Ann Coulter might be as interested in stoking ire as in persuading people. Many of her followers seem to enjoy watching her throw verbal punches and watching liberals or moderates reel with offense and shock. Ann Coulter is apparently not worried about charges of hyperbole when making her points, but she is difficult to ignore by those who hate or love her. If GOP candidate and real estate mogul Donald Trump started off his campaign by calling illegal immigrants “rapists,” Coulter has gone well beyond that and said immigrants (she doesn’t always make the distinction between legal and illegal, violent or non-violent, since she views it as a demographic problem) are more dangerous for America than ISIS. On Ann’s America, she said, “I have a little tip. If you don’t want to get killed by ISIS, don’t go to Syria. If you don’t want to get killed by a Mexican, there’s nothing I can tell you.” She left Jorge Ramos, a Mexican journalist and the best known Spanish speaking news reporter, speechless for a few seconds. Similarly, Donald Trump had Ramos thrown out of a news conference for allegedly speaking out of turn. When Ramos asked Coulter if she believed the Mexican immigrants were “biologically predisposed” to commit crimes, Coulter said, “No. I think there are cultures that are obviously deficient, and if they weren’t deficient, you wouldn’t be in America interviewing me, I’d be sitting in Mexico. You fled that culture. There are a lot of problems with that culture … when you bring those people here, you bring that culture here. That includes honor killings, it include uncles raping their nieces, it includes not paying their taxes, paying bribes to government officials. That isn’t our culture. You can see the successful cultures in the world … America is the best in the world, and we are about to lose it.”
On Fox News in 2011, Ann Coulter found a silver lining in the Japan nuclear power disaster by saying “radiation is good for you” and that “anyone exposed is much less likely to get cancer.” Perhaps a clue on how to take that remark from Coulter would be to look at another comment she made about nukes and Japan in 2007. Referring to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the WWII in the Pacific, Coulter said, “A couple of well-placed bombs, and the Japanese became meek little lambs.” Parents with disabilities demanded an apology from Coulter who discussed Mitt Romney’s debate performance in 2012, and said she approved of his decision to be “kind and gentle to the retard.” Ellen Seidman, a mother of a special needs child who complained over Coulter’s use of the “r” word applied to disabilities, told CNN, “At this point, I’m thinking the woman must surely be aware the word is offensive, and she chooses not to care. That’s pretty vile and heartless.” Coulter has alleged Bill Clinton and Al Gore had latent homosexual tendencies and said of Presidential candidate Jonathan Edwards, “I was going to have a few comments about John Edwards, but you have to go into rehab if you use the word [common expletive for homosexual].” Shortly after 9-11, Coulter said America should invade Muslim countries and forcibly convert their citizens to Christianity. Concerning widows who lost their husbands in 9-11, Coulter wrote she “had never seen widows enjoy losing their husbands so much.”
After awhile, it gets pretty exhausting to still feel offended by what Ann Coulter says, and that is exactly what she seems to be counting on; a war of attrition against those who will be offended. Coulter churns out intentionally provocative remarks that will hurt and shock people in such volume as to make her critics sound like easily offended, compulsive whiners. The only option for those who dislike Coulter is to ignore her, which means to stand back and let her grab the spotlight. After all, truth be told, her remarks about the debate were more memorable than anything said by anyone else during that evening.