Appearing on a special holiday edition of Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow, columnist Ann Coulter talked about how the media got the election wrong, its obsession with de-legitimizing alternative media as “fake news,” and the need to rebuild a conservative Washington establishment that was as wrong-headed as the liberal media in 2016.
The author of In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! said she found the current media obsession with “fake news” amusing, since as she documented in her book, so many of the stories pushed about Donald Trump during 2016 were false – “from the mocking of a disabled reporter, claiming that he was referring to Megyn Kelly’s menstrual period, that he lied about Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attack.”
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“That was, incidentally, what led to his making fun of the reporter, Serge Kovaleski, in a way that bears no resemblance to Serge’s disability, and it’s the exact same imitation Donald Trump does whenever he’s imitating a flustered person, including himself, including Ted Cruz, including a general. You can see the videos. They’re just outright lies,” she added.
“I must say, I think the most astonishing one this week was of your personal former Commander-in-Chief, and now chief strategist for the magnificent President-elect Trump, Steve Bannon. America’s leading hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, has put out a report claiming that Steve Bannon said that African-Americans are more violent than other people. It turns out, when you trace back the quote, he said nothing about African-Americans. He said maybe the people being shot are more violent or were committing crimes, I think that’s what it is, says something about how men are more violent than women – I notice it’s all men who are being shot in these police shootings. So the Southern Poverty Law Center took a quote that some people are more violent than others and inserts ‘African-American.’ They just inserted that,” she said with an incredulous laugh.
Marlow noted this was similar to how the media inserted the word “white” in front of the longstanding declaration by Breitbart News that it has a “nationalist” editorial posture.
“It’s amazing, this Hitler Hitler Hitler David Duke white nationalist white supremacist – it’s all they can say,” Coulter agreed. “I really did not think they were this – I hate to say it, but sometimes people are stupid – they were this stupid, naive, tone-deaf. They are in the bubble. I think that’s part of the reason Donald Trump’s approval ratings – and approval ratings for Trump supporters, I might add – are just going to keep going up. It’s the most airheaded, arrogant celebrities and coastal elites – they’re leading the team now. They have moved out the entire middle part of the country, the entire middle class, the entire working class. Everything they do is offensive to a normal person. This is how they’re going to attack Donald Trump and his supporters. Fantastic.”
Her advice to Breitbart News and its readers to withstand the coming years of media onslaught was: “Never appease, never compromise, never apologize even if you might have phrased something differently. Absolutely never apologize.”
She said said she has enjoyed “hate-watching” all of the “smug, arrogant prognosticators” who got the 2016 election wrong.
“Ana Navarro, Charlie Sykes, all of the consultants, Stuart Stevens, Mike Murphy, Matthew Dowd – one of my favorites – their sneering contempt! Well, first Trump was never going to get the nomination, and then there was going to be a contested convention, and then it was going to be the most historic wipeout ever,” she recalled. “And you would think – among the things I thought of in the days after the magnificent November election was: ‘Well, at least we won’t have to hear from those guys again.’ Nope! You would be wrong. You would be wrong if you thought that. You turn on your TV and all the people who have been not only wrong – I mean, people can get things wrong now and then, I’m not being arrogant about that – but they were smug and arrogant and sneering.”
“And as in that column I wrote earlier this year, the two people who have been saying no, Trump is going to win the nomination and will very likely win the presidency, the only ones I knew of on TV were me and you,” she told Marlow, referring to Breitbart News and Marlow’s own prediction from a 2015 appearance on CNN.
“And we are 100% blacklisted from the ‘serious’ news sites,” Coulter continued. “And now we’re hearing again from all the people who have gotten it wrong for the last 16 months – ‘Well, tell us what’s going to happen in the future.’ It’s one thing if they were inviting them on to say, ‘Whoa, mea culpa, I was totally wrong! You guys have gotta hang on everything Breitbart says, Alex Marlow says, Ann Coulter says.’ No, they’re coming on to now make new predictions about what Trump will do!”
“It’s funny, I’ve always said you can always tell what liberals are guilty of by what they accuse you of,” Coulter observed. “And what are they doing here? They’re accusing the one news site – or I’m sure there are a few others who are also being called ‘fake news’ sites now – but the news sites that got basically everything right over the past 16 months, while the entire, I guess it’s still called ‘mainstream media’ news, certainly television news, massively, hilariously wrong, now they turn and attack the websites that now have been proved accurate. They’re the ones that are being called ‘fake news.’ That’s what we know they’re guilty of.”
Coulter and Marlow saw the media’s “fake news” fixation as the first volley in a new wave of censorship. Coulter noted that as far back as her college days, left-wingers have been itching to impose speech controls, even as they fulminated against the Religious Right for its alleged book-burning impulses.
Another warning sign of the censorship impulse is the Left’s drive to associate Trump, and every media outlet that isn’t relentlessly hostile towards him, with racism and white supremacy, in a bid to de-legitimize those organizations and individuals. Coulter laughed as she quoted herself saying she doesn’t think David Duke really exists, “because I only hear about him every four years when Democrats or the media need to smear a Republican.”
“He could not be a more irrelevant person for an irrelevant organization,” she said of Duke. “I’ve known FBI agents over the years, and they used to tell me, they’d send out agents to infiltrate these Klan meetings, and discover there were more agents than there were Klan members. And David Duke left the Klan 20 years ago! Seriously, is he still alive? This is the craziest boogeyman.”
“They are totally projecting,” Coulter said of the media and its fake news witch hunt. “They have been making up stories, making up hoax hate crimes, many of which I go through in Guilty. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Liberals love to be victims. That’s the thesis of that book, how everybody wants to be a victim.”
