Until recently, I had never read Ann Coulter. I’d only seen her on television a few times, her gaunt features and sunken eyes rendering her something akin to a blonde zombie bombshell.
Now, normally I don’t use this space to take cheap shots at respectable intellectuals. But Coulter is neither an intellectual nor respectable. She’s merely an ideological provocateur, a cross between Joseph Goebbels and Lindsay Lohan. That much I was able to gather without even reading her work. Simply watching her perform on television, making grisly attempts to simultaneously push her venomous ideology and groping sexuality, was enough.
And then I actually read something she wrote: a brief article entitled “When Did We Vote to Become Mexico?”
It made me realize she’s even worse than I thought.
There are two major problems with Coulter’s piece. First and most obvious is her overt and horrific bigotry. It’s the most immediately repugnant thing about the article. However, beyond that, her intellectual dishonesty is so deep as to safely categorize her writing as propaganda.
Let’s start with the racism.
The very title of the article is the kind of pandering bigotry one would have expected to hear from a middle aged grump in the 1970s. “Was there a vote when the country decided to turn itself into Mexico?” Coulter opines, as if she were a sexy Archie Bunker.
“Why can’t the country be more or less the ethnic composition that it always was?” she wonders. To which, any sensible person can’t help but respond: Why on earth does it matter?
For Coulter there seesm to be two reasons. First and foremost is her open hostility to non-white immigrants. To her, the U.S. admitting people from Latin America is literally “scraping the bottom of the barrel.” And though she mostly attacks Latinos, claiming they “plunge headlong into the underclass,” she a
lso manages to lob a parenthetical potshot at Islamic immigrants: “Maybe if they had to work, immigrants wouldn’t have as much time to build bombs.”
The other concern driving Coulter’s nativism is her obsession with maintaining an illusory English dominance in American culture. She complains that, “We have been taking in more immigrants from Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Colombia, individually, than from England, our mother country.”
England, our “mother country?” That might make sense when talking about our language or tripartite political scheme. But with regards to demographics, which is the focus of Coulter’s article, it’s an odd and anachronistic sentiment.
People of primarily English descent haven’t been a majority of the U.S. population since . . . well, ever. I know this from looking at census figures. Coulter could have found out by looking at Wikipedia.
And the even larger bloc of British (English, Scottish, and Welsh) immigrants haven’t made up the majority of newcomers to this country since the 1830s. Immigration to the United States has come primarily from places other than England since the 1840s.
But in Coulter’s skewed view of history, the demographic undulations that unseated English dominance didn’t begin until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which replaced the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, also know as the 
Johnson-Reed Act.
Johnson-Reed had slammed the door. It greatly lowered the number of annual immigrants to the United States, allowing for only a few hundred thousand each year instead of the millions (of mostly non-Brits) who had periodically arrived during the years 1848-1920. It also implemented a series of national origin quotas that heavily favored immigration from northern Europe, slashed numbers from southern and eastern Europe, and all but eliminated most immigration from Asia and Africa.
The reason for these tight restrictions on eastern and southern European immigration also reveals an irony in Coulter’s misunderstanding of history. Many White Anglo Saxon Protestants nativists back then, much like Coulter today, were concerned about America’s growing population of so-called non-whites, and they wanted to staunch it.
The thing is, they didn’t consider eastern and southern Europeans to be white.
Italians? Nope. Slavs? Uh-uh. Jews? Not a chance.
In fact, even the Irish were not considered white during much of the 19th century. Seriously. Those pale folk from the Emerald Isle, along with many other groups who seem very white today, weren’t considered quite white in the eyes of many Americans during the turn of the 20th century.
That’s because race is not science; it’s a cultural construct. And so over time, it changes along with the culture that constructs it. There has been a tremendous amount of scholarship on this issue. In fact, one of the seminal books in the field, by Noel Ignatiev, is entitled How The Irish Became White (1995).
Alright, so Coulter’s anti-immigrant rant seems racist, dated, and misinformed.
But it’s one thing to define Coulter’s politics and racial attitudes as exceptionally regressive, and it’s quite another to call her a pandering propagandist. Yet that side of her is also evident in the article, particularly when she writes about the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
The 1965 Act is immensely important and worthy of discussion. Thankfully, it overturned the worst racism of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. However, it also set the stage for the enormous immigration this country has experienced over the past half-century, which the bill’s framers did not correctly anticipate. There’s room for reasonable debate about the pros and cons of these developments.
But Coulter is not a reasonable debater. She’s a propagandist. That’s why in her article she refers to the 1965 Immigration Act as “Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act.”
At first glance, this is quite peculiar since I’ve never once ever heard or read any historian refer to it as such. Rather, we often refer to it, as professionalism, convention, and basic honesty dictate, by the name of its Congressional sponsors. Thus, much like the 1924 Immigration Act is also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, the 1965 Immigration Act is also known as the Hart-Cellar Act, for its sponsors: Representative Emanuel Celler (D-NY) and Senator Philip Hart (D-MI).
While Kennedy did support the bill, he was not its sponsor, which is why absolutely no one calls it the Kennedy Act. What’s more, he was hardly alone, and his stance on the bill wasn’t all that important; it passed with broad bi-partisan support in both houses. Republicans were fully on board with 85% of their members voting in favor.
So why does Coulter call the Hart-Cellar Act “Ted Kennedy’s Immigration Act?” Unless she is profoundly ignorant on the matter, there is no other reason than to be disingenuous and inflammatory. She’s appealing to her base by turning one of their favorite bogeymen into a straw man. No matter that he’s been dead for nearly four years now. Te
d Kennedy’s stranglehold on the imagination of many Conservatives maintains its illusory grip, thanks in part to tired propagandists like Coulter.
Speaking of illusions and imagination, some fantasize that Coulter is smart, sexy, and funny. She’s certainly smart enough, cleverly manipulating facts and tossing raw meat to her cultish fan base. Whether or not she’s sexy is of course subjective and entirely irrelevant to her arguments, though probably vital to her success, as it separates her from the army of right wing pundits. But in the next posting, I will thoroughly critique and dismiss the premise that Ann Coulter is actually funny.