It cannot be a coincidence that within three weeks of the publication of In Trump -- which I electronically scheduled weeks earlier to drop into my Kindle on the late August release day -- the billionaire maverick candidate rose slightly but significantly in the polls, and according to some, even surpassed the now-ailing Hillary Clinton.
In a nutshell, there is not much shocking to say about this book. It is vintage, caustic, uproarious Coulter, who (alone among American commentators) has been fiercely defending Trump since the start of his presidential campaign, while contradicting and correcting the mainstream and conservative press regularly. It's now to the point that many of her fans -- like me -- rarely bother to tune in to the conventional media for news about American presidential politics. We wait anxiously for her weekly columns.
Written more quickly -- and therefore with relatively fewer citations than she is used to using -- in order to beat the November election, In Trump will educate and entertain Coulter fans, but her enemies, predictably, already think they are tasting blood. There is a lot of the usual name-calling and dismissing of Coulter: she is racist, past her best-before date, unimportant, unpopular and simply wrong. Funny how her detractors virtually never offer hard facts to contradict her work, unlike what she does constantly and with devastating effect with respect to their work.
In In Trump, as in her last book -- another New York Times Best Seller, Adios America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole -- she points a laser focus at the facts and figures of US immigration policies and their negative results since Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration act -- a law which has attracted an endless stream of third world immigrants, known collectively as a new Democratic voting bloc -- and particularly since 9/11. These topics are comprehensively, depressingly, even frighteningly, detailed in Adios America. A lawyer with a discerning eye for the most negative impacts of policies and lawbreaking, Coulter relates in both books the violent, culturally destructive, and unfairly -- if not illegally -- expensive consequences of both legal and illegal immigration.
From 2001, some two million Muslims have entered the country legally. Coulter and Trump have their fingers squarely on the pulse of that vast part of the American nation that, rationally, does not want so many invited Muslims living inside the US borders. Superficially, it may sound racist to not want unlimited Muslim immigration, but Coulter -- who is no more racist than Harper Lee -- explains it this way: "Billions of people don't live in America. We can admit them or not admit them for any reason we choose."
Feigning offence at such ideas, the Washington Post's Philip Bump once intoned: there is, "in fact, no reliable evidence that a large percentage of Muslims in the United States... support doing harm to the country or plan to commit acts of violence". Retorts Coulter: "There's evidence that some of them do. Why do we need to take that risk?... We want remarkable immigrants, not immigrants whose main selling point is 'hasn't gunned down fifty people in a gay nightclub yet.' Anyone with a brain cell could see that admitting Muslim refugees increased the odds of a terrorist attack in a way that admitting white Western Europeans would not."
About the unknown number of non-Muslim illegals, who have trekked, stowed away and slithered across the US-Mexican border, Coulter is unmoved by their fake righteousness and sob stories. Settling into California and increasing numbers of other unsuspecting states and communities -- where in terms of taxes they pay, for obvious reasons, only the sales variety -- these uninvited non-Americans are costing the humble American taxpayer untold billions.
Who is to blame? Coulter notes there is no shortage of elected and bureaucrat culprits, but the greatest fault probably lies with the lying, lazy press. "Islam's PR Agency: The American Media," is the title of chapter ten. Coulter extensively and audaciously covered this topic in her 2003 NYT Bestseller, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right. For those familiar with this latter work, Coulter's calling the media a PR agency for Islam is neither a surprise nor, for once, an exaggeration.
In In Trump, as well as many recent columns, Coulter pinpoints dozens if not hundreds -- no doubt representing a total thousands -- of instances where the press, even some of the normally conservative kind, protect, hide and, maybe most disingenuously of all, downplay the ethnic and religious identity of terrorists. This happens, she points out, not only in the US but in many other developed countries as well, all with a supposedly energetic and aggressive free press. Why is this type of reporting wrong? Obviously, and according to Coulter, because it is deceptive and misleading, an immoral and potentially dangerous attempt to fool Average Joe and Jane Public into believing that increasing local Islamic terrorism is a myth.
This is how chapter 10 begins: "One thing the guys who planned 9/11 never expected was that Muslims would become a protected class in America. They must have thought, 'Boy are we going to be hated!' Instead, since that attack, we've admitted another two million Muslims, we almost built a mosque at Ground Zero, colleges are teaching classes on 'Islamophobia'... and the US State
Department tells Muslim countries, 'We are pleased to present you with this check for 100 mosques.'
