Q&A: Ann Coulter convicts the ‘Guilty’

Editor’s note: WND news editor Drew Zahn sat down to interview best-selling author and columnist extraordinaire Ann Coulter just before release of her latest book, “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America.”

Question: The title of your book is “Guilty,” which leads to the natural question, “Who is guilty, and what are they guilty of doing?”

Coulter: Liberals. Liberals in every form and variety are guilty of being fake victims in order to change the world; and in the process, they create real victims. They prey on Americans’ sense of decency and kindness. You see someone screaming and wailing about some precious feeling of his that’s been violated, and most Americans have a charitable and kind instinct to help the afflicted. They’re not used to the crocodile tears of the liberals, so it works because Americans are kind people. But in the meantime, it creates real victims: like the children of single mothers, like aborted babies, like Sarah Palin and her extended family, like George Bush, [who is] endlessly lied about. Some of these are stand-ins for the Republican Party, for ideas generally. It’s a never-ending perpetual victim creation machine, all enabled by this game of liberals pretending to be victims themselves.

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Q: How have liberals painted themselves as victims?

A: One example is single mothers. I go through that in chapter two, about how single mothers are always described as being put-upon, and everyone’s mean to single mothers. I go through a list of books on “Unsung Heroes: Single Mothers” – one after another with the same title. There are more books on the heroism of single mothers than there are books on the heroism of the U.S. Marines.

At the beginning of the chapter I collect a series of newspaper articles about this or that disaster, crisis, malady, or hurricane that “hits single mothers hardest.” From hurricanes to shift work to the recession to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the story line is always, “Single mothers hit hardest.” And meanwhile, as we know, it is single mothers who are damaging their own children’s lives, creating generation after generation who are more likely to be addicted to drugs, to commit crime, to be juvenile delinquents, to rape, to get pregnant out of wedlock themselves, to be divorced. They are foisting not only the worst lottery ticket you could buy your child (that is what a single mother is buying her child) but also foisting this rash of social problems on all of society. And yet, even in Christian churches that are not Jesse Jackson’s churches, you hear Christian ministers talking, “Aw, the single mother,” as if it’s the personification of selfless virtue. We’re not living in Dickensian England anymore: we don’t have single mothers because the men are dropping in industrial accidents or of cholera or leprosy. We have single mothers because more than a million women a year choose to have babies out of wedlock.

Q: So these women are being portrayed as the victims, but the real victims in this case may be the children from these families?

A: And, secondarily, all of society as we get mugged and raped by these children. Obviously this isn’t a static problem: each year you have a new set of teenage runaways, you have a new set of teenage pregnancies, you have a new set of unwed mothers having more illegitimate babies. No matter when and how and who takes the studies, the statistics are pretty grim on the life chances of an illegitimate child.

This wasn’t an accident that happened. This was a plan of the left. It has been a plan since the ’60s. They hate the nuclear family. They’ve never understood the purpose of marriage. They’ve used the courts, the government, the media to create more children born without married parents, and it’s been a disaster for the children, for society – and they promote their ideas on the [pretense] of victimhood.

Q: In your book you write, “Liberals seem to have hit upon a reverse Christ story as their belief system. He suffered and died for our sins; liberals make the rest of us suffer for sins they didn’t commit.” What did you mean by that?

A: The reason this fake victimhood works in America is that it is still – in founding, in idea, and still in a slight majority demographically – a Christian nation. With that sensibility you do have liberals pretending to be Christlike, but one thing I think worth remembering about the real Christ is that he never claimed to be a victim. He didn’t go to Pontius Pilate and say, “Pontius Pilate is oppressing me.”

In fact, the [real] victims in this endless graveyard of victims being created by liberals never get recognized as victims. Does George Bush get recognized as a victim? No, of course not, nor would he want to be, but, wow, there’s been a lot of [character] assassination movies and books about him. Wow, there have been a lot of attacks on him and lies. If Republicans treated any Democrat the way Democrats have treated George Bush, I think they might have something to that “Republican attack machine.” But until then, it’s pretty apocryphal.

Q: It’s been said of your book that it comes “just in time to crash Obama’s inauguration.” How does this book specifically address the times and issues Americans are facing today?

