It’s so hard to find someone who doesn’t eventually disappoint. A decade or so ago I read some Ann Coulter books and found them well-researched, lively polemics. She was very careful about her facts. Maybe it was because she was writing about her area of specialty: Constitutional Law.
Now, sad to say, she’s gotten weird and sloppy. In her new book she spends three pages defending the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) as not being white-supremacist racists.
The CCC, Coulter opines, is “a conservative group” that has unfairly been branded as racist “because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group.” “There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation,” she says. “Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes — the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media — there is little on the CCC website suggesting” that the group is racist. Indeed, its main failing is “containing members who had belonged to a segregationist group thirty years earlier.”
Coulter could hardly be more wrong. And even if she can’t find time to read beyond a page of the CCC’s website, she really ought to know — after all, the organization where she frequently speaks, the Conservative Political Action Committee, has publicly banned the CCC from its annual gathering because it is racist. Also in the late 1990s, Jim Nicholson, then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, asked GOP members to stay away from the CCC because of its “racist and nationalist views.”
No evidence? It took me all of about a minute on their web page to find several examples of racism. That’s not counting the ads for “White Pride” tee shirts.
I can already tell that eyebrows have been raised by my linking to the Southern Policy Law Center. Yes, I know they’re a bunch of left-wing liars. But this time they aren’t lying.
Let’s quote straight from the CCC’s statement of principles, the first of which is on very shaky First Amendment and historical grounds. Skipping that and heading straight to the racism:
(2) We believe the United States is a European country and that Americans are part of the European people. We believe that the United States derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and the European people and that the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character. We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority in our lifetime. We believe that illegal immigration must be stopped, if necessary by military force and placing troops on our national borders; that illegal aliens must be returned to their own countries; and that legal immigration must be severely restricted or halted through appropriate changes in our laws and policies. We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.
(6) The traditional family is the basic unit of human society. We believe in the traditional family as the basic unit of human society and morality, and we oppose all efforts by the state and other powers to weaken the structure of the American family through toleration of sexual licentiousness, homosexuality and other perversions, mixture of the races, pornography in all forms, and subversion of the authority of parents.
(8) Cultural, national, and racial integrity. We support the cultural and national heritage of the United States and the race and civilization of which it is a part, as well as the expression and celebration of the legitimate subcultures and ethnic and regional identities of our people. We oppose all efforts to discredit, “debunk,” denigrate, ridicule, subvert, or express disrespect for that heritage. We believe public monuments and symbols should reflect the real heritage of our people, and not a politically convenient, inaccurate, insulting, or fictitious heritage.
Is it just me, or does the text in bold look just a tad racist?
First Ben Stein, now Ann Coulter. I used to respect Ron Paul until it turned out he was the crazy uncle of congress. I wrote in Alan Keyes for president back before he started getting a little looney. It’s not that I expect anybody to be perfect. But why do so many people I admire end up barking at the moon?
