Ann Coulter, author of In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, joined Breitbart Editor-in-Chief host Alex Marlow on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM to talk about the legacy of the late Phyllis Schlafly.
“As I say in the obituary, a lot of us get compared to Schlafly, often thinking it will be taken as an insult. No, it’s like being compared to Winston Churchill,” Coulter said, quoting from the obituary she wrote for Schlafly.
Coulter said Schlafly’s work “guided my view of the feminists and the media,” as she explained in her tribute to Schlafly from her 2003 book Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.
In that book, she compared Schlafly favorably to feminist icon Betty Friedan, who “constantly needed a man to bail her out, had that stupid Ms. magazine where they literally did have debates on whether it’s appropriate for feminists to wear lipstick.”
“Meanwhile, Phyllis Schlafly, while raising six amazingly accomplished kids, and having a lovely life, first got – well, not first, first she was writing a lot about military policy with a general, General Ward, I think his name was, these long tomes. She was a big proponent of High Frontier,” Coulter recalled.
“Then she wrote A Choice Not an Echo, that was credited with getting Barry Goldwater the nomination, in an election much like the election we’re going through right now. It was the grassroots against the, back then, much more Northeastern elites. Now it’s more the Washington, D.C. / New York elites. And, although Barry Goldwater was a very imperfect messenger, a cranky libertarian, it took away the kingmakers, as Phyllis Schlafly called them, from choosing our nominees – which is also credited with leading to Reagan’s nomination,” Coulter said.
She recounted the story of how Schlafly entered the battle to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment:
And one of her big fights, defeating the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – I probably should have mentioned this in the obituary, I told Julia Hahn by email one little interesting fact in the New York Times obituary, although it was snippy, it had a lot of great quotes from Phyllis Schlafly, but one thing they noted was that she had not leaped on the Equal Rights Amendment, she didn’t even know about it. A friend, the Times reports, told her about it, and she stopped it dead.
It was sailing to nomination. It was one of these feel-good amendments. But, as I think all Americans are a lot more aware now, in large part thanks to Phyllis Schlafly, you can’t just attach random feel-good amendments to the Constitution. We would be living in world right now in which – maybe it’s happening piecemeal, rather than in one fell swoop – instead of state legislatures, it would go straight to federal courts, whether you could have men in women’s bathrooms, whether women could serve in combat. That would be taken out of the democratic process, and given to the courts.
And she wrote all these articles, attacking the ERA in a very simple way that everyone could understand. But later, you’d see the exact same arguments being made in places like the Yale Law Journal.
Coulter concluded by revealing that the friend who gave Schlafly the heads-up on the Equal Rights Amendment was none other than her older brother John, who wanted her to discuss the ERA during a speaking engagement at his high school.
“She instantly grasped what a horror this was, and that was the first time she found out about it, but she alone stopped it, and I quote George Gilder in the obituary, saying it was sailing through Congress, it was sailing through the states, the media were for it, both political parties’ platforms were for it – but Phyllis Schlafly was on the other side, and that was enough,” said Coulter.
When Marlow celebrated Schlafly for combining “intellectual heft” with a persuasive, entertaining prose style, Coulter said presidential candidate Donald Trump had similar qualities, which is one reason Schlafly supported him so energetically before her passing.
“That’s part of his appeal, that is so appalling to the intellectual snobs around us, as I describe in the book,” she said, referring to her own In Trump We Trust.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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