First Trump, now Coulter: All illegal immigrants are rapists or molesters.

When announcing his campaign for president, Donald Trump said,

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.  (Source)

A lot of people on the Tulsa World's link of the follow-up story, when Univision and NBC dumped their relationships with Trump over the comments, got upset, arguing that Trump was right in his comments, which boggles my mind.  The natural way to read this sentence, I would think, is that Trump is saying everyone who illegally immigrates to the U.S. is a rapist, a criminal, and a drug courier.  Perhaps he merely means that those things are more rampant in the illegal immigrant population than in the average population (which you could read into it by his "good people" comment).  In that case, it's an argument we could evaluate based on available data and determine if these crimes are more prevalent among that population; however, this is the story that came out next...

Asked why he used the term "rapists" to characterize Mexican immigrants, Trump pointed to recent reports that as many as 80 percent of the female immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are sexually assaulted during the trip.

CNN's Don Lemon then pointed out that those reports document immigrants being raped during their journey across the border - not the immigrants raping people after they get here.

Trump replied, "Well, somebody's doing the raping, Don. I mean, you know, somebody's doing it. Who's doing the raping? How can you say such a thing?" (source)

So rather than focusing on the issue of women being raped, and actually looking for an answer to the question "who's doing the raping," Trump appears to have decided that the men who are immigrating with these women are doing it.

Of course, that's not remotely the case.  In their 2010 study on the issue, titled "Invisible Victims: Migrants on the Move in Mexico" (available here), Amnesty International detailed several cases of women being raped on their way to the U.S., and in none of their stories do they ever mention that it was an immigrant doing it.  In fact, not even the coyotes ferrying the women across the border were accused of it, although they often may have been complicit.  Instead, these rapes usually occurred on both sides of the border by gangs who were abducting women and engaging in human trafficking, and sometimes even by the law enforcement agencies tasked with protecting them.  

Ann Coulter defended Trump's comments in a post that reads more like a conspiracy theorist's attempts to disprove the moon landing than an authoritative argument on the topic, but apparently decided to double down on the topic herself:

“You have to understand,” Coulter told Breitbart News, “screaming and defacing things is how Latin Americans express disagreement. At least as long as they were destroying books and screaming in a book store, they weren’t molesting any 4-year-olds.”  (Source)

Which is to say that the default position for someone from Latin America is to molest children?

Either that, or it's going to become the model of how I make fun of Ann Coulter going forward...

"At least if she's writing a blithering blog post, she's not biting the heads off hamsters."
"At least if she's appearing on Fox News, she's not slitting the throats of infants just to feel the warmth of their blood on her hands."

and so on...