Ann Coulter facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ann Coulter
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Coulter in 2019
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Ann Hart Coulter
December 8, 1961 New York City, U.S.
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Ann Hart Coulter (
i/ˈkoʊltər/; born December 8, 1961) is an American conservative media pundit, author, syndicated columnist, and lawyer. She became known as a media pundit in the late 1990s, appearing in print and on cable news as an outspoken critic of the Clinton administration. Her first book concerned the impeachment of Bill Clinton and sprang from her experience writing legal briefs for Paula Jones's attorneys, as well as columns she wrote about the cases. Coulter's syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate appears in newspapers and is featured on conservative websites. Coulter has also written 13 books.
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Early life
Ann Hart Coulter was born on December 8, 1961, in New York City, to John Vincent Coulter (1926–2008), an FBI agent from a working class Catholic Irish American and German American family in Albany, New York, and Nell Husbands Coulter (née Martin; 1928–2009), who was born in Paducah, Kentucky.
Coulter's mother's ancestry has been traced back on both sides of her family to a group of Puritan settlers in Plymouth Colony, British America arriving on the Griffin with Thomas Hooker in 1633, and her father's family were Catholic Irish and German immigrants who arrived in America in the 19th century. Her father's Irish ancestors emigrated during the famine—and became ship laborers, tilemakers, brickmakers, carpenters and flagmen. Coulter's father attended college on the GI Bill, and would later idolize Joseph McCarthy.
She has two older brothers: James, an accountant, and John, an attorney. Her family later moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where Coulter and her two brothers were raised. Coulter graduated from New Canaan High School in 1980.
While attending Cornell University, Coulter helped found The Cornell Review, and was a member of the Delta Gamma national sorority. She graduated cum laude from Cornell in 1984 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and received her Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan Law School in 1988, where she was an editor of the Michigan Law Review. At Michigan, Coulter was president of the local chapter of the Federalist Society and was trained at the National Journalism Center.
Coulter's age was disputed in 2002. While she argued that she was not yet 40, The Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove cited a birthdate of December 8, 1961, which Coulter provided when registering to vote in New Canaan, Connecticut, prior to the 1980 Presidential election, for which she had to be 18 years old to register. A driver's license issued several years later purportedly listed her birthdate as December 8, 1963. Coulter will not confirm either date, citing privacy concerns.
Career
After law school, Coulter served as a law clerk in Kansas City for Judge Pasco Bowman II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. After a short time working in New York City in private practice, where she specialized in corporate law, Coulter left to work for the United States Senate Judiciary Committee after the Republican Party took control of Congress in 1994. She handled crime and immigration issues for Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan and helped craft legislation designed to expedite the deportation of aliens convicted of felonies. She later became a litigator with the Center for Individual Rights.
Coulter has written 13 books, and also publishes a syndicated newspaper column. She is particularly known for her polemical style, and describes herself as someone who likes to "stir up the pot. I don't pretend to be impartial or balanced, as broadcasters do". She idolized Clare Boothe Luce for her satirical style. She also makes numerous public appearances, speaking on television and radio talk shows, as well as on college campuses, receiving both praise and protest. Coulter typically spends 6 to 12 weeks of the year on speaking engagement tours, and more when she has a book coming out. In 2010, she made an estimated $500,000 on the speaking circuit, giving speeches on topics of modern conservatism, gay marriage, and what she describes as the hypocrisy of modern American liberalism. During one appearance at the University of Arizona, a pie was thrown at her. In defense of her ideas, Coulter has on occasion responded with inflammatory remarks toward hecklers and protestors who attend her speeches.
Books
Coulter has authored twelve books, including many that have appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list, with a combined 3 million copies sold as of May 2009[update].
Coulter's first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, was published by Regnery Publishing in 1998 and made The New York Times Bestseller list. It details Coulter's case for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Her second book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, published by Crown Forum in 2002, reached the number one spot on The New York Times non-fiction best seller list. In Slander, Coulter argues that President George W. Bush was given unfair negative media coverage. The factual accuracy of Slander was called into question by then-comedian and author, later Democratic U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken; he also accused her of citing passages out of context. Others investigated these charges, and also raised questions about the book's accuracy and presentation of facts. Coulter responded to criticisms in a column called "Answering My Critics".
In her third book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, also published by Crown Forum, she reexamines the 60-year history of the Cold War—including the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss affair, and Ronald Reagan's challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall"—and argues that liberals were wrong in their Cold War political analyses and policy decisions, and that McCarthy was correct about Soviet agents working for the U.S. government. She also argues that the correct identification of Annie Lee Moss, among others, as communists was misreported by the liberal media. Treason was published in 2003, and spent 13 weeks on the Best Seller list.
Crown Forum published a collection of Coulter's columns in 2004 as her fourth book, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter.