"Importing millions of immigrants whose religion teaches them we are Satan -- when we don't have to take any -- [is] the new Selma," a reference to the imperative and long over-due voting and civil rights movement of the 1960s. "We are supposed to accept that Islamic terrorism... [is] just part of life, a wonderful slice of the vibrant fabric of America. If you disagree, you [are] a racist."
After the murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 by a Muslim army major screaming "Allahu Akbar," President Obama told citizens not to "jump to conclusions," in other words, not to conclude automatically that the violence was an act of Islamic terrorism. Soon after, on "Meet the Press," army chief of staff General George Casey stated: "As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that is worse." That must have been comforting to the families of the victims.
The night of the December 2015 San Bernardino attack, one of a dozen major Islamic terrorist assaults since 9/11, news reporters were in their element. Those from ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox News, were reminiscing about some solo white male psychopathic murderers, who clearly belonged, says Coulter, "in straightjackets" inside locked state mental hospitals. Instead, the press should have been informing readers and listeners that the attack was done by two people, in fact two Muslims.
"The media threw everybody off the scent with a report from the Los Angeles Times claiming that one of the perpetrators had gotten into an argument with someone at the community centre and stormed back twenty minutes later, guns blazing. This was an incredibly important detail to be dropped into the news cycle, because it clearly pointed to workplace violence. Except, apparently, it wasn't true -- which the Times discreetly admitted a month later.
"It was just invented by some anonymous law enforcement official, passed on to the newspaper, and injected into the breaking news coverage. This prevented virtually every analyst on TV from suggesting the attack was terrorism for at least another twenty-four hours."
The press uses other tricks to divert attention from the widespread problems of immigrant welfare fraud and violence, violence which includes but is not limited to: clitorectomies, honour killings, child rapes, gang brutality and just plain rampant physical abuse in families. Besides ignoring the data that tell these bureaucratic and horror tales -- data Coulter seems to have no problem finding -- the mainstream press has a host of cute sleight-of-hand tricks, like referring to third-world-culture-clinging-second-generation-non-English-speaking-immigrant criminals and terrorists as "home grown" and "American." Her book is full of these examples.
Getting back to Trump, he is the only politician in modern American history to actually speak publicly and practically about solving immigration problems, which only non-elitists seem to identify as critical. Coulter, for some reason, is the only American political writer to document and cheer on Trump's attractiveness to the forgotten classes. It is painful to watch old favourites like Charles Krauthammer, Meagan Kelly and the Bushes condemning Trump and totally missing the major points, including that he is the 2016 Republican candidate. He has a lower chance of winning when so many well-known talking heads, so many from his own party, can't stop publicly hating him. How are they going to react when Trump wins? I am sure he will forgive them. Will they forgive him, or themselves?
Predictably, Coulter is being pulverized without mercy by the same liberal press she has denounced decisively and ferociously for about two decades, but she expected that reaction, no doubt. If possible, the criticism is almost over-the top: at least one commentator has accused Coulter of being hugely embarrassed and ashamed because Trump has retreated on some of his immigration pronouncements, as if she is developmentally slow, too slow to predict he might alter his statements. Yes, she is disappointed: “I think this is a mistake. It sounds like it’s coming from consultants,” Coulter said on the MSNBC program "Hardball" with Chris Matthews. Does she sound ashamed and embarrassed? She knows this is politics, forever fluid. Trump was never going to follow her advice stringently. And whatever else is going on in her wickedly intelligent head, what she really wants, besides helping to save her great country, is to sell books.
As of writing, In Trump We Trust is already 17th on the NYT Bestsellers List, only ten below
Crisis of Character, a book about scandalous behaviour by the Clintons, written by one of their own secret service agents. Interestingly, a version of that latter book has already been produced, by Coulter almost 20 years ago. It was her first, and her first NYT bestseller, written in 1998. It is called High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton. In those days I had no Kindle, which is fortunate, because ten years later Ann Coulter herself signed my copy.
As with most books on Lynne Like's, you can get this on Amazon.ca.
I'm rather shocked that a former B'nai Brith Jewish Tribune reporter would be promoting Ann Coulter, a vicious and well documented anti-Semite.
ReplyDeleteYou clearly do not know her at all. That's the name-calling I discuss in the review, without any substantiation. Why don't you at least give your name?
ReplyDelete