Ann Coulter Associates College

Jeff Poor

On Dennis Prager’s radio show on Monday, conservative commentator Ann Coulter offered her takeaways from last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference held outside Washington, D.C., where Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul won the event’s presidential straw poll.
Coulter, author of “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama,” explained how that happened, which led to her critique of the libertarian movement within college campuses and its antics.


“’How did that happen?’ you’re wondering,” she said. “Ron Paul used to win every year because these libertarian college kids — unlike libertarian adults like Richard Epstein and Gary Lawson for example — they are just consumed by groupthink. They’re really like liberals this way. They remind me of those Howard Stern groupies who, you know, would obsessively call into radio shows, to TV shows or try to show up on TV … this is what these young — many of the young libertarians are like. But don’t worry, they’re going to turn 16 and grow out of it.”


“The young college students do, which is why they ought to put down their pro-pot signs and read some Richard Epstein — probably the leading libertarian in the country,” she continued. “Also Richard Posner, they’re both at the University of Chicago, and Gary Lawson, a law professor up at [Boston University]. These are smart intellectual libertarians. There’s an awful lot of we need to be privatizing now. I am more libertarian than these whipper-snappers calling themselves libertarians. You know, how about privatizing the New York City subway system, the bus system?”
Coulter referenced her appearance at last month’s International Students for Liberty Conference held in Washington, D.C., and aired on Fox Business Network’s Feb. 21 broadcast of “Stossel.” That she used as an example of the groupthink mentality that exists in the college libertarian movement.
“It’s not even liberals I hate so much,” she said. “I hate groupthink. And the libertarians have it every bit as much as the college liberals I speak to. I give a lot of college speeches and it was the same thing, you know where you all have to cheer together and you all have to boo the same stuff. And I guess when you’re young and insecure feeling like you’re part of a group is important to you. If I was ever like that, it would be gun-to-the-mouth time. But OK, I understand the psychology of it.