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Ann Coulter Says My Writing Proves Replacement Theory — She’s Wrong

The left doesn’t cheer demographic replacement of white people — just a decline in unchecked white power. There’s a difference.

Tim Wise
7 min readMay 21, 2022
Ann Coulter, Image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr, Creative Commons, ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

First, a little backstory before I get to the Ann Coulter part.

The day after the Republicans made massive gains in the 2010 mid-term elections, I penned an essay taunting older white conservatives — those most responsible for the night’s results.

You know, the Tea Party types.

The message was simple: drink up and enjoy your win because the demographics of the nation are changing and eventually, there won’t be any white folks left who can nostalgically remember the pre-civil rights era, thus demanding to “take their country back” to such a time.

That, I said, would be a good thing.

Not because I wanted them to die, but because nostalgia for that era, which causes older white folks to believe America was “great” then and needs to be made great like that again, holds us back.

What I was trying to suggest was that once those folks had passed into loving memory, we could more easily get on with the business of multicultural democracy.

I’m not going to say it was my best work; far from it.

First, it was overly optimistic about the inevitability of progressive change, seeing as how things have gotten worse.

But more to the point, it was mean-spirited. It struck a tone for which I am genuinely sorry.

It was an intemperate screed, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the intervening years, it’s this: screeds are best when temperate.

Within hours of it going viral, wishes for my death or offers to make it happen were pouring in.

There was “Robbins Mitchell” from Houston, who e-mailed me to say, among other things:

I trained as a Cadet at the USAF Academy in unarmed combat…and I know 12 ways to kill a man without using a weapon…so what say I come up there and give you your choice of those 12 ways?

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Tim Wise
Tim Wise

Written by Tim Wise

Senior Fellow, African American Policy Forum, critical race theorist, and author of 9 books on racism and racial inequity in the U.S.

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