Fact-Checking Ann Coulter

I often support right-wing pundits who are widely considered to be thoughtless radicals. It is a coincidence of perception; I don't support them because they are considered thoughtless radicals, but because I judge them to be inaccurately considered thoughtless radicals.

One such pundit is Ann Coulter. She says plenty of things that are inflammatory, so many people who are passingly aware of her work consider here solely inflammatory. This is not so. She says inflammatory things because many of her right-wing readers find them funny. Thus, her rhetoric attracts readers. But behind these shallow-but-effective marketing tricks stand her solid political analysis. She really is a smart political analyst looking for correlations and patterns that she believes have been largely ignored by the press for the past 40 years. Though she and I have approximately zero rhetorical style in common, I do relate to and respect her underlying analytical style.

Here's an example of a Coulter argument. Parts I believe to be ignorable rhetorical marketing are in blue, and her overall thesis is in red.

Every presidential assassin in the history of the nation has been a liberal—or has had no politics at all. None were right-wingers.

Actor/Activist John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, because he was opposed to Lincoln’s Republican war policies. Booth, the Tim Robbins of his day, left a letter with his family explaining his actions, saying he loved “peace more than life” and denouncing Republicans for foisting the war on the South. He may have even used the word “Quagmire” to describe Gettysburg.

Charles J. Guiteau, who shot President James Garfield in 1881, had a long relationship with a utopian commune called tThe [sic] Oneida Community, where free love and communal child-rearing were practiced.

Leon Czolgosz, who killed President William McKinley in 1901, was a socialist and anarchist (okay, that’s redundant) who was captivated upon hearing a speech by radical socialist Emma Goldman the year he shot McKinley. If memory serves, Goldman’s inspirational speech had something to do with “hope” and “change.”

John Shrank, who shot and wounded Teddy Roosevelt in 19212 [sic, correctly: 1912], seemed to have no political beliefs other than a strong opposition to third terms, —which Roosevelt was then campaigning for.

Giuseppe Zangara, who narrowly missed shooting President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, was consumed by envy of the rich and sought to assassinate “all capitalist presidents and kings.” Earlier, Zangara had plotted to kill Republican President Herbert Hoover, because both Hoover and Roosevelt were “capitalists.” Yes, you heard me right: This would-be assassin was to the left of FDR.

Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a stone-cold Communist ever since he read a Communist pamphlet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a teenager. Incensed by racial discrimination in America, he defiantly rode in the black sections of buses as a child. Oswald studied Russian and moved to the U.S.S.R. in his late teens, hoping to avoid the rush. When his application for Soviet citizenship was declined, he slit his wrists. Oswald eventually returned to the U.S. with his Russian wife and child, where he continued to plot an escape to a socialist paradise such as Cuba or Red China.

Ginned up by publications of the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party—, “The Worker” and “The Militant,” respectively—, Oswald first tried to kill Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, a John Bircher. Ten days before shooting at Walker—and missing—Oswald had posed for a photograph holding his guns and copies of the socialist publications denouncing Walker. Some of you will recognize this photo as Randi Rhodes’s screen saver.

Oswald next plotted to kill former Vice President Richard Nixon, but got distracted the day Nixon was in Dallas. He spent the next several months passing out “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets he had written himself. In between “You never take me anywhere!” arguments with his wife, Oswald tried to talk her into helping him hijack a plane to Cuba, so he could fight in defense of the revolution.

When he was arrested for shooting Kennedy, Oswald immediately placed a call to John Abt, lawyer for the American Communist Party, planning to ask Abt to defend him, so he could use his trial to showcase his Marxist beliefs. He never got the chance, thanks to Jack Ruby.

Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Robert Kennedy on June 5, 1968, was a Palestinian extremist angry with Kennedy for his support of Israel. For more on this worldview, see the works of Noam Chomsky.

So how much of this analysis is legit, how much is cherry-picking, and how much is outright crap? Go ahead and put the blue sections in the "outright crap" category right away.

Is there any dispute she was right about Leon Czolgosz, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Giuseppe Zangara being leftists? Or about John Shrank being crazy rather than political?

As a Know-Nothing, a slavery promoter, and a Confederate patriot, John Wilkes Booth was primarily motivated by racism, not peacenik leftism as Coulter subtly suggests. But his neutrality on the left/right scale is not enough to dispute Coulter's overall point: she allows for the possibility of non-leftists as assassins, just not right-wingers.

Charles J. Guiteau was indeed a member of the Oneida Community and it's "complex marriage" free love experiment. That community also performed a kind of ritual birth control that draws a lot of parallels with the sex ed/condoms/abortion policies of the American left, though it was not so high-tech. Guiteau was only awkwardly connected to this society, but I think it's fair evidence of "leftism" by modern standards.

