Far-right commentator and informal Donald Trump immigration adviser Ann Coulter joined Florida radio host Joyce Kaufman yesterday to discuss the media coverage of recent violent white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, claiming that the media had been unfairly “leaping to conclusions” about participants.
Coulter insisted that the media has been dishonestly portraying the white nationalists who gathered in Charlottesville as violent, when they could have just been “little old ladies” hoping to listen to “Civil War buffs” speak about Robert E. Lee. She also complained that people were too quick to assume that a car attack that left a counter-protester dead was white supremacist terrorism when it could have been done “accidentally.”
Coulter complained that “the left, the media and elected Republicans are very quick to discern motives in some cases, but not in others.”
At Saturday’s Unite the Right rally, she claimed, “for all we know, there were little old ladies who don’t care anything about race” and “the speakers could have been civil war buffs” speaking about a Robert E. Lee statue but “we don’t know because they weren’t allowed to speak” because the rally was broken up early in the day.
In fact, we know exactly who the speakers were set to be: not “Civil War buffs,” but avowed white supremacists and neo-Nazis protesting the removal of a Lee statue while protected by a “whites only” motorcycle gang.
Coulter also claimed that the media and elected officials have been too quick to jump to conclusions about James Alex Fields, the man who drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters, killing one, saying that “he could have done it accidentally.”
While Coulter was not happy with how much of the conservative media had covered the events in Charlottesville, she noted approvingly that “everyone seems to dislike Richard Spencer,” whom she called “apparently a gay showboater who just wants lots of media attention.” As Jared noted earlier today, far-right media figures have been increasingly distancing themselves from Spencer, an early leader of the white nationalist Alt-Right, in an attempt to insulate themselves against accusations of extremism.
