What should we do with the likes of Ann Coulter?
More than a few people are upset with her recent comments disparaging the 9/11 widows. Her new book wastes a lot of trees misrepresenting evolution. Ed takes umbrage at her self-comparison with H.L. Mencken. For me it was Mark Twain. Clearly this is a person with little or no grasp of reality, history or decency. The easy answer is to ignore her. But I'm not yet convinced that's a good idea.
Sunday's re-run of a "60 Minutes" interview with Mel Brooks included a segment in which Brooks suggested the best way to deal with Hitler's legacy was to make fun of it. I like that idea, but Hitler was long dead by the time Brooks hit Broadway. Coulter's latest screed is No. 1 on the Amazon list this week.
Whether she believes what comes out of her own mouth is not the point. As Stephen Colbert demonstrated a few weeks ago, lambasting a guest on a satirical TV talk show (Tom Delay, Caitlyn Flanagan) is no guarantee that the guest or the guest's fans will get the joke, even if everyone involved in perpetrating the gag is in on it. So can we -- should we -- let millions of readers further contaminate their minds with her drivel? If not, will poking fun at her be sufficient?
I put it to my Scienceblog colleagues and our readers: What then must we do? Surely among us we can come with a strategy that will do more than just broaden Coulter's already monstrous public platform.
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I don't want to sound too idealistic, but I recommend fighting the dark view of a Colter with the light of reason and truth(iness).
Ignoring people doesn't work. About a decade and a half ago, I was involved in a pretty well-known incident on an online site called LambdaMOO, where I was in a room while someone else knew that I was ignoring them (programmatically) and took the opportunity to accuse me of being a child molester. Since I didn't hear I didn't respond, and my silence was apparently interpreted as nolo contendere. For *years* afterward, I'd meet people and they'd ask me about it. It's not a question that normally gets asked. It's not a possibility you usually consider when you first meet something. Because of that incident, my first interactions with many people were colored by them wondering whether this totally unfounded accusation might be true.
Today I see a similar phenomenon in online forums. Silence is too often interpreted as concession. Never mind that reasonable people sometimes get tired of pointing out that the exact same piece of juvenile bullshit has already been refuted five ways in a thread, and that they're quitting not in defeat but in disgust. Those who rely on repetition and repulsiveness will still treat it as a victory, and in some ways they're right because there really are a lot of people who think the last word always wins.
If "relying on repetition and repulsiveness" sounds like Coulter, it's not by accident. Ignoring her doesn't work, so long as she retains some non-trivial audience somewhere. Trying to counter her with reason doesn't work either, because she was never making an appeal to reason in the first place. Ditto for decency. Parody and satire can be effective, though. Of course there's always the danger that the parody/satire won't be recognized as such, but that's just a risk that has to be taken. There's also a risk that she might accuse others of refusing to address her "real points" but that can be easily addressed by at least occasionally taking time out to address her many moments of total lunacy in more sober fashion, but ridicule should be the primary weapon. People like her deserve to be belittled because they are already quite little both morally and intellectually.
Here's a way to both ridicule her AND to make others ignore her:
Let's nominate her a high priestess for Its Wholiness the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Sure, she's a raging you-know-what. But the fact is, she's not making any real arguments. Polemicism without any factual basis is not going to convert anybody. So she's already a cipher, except in the sense that her over-the-top rhetoric is pushing people away from conservatism. Let her say whatever she wants - she is already satirizing herself.
For what it's worth I think Brian is close on this one. Coulter is not well known to many Canadians but I do see the recent posts on conservatvie blogs decrying her shrill nonsense. If anything she is now giving more sensible conservatives a reason to back away from the Religous Right, anti-humanist, anti-woman and anti-anybodythat diaagrees bunch that seem so powerful in the US. This is a good thing. Keep ridiculing her but as Brian says she is already doing that to herself.
Those readers who agree with her are not susceptible to reason, and they don't spin in the same spheres as blogs like this one do, so there really is no point of intersection for making change. I think she is marginalizing herself, which can only be a good thing.
I think she's marginalized herself as well. I also think that she and Tom Cruise should hook up and move to the Island of Really Dangerous People.