Duran Duran Sirhan Sirhan acted as an Arab Nationalist first and foremost. While it is not necessarily required for one to support Israel to be a right-winger, Americans leftists who support Israel tend to be called "neoconservative" or "Joseph Lieberman". Yes, the mention of Noam Chomsky is a cheap joke, but the anti-Israel parallel is real. He's doesn't really fit into the American left, but he fits even less into the American right.

Perhaps the biggest criticism of Coulter's analysis, though, is how few assassins are on the list. Even Reagan's would-be assassin, John Hinckley, wasn't mentioned (though, by reason of insanity, he doesn't dispute her thesis either). Richard Lawrence, who attempted to shoot Andrew Jackson and got beat with a cane for his trouble, was also motivated by madness rather than politics.

Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola attempted to assassinate President Truman in the name of Puerto Rican independence. This instance, like John Wilkes Booth, has more to do with disputed sovereignty than with political partisanship. Unlike Booth, Collazo and Torresola were considered heroes by Fidel Castro and Cuba's communist government. Also, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party split up in the 60s and many factions joined up with various socialist movements. That suggests that this is a left-wing nationalist movement, though I admit ignorance on much of this history.

Formal postal employee Richard Pavlick was going to ram his bomb-laden car into Kennedy's out of a kind of anti-Catholic paranoia, later saying "Kennedy money bought the White House and the presidency." However, seeing JFK saying goodbye to his wife and two little kids gave him a pang of conscience that prevented the attack, and getting pulled over with explosives still in his car ensured he'd never have another opportunity. He spent most of the rest of his life in mental institutions. I think Pavlick is the origin of the "disgruntled postal worker" stereotype and the related phrase "going postal". File him under C for Crazy.

Samuel Byck believed the US government was conspiring to oppress the poor, and thus hoped to crash a commercial airline into Richard Nixon's White House. It never took off, and Byck committed suicide rather than be brought in. Half crazy half leftist, then?

Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme of the Manson Family cult pulled a gun on President Gerald Ford at point blank range. I don't think she ever intended to hurt anyone, but rather to be sent to jail to be with the rest of the Family. A free love hippy commune clearly qualifies as left-wing. Also, she's the origin of the phrase "squeaky clean" because she had no real connections to the Manson Family murders, just to the murderers.

Frank Corder, who crashed an airplane on the White House lawn during the Clinton Administration, is widely believed to have been just plain drunk. No politics here.

Francisco Duran fired 29 shots toward the White House at a man he believed was President Clinton. It wasn't, and no one was hurt. In court, he argued alternately that he was trying to save the world from aliens and that he was incited by talk show host Chuck Baker (whom Wikipedia describes as "ultraconservative" but who sounds just plain violent by this description). I've gotta concede he's a right-wing nutjob, though he's more nutjob than anything and no kind of right-wing I support.

Former IRS agent Richard Pickett fired shots from a pistol at the White House while it was occupied by George W. Bush. White House security fired back and nearly killed him. He was on 24 different medications at the time and had been in psychiatric care for the 15 previous years. It is considered by many to be a textbook example of a suicide by cop attempt. (Apparently, violent hatred of George W. Bush is so commonplace that Robert Pickett is not considered noteworthy enough to have his own Wikipedia page.)

All in all, I count 5 clear leftists, 6 clear crazies, 2 political neutrals, 1 leftist/crazy tossup, and 1 right-wing/crazy tossup. Obviously and unsurprisingly the most common reason for an assassination attempt is "crazy". But left-wing politics are the second most common reason, and right-wing politics are least common. Coulter's claim that no assassins are right-wingers may not be precisely true, but there is a pattern in that direction. Could there be a reason?

Perhaps a quote from Oscar Collazo (the Puerto Rican Nationalist would-be assassin) sheds some light on the subject. When asked why he targeted Truman, a very pro-Puerto Rico President, Collazo said Truman was "a symbol of the system. You don't attack the man, you attack the system." Murderous right-wing crazies, like Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, obviously had no problem attaching the system directly while ignoring symbolic figureheads. I wonder if the prioritization of symbolism over practical effect corresponds more to left-wing ideologies, whereas giving the practical higher priority than the symbolic fits better with right-wing politics. Or perhaps that's only true when plotting the downfall of institutions.

All in all, though, Ann Coulter's descriptions of the various assassins seems largely (though not entirely) in line with the facts, and her thesis seems statistically true (though, with one semi-right-winger on the list, not universally true). It's an interesting take on things, and leads to a reasonable analysis of reality that might otherwise not be had. Things like this are why I remain a fan, despite her heavy-handed hyperbole.