Ann Coulter comes out of the immigration closet—after 13 years, for one second

In her June 6 column, Ann Coulter criticizes America’s current immigration policy for transforming America into a non-European, Third-World country. While she oversimplifies the 1965 Immigration Act which made this all happen, presenting it as though it was exclusively the work of Edward Kennedy instead of President Johnson and the Congress, and portraying it as an explicitly pro-Third World bill rather than as a non-discriminatory bill (she’s still too much of a liberal to criticize the idea of non-discrimination which is the real source of America’s racial transformation) , she gets the basic outline of the story right, which is that in 1960 America was a 90 percent white country and that as a result of the 1965 Act America is rapidly turning into a white-minority country. She says whites have a right to protest this but are called racist if they do.

In short, she is taking, for the first time, the race-conscious position on immigration that I and a handful of other dissidents have been taking for years, a view that has never been allowed to be spoken in the mainstream (except for a tiny number of times, the first one being my appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire” in 1991). And now that she does take it, she gives her column the vulgar and arguably racist title: “BUSH’S AMERICA: ROACH MOTEL.”

Honestly, I can’t say I’m cheered by her column. In fact, I’m seriously annoyed. If Coulter had these beliefs, where the heck has she been all these years? She’s been a star of the conservative movement, virtually a commodity on the conservative Web, on tv constantly. Imagine how she could have helped publicize and legitimate the cause of immigration restriction. Yet she never once said a single word about it, not for all these years while she’s been in a position to say anything she wanted on any subject and never seemed to be at all shy about making utterances that outraged lots of people. When it came to the destruction of white America by our immigration policies, she was silent.

So why does she speak out now? One possibility is that she felt that in the current passionate climate triggered by the Bush-Kennedy bill it had become safe to do so; but, as explained above, I don’t think that’s the case. My own guess is that she doesn’t really care about the issue at all, because if she did, she would have said something about it during the last 13 years. So what I think is that the racial and cultural transformation of America is just one more issue to her, one more game on which to exercise her ego. In the past she didn’t see sufficient pay-off for herself in talking about it, but now that the issue is hot, she’s decided to jump in the pool, make a splash, and then (my prediction) not revisit the issue again. [Note, March 28, 2010: I just came upon this entry, and saw my prediction that Coulter would not revisit the issue again. So I did a search of her articles at AnnCoulter.com. There were a few columns, almost all from 2006-2007, criticizing amnesty. There was no further column mentioning America’s existing immigration law—particularly the 1965 Immigration Act which opened America’s borders to the world—and how it is transforming America racially, culturally, politically, and economically. So my prediction in June 2007 was correct. After coming out of the immigration closet for one second, after 13 years of stone cold silence, Coulter went back into it again and has never re-emerged. In her entire career as a prominent conservative commentator who is known for saying whatever she wants to say, no matter how outrageous or politically incorrect, her sole contribution to the immigration debate (as distinct from the no-brainer illegal immigration debate) has been a single column.]

The first time I became aware of Ann Coulter’s existence was when I was a speaker at the 1994 American Renaissance conference and she was an attendee. During breaks in the conference, I saw men crowded around this striking-looking woman with long blond hair, and heard her name, Ann Coulter. That’s all I knew about her. When she later became the famous tv pundit she is, I figured, because of her presence at the AR conference, that she was in sympathy with our views. As the years passed and she never said anything about immigration or other race-related topics, I concluded that she was not in agreement with us after all.

I had one conversation with her, in the late 1990s at a cocktail party on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I mentioned the AR conference and my speech there in a general, indirect way, and only alluded to her presence there, not wanting to put her on the spot by associating her with my pariah-like views. (By way of explaining my uncharacteristic timidity, I was feeling a bit down during that period, and was not into pushing my ideas on people who didn’t want to hear them.) She neither said anything definite in response nor denied that she knew what I was talking about. She seemed to acknowledge that she knew what I was talking about, but said nothing to indicate positively that she did. The main thing I picked up about her, other than her alarming skinniness, was that same air of sarcastic detachment that characterizes her tv persona and her writings.

But now it turns out that she has been in basic agreement with my position all along. I ought to be glad that she’s finally stepped forward. But I’m not. I’m too angry about her silence for all these years, these years the locusts ate.

- end of initial entry -

James P. writes:

A couple of years ago when Coulter landed the cover of Time magazine, she was a subsequent guest on several political news shows to talk about the article. More than once she expressed her outrage at the photo on the cover and how it made her feet look big, instead of making any thoughtful comments on the article. Even when redirected by direct questions about the article, she seemed to remain focused on talking about the photo.

While I find her commentary funny and sometimes biting, albeit lowbrow, it is apparent that her number one motivation is vanity. Her website has a link to numerous photos of her in various poses as if she knows and expects all good conservative men to find her irresistible. You shouldn’t have been surprised at her “air of sarcastic detachment” upon meeting her, she was probably looking around the room for a mirror.

