On Monday, NewsBusters published part I of our interview with Ann Coulter regarding her new book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama.
In part II, she discusses amongst other things how the media are intentionally stoking racial tensions to help get President Obama reelected.
COULTER: Oh, yes, yes, yes. I touch on that in the first chapter in which I rely heavily on the great book by Thomas Sowell “Black Rednecks, White Liberals,” which is an hilarious book because it's a lot about the folkways of the Scots-Irish – my people – in the south. They were a very different breed than the northeastern British, mostly from East Anglia. These hillbilly ways were transferred because that is where the vast majority of black people were living. This is the environment they were marinating in for centuries.
When white hillbillies went north, people would just say, “No, you can't move into this neighborhood. We're not hiring you. We hear that southern accent.” That was the process a lot of immigrants to America went through where there was a small amount of discrimination in order to make them better, stronger, Americans. Better people.
As soon as blacks were about to go through the same immigrant experience that white southerners had gone through, and that all immigrants had gone through, that's when liberals decided, “No, we're going to help blacks by saying this is part of their native, African folk ways.” No, it wasn't. It was from Europe. They got the bad habits of the Scots-Irish, but at least the Scots-Irish – because they didn't have liberals protecting them – had it beaten out of them. And interestingly, black marital rates were higher than white marital rates up until the Great Society programs.
NEWSBUSTERS: You addressed how well the black community was doing after the Civil War well into the 20th century, and then along came all of these liberal policies and it just destroyed black families.
COULTER: Yes, and that was coming out of slavery. That was with laws discriminating against them and when black people had a lot to be angry about. And yet – I would like to think because they were such good Christians – not a chip on their shoulders. You have these massively successful black people. You have the entire race moving up and advancing, and then - wham! - you get government programs that shut it down.
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NEWSBUSTERS: You wrote, “[The OJ] verdict ended up being one of the best things that ever happened to black America.” Explain.
COULTER: It's just that liberals werel oohing and aahing over everything black people would do and refusing to treat blacks like adults. The media still continued doing it as I described in that chapter. Only one felony conviction came out of the OJ trial that was technically about a brutal double murder. The one conviction was Mark Fuhrman's for allegedly perjuring himself about whether he had used the N-word in the prior ten years. There was a tape recording of him using it nine years and some months prior while working on a screenplay with a screenwriter. That was the only conviction, and most editorial writers around the country were indignant that he got no jail time for it. But America had moved on.
Liberals were on either the sidelines or the wrong side of real civil rights battles. Once the danger was over, once those battles were won, suddenly liberals wanted to play civil rights heroes. And they did that through the '70s and '80s by going around casually throwing out accusations of racism - accusations that could destroy people's careers.
So everyone was walking on eggshells. It just became a staple of daytime TV for Phil Donahue to announce pompously, “America is still a racist country.” Oh, yay, yay, standing ovation. People just got fed up with it. And at that point, when the OJ verdict came down, black people had won the final civil rights victory – the right to be treated like adults. Suddenly you saw just a flowering of all these talented blacks on TV as well as writers, comedians. This may also be attributable to the eruption of Fox News and talk radio. You wondered where they had been all this time. They were probably sitting at home wondering why white America considered Jesse Jackson the spokesman for all of black America.
NEWSBUSTERS: And yet what's fascinating is that we entered a real post-racial period after the OJ verdict.
COULTER: Yes, and it was paradise.
NEWSBUSTERS: Then in your view, along comes Barack Obama, and in reality, rather than creating a post--racial America as he promised, he created a post-post-racial America.
COULTER: Yes. We're right back to the '70s and '80s again where people feel that they should be walking on eggshells about anything they say about Obama. Just to mention a few things from the dozen or so years we had of the post-OJ paradise, I wonder if Giuliani would have been as magnificent a mayor as he was if the OJ verdict had not come very early in his term. Perhaps he wouldn't have been brave enough to risk being maligned and turned into America's Emmanuel Goldstein by the left for pursuing his anti-crime policies. But his anti-crime policies saved, at this, point tens of thousands of black lives because young black males have a very high crime rate, and the people that are most likely to be their victims are other blacks.
Amazingly, one of the words that is now racist is the word “the” because Donald Trump said something like “the blacks love me,” and oh, there's hysteria all around, and that's so racist. Of course, "kitchen cabinet" is also now racist. This is what it was like back in the '70s and '80s: white people terrified they'll make a slip of the tongue, and black people not knowing really what to make of white people. “Why are they acting so crazily?”
Now the media tell black people - or at least the NFM as I call them, the non-Fox media - 24 hours a day, white people hate you. Liberals LOVE telling black people that white people hate them.
