Anti-immigrant pundit Ann Coulter was one of the speakers at a post-election gathering in Florida this weekend hosted by far-right activist David Horowitz, where she joined activists including Mike Huckabee, James O’Keefe, Dinesh D’Souza and alt-right icon Milo Yiannopoulos, who received a journalism award. Donald Trump’s campaign CEO Steve Bannon, who has since been named to a senior position in the president-elect’s White House, was scheduled to attend as well, although we have not been able to confirm that he actually did so.
In her speech to the gathering, Coulter rejoiced in Trump’s victory, even going out of her way to attack Khizr Khan, the father of a slain Muslim-American soldier who became the object of Trump’s wrath after he criticized the candidate’s anti-Muslim rhetoric at the Democratic National Convention.
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Coulter said that “Muslims must have felt like, when they were about to commit 9/11” that they were “going to be hated” by America, but instead the country has continued to welcome Muslim immigrants after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
“We’re admitting more immigrants from Muslim countries than we do from all of the British isles,” she griped. “Hell, did we take a vote on this? But apparently we’re not allowed to have an opinion on that because Khizr Khan’s son died in Iraq. Khan was the snarling Muslim who took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to wave the Constitution at Trump and denounce him because he doesn’t have a son who died in Iraq so he’s not allowed to have an opinion on an important issue of public policy, namely whether we should keep admitting people whose religion teaches them that we’re infidels and they should kills us.”
Khan did not, as Coulter claims, say that Trump wasn’t allowed to have policy opinions because he had not lost a child in the military.
“Khan’s son was one of only 14 Muslims killed fighting for America,” Coulter continued, “which coincidentally is the exact same number of members of our military killed by Muslims in our military. Fourteen and fourteen.”
She said that even though Trump has revised his initial proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., there was “nothing racist” about that plan to begin with, noting that she’d support a moratorium on all immigration for “at least a year.” (Trump’s call for the ban still appears on his website and he has since said that he has proposed an “expansion” of the ban).
“But even the most aggressive description of Trump’s Muslim ban, it’s not racist,” she said. “You can be born into a Muslim family, you can’t be born believing something. We’re not talking about, you know, ‘I’m a Muslim because I eat pita and lamb.’ These are people who believe of seven tenets in the Quran, that’s obviously what he’s talking about, who believe this fundamentalist Islam that teaches them they should kill us. It would be as if it’s 1944, we have an immigrant from Europe ... flip open his suitcase and find a dog-eared copy of Mein Kampf. I think we’d say no thanks. That’s what Trump is talking about and, luckily, what most Americans, I think, understand he’s talking about.”
A video of Coulter’s speech was posted on Periscope by Andrew Torba, an alt-right tech executive, but was later removed.