LA replies:

Vanity is a general human trait, but it is a much more central and controlling factor in women than in men. This is a major reason why women should not be in leadership positions. Look at Rice. In every clip you see of her, she’s not carrying herself as the representative of the United States, she’s carrying herself like a “star,” infatuated by herself and her own wonderfulness. It’s utterly inappropriate and repellant, but no one ever comments on it.

However, neocon Michael Rubin of AIE (one of the Magnificent Seven who came out against Bush’s Iraq policy in Vanity Fair last fall) did say something about this recently—he said what I just said, that Rice is all about celebrity. For a neocon, even a critical neocon to say something like that about a top level of this administration is really a shift.

Jay M. writes:

Surely you know that the fact that Coulter is female, and half-way good looking to the average Joe, means that she can say things that you would be tarred and feathered for saying.

I agree with your criticisms of her vanity and late arrival to the topic—as to the vanity, she is female; what do you expect? As to the tardy arrival—ditto—but with her sarcastic wit and wide distribution, I say: Better late than never.

You must admit that the title of the article says more in four words than most pundits say in four chapters—yourself excluded.

Remember that trailblazers more often get arrows in the back than it the front. You should be satisfied by the sure knowledge that you’ve helped lay the groundwork for a piece such as this to even exist. I certainly would be, though I know there’d be a measure of exasperation mixed in with it.

Keep up the good work—it’s paying off, brother.

LA replies:

I’m chuckling at Jay’s comments about Coulter. He has a healthy perspective on this, which is: why expect anything of Coulter? That she’s coming forth now is good.

Paul K. writes:

Very good analysis of Ann Coulter. As far as her title, “BUSH’S AMERICA: ROACH MOTEL”, I assume it’s a play on the slogan of that product, “Roaches check in, but they can’t check out,” and refers to the point she is making about the IRS’s lenient policy toward immigrants compared to its relentless pursuit of emigres.

C. writes:

The roach motel thing is a disaster for our side; lots of ammo for La Chavez’s cries of racism.

LA replies:

Right. Coulter remains stone cold silent on the issue through her entire career as a pundit while others less prominent than she are struggling to get the issue heard, then she finally writes a column on it and gives the column a racist title. Thanks a lot.

LA adds (June 7):

By the way, the title is not an editor’s. It is the title of the article as it appears at Coulter’s own website, where it was published on June 6. Moveover, that title is maintained in the version of the article published June 7 at FrontPage Magazine. So Coulter’s editors are accepting her title, not vice versa.

Howard Sutherland writes:

I generally agree with your take on Coulter’s latest. I have to admit, though, that I liked her title at first. It is very pithy, and I took it not as an insult to illegal aliens but as a reflection of President Bush’s contempt for America, which I thought it nailed. I have to agree, though, that it does give ammunition to people like Chavez, Lindsey Graham, Chertoff and The Decider himself, who want to dismiss us all as bigots.

Still, I thought she did good work (even if, as you note, oversimplified) about the crimes of 1965, and the Kennedys’ role. I think there is a lot of truth in this quote, and I haven’t seen it expressed so clearly before in the mainstream press:

But in an angry, long-awaited payback to WASPs, Kennedy decided he was going to radically transform the racial composition of the country. Instead of taking 15 immigrants from England and three from China, America would henceforth take three from England and 15 from China. Payback’s a bitch, Daughters of the American Revolution!

White ethnic resentment of WASPs, whether or not deserved, is a real and very destructive force in American politics and society. Where there should be an effective coalition of the majority opposing things like the 1965 immigration “reforms,” the 1986 amnesty and the horrors Bush and the Senate pushed this year and last, we have a politically fragmented white population, with too many endorsing their own disinheritance because of some dewy-eyed loyalty to the Ellis Island/Statue of Liberty (that last symbol misappropriated, of course) “Nation of Immigrants.” That immigrationism is fed further by hard-luck tales of grievances suffered at the hands of hard-hearted unwelcoming WASPs. This can be very distorting. E. Michael Jones, for example, has done some good work showing how our liberal rulers—whom he sees as an unholy alliance of WASP and secular Jewish liberals—have destroyed our cities, but his work is warped by an exceptionally strong case of the Catholic ethnic’s visceral dislike and resentment of WASPs. (To be fair, Jones isn’t too fond of Jews either.) I think this resentment of WASPs combined with adoration of immigration is more true of the political/journalist/academic class, especially those who live in the immigrant stews of New York, Washington and Los Angeles, than of Americans at large. But Americans at large have precious little voice, and the political/journalist/academic class has almost all the media megaphones.