But I think we can learn from history. So I take readers on a little stroll down memory lane to the '70s and '80s with all of the racial turmoil, everyone upset and worried, and blacks not advancing, to the post-OJ paradise and now the audacity of liberals to bring it back – not because they care about black people. It was obvious from my Twitter feed today after This Week. They don't care about black people. They care about advancing liberalism. They care about gay marriage and abortion and amnesty for illegal immigrants.
I made the point on This Week that the only reason we needed civil rights laws was to try to get Democrats to stop discriminating against blacks, not to mention lynching them – that was the KKK, an outgrowth of the Democratic Party. That's the only reason we needed the civil rights laws to begin with. The Democrats pretended to care about civil rights for five minutes only to drop the blacks and move on to using civil rights in order to promote equal pay for white women from Scarsdale and the right of two lesbians to marry one another and illegal immigration.
The official Democratic position is civil rights means rich white women, illegal immigrants, gays who want to get married, and liberals are all indignant when you counter, “No, civil rights were for black people. When was it that the U.S. enslaved Hispanics and gays?” I don't remember that part.
NEWSBUSTERS: As you wrote, civil rights were created for black people for a reason, and now in the last forty some odd years, liberals have expanded it to include every one of their pet causes.
NEWSBUSTERS: Why did you write “N-word” in the book rather than actually write it out “n-i-g-g-e-r?”
COULTER: I know. One of my friends makes fun of me for this. He says, “Ann, they're just symbols on a page. It's just a different way of indicating the same word.” I know that, but I just can't bring myself to do it.
NEWSBUSTERS: Moving forward, in the chapter “That Old Black Magic,” you raised a fascinating point I’d never considered about left-wing double standards concerning religious whites and religious blacks. The former are reviled for their beliefs while the latter revered. Explain.
COULTER: It's more that they're condescended to. I remember noticing this one time when I was listening to Randi Rhodes on radio – as you can see, I get a lot more of my news from the crazy left than from the right! - and the way she was talking about black people and their religion, and “Oh, it's just so cute,” it was like she was talking about a small child.
When it comes to white Christians, that's the rise of Nazi Germany. When it comes to black Christians, liberals are even willing to forgive them for being opposed to gay marriage! In 2008, California's Proposition 8, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman, likely passed because of the huge number of blacks who voted for it. Something like 50 percent were for it among only whites and Asians, while like 70 percent of blacks voted for it.
NEWSBUSTERS: It was pretty high, and at the time, most political analysts in California felt the measure passed because of the high black turnout for Obama. It probably wouldn't if Obama hadn't been on the ballot.
COULTER: Or it might have passed but certainly not by the margin it did. And the excuses liberals made for that. Meanwhile they're out protesting with vicious signs outside Mormon churches in California, Boston, Chicago. But oh no, those darling black people with their Christian beliefs. Liberals treat blacks practicing Christianity as if they're practicing voodoo. They're that cute.
NEWSBUSTERS: So a white Evangelical who opposes same-sex marriage is to be totally reviled.
COULTER: Nazi.
NEWSBUSTERS: But a black person who's religious and is opposed to same-sex marriage, that's okay. Why is that?
COULTER: Because Democrats spent the first hundred years of the nation's history refusing to treat blacks like human beings and the second century refusing to treat them like adults. Just vote for us and shut up!
NEWSBUSTERS: Speaking of double-standards, in the chapter “Liberal-Black Relations,” you took our dear friend Chris Matthews of MSNBC to task for his double-standard concerning race. Tell us about that.
COULTER: He is just the biggest racial bean-counter on MSNBC always counting up the number of black people at a Tea Party event - as if the Tea Party can control who shows up. And by the way, there were quite a few black faces, but nonetheless, you're not going to expect there to be too many. Blacks are overwhelmingly Democratic, though I'm hoping this book will change some minds and reveal to them what a rotten Party the Democrats are. And, well, Obama is the first black president. A lot of Irish Catholics supported the first Irish Catholic president. So, you have both elements going against the Tea Partiers who were protesting first the stimulus bill and then ObamaCare, two liberal Obama policies.
But for pasty white Chris Matthews to act like he's the spokesman for all black people as he harangues every young Republican as if they were with Bull Connor. No, no, no, no. A) Bull Connor was a Democrat, and B) that was a really long time ago before most young Republicans were born. And C) any Republican saddled with the facts of Chris Matthews life would be convicted of racism in a heartbeat.
He lives cheek-by- jowl next to a majority black city, and yet he lives in a white suburb in Maryland. His kids go to fancy private schools that are probably about two percent black. I even included the New York Times article of his son's wedding in my book. It included a panoramic picture of the church, and you could see about one hundred people - not a black face among them. So I included the URL to the New York Times article, and you can see for yourself.
NEWSBUSTERS: You also took Rachel Maddow to task for the same issue concerning her treatment of MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry. Explain.
