Politics & Power Quote by Ann Coulter

Coulter’s line is a neat little booby trap for a familiar rhetorical tic: the performative “I’m torn” that isn’t torn at all. “I don’t know which is more frightening” pretends to weigh two possibilities, but it’s really a stage direction that tells the audience what to fear and in what order. Coulter’s intent is to strip that device of its camouflage and brand it as a liberal tell - a predictable preface to a predictable conclusion. The joke isn’t that liberals are wrong; it’s that they’re supposedly incapable of honest uncertainty.

The subtext is more aggressive than the syntax. By framing the other side’s phrasing as a giveaway, she’s not debating their claim; she’s delegitimizing their posture. It invites the listener to stop parsing arguments and start scanning for verbal cues - a kind of political phrenology where vocabulary stands in for evidence. “Pretty clear” does double duty: it signals certainty while implying that anyone who doesn’t see it is either naive or complicit.

Context matters: this is late-era cable-news combat, when politics is as much about tone policing as policy. Coulter built a brand on turning liberals into stock characters (hand-wringing, self-congratulatory, theatrically anxious) and then dunking on the caricature. The line works because it offers conservatives an easy laugh and an easier shortcut: you don’t have to engage the argument if you can call the opening sentence a script. It’s not persuasion so much as inoculation.