First Trevor Noah defended Tomi Lahren. Now he has Ann Coulter’s back. Well, sort of.
After opening Thursday night’s edition of The Daily Show with a vigorous defense of President Barack Obama’s right to get paid for his speeches to Wall Street firms, Noah moved on to Coulter’s canceled speech on UC Berkeley’s campus this week. “If you think Obama made people mad with his planned speech, Ann Coulter was like, ‘Hold my beer.’”
“‘Why won’t they let me say I’m a Nazi?!’” Noah asked, imitating Coulter. But then, he said something more surprising. “She’s right about the free-speech thing, but here’s my opinion,” he told his viewers. “Even though Ann Coulter is clearly trolling and doing this for the publicity of not letting her speak, they should just let her speak.”
“Because you realize, she doesn’t actually want to speak. She wants to be stopped from speaking,” he continued, comparing Coulter to a guy in a fight who asks his friends to “hold me back.”
“The truth is, a side effect of free speech is that there will always be hate speech,” Noah said. “If you ban one, you risk banning the other.” If you call Coulter “hate speech,” then “what’s to stop Jeff Sessions from calling Black Lives Matter ‘hate speech’?” he asked.