This is not a person who is comfortable around black people. I really want NewsBusters to put together a bunch of those clips in a video montage because it would be hilarious.
NEWSBUSTERS: The beauty of her introducing Hayes that way is he's basically her twin brother.
COULTER: Well, I must disagree with that. As MSNBC's most frequent flyer, one thing I like about Chris Hayes, which is very unusual on MSNBC from either the host or the guests, is that he's not a smirker. Their signature move on MSNBC is smirking, just this arrogant, smarmy, “We are so much smarter and cooler and look at these dull, nerdy, square Republicans who probably shop at Kmart.” Chris Hayes may believe crazy things, but he is not a smirker.
NEWSBUSTERS: In his defense, I do believe it's because he's only had his own show a short period of time. I think he's going to get that smirk.
COULTER: In a way I hope so because I think it's very off-putting to the average person. By the way, there are no smirkers on Fox. Everyone would admit Sean Hannity is a partisan host. I think he's the only partisan host in primetime. I know he is. But he doesn’t smirk.
NEWSBUSTERS: No, but actually on Fox it's the liberals that smirk. Alan Colmes smirks. Bob Beckel smirks.
COULTER: Yeah, you're right. It is a liberal thing, and I think it's extremely unappealing.
NEWSBUSTERS: You spent an entire chapter on how KTLA in Los Angeles edited the Rodney King video saying that edit resulted in numerous lives lost as well as a billion dollars in damages. Tell us about the edit and why it’s so important.
COULTER: One of the things I strive for in my books is to give people new information. The reason I often don't read a lot of conservative books is if you casually keep up with NewsBusters, the Drudge Report, and so on, you're going to know everything that's in those books. So I pride myself on doing a lot of research and presenting people with pretty spectacular stories that they don't even know about. The Farrakhan mosque incident is a good example.
The King video was one that I thought if you've read Lou Cannon's book you might already be familiar with the significance of this edit. Certainly a lot of people in Los Angeles know about it. They edited out only about twelve seconds, KTLA. It doesn't sound like much, but as I wrote, look at how little NBC had to edit to drastically change George Zimmerman's 911 call regarding Trayvon Martin. It doesn't take too many tweaks to twist the meaning.
The part that was expressly edited out of the video - forget the various steps, the car chase, the crazy behavior by Rodney King, the fact that he had two black passengers in the car. They got out without dancing around and charging the officers, and they went home unharmed that night. Not only the police officers watching, but King's own passengers said that they thought he was on angel dust that night because he was behaving so crazily.
Officer Stacy Koon escalated force, step by step, giving verbal commands. Then he tried sending four cops, one to grab each limb, one on each arm, one on each leg. Rodney King seemed to show super-human power – he must have been very strong because they didn't find angel dust in his system, though he was very drunk – he threw all four of them off his back like they were rag dolls.At that point, he got a couple of tasers that seemed to have absolutely no effect on him.
Right here is where the amateur video of the guy standing on a porch nearby began. Rodney King rises like a Phoenix, charges at one of the officers and gets his first whack with a baton. Then you see the final escalation of force that is intended to end the event without anyone dying – the cops or Rodney King.
The media, just for fun, just because they want to keep play-acting “Mississippi Burning,” they twisted this videotape to make it appear that you have these racist cops brutalizing this poor black motorist, and that edited tape was then sent out to other networks. It was played around the clock. The foreman of the first jury told, I think it was Ted Koppel, “Well, when I saw that video being played, I just thought it was awful how they were treating that man and just beating him. It just made no sense to me. But then at the trial, I saw the full video” And she was on the first jury that acquitted the officers.
NEWSBUSTERS: Given how important this incident is in American history, it's strange how we don't talk about this edit and how it inflamed the country, particularly in Los Angeles, such that when the verdict came down – conceivable the correct verdict – riots broke out and people ended up dying. It's actually a tragedy incited by media malpractice.
COULTER: It's happened over and over again. Look at the case of the movie “Mississippi Burning” made by a British filmmaker who proudly said, “I played with the facts. I wanted an emotional reaction.” And then you had a case out in Minnesota, I believe, where a few young blacks were really angryafter seeing the film, and one of them said, “You want to go move on some white people?” And they beat some young white boy at random, beat him, put him in a coma, he has permanent brain damage. This is liberals playing with people's lives both black and white, mostly black.
NEWSBUSTERS: They say sex sells in books, movies, and on TV, but with liberals, it's racism that sells best, isn't it?
COULTER: Yes, yes, ugly portrayals of racism that no longer exist. And when it did exist, it was liberal Democrats who were the racists. This is how they're going to make up for it, by just continuing to stir racial fires. They're doing it now to get Obama reelected.
