Thanks to Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, Ann Coulter is now the author of nine consecutive New York Times bestsellers. And if that's not some kind of record, I don't know what is. Moreover, unlike the Clintons, the erudite author has written all of her books without a team of ghost-writers.
In Mugged, we learn that Republicans fight racism and Democrats fight imaginary racism after the real battles have been won. For Coulter reminds us that: Republicans opposed slavery, Democrats protected slave owners; Republicans supported anti-lynching laws, Democrats protected lynching mobs, and so on. Or basically, key historical events unionised history teachers don't teach pupils.
Turning to big-picture history then, the election of America's first half-black president wasn't as revolutionary as MSNBC likes to imagine. It certainly didn't involve a war. Indeed, the real battles were won decades earlier. And let's face it: Bush 43's team was already dominated by minority leaders, including US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Or as Julia Gillard stated in 2005, "Dr Rice is a single, childless, black woman and she is the most powerful woman in the world"! (The Australian, 25 January).
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Even the African-American Civil Rights Movement was a day late and a dollar short, thanks to Democrats. As Coulter notes: After defeating slavery, crushing lynching mobs, and demanding integration of the military in civil services, Republicans tried to break down more racial barriers through the Civil Rights Act of 1957, an act opposed and then watered down by the Democratic Party. And although some Democrats finally supported the famous Civil Rights Act of 1964, Republicans voted in far greater numbers for it.
It's confronting history. Yet, today, Democrats are selective when it comes to what we can and can't talk about, opting to hide their side's racist past. Or as Coulter also reminds us (p.183): "The most beloved Democratic president in the liberal firmament is Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he nominated a former Klan member to the Supreme Court. But the left's secular religion holds that FDR was the greatest president who ever breathed, so that nasty business with the Klan was swept under the rug."
Only a media-approved Democrat could get away with sending a segregated army to fight Hitler, one of many examples of blatant hypocrisy. However self-praising Democrats just didn't give us the Ku Klux Klan, among many other race-based groups. As recently as 201o, one Bill Clinton was still making excuses for Democrat Bob Byrd, the former KKK "kleagle" (recruiter) and star Democrat (with fifty-one years in the Senate to prove it).
There are also many documented fake hate crimes in Mugged (too many to cover in this review). Needless to say, choreographed events are part of a media-approved cottage industry, and give predominately white left-liberal thinkers an excuse to present themselves as braver-then-brave heroes. And, why not? Why talk about Bill Clinton's "role model" and "mentor" hero, the segregationist Democrat J. William Fulbright, when one can pretend (as the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing did) that Obama was going to be assassinated early on?
Coulter's position: Since the seventies, Democrats have been very good at burying their sins, fighting fake hate crimes, patronising blacks through affirmative action experiments, falsely accusing Republicans of racism, and redefining (and therefore undermining) civil rights to include upper-middleclass white feminists.
In the early days, Democrats protected lynching mobs. Now African-Americans run the risk of being patronised to death. Or being killed by cosmetic multiculturalism. For highbrow leftists believe in releasing guilty-as-hell black murderers into black-majority neighbourhoods because the justice system is allegedly racist. And do-gooders just adore reserving seats for media-approved minorities in medical schools even after affirmative action graduates butcher their subjects (as Doctor Chavis's patients found out).
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Coulter's evidence-based case is striking, but more importantly readable in a world full of wishy-washy books. I was most interested in how the Left's love of illegal immigration is hurting unemployed African-Americans (another symptom of do-gooder multiculturalism), but also how although blacks tend to vote like white Democrats they sound more like Republicans on many social issues (from traditional marriage to border security). Mugged, after all, is written by one real person, with a detective's mind.
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