Coulter's fifth book, published by Crown Forum in 2006, is Godless: The Church of Liberalism. In it, she argues, first, that American liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, and second, that it bears all the attributes of a religion itself. Godless debuted at number one on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Coulter's If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans (Crown Forum), published in October 2007, and Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (Crown Forum), published on January 6, 2009, both also achieved best-seller status.
On June 7, 2011, Crown Forum published her eighth book Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.
Her ninth book, published September 25, 2012, was Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama. It argues that liberals, and Democrats in particular, have taken undue credit for racial civil rights in America.
Coulter's tenth book, Never Trust a Liberal Over 3 – Especially a Republican, was released on October 14, 2013. It is her second collection of columns and her first published by Regnery since her first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors. Coulter published her eleventh book, Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, on June 1, 2015. The book addresses illegal immigration, amnesty programs, and border security in the United States.
Columns
In the late 1990s, Coulter's weekly (biweekly from 1999 to 2000) syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate began appearing. Her column is featured on six conservative websites: Human Events Online, WorldNetDaily, Townhall.com, VDARE, FrontPage Magazine, Jewish World Review and her own website. Her syndicator says, "Ann's client newspapers stick with her because she has a loyal fan base of conservative readers who look forward to reading her columns in their local newspapers".
In 1999, Coulter worked as a columnist for George magazine. Coulter also wrote weekly columns for the conservative magazine Human Events between 1998 and 2003, with occasional columns thereafter. In her columns, she discussed judicial rulings, constitutional issues, and legal matters affecting Congress and the executive branch.
In 2001, as a contributing editor and syndicated columnist for National Review Online (NRO), Coulter was asked by editors to make changes to a piece written after the September 11 attacks. On the show Politically Incorrect, Coulter accused NRO of censorship and said she was paid $5 per article. NRO dropped her column and terminated her editorship. Jonah Goldberg, the editor-at-large of NRO, said: "We did not 'fire' Ann for what she wrote... we ended the relationship because she behaved with a total lack of professionalism, friendship, and loyalty [concerning the editing disagreement]."
In August 2005, the Arizona Daily Star dropped Coulter's syndicated column, citing reader complaints: "Many readers find her shrill, bombastic, and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives".
In July 2006, some newspapers replaced Coulter's column with those of other conservative columnists following the publication of her fourth book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. After The Augusta Chronicle dropped her column, newspaper editor Michael Ryan said: "it came to the point where she was the issue rather than what she was writing about." Ryan added that he continued himself "to be an Ann Coulter fan" as "her logic is devastating and her viewpoint is right most of the time."
Television and radio
Coulter made her first national media appearance in 1996 after she was hired by the then-fledgling network MSNBC as a legal correspondent. She later appeared on CNN and Fox News, and went on to make frequent guest appearances on many television and radio talk shows.
Political views
Coulter is a Presbyterian. She is a conservative columnist and in 2003, described herself as a "typical, immodest-dressing, swarthy male-loving, friend-to-homosexuals, ultra-conservative." She is a registered Republican and former member of the advisory council of GOProud since August 9, 2011.
She supports the display of the Confederate flag.
Christianity
Coulter was raised by a Catholic father and Protestant mother. At one public lecture she said: "I don't care about anything else; Christ died for my sins, and nothing else matters." She summarized her view of Christianity in a 2004 column, saying, "Jesus' distinctive message was: People are sinful and need to be redeemed, and this is your lucky day, because I'm here to redeem you even though you don't deserve it." She then mocked "the message of Jesus... according to liberals", summarizing it as "something along the lines of 'be nice to people'", which, in turn, she said "is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity."
Confronting some critics' views that her content and style of writing is unchristian, Coulter said that she is "a Christian first and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don't you ever forget it." Six years later, in 2011, she also said: "Christianity fuels everything I write. Being a Christian means that I am called upon to do battle against lies, injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy—you know, all the virtues in the church of liberalism". In Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Coulter characterized the theory of evolution as bogus science, and contrasted her beliefs to what she called the left's "obsession with Darwinism and the Darwinian view of the world". Coulter advocates intelligent design, a pseudoscientific antievolution ideology.
Civil liberties
Coulter endorsed the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program directed at Al-Qaeda. During a 2011 appearance on Stossel, she said "PATRIOT Act, fantastic, Gitmo, fantastic, waterboarding, not bad, though torture would've been better." She criticized Rand Paul for "this anti-drone stuff".
Coulter opposes hate crime laws, calling them "unconstitutional". She also stated that "Hate-crime provisions seem vaguely directed at capturing a sense of cold-bloodedness, but the law can do that without elevating some victims over others."
Immigration
Coulter has criticized former president George W. Bush's immigration proposals, saying they led to "amnesty". In a 2007 column, she claimed that the current immigration system was set up to deliberately reduce the percentage of whites in the population.
