Why using hate speech is about you being an a**hole, not being ‘edgy’

• Tweet
• 
• 

• Tweet

Ann Coulter is a performance artist, plain and simple — while she may, in fact, hold at least some of the opinions she gets paid to spot off about, it’s her intention to cause offense at each and every opportunity because that, and not the stating of her opinions, is how she makes money. And so it was that she came to refer to President Obama as a “retard” this week (a word I don’t like seeing and refuse to say).

You see, the other part of Coulter’s ham-handed shtick is that she uses words, chooses phrases and espouses viewpoints that are all about making herself seem “edgy” — kind of like being the original hipster racist, but with less winking and nodding about the inherent racism — and allowing her to mock those who object as beholden to some sort of politically correct mind-police despite the fact that she believes we all think that shit anyway.

If hurting people’s feelings is your idea of being “edgy,” you’re not more interesting than me, you’re just an asshole.

And if you think that you’re smarter than John Franklin Stephens, a man with Down Syndrome whose open letter to Coulter (and previous OpEd in the Denver Post) put into context what using that word really means, then you’re also the actual stupid one.