The Irish (the Kennedy clan is Exhibit A) are the champions of grievance-nursing. They, of course, add all the sins of England in the Emerald Isle to their dislike of WASPs, the American English, to get a double-dose of festering resentment. American Jews are pretty good at it too, and thanks to their great intelligence and initiative, their immigration-worship and WASP-resentment have combined to make the major Jewish-American organizations among the most nation-destroying we have. The folly of this, given how Jews have prospered in America, is beyond measure. I don’t detect the same degree of disgruntlement among Italians, although Mario Cuomo was a whining ethnic special-pleader of the worst kind and Giuliani is clearly immigration-besotted on an emotional level.

I guess it is a measure of Bush’s stupidity that he has reached a level of total mindless veneration of immigrants, even though he is entirely the descendant of colonial stock WASPs, without any immigrant sob stories in his family tree at all! I’m less familiar with Senator McCain’s family tree, but the same may be true of him as well. Both candidates for the Darwin Award, seems to me …

Maybe the sheer scale of the Bush/Senate proposed betrayal is so enormous, and the snotty disdain of its supporters for ordinary Americans so obvious, that a healthy concern for self-preservation will outweigh the emotional pull of immigrationism. One must hope so!

LA replies:

Let’s hope that the Bush-Kennedy bill turns out to be the Stalingrad of the open borders movement.

RG writes:

Are we witnessing the beginning of real, substantive debates on seminal issues such as country, culture, language and how uncontrolled immigration affects them? Does a sovereign nation have the right to decide who and in what numbers foreigners (potential immigrants) are allowed into the nation? We VFR readers certainly know the answer to those questions!

Something seems to be happening…..

Jeremy G. writes:

I think the recent pro-white America comments emanating from leading conservatives such as Coulter, when combined with their past reticence illustrates the tremendous power the far left has had in suppressing American racial discourse. Imagine for a moment the intense attacks on Coulter coming from all directions if she had come out of the closet on immigration and defended a white America even a few years ago. Who in the mainstream would have dared come to her defense? She is despised by the left and they would have been crowing for her head. Have you already forgotten that the collective white conservative consciousness has been changed almost overnight by Bush’s amazing betrayal? It is within this collective sense of moral outrage that Coulter has found the strength to come out. Coulter is always carefully positioning herself at the right edge of what is possible for one to remain in the mainstream and she has been very effective at transmitting ideas from the far right into that mainstream. Now is the time to make sure that she and others who have made similar statements remain on the righteous path and work to get our movement moving.

Stewart W. writes:

While I certainly understand your anger and frustration at Ann for taking as long as she did to bring her views on the 1965 Immigration Disaster, I also see this as possibly being a turning point in the discussion of the destruction of Europeans and European culture. Although you and Ms. Coulter have very different styles, neither of you ever backs down from your own beliefs and writings. Ann appears on TV constantly, and is unapologetic and fierce in defending her own words. If she follows that pattern with this article, the racial and cultural aspects of the current immigration disaster will be brought into the open as never before, and many new people will have their eyes opened. While it remains to be seen if anyone will dare bring this up, it nevertheless presents a tremendous opportunity, and hopefully other, more strategically oriented, thoughtful commentators (such as yourself) can step into the breach, secure and hold the territory, and finally break through into the mainstream.

David B. writes (June 10):

I’m a few days late with a message about Ann Coulter, but I wanted to mention this anecdote. About six years ago, I was reading a post by Peter Brimelow at VDare. He was writing about how some people were slowly coming around to our position.

Brimelow wrote something like, “I was at a cocktail party in New York City and was talking to a woman very prominent in the conservative movement. She told me, ‘I agree with you on immigration.’ Brimelow went on to say that many people feel that way, but can’t say so publicly and still be published in most “conservative” publications.

I thought then and think now that the woman Peter Brimelow was referring to was Ann Coulter. While she never wrote much of anything on the issue, she did not write (I don’t remember any) syrupy columns devoted to the glories of unlimited immigration. The fact that she would show up at a American Renaissance conference leads me even more to think so.

LA replies:

It could well have been the same cocktail party where I spoke to Coulter, since Brimelow was there as well.

I don’t remember the exact year, it could have been as late as 2000.

But still, David, this doesn’t scan for me. If she agreed with the restrictionist position on immigration, then you would expect this to come out, at least a little tiny bit, in her columns. But there was nada, zilch, zero. For a person to indicate that she has a definite conviction on an important issue, and for no sign of it at all, no matter how indirect, to appear in her writings, over a period of many years, is very strange. I would not trust such a person. (Whoops, there I go again.)

David continues:

It was a Vdare article for November 22, 2000. However, I misremembered it. Brimelow says a “Washington or New York gathering.” He doesn’t specify that it was a cocktail party. The theme was that there is Intelligent Life in the Conservative Establishment. When I read it at the time, I was convinced that it WAS Ann Coulter that Brimelow meant. Who else would “hiss?”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 06, 2007 08:13 PM | Send