Ann Coulter is a conservative, and she is a liar —  but I repeat myself. However, she is a sophisticated liar. Unlike Trump, who says whatever he wants, safe in the knowledge his base will never fact-check anything, Coulter strives for credibility by giving her lies a superficial plausibility. Let me give you an example. 

Yesterday she tweeted this ‘fact’:

 

Not 1 of the 142 anti-Semitic hate crimes in NYC was committed by a right-winger, according to NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force.

She linked to a NY Times article, “Is It Safe to Be Jewish in New York?” And in doing so, you assume that she has found something in the piece that supports her tweeted claim that no right-winger has committed an anti-Semitic hate crime.

But nowhere does the article say that. What it does report is: 

“During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group, Mark Molinari, commanding officer of the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, told me.”

You can certainly be a right-winger and not associated with a “far right-wing group”. So Coulter willfully misrepresented what the NYPD’s Molinari said. She also ignored that he only talks about people “caught or identified as the aggressor”. So we have no information on unsolved attacks where the aggressor is not identified. How many are there? The article doesn’t say. For argument’s sake let’s pick 50%. If so, that leaves 71 attacks where the perp may be a right-winger. But we’ll never know.

This misstatement is not a careless error on Coulter’s part. She is smart, well-educated and trained as a lawyer, so she knew exactly what she was doing. And in doing it, she lied. And if she weren’t lying there would presumably be information on who did commit the hate crimes. But she makes no mention of it.

The article does say that swastikas and the phrase “Go Trump” showed up on playground equipment in Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn Heights shortly after the 2016 election. But it also identifies a Muslim taxi-driver as an assailant. As well as highlighting the historical tensions between the Black and Jewish communities.

All-in-all, it is an even-handed, if brief, analysis of anti-Semitic attacks in NYC. But nowhere does it say what Coulter would have her Twitter followers believe it said.

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