If I had any doubts about the need for this book, all I had to do was open up my morning paper and see the syndicated column by Leonard Pitts - headline teased to the front page - about the sighting of a "Don't Re-Nig" bumper sticker.
Pitts, who bravely battles racism every day whether he needs to or not, quotes a woman he doesn't name who says she saw such a bumper sticker, and then uses it to launch an entire column on pervasive Republican racism. No effort to determine if it was true, it's second or third-hand by the time it gets to you the reader, but if it allows to let liberals put the N word in play in the service of Obama's reelection, who cares?
And that's what this book is about: Racial demagoguery, which Ann Coulter has touched upon frequently but focuses on here. Her overarching theme is the deterioration of both race relations and black fortunes in the country starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her premise is threefold:
First: Democrats, after having been the party propping up segregation for decades, cleverly substituted themselves as the party of racial equality after most progress in that field had actually been made by Republicans. Desegregating the military? Eisenhower. Sending troops to desegregate schools in Little Rock? Eisenhower. Civil rights bills in Congress in 1957 and the early 1960s? Supported more by Republicans than by Democrats. Finally pushing through real desegregation across the South? Nixon. Segregationists? All Democrats, including some liberal ones, with a lot more liberals around the country condoning it for partisan reasons: they needed that Solid South on Election Day and in Congress.
Blacks around 1960, she says, were beginning to follow the same trail immigrant groups had, and it was only a question of time before they'd catch up.
Second: The institutionalization of white liberal guilt around the same time, as reflected in news coverage and politics, helped destroy inner cities and the black family and lead to skyrocketing crime rates, as attempts to crack down on black crime were labelled "racist".
Third: The 1994 O.J. Simpson trial derailed the white liberal guilt train, as no one could avoid noticing someone apparently guilty of two savage murders had been acquitted on racial grounds.
And a lot of the most sensational cases of racial demagoguery - unwarranted prosecutions of cops who had shot black criminals, victimization hoaxes and the like, cases she details extensively here - had taken place in the years immediately preceding it. After that, it was like the nation woke up. But this progress was undone by election of Barack Obama. "The postracial president, who was supposed to allow the country to move past race, mau-maued white America from day one of his campaign."
Coulter is careful not to point the finger at black people much, with a few deserved exceptions like Al Sharpton and Alton Maddox, the ultimately-disbarred lawyer in several of the most notorious cases including Tawana Brawley and Howard Beach.
Generally, she's sympathizing with the regular folks in the black community, the primary victims of crimes unleashed by a system that suddenly didn't know how it felt about arresting and jailing black thugs. She notes many blacks sympathized with the forces of law and order - for the same reasons white people do - and stunningly, tended to support Bernie Goetz, the white man whose shooting of four young black muggers on a New York City subway in the 1980s was a cause celebre. Coulter quotes interviews done at the muggers' own housing project with neighbors, people who knew them, some who even said they liked them, but knew they had it coming. Translation: black NYC residents didn't see the muggers as beleaguered fellow people of color. They saw them, properly, as muggers.
She pounds much more heavily on the white liberals who manipulate these issues, whose bad social policies did so much damage, and who are never made to own up to it as a compliant media sweeps under the rug their errors - their rushes to judgment in racially charged cases later shown to be unfounded.
And meanwhile some real hate crimes are committed by people whipped up by a media frenzy.
She lays the blame for the Rodney King riots, which killed more than 50 people nationally, squarely at the feet of the LA television station that cut the initial 13 seconds of the beating tape from the tape it then ran hundreds of times on the air - the part showing King failing to be subdued by not one by two Tasings, a big man continuing to come at police with a frenzy that both they and his own friends attributed to angel dust, which makes people insane, violent and difficult to subdue. Police, jurors and even liberal journalists who saw the complete tape and had it put in context at trial, ended up seeing things the same way the police at the scene did - that this was the least violent and most legal way to subdue a dangerously out of control man. The acquittal of the cops was proper and just.
Like any Ann Coulter book, the writing is half the fun. She doesn't write for dumb people. Just on principle, I like any book where the expression "mau-maued" gets used even once. Every page is like that.
This book couldn't be timelier. Keep it up, Ann. They'll scream that it's all lies, but those of us who read the thousand or so footnotes know it's not. Illegitimi non carborundum!
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Top reviews from other countries
Stevie D
Get it if you're already here.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 21, 2022zoink
The UK desparately needs its own Ann Coulter to question some of the absolute garbage our lock-step media organisations pump out
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 11, 2017