Coulter strongly opposes the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Regarding illegal immigration, she strongly opposed amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and at the 2013 CPAC said she has now become "a single-issue voter against amnesty".
In June 2018, during the controversy caused by the Trump administration family separation policy, Coulter dismissed immigrant children as "child actors weeping and crying" and urged Trump not to "fall for it".
Coulter is an advocate of the white genocide conspiracy theory. She has compared non-white immigration into the United States with genocide, and claiming that "a genocide" is occurring against South African farmers, she has said that the Boers are the "only real refugees" in South Africa. Regarding domestic politics, Vox labelled Coulter as one of many providing a voice for "the 'white genocide' myth", and the SPLC covered Coulter's remarks that if the demographic changes occurring in the U.S. were being "legally imposed on any group other than white Americans, it would be called genocide".
LGBT rights
Coulter opposes same-sex marriage, opposes Obergefell v. Hodges, and supports, after previously saying she did not, a federal U.S. constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union of one man and one woman. She insists that her opposition to same-sex marriage "wasn't an anti-gay thing" and that "It's genuinely a pro-marriage position to oppose gay marriage". In an April 1, 2015, column, Coulter declared that liberals had "won the war on gay marriage (by judicial fiat)".
Bernie Sanders
In April 2019, Coulter said of Senator Bernie Sanders she would vote and perhaps even work for him in the 2020 U.S. presidential election if he stuck to his "original position" on U.S. border policy. "If he went back to his original position, which is the pro blue-collar position—I mean, it totally makes sense with him", and "If he went back to that position, I'd vote for him, I might work for him. I don't care about the rest of the socialist stuff. Just, can we do something for ordinary Americans?"
Candidate endorsements
Coulter initially supported George W. Bush's presidency, but later criticized its approach to immigration. She endorsed Duncan Hunter and later Mitt Romney in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries and the 2012 Republican presidential primary and presidential run. In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, she endorsed Donald Trump. Coulter later distanced herself from Trump following arguments over immigration policies; she called for his impeachment in September 2017, saying "Put a fork in Trump, he's dead". She described herself in 2018 as a "former Trumper"; in a 2020 speech to a Turning Point USA event, she said, "The Trump agenda without Trump would be a lot easier. Our new motto should be 'Going on with Trumpism without Trump.' That's a winning strategy." Coulter blamed Trump's son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner for Trump's 2020 election loss, and said that Trump had failed to deliver for the white working class. In August 2024, Coulter spoke out against Donald Trump saying he was an "awful, awful person" however said she would vote for him in the 2024 election because she liked his running mate JD Vance and how we needed "a wall on the border". "Can’t trust Trump as far as I can throw him, but I do trust JD Vance to care about the left behind people” Coulter said.
Other candidates Coulter has endorsed include Greg Brannon (2014 Republican primary candidate for North Carolina Senator), Paul Nehlen (2016 Republican primary candidate for Wisconsin's 1st congressional district in the United States House of Representatives), Mo Brooks (2017 Republican primary candidate for Alabama Senator), and Roy Moore (2017 Republican candidate for Alabama Senator).
Public perception
Coulter was played by Cobie Smulders in Impeachment: American Crime Story; Betty Gilpin was originally cast in the role but dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. The series portrays Coulter's actions while assisting the prosecution in Clinton v. Jones.
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Personal life
Coulter has been engaged several times, but she has never married and has no children. After the September 11 attacks, she dated a Muslim boyfriend. She has dated Spin founder and publisher Bob Guccione Jr. and conservative writer Dinesh D'Souza. In October 2007, she began dating Andrew Stein, the former president of the New York City Council, a liberal Democrat. On January 7, 2008, however, Stein told the New York Post that the relationship was over, citing irreconcilable differences. In 2013 it was reported that Coulter was dating actor Jimmie Walker. Coulter responded to the rumors by saying "He’s the one spreading that [dating] rumor! No, we’re great friends. We do a lot of stuff together. … He is so hilarious, so I see him a lot when I’m in L.A., but we are not technically dating.” In 2017, Norman Lear, who created the television sitcom Good Times in which Walker starred, said of Walker "I love him; he’s a wonderful guy. But I’ll tell you something about him that’ll astound you: He dates Ann Coulter.” Coulter responded to Lear's comments by saying "This rumor spreads every now and then, but it’s never been true. We’re great friends. He’s hilarious and a Republican. Now, that’s news!”
Kellyanne Conway, who refers to Coulter as a friend, told New York magazine in 2017 that Coulter "started dating her security guard probably ten years ago because she couldn't see anybody else".
Coulter owns a house, bought in 2005, in Palm Beach, Florida, a condominium in Manhattan, and an apartment in Los Angeles. She votes in Palm Beach and is not registered to do so in New York or California.
See also
In Spanish: Ann Coulter para niños
