Politics

Coulter: Al Sharpton ‘may be the only black person who will not really like this book’

Jamie Weinstein Senior Writer
Font Size:

Conservative provocateur Ann Coulter’s back and this time she’s talking black … history.

“The true history of the Democrats and black Americans is one Democrats should be ashamed of,” Coulter told The Daily Caller, discussing her new book, “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama,” to be released Tuesday.

“It has been the Republican Party from the beginning, and to this day [they] are the only ones that treated blacks both as human beings and as adults, with Republicans constantly pushing for civil rights and Democrats flipping only when it became politically — or let me say, electorally — advantageous for them to do so.”

“I tell the true history of civil rights,” she said.

Hers is a history where Republicans fought for civil rights and Democrats were often an obstacle to it. “Not all Democrats were segregationists,” Coulter writes, “but all segregationists were Democrats.”

“The Southern Strategy is utterly contrary to history,” Coulter said. And the segregationist Democrats in the Senate were hardly conservatives in Democrats’ clothing, she argues.

“These were all liberal Democrats; they weren’t conservative Democrats,” she said.

“Out of a dozen of them, maybe two could possibly be conceived of as conservative Democrats. And of course the only one — I’m talking the United States Senate now, where the votes were the most important (it was said that civil rights bills go to the Senate to die) — only one of them ever became a Republican, and that was Strom Thurmond.”

Coulter maintains that Democrats’ reputation as champions of civil rights comes from a biased history written by liberals. The deception, she says, is significantly based on the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was singed into law by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.

“And then claiming all glory for that one civil rights bill that was finally pushed by a Democrat — the 1964 civil rights bill,” she said, “which as all Republicans know, but no one else other than political obsessives … know, was overwhelmingly voted for by Republicans, not overwhelmingly voted for by Democrats. It was about 60 percent of Democrats voting for it, about 80 percent of Republicans.

“And the Republicans who voted against it like [Arizona Sen. Barry] Goldwater did so for purely constitutional reasons — Goldwater had supported every other civil rights bill until then. No, not the Democrats. They loved big government, except in the case of civil rights.”

All of which prompts a question: If the Republican Party has been the true champion of civil rights for African-Americans, why do blacks support the Democratic Party so overwhelmingly?

“It’s like the Jews,” Coulter said, referring to Jewish Americans’ history of voting for Democratic candidates in large numbers. “It’s one of those questions: How high is up? It drives people who pay attention to history crazy on both groups.”

“Most recently, I think most people just don’t know the history,” she added. “I mean, this is lied about night after night on MSNBC. This is lied about in the New York Times, in Newsweek, in Time magazine.”

Will Coulter be debating MSNBC’s liberal hosts on her book tour?

“I wish, I wish, I wish,” she said. “I think the mainstream media’s official position on this book is that it doesn’t exist.”

“I’m going to try to taunt them into it,” she added, noting that MSNBC host and activist Al Sharpton may not be too fond of the book.

“He’s all over this book,” she said. “I think he may be the only black person who will not really like this book. I mean, even Jesse Jackson comes off pretty well in my book.”

Coulter said she came up with the idea for the book in April and rushed to complete it so it could be released before the election.

“This was the fastest book turnaround in world history,” she explains, noting that despite the rushed delivery it has no more typos than your average New York Times story.

As for how the idea for “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama” dawned on Coulter, she said it came to her during the media coverage of the death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin.

“It was a little Trayvon Martin and my obsessive viewing of MSNBC,” she said. “And it just hit me like a thunderbolt: Obama can’t run on his record. His usual campaign strategy is to force his opponent to default by digging up sealed divorce records. Well, he’s not going to get that on [Mitt] Romney. And I realized this fall is going to be non-stop racial demagoguery from white liberals in the media and that is certainly what we are already getting right now.”

And it is white liberals who are the main villains of her book, she explained.

“Definitely mainly white liberals. And it’s always been that way,” Coulter said, arguing that group was principally responsible for what she sees as racial demagoguery. But she also pins blame on President Obama, though principally for his actions before he was elected president.

“My impression before writing the Obama chapters [was] that definitely that Obama doesn’t use the race stuff,” she said. “It’s all done on his behalf by white liberals. And it’s true they do it a lot more. I was surprised when I actually wrote the chapters on Obama how much he does use it.”

After rereading her chapter on President Obama last week when her book finally came from the printer, Coulter says she was inspired to send a copy of it to a certain former Obama political opponent who she thought would appreciate it.

“When I got to those sections about the 2008 campaign, I thought, ‘I should send a book to Hillary [Clinton], signed to her, saying I think she’ll like this book more than my others,'” Coulter said.

President Obama’s secretary of state has yet to respond to Coulter’s gift. To be fair, Coulter says she isn’t quite sure it has arrived yet.

Follow Jamie on Twitter