With guns blazing, Ann Coulter has made a career of blasting and destroying the Left -- and she's having a great time doing it. In an exclusive interview with Townhall, she gets personal about her life, her past and her passions.
Anyone who knows Ann can tell you that the peals of her distinctive laughter are as much her trademark as the slinky dresses and the blond tresses. Judging by her frequent appearances on "Hannity," "Red Eye With Greg Gutfeld," "The O'Reilly Factor," "The View," "The Today Show" and a host of other TV shows, when Ann Coulter is on camera, she always seems to be laughing, or have just laughed, or be about to laugh, or have just made someone else laugh. Why, then, do her critics so often describe her as angry?
Case in point: When she made her first (and only) appearance on the "Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson" in 2005, she entered the studio to sustained, thunderous applause. She was absolutely beaming when she took her seat, even giggling a bit with delight as any normal person would be while basking in such unabashed public approval. And yet, the first thing the host said to Coulter -- the very first words out of his mouth, mind you -- were, "Why are you always so angry?" Ferguson's inane question, naturally, was greeted with yet more laughter from Coulter (and the studio audience), because it was so utterly absurd.
In a highly entertaining and informative piece about the right-wing rock star based on exclusive interviews, Hollywood writer Ned Rice provides readers with an understanding about Ann Coulter that most people don't have and gives Ann a chance to confront her critics.
In "Bombshell" in the June issue of Townhall Magazine, Coulter answers the haters, taking this opportunity to answer some of the charges most commonly lodged against her. And she gives her honest -- and blunt -- thoughts on politics, including the 2012 elections and Gov. Mitch Daniels' idea of taking a "time out" on divisive social issues.
Subscribers will also read Ann's reaction to the charges that she's not winning over any new converts with her books, columns and speeches and that she's merely preaching to the choir? Plus, get to know her personal history: Every right-wing firebrand's story starts somewhere -- find out what Ann was like as a kid, what her family was about, and the choices she made in her youth that led her to where she is today.
Get this rare inside look at the life of Ann Coulter ONLY in the June issue of Townhall Magazine. Here are some excerpts:
So when did Ann Coulter become the Angry Woman of the Right -- and doesn't she find this, well, infuriating? "Not at all", she laughs. "What 'angry' means today is, 'I don't agree with you,'" she adds. "To avoid being called 'angry,' people on our side are always supposed to yield to the Left. Otherwise, we're injuring them somehow."
So what accounts for the gap between Coulter's reputation for being cranky and reality? "It's something the Left does very well," she explains. "Getting people to deny what their own senses -- their own eyes and ears -- are telling them." ...
The proverbial reasonable man might wonder if Coulter would be willing to reveal anything at all about her new book. She would indeed: "It's called 'Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America,' and it's about how liberals act like a mob because they are a mob. Picking up where the brilliant 19th century social scientist Gustave Le Bon left off, I show how similar the Left is to a common street mob in the ways they think and behave."
What examples can she cite of behaviors shared by both a street mob and the Left? "Groupthink -- a reasoning disability to which Christians and conservatives are immune, by the way. An inclination to hold contradictory opinions. A habit of being swayed by images rather than by words and logic. A tendency to resort to violence to advance their cause. And, as I've said, a willingness to disbelieve their own senses."
Asked for a recent example of this phenomena, Coulter cites the banking crisis: "Here's how Obama described the economic collapse: 'The Republicans drove the car into a ditch, and now they want us to give them the keys back.' So instead of a carefully worded description of how the banking crisis unfolded, people remember Story Time when the car went into the ditch and John Boehner climbed out from behind the wheel, with maybe a cut on his forehead, and said, 'Wha' happened?' The End.
"Now, if you explain to liberals that Fannie [Mae] and Freddie [Mac] and the Community Redevelopment Act encouraged banks to issue suicidal mortgages, and Wall Street intermingled those bad mortgages with good ones and sold them in bundles, and when the housing market collapsed, the whole economy tanked, they say, 'OK, but what about the car and the ditch?'
"They also believe that since government intervention and Wall Street got us into this mess, what we need is for the government to step in again and give Wall Street more money. It's textbook mob thinking." ...
The high-water mark of mob behavior, she believes, was the French Revolution. "The American Revolution was a revolution of ideas," she explains. "The idea of a constitutional, representative democracy, based on the consent of the governed, in the form of three competing branches, was revolutionary. The French Revolution -- which hardly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the American Revolution! -- was a protracted mob action, which mostly consisted of some French people mindlessly beheading other French people. The French Revolution was not inspired by some groundbreaking political manifesto like the Declaration of Independence. It was more like a street riot that got out of control and went on for years because they let it. As Napoleon said, if Louis XVI had stood up to that mob, even once, he would have won."
So, in SAT test-question form, the French Revolution, with its wanton violence and primitive thinking, is to the liberal mentality as the American Revolution, with its emphasis on ideas and well-crafted arguments, is to the conservative mentality? "Exactly!" ...
The first and most often heard charge against her is that she writes and says incendiary things she doesn't really believe just to sell books. "This is my favorite of all the things people say about me," she begins. "Well, that and when they say that the only reason I'm on TV is because I'm pretty -- and then they turn around and say that I'm extremely ugly. In fact, the mainstream media is constantly telling people not to read my books. The New York Times Book Review has never even reviewed one of my books. And yet, all of them have been New York Times best sellers -- sometimes I think I keep writing just to force the Times to print my name in their best-sellers list, even though their book critics ignore me. Anyway, at the risk of stating the obvious, being an outspoken conservative is about the least likely way of becoming a successful author in this country. Just look at all the terrible writers who've become wildly successful by writing things that liberals like. ... Gail Collins is such an amazingly bad writer that I've stopped reading her completely because I'm afraid some of the inane clich?s she's written might become lodged in my brain and I'd lose the ability to speak. ... Naomi Wolfe's another one. She cranks out one failed, moronic book after another. If you have no talent but you want to become a successful writer, be a liberal!" ...
With so much accomplished, what continues to drive her? ... The answer is simple. It's "The Cause," which Ann describes as follows: "Writing this book has convinced me that you'll never defeat liberals, because, like evil, they'll always be there. We always have to be ready to fight. It can happen here."
Get the full piece only in the June 2011 issue of Townhall Magazine. Order today.
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