Ann Coulter is an "out there" right-wing fanatic. Here, on her recent blog Negroes With Guns (http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2012/04/18/negroes_with_guns/page/full/), she portrays Republicans as angels supporting the rights and power of Black people, going so far as to pretend that Republicans are pleading with African-Americans to arm themselves for their own protection against racist white people. I kid you not. This is not a spoof website.
It is widely acknowledged that Democratic support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which was supported by some courageous moderate Republicans) caused many (not all) of the traditionally Southern Democrats to make a shift to the Republican Party, bringing along their contempt for African-Americans' civil rights and seeking a return to segregation. Some of this shift was later known as Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy." Coulter asks us to believe that nothing of the sort happened, that the Democratic commitment to civil rights and equal opportunity was actually a racist cover for disarming and dis-empowering African-Americans.
Coulter and her fellow right-wing pundits and presidential candidates have made many outrageous, delusional claims about history and politics. This one, as applied to the past 50 years, is so patently false that we know she is just making stuff up. Slavery in the South was historically defended as a State's Rights issue and secession from the Union was based upon the "right" of Southern States to make their own determination as to whether slavery was moral and legal. Republicans now more often claim that issue, State's rights, not Democrats, since racists like George Wallace, Jesse Helms and Strom Thurman were marginalized by the Democratic Party or voluntarily left it in the 1960's and 1970's. The hoods of the Klan, the reactionary views of the John Birch Society, the racist white supremacists of the militias are now more aligned with the anti-government Republicans. Check out Southern Poverty Law Center.
Most of us know what it would mean for African-Americans to massively arm themselves for self-defense. In fact, racist paranoids have been claiming that African-Americans have been arming themselves for decades, planning for a race war. Coulter asks African-Americans to walk into nothing less than a hideous trap. If Trayvon Martin had been carrying a gun, Coulter opines that he would have been safe. That lady is crazy! She's trying to mess with the minds of the American people, and making lots of money doing just that.
