Ann Coulter

About

Ann Coulter is an American conservative political commentator who is well known for her conservative political opinions and polemical statements as expressed on TV shows and social media, as well as in several books she authored. Due to her perceived attempts to intentionally generate public outrage with controversial remarks, her behavior has often been described as resembling that of an Internet troll.

Career

After graduating law school, Coulter initially served as a law clerk for federal judge Pasco Bowman in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1994, Coulter was hired to work for the United States Senate Judiciary Committee under a Republican-controlled Congress. In 1998, Coulter’s first book High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton was released, which outlined Coulter’s arguments in favor of former United States President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Coulter went on to author nine additional books, including Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002), Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003), How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) (2004), Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2006), If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans (2007), Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America (2009), Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America (2011), Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (2012) and Never Trust a Liberal Over 3 (2013).

Online History

In the late 1990s, Coulter wrote a syndicated column featured on several conservative websites, including Human Events Online, WorldNetDaily, TownHall, FrontPageMag and Jewish World Review. In 2001, the National Review Online terminated Coulter’s editorship for accusing the publication of censorship on the political talk show Politically Incorrect. On October 8th, 2007, Coulter revealed she wished Jews would convert to Christianity in order to be “perfected” during an interview on the CNBC talk shot The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch (shown below, left). On October 24th, the Barely Political YouTube channel uploaded a parody music video titled “The Ann Coulter Song,” in which a Jewish woman begs for Coulter to “perfect” her by converting her to Christianity (shown below, right). In the next seven years, the video garnered upwards of 730,000 views and 4,000 comments.

In September 2010, Coulter launched the @AnnCoulter^[8] Twitter feed, gathering more than 523,000 followers over the next four years. On November 11th, 2011, YouTuber Gustavo Lagos uploaded a montage of Coulter clips in which she makes several controversial statements (shown below).

Reddit AMA

On October 21st, 2013, Coulter participated in an “ask me anything” (AMA) post in the /r/IAmA^[3] subreddit. For verification, she posted a tweet^[4] joking that Reddit was performing as poorly as the Obamacare website (shown below).

Prior to being archived, the post received a score of 0 and over 6,800 comments, many of which attacked and criticized her values and politic opinions. That day, several image macros referencing the AMA reached Reddit’s front page (shown below).^[6]^[7]

#BringBackOurGirls Tweet

On May 11th, 2014, Coulter tweeted^[5] a photo of herself holding a “sign”;http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sign-holding with the hashtag “#BringBackOurCountry” as a parody of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign raising awareness for kidnapped Nigerian school girls (shown below).

The tweet was widely criticized for being insensitive and making light of a serious issue. In response, Twitter users began photoshopping the sign with various humorous statements. On May 12th, Gawker^[10] published an article highlighting several notable example tweets (shown below).

2014 World Cup Controversy

On June 25th, 2014, Coulter published a column titled “America’s Favorite National Pastime: Hating Soccer”^[1] (paraphrased below), in which she insulted soccer fans for not being real Americans and criticized the sport and the World Cup for encouraging the United States “moral decay.” The following day, Redditor SaintAnarchist submitted the column to the /r/forwardsfromgrandma^[2] subreddit.

(1) Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer. In a real sport, players fumble passes, throw bricks and drop fly balls -- all in front of a crowd.

(2) Liberal moms like soccer because it’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys. No serious sport is co-ed, even at the kindergarten level.

(3) No other “sport” ends in as many scoreless ties as soccer.

(4) The prospect of either personal humiliation or major injury is required to count as a sport. Most sports are sublimated warfare.

(5) You can’t use your hands in soccer. (Thus eliminating the danger of having to catch a fly ball.) What sets man apart from the lesser beasts, besides a soul, is that we have opposable thumbs. Our hands can hold things. Here’s a great idea: Let’s create a game where you’re not allowed to use them!

(6) I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is “catching on” is exceeded only by the ones pretending women’s basketball is fascinating.

(7) It’s foreign. In fact, that’s the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not “catching on” at all, is African-Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it.

(8) Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it’s European. Naturally, the metric system emerged from the French Revolution, during the brief intervals when they weren’t committing mass murder by guillotine.

(9) Soccer is not “catching on.” Headlines this week proclaimed “Record U.S. ratings for World Cup,” and we had to hear -- again -- about the “growing popularity of soccer in the United States.”

Reputation

Coulter has a reputation for saying intentionally controversial or offensive polemic statements to generate an outraged response. On October 24th, 2012, Death and Taxes Mag^[9] published an article written by Ned Hepburn arguing that Coulter had made a career for herself using tactics bearing similarities to the behavior of an Internet troll.

Personal Life

Coulter was born on December 8th, 1961 in New York, New York. She identifies herself as a Christian but has not professed belonging to a specific denomination. Coulter has publicly stated that she is pro-life, opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants, opposes same-sex marriage and supports the United States “War on Drugs.”