Bernie Sanders Defends Ann Coulter’s Right To Speak
Conservative pundit Ann Coulter got some surprising backing over the weekend from Bernie Sanders, the ultra liberal Democratic senator whose views are almost diametrically opposed to hers.
He came out to her defense after students threatened to disrupt Coulter’s planned speech at the University of California Berkley.
“Obviously Ann Coulter’s outrageous ― to my mind, off the wall,” Sanders told the Huffington Post. “But you know, people have a right to give their two cents-worth, give a speech, without fear of violence and intimidation.”
Coulter was invited to speak at Berkley by the college Republican club, but facing threats from students to stage protests outside and inside the hall, campus authorities asked to move her speech to a later date and to the early afternoon.
Sanders made clear he does not believe that disruption was the appropriate way to counter Coulter’s conservative message. “What are you afraid of ― her ideas? Ask her the hard questions,” Sanders said. “Confront her intellectually. Booing people down, or intimidating people, or shutting down events, I don’t think that that works in any way.”
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com or on Twitter @nathanguttman
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO