I realize, someone has to put in a kind word for the oppressors. For cocktails alone, I figure I owe the male population several thousand dollars. So, I will be the one to step forward and say: 'To the extent one gender is oppressing the other, it’s not women who should be complaining.'"
5) "Liberals hate religion because politics is a religion substitute for liberals, and they can't stand the competition."
4) "Hearing politicians tell us 'we' can’t 'afford' a tax cut is like listening to a glutton tell you he can’t 'afford' a diet. In no other context do people talk about 'paying for' money they don’t have. I can’t pay for your refusal to give me money because I need a yacht."
3) "If you can somehow force a liberal into a point-counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you’ve said — unless you were in fact talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It’s like arguing with someone with attention deficit disorder."
2) "This is liberalism's real strength. It is no longer susceptible to reductio ad absurdium arguments. Before you can come up with a comical take on their worldview, some college professor has already written an article advancing the idea."
1) "Liberals don't care. Their approach is to rip out society's foundations without asking if they serve any purpose. Why do we have immigration laws? What's with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards – why not make heroin legal? Let's take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens!"
I've been a fan of Ann Coulter for decades and I do think she is one of the best people on the planet. She is brilliant, wise, and fearless. I shared some of her anger and disgust towards Trump for dropping the ball on the border wall; she's right, that should have been job one since day One. Her research is amazing- read her book on immigration, Adios, America!, then try to argue there's been no Replacement strategy in place since Ted Kennedy started destroying America in 1965. Thanks for writing this column, John.