Yesterday afternoon I wrote a short post noting a small irony about Ann Coulter: Even while she was slamming the GOP for “pandering” on issues like abortion and Israel, she herself was using specific language that panders to the small, race-obsessed far-right crowd that is particularly focused on those same issues. This group — known to smear conservatives who disagree with them as “cuckservatives” or “cucks” — has a set of beliefs that go far beyond antipathy toward Israel and indifference toward abortion. Many of them are unapologetically white-nationalists, hate interracial adoption and other “race-mixing” practices, and think about the issue of immigration primarily, if not exclusively, in racial terms.

While this small white-nationalist crowd has latched onto Donald Trump, I don’t think Trump panders to them (his rhetoric departs from theirs significantly on abortion and Israel), I don’t think he cares for them, and I think it’s unfair to hold him responsible for their support. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I feel differently about Coulter. Her shtick has always involved cultivating an extreme online persona, and lately that seems to mean deliberately stoking the cuckservative-obsessed crowd, only to distance herself ever-so-slightly when the Twitter fur flies. She thus enjoys the best of both worlds — praise from the worst and defense from good-faith conservatives who grow tired of PC nonsense and sympathize with many of her arguments.

When I posted my piece, I thought it might cause a bit of a reaction from Twitter trolls, and it did. They combed through Facebook to find pictures, Googled my family, and then handed out “awards.” I’m going to post a small sample to demonstrate a sad truth: When it comes to race, the far Left and the far Right — the so-called “alt-right” — are remarkably similar.

@genophilia @DarklyEnlighten @DavidAFrench @NancyAFrench @Ricky_Vaughn99 pic.twitter.com/f6yDIW4f72

— Bill Ainsworth (@ainsworthbill71) September 18, 2015

That’s my “Cucky” award for adopting a black child. (I will note that I don’t live in Memphis, though I do love the Grizzlies.) The fact that my youngest child is from Ethiopia was a point of real contention:

.@DavidAFrench <— Major #cuckservative. Raises Jamal’s kids instead of his own. Needs to grow a pair. @NancyAFrench #NRORevolt

— Lord Humungus (@DarklyEnlighten) September 18, 2015

Meet cuckservative @DavidAFrench. Resident manlet at NRO. @NancyAFrench @NRO @KevinNR #cuckservative #nrorevolt pic.twitter.com/0dzcWGtjVJ

— End Cultural Marxism (@genophilia) September 18, 2015

I can see why the “cuck” insults sting you so hard. Ann just doesn’t want what happened to your bloodline to happen to US @DavidAFrench @NRO

— Myron Gaines (@DeafFromAIDS) September 18, 2015

Then there’s this lovely tweet, which harks back to a bizarre porn fetish where a white man apparently watches a black man have sex with his wife:

@society_strong @genophilia @NancyAFrench @DavidAFrench David likes to watch 3 Black men sharing his wife

— Ahmed Quraishi (@AQpk_) September 18, 2015

I could go on and on and on. This is not the first time that my family’s been attacked on racial grounds. Several years ago, my wife made the mistake of allowing the Huffington Post to interview her at CPAC — while she was holding our youngest child. The comments on the interview, which have since been deleted, soon devolved into a leftist carnival funhouse of hate focused in part on our decision to adopt a black child. But the comments weren’t as bad as the private messages, which included threats to contact child protective services and direct attacks on our motivations for adopting.

Shunning the slur disempowers the trolls and forces the radical Left to confront the race hatred that fuels its own rage.

Online trolls are one thing, but the federal government is another entirely. Amid ongoing controversies over international adoption and longstanding claims from the far Left that interracial adoption constitutes a form of “cultural genocide,” the Obama administration launched a wave of adoption audits, auditing 68 percent of families, including our own, who claimed the adoption tax credit in 2011 and 69 percent of such families in 2012. The normal audit rate for a middle-class family is roughly 1 percent. As I said at the time, while I think bureaucratic inertia and sheer stupidity are perhaps the best explanation for the IRS’s actions, ideologically driven malice is also possible given the agency’s demonstrated far-Left bias.

On the alt-right, the race-obsessed get Twitter accounts; on the far Left, they get tenure — and then go on to celebrate only the most radical voices as truly “authentic.” Recently, Yale even hired one of Twitter’s foremost race-trolls, DeRay McKesson, to help teach a class called “Transformational Leadership in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” Many on the left are doing their best to march our nation toward the madness of race obsession and eternal conflict.

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And in that quest, the far Left needs the alt-Right —fringe views like those expressed in the tweets above help stoke liberal extremists’ paranoia and provide ammunition for their own radicals. The alt-Right, in turn, feeds off the far Left’s rhetoric to bolster its own credibility.

I understand frustration at political correctness. In fact, I’ve done something about it, filing more lawsuits to protect students and professors from campus PC tyranny than perhaps any other lawyer in the United States. I agree with the incredulity and rage at elites’ unwillingness to secure the border and their insistence that every immigration debate has to be racialized, with conservatives constantly accused of bigotry. In their frustration, I’ve even seen conservatives I call friends deride those they deem insufficiently devoted to the cause as “cucks” and “cuckservatives.”

In addition to being a derogatory, insulting slur, the word provides aid and comfort to the trolls whose tweets I’ve posted above. Just as bad, it enables and feeds the Left’s own engine of racial grievance.

Conservatives should reject those on both extremes of the spectrum. We defend a culture, not a race. The foundation of that culture is a faith that makes no distinction among races but rather declares, unequivocally, “All are one, in Christ Jesus.” Shunning the slur disempowers the trolls and forces the radical Left to confront the race hatred that fuels its own rage.

— David French is an attorney and a staff writer at National Review.