Ann Coulter Is Bringing Her Racist Speech to Berkeley Wednesday Night

Ann Coulter, white nationalist provocateur, will be at University of California, Berkeley Wednesday night to talk about the dangers of non-white immigration in a speech she calls “Adios, America!”

Berkeley College Republicans, the organization that invited Coulter to speak, advertise on their website in bold, large type that the speaker will address “the dangers of mass immigration.” However, the event page fails to mention that Coulter’s immigration ideology shifts widely based on skin tone. In a 2007 op-ed, she wrote:

“In 1960, whites were 90 percent of the country. The Census Bureau recently estimated that whites already account for less than two-thirds of the population and will be a minority by 2050. Other estimates put that day much sooner.”

“One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been. If this sort of drastic change were legally imposed on any group other than white Americans, it would be called genocide. Yet whites are called racists merely for mentioning the fact that current immigration law is intentionally designed to reduce their percentage in the population.”

Coulter continues:

“If liberals think Iraqis are genetically incapable of pulling off even the most rudimentary form of democracy, why do they believe 50 million Mexicans will magically become good Americans, imbued in the nation’s history and culture, upon crossing the Rio Grande? Maybe we should dunk Iraqis in the Rio and see what happens.”

This is not the first time Coulter has attempted to share her rhetoric with students at the UC Berkeley campus. She was compelled to withdraw from an appearance in April 2017 due to safety concerns. It was just a little more than two months before then that protesters erupted at the prospect of a Milo Yiannopoulos speech about none other than illegal immigrants — it was reported that he planned to publicly name undocumented students and push for federal de-funding of sanctuary campuses.

As a result, both have accused the campus and people of Berkeley of being hypocrites in their interpretation of “free speech.” We’ve covered at length how public reaction to unpopular opinion is not an infringement on the First Amendment, that in fact it is a direct exercise of that right, but acknowledgment of documented and established fact is an unfortunate casualty of the Trump administration.

Ann Coulter is scheduled to speak at University of California, Berkeley on Wednesday, November 20, 2019. Her talk is centered around her non-white anti-immigration views. Photo by Gage Skidmore/Flickr.

Coulter is scheduled to speak at Wheeler Hall at 9 p.m. with tickets ranging from $15 to $75 per head for the opportunity to be in the same room with the far-right celeb as she spews rhetoric we can all get for free in her pundit appearances and Twitter tirades. It is not a stretch or an ethical bias to call Coulter out as a racist — she makes the connection unavoidable with her long, consistent and public history of racist commentary and dangerously racist ideology.

She called crying children separated from parents at the border “child actors.” She’s been a proponent of re-establishing certain voting requirements, including the “literacy test” and “poll tax” — in other words, she’d be quite happy with a return to Jim Crow laws.

If you’re still on the fence about just how racist Coulter unabashedly is, you can check out her Sept. 11 blog post about how “mass incarceration saved black America.”

I rest my case.

Berkeley may not be the place it once was, where history was written fighting for what was right — today’s Berkeley would be hardly recognizable to Mario Savio. But, even in its diluted form, Berkeley has not yet devolved into a space where this level of hate is easily tolerated.

Several groups have vowed to protest her presence at UC Berkeley Wednesday night. City and campus police have vowed to keep the peace and to protect Coulter from her objectors. Nobody wants to see violence or real destruction, but if her appearance and the words she uses incites such a reaction, it is fair to question whether her expression is actually protected by the First Amendment, remembering that hate speech is not.

To the good people who will be out there protesting tonight: Please stay safe — don’t get hurt and don’t hurt anyone else, and thank you for rising up on the right side of history.