Bigots don’t necessarily take vows of poverty

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Screenshot: Fusion TV

Ann Coulter is one of those right wing demagogues with a high public profile who attracts a strange sort of – almost what you’d call a defense of her – that she’s just in it for the money! There’s a belief among many liberals that because she lives a cosmopolitan life split between New York City, Palm Beach FL, and Los Angeles (according to available bios) and is known to have gay friends and date liberal men, that she doesn’t really believe all that nasty stuff she espouses in numerous books, articles, speeches, and TV appearances.

But if you watch Coulter in a recent interview on the Fusion network with Jorge Ramos, it’s difficult to conclude that she’s acting. She refused to accept the offer of a hug a young woman who was an undocumented immigrant and compared Mexican immigrants to ISIS terrorists.

At another point in the appearance, Fusion host Jorge Ramos asked Coulter whether she really believed that immigrants were more dangerous to Americans than the Islamic State terrorist group.

“I have a little tip,” Coulter said. “If you don’t want to be killed by ISIS, don’t go to Syria. If you don’t want to be killed by a Mexican, there’s nothing I can tell you.”

Ramos said “most immigrants are not terrorists nor criminals” and asked Coulter whether she thought people were “biologically predisposed to commit crimes.”

“No, I think there are cultures that are obviously deficient and if they weren’t deficient you wouldn’t be sitting in America interviewing me, I’d be sitting in Mexico,” Coulter said to Ramos. “You fled that culture because it is a — there are a lot of problems with that culture.

“Hopefully it can be changed but we can share our culture with other nations without bringing all of their people here,” Coulter continued. “When you bring the people here you bring those cultures here. That includes honor killings. It includes uncles raping their nieces. It includes dumping litter all over. It includes not paying your taxes. It includes paying bribes to government officials. That isn’t our culture.”

This isn’t acting, in my estimation. Coulter is expressing a carefully thought out viewpoint. And yes, she is a skilled con artist who has separated money from millions of credulous wingnuts (for whom she likely has zero respect) for nearly two decades, having risen to fame in the late 90s as an attacker of the Clintons.

I don’t understand why some people cling to this weird insistence that one can either be a reactionary bigot or a grifter, but not both. Back in 2010, Arizona reporters and pundits pooh-poohed allegations that then AZ Senator Russell Pearce had collaborated with ALEC and private prisons in the formation of SB1070. They treated the reports as spurious simply based on their experience of Russell Pearce as a “true believer” in the anti-immigrant cause. As if an awful person like Russell Pearce wouldn’t also grift. Why not? Awful people are awful and who would be more likely to con you than an awful person? Possibly they have convinced themselves that they are doing their grifting toward a worthy cause, which makes them no less awful.

My guess is that Americans have seen too many movies about hard-bitten con artists with secret hearts of gold. That might be a reasonable explanation for why the likes of Joe Arpaio and Sarah Palin continue to have careers.