conspiracy researcher. Off camera, | asked what the turning point had been for him. He said that it was when his fiancée, a CIA operative, tried to involve him in drug smuggling, and he refused. Ruppert and | were both columnists for High Times then, but, he told me, “I don’ t smoke grass.” The other panelist was scheduled to be former Nixon speechwriter and now bespectacled, drone-voiced personality Ben Stein, but he canceled out at the last minute. Ann Coulter, former Justice Department attorney and Senate aide, now a professional reactionary and Stepford pundit, was at the studio for a subsequent taping about secret societies, and she was drafted into taking Stein’ s place. A frequent guest on talk shows, Coulter is recognizable by her long blond hair, her short black skirt, and her drag-queen aura. When she was a guest on CNBC’ s 7he Big /dea, host Donny Deutsch asked her what an ideal country would be like, and she replied that it would be one in which everybody was a Christian. “We just want Jews to be perfected,” she said. As for Muslims, two days after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, she wrote in National Review Online “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” But now, the taping of 7he Conspiracy Zone had to be delayed because she was still in the makeup room. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015271