Syndicated columnist Ann Coulter has a problem with soccer. Interest in it is a sign of moral decay, she wrote in a column June 26. And as is her wont with just about every aspect of American life she denounces, she blames immigrants and immigration for it. "If more "Americans" are watching soccer today, it's only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration law. I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer," she wrote. 

It was only one of many willfully inaccurate statements she included in the column, clearly intended as clickbait for the Clarion-Ledger. This type of "provocation for the sake of clicks" writing really frosts my cookies. Which is why, in my link to the article here I use donotlink.com, which enables you to read the column without recompensing the cynical baiting it represents. 

There are too many idiotic statements about soccer in Coulter's column to refute them all here ("Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer" — ummm, how about we ask Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo about that, Ann? Or "it's a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys" — running the equivalent of six to ten miles in every match isn't athletic? And don't get me started on the boy-girl part of that statement...). 

But let's be clear, Coulter's isn't really a column about soccer. 

It is yet another piece by a pundit who garners attention by pushing zero-sum-game arguments against immigrants and whose columns evince a certain antipathy toward people of color in general. She's both astute and needy enough to understand that, given the current focus on the World Cup, she wasn't about to get any attention for any of her writings unless she dissed the sport that includes many Black, Latino and Asian players along with the many white American and European ones. 

Consider Coulter's quote in the opening paragraph of this column — does Coulter really believe that no one whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer? If so she truly is an imbecile. I am a soccer fan. My maternal great-grandfather was from Tennessee, and while I really like to think I'm unique, there are probably tens of thousands of people watching the World Cup this month in the U.S. who can make the same claim. 

Moreover, one of the U.S. national team's players, Chris Wondolowski, is an enrolled Kiowa tribal member. His grandmother, Dorothy Whitehorse-Delaune, can point to more generations on U.S. soil than Coulter can count. And, according to the director of the Kiowa Nation Youth Activities Sports Club which holds an annual soccer camp, tribe members "not only watch the Super Bowl and the national championship in football and basketball, but now we're watching soccer."  

Speaking of the First Peoples of the Americas ... it might interest Coulter to learn that from North America to the tip of South America, there are accounts of sport played with feet and a ball since well before the first European landed on continental shores. Those pilgrims who settled in the northeastern region of the U.S., for example, happened upon a very World Cup-ish example of sport that involved kicking a deer-hide ball with the foot, and matched village team against an adjoining village team.

Like so many of Coulter's other claims about immigrants and immigration, this one is built on a narrow and ahistoric supposition of what it means to be American. She pines for a flat, colorless and homogenous U.S. that never existed, except in the puerile and naive imaginings of the unschooled. 

This last column's timing and tone reveal that Coulter is way too much of a child —making a scene and throwing a temper tantrum because there's a great game going on without her — to be taken seriously as commentator, a pundit, or even a mature human being. 

Let's put her in time-out and leave her there a good long while, shall we?