A: Obama is our next president, and it’s pretty big and important [to recognize] how he’s perceived and portrayed and how he became our next president. We just finished this election where the media anointed the next leader of the free world. And it anointed [the loser], which was the media’s single most important task: just as the O.J. case was lost when the jury was picked, the last presidential election was lost when the Republican nominee was picked. And everything about how everything is perceived in the world – whether it’s the Westminster Dog Show or the leader of the free world in difficult times – is a function of how the media reports. The media is everything; so to learn their dirty little tricks, and to learn how their dirty little tricks gave us this president to begin with, is important.

Q: What do you hope readers will take away from reading this book? What kind of impact do you hope this book will have on culture?

A: I hope that fake victims will be looked at with a little more skepticism. Most Americans are normal, lovely, decent people, and they hear these wails of a liberal claiming, “Offended! Offended!” and their reaction is to provide comfort to the afflicted. I want them to start noticing that these are crocodile tears. This is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. These people pretend to be victims in order to advance, attack, and oppress others. I want that to start being recognizable. It is not good for the fake victim, and it is certainly not good for society at large to have all these marauding fake victims around.

Q: What would you say to critics who are chomping at the bit, waiting to say you’re wrong?

A: Well, no, they’re wrong. It’s a little hard to do that because we never know what the criticism is going to be. Because liberals don’t read, usually it’s just one or two lines lifted from the book, twisted beyond all recognition. They always capture the viciousness but generally drop the humor, and that will come to be the stand-in for the entire book, but nobody ever knows what it’s going to be. I send galleys of the book out to a few of my smart friends – including a couple liberals – and ask them to read it and attack the book and tell me what the critics are going to focus on. It’s a game of Where’s Waldo? Nobody’s ever been able to guess. Certainly no one suspected it was going to be the Jersey girls in “Godless.” Everyone thought it would be Joe McCarthy in “Treason,” but no. It’s never what you think it’s going to be, so it’s hard to respond anticipatorily. And for critics to just say, “You’re wrong,” well, no, I think I’m right, and the reasons therefore are contained between the covers of the book.

Q: You’ve brought up this issue of false victimization. What is the solution?

A: For people to laugh – to hoot with laughter – when they see fake victims. I want people to start seeing it and thinking in these terms and noticing how causes are advanced on the backs of fake victims.

I start the book off with Hillary Clinton begging for more federal money for New York on the back of a son of a fireman who allegedly rushed to Ground Zero after the 9-11 attacks and put in 16-hour days, worked tirelessly to save us, to save New Yorkers, and then developed a rare pulmonary disease and died the very day of President Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address. Hillary dramatically brings out the son of the officer who “died after rushing to Ground Zero the day of the attack,” brings out Officer Cesar Borja’s son to the State of the Union address. It’s a huge production, there are news articles all over, she’s publishing her letter to the president to please give New York City more money to “help those who helped us in our hour of need.” And then, of course, the whole story turned out to be a hoax. Officer Borja did not rush to Ground Zero on 9-11; he got there sometime in late December 2001. He was directing traffic, he wasn’t a volunteer; this was his job. He was working 16-hour days to increase his pension – nothing dishonorable – but we’re constantly getting the stories of fake victims. New York City got its money, and the Daily News that had been promoting these stories defended itself, saying, “Well, we never specifically said that officer Borja rushed to Ground Zero the day of 9-11; we just said eventually he rushed there.” The end of December – he rushed there.

Q: So you’re saying that while the liberals are fraudulently plucking our heart strings, you’re hoping that Americans will start plucking their own brain strings?

A: Yes, I think recognition of the phenomenon [is important]. There is a lovely instinct in Americans, and I certainly don’t want to discourage it: Americans are the most charitable people in the history of the universe. Particularly religious and conservative Americans, no matter how much they have overall, are incredibly giving and Christian in their outlook toward the world. Of course, I’m not trying to discourage that, but liberals are taking advantage of that very charitable impulse to hoodwink us, to hoodwink the world, to change policy and to victimize and oppress and create genuine victims.

Q: What else can you tell us about the book?

A: One little thing: We crashed the book to get it out in time – this happens whenever you are writing about recent events. The book is not exactly on the election, but the election was used for examples on eternal truths about liberals and the media. Therefore, there are a few typographical errors that will be corrected in the second printing, so you definitely want to get the first printing, because it will be like one of those stamps with the airplane upside down.

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