"Liberal soccer moms are precisely as likely to receive anthrax in the mail as to develop a capacity for linear thinking"
About this Quote
Weaponized contempt is Coulter's native tongue, and this line is a compact showcase: a culture-war insult that borrows the imagery of domestic terrorism to make stupidity sound like a punchline. The phrasing is engineered for maximum sting. "Liberal soccer moms" isn’t a demographic description so much as a political cartoon: affluent suburban women, coded as earnest, overprotective, and sentiment-driven. Coulter isn’t debating their policy views; she’s delegitimizing their mental equipment. The insult lands by pretending to be a probability claim ("precisely as likely") while offering no evidence, only bravado. That fake exactness is the joke and the weapon.
The anthrax reference does extra work. It yanks the reader back to the early-2000s panic, when anthrax letters turned everyday mail into a threat and newsrooms and politicians became literal targets. Coulter uses that fear as a prop: if the chance of being attacked is vanishingly small, then, she implies, so is the chance these women can think "linearly". It's a sneer dressed up as statistical common sense.
Subtext: empathy and compromise are not just wrong but cognitively inferior. It’s a gendered shot, too, narrowing "liberalism" into a maternal stereotype and framing emotion as the enemy of rationality. Contextually, this is red-meat punditry optimized for applause lines, not persuasion: it rallies an in-group by offering permission to hate, and it does so by making political disagreement sound like an IQ test with only one acceptable score.
The anthrax reference does extra work. It yanks the reader back to the early-2000s panic, when anthrax letters turned everyday mail into a threat and newsrooms and politicians became literal targets. Coulter uses that fear as a prop: if the chance of being attacked is vanishingly small, then, she implies, so is the chance these women can think "linearly". It's a sneer dressed up as statistical common sense.
Subtext: empathy and compromise are not just wrong but cognitively inferior. It’s a gendered shot, too, narrowing "liberalism" into a maternal stereotype and framing emotion as the enemy of rationality. Contextually, this is red-meat punditry optimized for applause lines, not persuasion: it rallies an in-group by offering permission to hate, and it does so by making political disagreement sound like an IQ test with only one acceptable score.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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