Tokin' Woman Suspended from Twitter over "Cruella Coulter" Hashtag

Pot makes you retarded.https://t.co/e9Qan5AD7n

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 23, 2021

As reported on in MarijuanaMoment, conservative columnist Ann Coulter tweeted this week, "Pot makes you retarded," with a link to a study finding that smoking pot in young adulthood can cause people to remember one less number out of 15 when tested decades later.

Via my @TokinWoman Twitter account, I responded that the study was misrepresented in Coulter's tweet, adding #CruellaCoulter, an existing hashtag (used before 2018, when Twitter began to clamp down on offensive tweets). Twitter responded by suspending my account for 12 hours, reinstating it only after I'd removed my tweet. 

I then reported Coulter's tweet to Twitter, calling it offensive not only to pot smokers but also to intellectually disabled persons, who aren't called "retarded" any longer in polite (some would say "woke") society. But her Tweet remains, with lots of interesting replies from folks pointing out that alcohol is the true brain-cell killer, and using themselves as examples of highly functional "potheads."  

Ordinarily I don't resort to name-calling on Twitter or elsewhere, but I made an exception for Coulter after she did the same for cannabis consumers, not the first time she's called us the R word.  She posted a similar Tweet in December 2020, and at a 2017 Politicon event, said marijuana is "destroying the country" and "makes people retarded."  She also claimed that "nobody goes to prison for [pot] possession" and that a study exists finding that blacks are 10 times as likely to lie about using marijuana than whites (she could not produce the study). 

Coulter made much of widely discredited author Alex Berenson's 2019 book on marijuana, repeating wild claims about a connection between cannabis and schizophrenia in an article that began, "I think I’ll direct a series of low-budget movies with names like 'Tobacco Madness,' 'Gun Madness' and 'White Male Madness'... my films will be so silly that, in the future, they will anathematize any untoward remarks about smokers, gun-owners or white men." In her own version of "Reefer Madness," a follow-up column repeated Berenson's claims that marijuana smoking leads to gruesome crimes. 

Pot smokers aren't the only "retards" in Coulter's twisted (not in a good way) mind. She once wrote, "reporters [in 'bush league' cities] have all the venom of the big-city newspapers, combined with retard-level IQs." She's described Sen. Jim Jeffords as a "half wit," and once said, "environmentalists can be dismissed as stupid girls who like birds."  Trading on her looks, she appears in slinky dresses on the covers of her books, like her 2008 screed, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans. 

A junior lawyer on Paula Jones's case against Bill Clinton, Coulter spun the scandal into a career as a pundit, starting with her 1988 book calling for Clinton's impeachment. Her subsequent book Slander accuses liberals of calling conservatives names. This from a woman who called the 9/11 widows "witches" and "harpies," referred to Muslims as "ragheads," and called Al Gore a "total fag" and Katie Couric "the affable Eva Braun of morning television."

Of activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in the Iraq war, Coulter wrote, "The only sort of authority Cindy Sheehan has is the uncanny ability to demonstrate, by example, what body types should avoid wearing shorts in public." Coulter is particularly hard on anti-war protesters, calling those who were "idealistically rioting on collage campuses in the 1970s" the "Worst Generation."  

As Susan Estrich wrote in her 2006 book Soulless: Ann Coulter and the Right-Wing Church of Hate, Coulter has also called for harm against her opponents, saying we need "somebody to put rat poisoning in [liberal Supreme Court] Justice Stevens' creme brulee," and that she couldn't decide whether the appropriate punishment for President Clinton was "impeachment or assassination." Estrich counted at least a dozen times where Coulter suggested death for an opponent. 

Why does Twitter, and other media outlets, have different rules for Coulter than they do for the rest of us? Why does she get away with hate speech, and name calling? "She knows exactly what she is doing," Estrich says, "And she is scary as hell because of it." 

You can visit Coulter's Tweet and complain to Twitter about it. When I did, several other Tweets from Coulter I could add to my complaint popped up, along with suggestions that I block or mute her for my comfort level. Tempting, tempting...meanwhile, it's ironic that smoking pot is probably exactly what Coulter needs to turn her from Cruel to Compassionate.