She explicitly defended the Council of Conservative Citizens in her last book, Guilty. My esteem of her went way up because of that. Now, I’ve been an appointment reader of hers for as long as I’ve heard of her, just for the snark alone. However, as someone who is perpetually working toward a Ph.D. in sarcasm and snarkology, one that I will never attain, I can attest that most people either don’t understand much less grok sarcasm, or it is repugnant to them from a personality standpoint. I suppose the closest Coulter analogue the left ever had was Keith Olbermann, but he gave up on his clever snark years ago to become an unhinged deranged leftist.
She has a new book out, entitled Demonic. Now, before I carve these conclusions in stone, I’ll have to read the whole thing, just in case the author of this review is taking things out of context. However, just based on this, she just popped her esteem balloon in my eyes.
7.) Republican “Southern Strategy” was not racist
“The entire basis of the liberals’ ‘Southern Strategy’ myth is the sophisticated belief that anyone who votes Republican must be a racist,” Coulter writes.
“If Nixon had planned to appeal to white racists, speeding up desegregation was not an effective strategy. But he turned around and won an even bigger landslide in 1972, running against George McGovern and the party of acid, abortion, and amnesty,” she argues.
She’s right about Nixon, but halfway around about the S/S. Its purpose was to dog whistle around race to trick white formerly Democrat Southerners into voting Republican as a matter of habit, all the while the Republicans that won public office on the backs of the white South had almost no intent on following through, either with the half-assed dog whistling promises on race, much less any “full monty” racial agenda. Point of fact, Nixon’s ’72 landslide was because there was no Wallace on an indy or third party ticket sucking votes away from him, (Nixon deliberately sicked the Justice Department and the IRS around Wallace’s inner circle, to try and smear Wallace out of credibility for 1972, or at the very least get him to run as a Democrat because Nixon knew that the Democrats by that time had gone so far left that they would never let him be their Presidential nominee, even if Wallace would have never been shot and gotten a majority of the delegates — Hint: Superdelegates. Before that, Nixon directed a river of dirty money into the campaign coffers of Albert Brewer, the man who took over as Governor when Lurleen Wallace died in the Spring of 1968, and who Wallace faced and toppled to win the Democrat nomination for his second term as Governor — Nixon wanted a Brewer firewall to defeat Wallace and keep him out of credible contention for ’72. The great untold story about Nixon isn’t how cruel he was to the left, it was how cruel he was to his right flank. See also: John Schmitz, whom Nixon torpedoed at about the same time.), and McGovern was a bit too left-wing for the country to handle.
4.) The GOP has always been the party supporting civil rights, not the Democratic Party
“Angry violent mobs are always Democratic: Code Pink, SDS, The Weathermen, Earth First!, anti-war protesters, and union protesters in Wisconsin,” Coulter writes.
“Like them, the Ku Klux Klan was, of course, another Democratic undertaking, originally formed to terrorize Republicans, but later switching to terrorize blacks. It was Democratic juries that acquitted Klansman after Klansman. It was Democratic politicians who supported segregation, Democratic governors who called out the National Guard to stop desegregation, Democratic commissioners of public safety who turned police dogs and water hoses on civil rights protesters.”
Also: “Democrats only came around on civil rights when blacks were voting in high enough numbers to make a difference at the ballot box – and then they claimed credit for everything their party had ferociously blocked since the Civil War.”
Crack a book other than your own every once in awhile, will you, Ann? The original purpose of the Forrest-founded Klan in the 1870s was to deter black crime, (because the occupying Union troops wouldn’t, and in fact, encouraged it), by dressing up as the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, and quite a bit more. Now, when it had free time, it also terrorized white Republicans, but that was purely optional “cake icing.” And there’s no way in hell any credible historian of any ideological stripe worth his salt would consider the Klan in remotely the same box as 1960s and later far left rabble rousers. After the 1876 Presidential election and the deal to settle it that involved the end of Union occupation of the South, state governments in the South gradually re-assumed the responsibility to police and punish black crime, without the need for white sheets and cross burnings. Therefore, the first Klan withered and died because it wasn’t needed. The 1920s Klan, while anti-black, was more oriented toward the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, and opposition to white ethnics. In fact, the 1920s immigration restriction legislation that was eventually passed, the “national origins” scheme, while passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Republican President, was largely due to Klan and labor union support, two constituencies that at the time heavily favored the Democrats of the time.
I’m so tired of this business about equating an 1870s white Democrat to a 2010s white Democrat that my fingers are blue. Most people know better, especially people who have read at least one book not written by themselves in their lives, so I don’t need to repeat.
She is right that the Republican Party at its elite core is just as egalitarian and “civil rightsey” now as they were during the peak of Reconstruction mania.
2.) Coulter takes on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Martin Luther King Jr. was the heir to Rousseau. He used images in order to win publicity and goodwill for his cause, deploying children in the streets for a pointless, violent confrontation with a lame-duck lunatic: Theophilus Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor,” she writes.
In attacking King’s legacy, Coulter uses the words of liberal icon Thurgood Marshall, who became the first black justice of the Supreme Court, to aid her in tarnishing King’s reputation. “Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King’s methods, calling him an ‘opportunist’ and ‘first rate rabble-rouser,’” Coulter writes. “Indeed, when asked about King’s suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men’s work and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was ‘a boy on a man’s errand.’”
Coulter concludes, “The civil rights movement had made mobs respectable, to the great misfortune of the nation. In no time, liberals began engaging in what I believe Gandhi called ‘active resistance’ every time they didn’t get their way through legitimate legal processes.”
In a later chapter, she says, “If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we’d be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day.”
Yeah, and, so? The only difference between Marhsall and King is that Marshall wanted to dispossess whites through quasi-legal means using legal methods, shredding the Constitution while acting as an agent of the Constitution, while MLK wanted to gin up street rabble (on that, Coulter is correct — In spite of all his rhetoric about “nonviolence,” everywhere MLK went and preached “nonviolence,” black violence went through the roof, and that was MLK’s intent, IMHO. White locals joined the Citizens Councils, the John Birch Society and other similar organizations in droves in reaction.). However, in my opinion, better the devil you can see (MLK) than the devil you can’t (Marshall). Better a ridiculous enemy that is nothing like you than a sublime enemy who infiltrates you. Believe me, they both hated white people just the same.
Marshall may not have approved of King’s methods before the infamous Bull Connor hosegate, but it is my understanding that the only reason was that Marshall was worried that the public would turn against “civil rights” if King’s street theater went badly. Now, it did go badly, but the media spin led most of the non-Southern public into the hands of the civil rights cause, something for which I understand Marshall was very pleased. As far as this business of Bull Connor vs “Children,” the MLK-led Rousseauean branch of the civil rights movement deliberately used teenagers (not “children”) in a lot of their street theater, because they knew they would get arrested, and real black adults had too much to lose — Most of them were gainfully employed, even though they were part of a civil rights movement that wanted to trick people into thinking that the white bigots in the Deep South wouldn’t let them have jobs.
I’m sure the truthful tidbits plus the snark will make Demonic worth reading. But believe me, I’ll be reading it with eyes wide open.
Countenance Blog 