The New York Times has come under fire for publishing an opinion piece based on a conversation with conservative commentator Ann Coulter, just over two decades after she shared her wish that the paper’s offices be blown up.
Contributing opinion writer Frank Bruni “hosted an online conversation” with Coulter and former GOP political strategist Stuart Stevens, the result of which was posted as an op-ed ahead of the first Republican debate on Wednesday night.
Coulter, previously a strong supporter of former President Donald Trump who now is one of his most outspoken conservative critics, told The New York Times that she doesn’t think he’ll end up being the nominee.
“I think this is Ron DeSantis’s to lose. If he’d just ignore the media and be the nerd that he is, he’ll do great,” Coulter told Mr Bruni.
She added that if Mr Trump is the nominee, she believes he’ll lose the general election.
He says the “same old thing over and over and over again,” Coulter claimed.
Her appearance in the pages of the Times comes more than 20 years after her 2002 interview with the New York Observer in which she said: “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”
McVeigh, an anti-government extremist and domestic terrorist, was behind the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, in which 168 people were killed.
Coulter told Fox News in 2006 that her comments were “merely prescient” as the outlet had “leapt beyond nonsense straight into treason”.
In 2012, she told a rightwing site that the only thing she wanted to add to her statement was “after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters”.
Twitter users were quick to slam The New York Times for agreeing to engage with Coulter.
Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC wrote on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, that it was “Truly shameful from the Times. A woman who is not just openly racist and bigoted but has incited hate and violence against the Times itself”.
“So many prominent media liberals will never stop both-sidesing in this country. Nor excuse-making for racists and fascists,” he added.
“Ann Coulter’s bio just says ‘author’ like how I imagine Hitler’s bio would just say ‘painter’,” one Twitter user said.
“If wokeness was really was in control of major journalistic institutions I am pretty sure Ann Coulter would not be writing for the New York Times,” Georgetown policy professor Don Moynihan wrote.
He added that the Times was “committed to publishing a diversity of opinion, including the people who do and don’t want to kill you”.
Author Jeff Sharlet wrote: “The most astonishing aspect of NYT imagining that Ann Coulter is or ever has been anything but a fascist gadfly is that in her inner contest between attention & hate, hate wins. She hates ‘illegals’ so much she’s willing to sacrifice attention. Then along came NYT…”