“In fact, I should have called it – it’s a point I’ve been making forever that only conservatives seem to grasp – I should have called Guilty ‘You’re Not Black.’ Everybody wants to be an African-American because we do owe African-Americans something,” she mused. “I don’t think creating an entitlement society and destroying the black family was a nice thing to do to them. But still, yes, of course, set-asides, affirmative action, you ought to be able to sue. You notice whenever it’s gays, women, immigrants – whenever they are demanding some special favor that’s a violation of people’s right to associate, they always say, ‘Well, what if this were a black person?’ No, civil rights are for black people! That’s it. That’s the end of the list. It would be great if we could get that a little bit more clarified.”
Marlow asked if anyone in the commentary class has been fired for getting the entire 2016 election wrong, to which Coulter tartly replied: “No, and they should all be.”
“They’re turning into the biggest political comedy shows on TV, all of these alleged serious TV shows,” she chuckled. “Again, it’s not just getting things wrong. They’re putting their finger on the scale, libeling the nominee of one of two major parties in this country. I believe every New York Times op-ed columnist – this is about the time I had to stop reading it, and I’ve been their most loyal reader since law school; I read them every day; I get the enemy playbook delivered right to my front door. I haven’t been able to do it, starting probably whenever the last op-ed columnist wrote the deep think piece on the amazing similarities between Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler. That’s the New York Times!”
She quoted Steve Bannon from an interview in The Hollywood Reporter, in which he described the “alt-right,” which “none of us have ever heard of until this year,” as “primarily composed of apparently 14-year-old boys who so hate political correctness that they go around trolling liberal journalists, so they can get themselves called racists, anti-Semitic, sexist, Islamophobic, whatever it is. That’s like a score for them, not because they are any of these things, but because they so hate political correctness.”
Coulter thought the Left’s relentless effort to demonize everyone it disagrees with, and delegitimize competing arguments instead of engaging them, was one reason the media lost so much credibility with the voters who gave it such a big surprise in 2016.
“There’s this weird phenomenon going on where they describe taking a normal commonsense position – for example, hearing about American workers wanting to protect the country. ‘Well, that’s racist! That’s anti-Semitic!’ People must be sitting backing thinking, ‘Well, then I must be a racist and anti-Semite, because I like those ideas.’ If they’re going to label good ideas, put hateful labels on them, people are going to check out.”
Coulter talked about how that loss of media credibility hinders their ability to cover a truly serious story, like the potential conflicts of interest for Trump and his family.
“This is the problem with having a media that isn’t acting like a media,” she said. “I actually think there are issues here, and I don’t know the answer, for example, to what he should do with his businesses. I think a normal person looks at that and thinks, ‘Yeah, that is a problem, you’re going to end up with a Clinton Cash problem if he’s still running these businesses. But he’s a sui generis. There’s no president like him that’s coming to office, running an enormous international business. So it’s a new case. It does need to be considered seriously. He can’t hire his children, that’s madness. But none of the same points can be made by people who actually care about Trump and want his Administration to succeed.”
“I was just watching some TV on this today, you have all the slanders, and then they throw in something about the conflicts of interest with his business. Well, at that point in the interview, I’ve already decided that the interviewee is a lunatic, and so I think a normal person isn’t paying attention to that. But these are issues, they do need to be looked at seriously. It may be that his kids, I don’t know if they could – they may have to sell off a lot of the businesses, or at least it’s got to all be turned over to them, and even then there are problems. These are serious issues, but because we don’t have a serious media – they’re busy talking about fat-shaming Miss Universe. An entire week, I would say two weeks of a presidential campaign were expended on the woman who drove the getaway car or had sex on camera, and Trump’s alleged fat-shaming of her. That’s our media,” she said with disgust.
Marlow asked Coulter about her interest in writing mystery fiction, something she had anticipated doing full-time if Trump lost the election, as a way to “console myself if America was finished on November 8.”
“I was going to write mysteries, stop giving speeches, get some beagles,” she recalled. “One of the things I was realizing recently: You know, that actually sounded really fun.”
While Coulter looked forward to a happy holiday season for herself and Trump supporters, she expected the Republican Establishment and NeverTrump media would have less to be thankful for.
Marlow asked her, “What do you think happens to that crowd, that sort of establishment conservative crowd, the AEIs of the world – though there are a couple of good people over there – and the National Reviews of the world, of course couple of good people over there too. I’m saying that the people who, by and large, are not really going to have a seat at the table during the Trump Administration, and clearly don’t have a lot of friends on the Left either. What do they do, the Washington conservative establishment?”
“I think it’s just got to be burned to the ground,” Coulter replied. “It’s the only hope for the country.”
“I used to kind of throw the consultants, the pollsters, everyone who lives in Washington basically, in the same class with the plutocrats, but spending time on my vacation with plutocrats – plutocrats aren’t so bad. They’re just busy,” she said. “Mike Murphy came to them and said, ‘No, if you want less regulation and less trial lawyers destroying businesses, and so on and so forth, you must donate. We need a million dollars for Jeb-Exclamation-Point’ And the plutocrats are busy. They figure Mike Murphy must know what he’s talking about because he’s expensive. Last Christmas, they were wandering around dazed, jaws dropping open at all these parties, saying ‘I don’t understand it, we were all for Jeb, but the Hispanic help is all for Trump!’ I love that so much.”
Coulter thought plutocrats who had “even an ounce of patriotism” would be happy with Trump, while the consultant class in Washington went crazy, a process she admitted she enjoyed watching.
“They’re the ones who care more about their livelihoods, their careers, their TV gigs than the country,” she declared.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Listen to the full audio of Coulter’s interview above.
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