The Most Important Reason Why Ann Coulter Is the Best Conservative Columnist

This is Week 7 of Season 3 in my new 13 Weeks of Wild Man Writing and Radical Reading Series. Every week day I try to blog about compelling writers, their ideas, and the news cycle’s most interesting headlines.

Midway through this third 13 Weeks writing season now, I’ll restate the objective of this series. I’m trying to organize a collection of the best writers and thinkers today and their most useful ideas. Inspired by James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus’s book America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century-Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come, I’m now describing this new ideological approach as Conservatism 3.0.

Now I move on to a much-procrastinated part of this project: the determination of the Top 10 Conservative Columnists (a list apart from the PJ columnists I edit who I’ve been writing about first since August). Exhibit A for Ann Coulter as the most skilled polemicist of her generation is her new book, collecting her best columns of the last decade, Never Trust a Liberal Over 3-Especially a Republican. (See Susan L.M. Goldberg’s writings on it here, here, and here. I’ll have more blogging on my favorite parts soon.)

Inspired by this compilation, I’ve decided to get caught up on the rest of Coulter’s books:

An Ann Coulter collection, well-guarded. I’ve already read Demonic, which is still my pick for Coulter’s best book. I’m 99 pages into Godless; Guilty, Treason, and Mugged are the next three in line.

At some point I’ll finish a top 10 list of ideas every Conservative 3.0 activist should steal from Coulter. But for now, I’ll lead with the #1 reason why her columns and books hit harder than any other columnist today:

Ann Coulter is not a conservative columnist who happens to be a Christian and a lawyer. She is a Christian trained and practiced as a lawyer who uses a conservative column to expose evil by name. Conservatism is a means to an end: the defeat of all criminal cultures — from street thugs to Islamists to Democrat Marxist liars — who live in rebellion against Western civilization.

Consider Coulter’s column last month about the finale of Breaking Bad which cuts to the essence of why people fall for lying criminal cult leaders over and over again:

The meth cook’s wife, Skyler, illustrates why Scripture instructs us to flee evil and admonishes: “You shall have no other gods before me.” When Skyler discovers her husband is a meth cook, she stays with him, despite hating him for what he’s done. Eventually she becomes his partner in crime. It worked out badly for her.

The only explanation for Skyler’s decision to stay is that she still loves Walt and — as she tells her divorce lawyer — she is desperate to prevent her son from finding out his father is a meth cook. Her husband and son have become her “gods,” whom she values more than the one true God.

This mirrors the point I made last year about how the American people voting to reelect Barack Obama was akin to Carmela Soprano staying with Tony:

The world is not divided between evil people and good people — or “Left” and “Right.” The important division transcends politics: there are those who recognize the evil in their own heart, and those who do not. Whether someone learns how to control their animal nature and become a less evil person has everything to do with what god they worship. Is the god you worship one of love or hate? For 20 years Barack Obama saw nothing wrong with worshiping the god of black liberation theology, as preached by Wright. That means that for 20 years Barack Obama was not reading the Bible to hear about how he was a weak, frail human being in need of God’s grace. He was not investigating his own character flaws and trying to become a better person. He was hearing the Bible perverted through the theological framework of self-described “angry black man” James Cone.

Yes or no: If a man chooses a racist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist (who tells his church that the United States manufactured AIDS to exterminate black people) as his spiritual mentor, can he still be regarded as a good person? When he launches this conspiracy theorist into the national political debate by making one of his sermons the title of his second book and the slogan of his campaign, can he still be regarded as a good person?

Carmela Soprano: He’s a good man. He’s a good father.

For Carmela, accepting that she had married an evil person was just the first step on to the realization that actually mattered: her life was in danger.

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Does anybody wonder why Obama removed “under God” from the Gettysburg Address?

More great ideas from Ann Coulter’s canon coming in the coming weeks. And next in this series: a reading list of my favorite books by the #2 conservative columnist, the #1 most influential conservative philosopher Thomas Sowell.

And see also: Andrew Klavan on Coulter yesterday: We Are the Lifeboats We’ve Been Waiting For

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