ALSO BY ANN COULTER
GUILTY
IF DEMOCRATS HAD ANY BRAINS,
THEY’D BE REPUBLICANS
GODLESS
HOW TO TALK TO A LIBERAL
(IF YOU MUST)
TREASON
SLANDER
HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS
Copyright © 2011 by Ann Coulter
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN FORUM with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-307-88536-4
Jacket design by Jean Traina and David Tran
Jacket photograph by ShonnaValeska.com
v3.1
For Peter Thiel
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART I:
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LIBERAL
ONE. THE LIBERAL MOB
TWO. AMERICAN IDOLS: THE MOB’S COMPULSION TO CREATE MESSIAHS
THREE. CONTRADICTIONS: YOU CAN LEAD A MOB TO WATER, BUT YOU CAN’T MAKE IT THINK
FOUR. CRACKPOT CONSPIRACY THEORIES—OR, AS LIBERALS CALL THEM, “THEORIES”
FIVE. I’LL SEE YOUR BIRTH CERTIFICATE CONSPIRACY THEORY AND RAISE YOU ONE OCTOBER SURPRISE
PART II:
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE LIBERAL
SIX. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: WHEN LIBERALS ATTACK
SEVEN. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION PART DEUX: COME FOR THE BEHEADINGS, STAY FOR THE RAPES!
EIGHT. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: HOW TO THROW A REVOLUTION WITHOUT LOSING YOUR HEAD
PART III:
THE VIOLENT TENDENCIES OF THE LIBERAL
NINE. THE SIXTIES: THE MOB GOES TO COLLEGE
TEN. CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE MOB: GEORGE WALLACE, BULL CONNOR, ORVAL FAUBUS, AND OTHER DEMOCRATS
ELEVEN. TIMOTHY McVEIGH IS NOW A TEA PARTIER
TWELVE. IMAGINARY VIOLENCE FROM THE RIGHT VS. ACTUAL VIOLENCE FROM THE LEFT
THIRTEEN. RAPED TWICE: LIBERALS AND THE CENTRAL PARK RAPE
PART IV:
WHY WOULD ANYONE BE A LIBERAL?
FOURTEEN. STATUS ANXIETY: PLEASE LIKE ME!
FIFTEEN. INHERITORS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: LIBERALS ♥ MOBS
SIXTEEN. THE TOTALITARIAN INSTINCT AND SEXUAL PERVERSITY OF LIBERALS
SEVENTEEN. LUCIFER: THE ULTIMATE MOB BOSS
APPENDIX
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
PART I:
THE
PSYCHOLOGY
OF THE
LIBERAL
ONE
THE LIBERAL MOB
2 When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him.
3 This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain.
4 For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him.
5 Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.
6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him.
7 He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!”
8 For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!”
9 Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” “My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.”
—MARK 5:2–9
The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. It is the nihilistic mob of the French Revolution; it is the revolutionaries who seized control of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century; it is the Maoist gangs looting villages and impaling babies in China; it is the Ku Klux Klan terrorizing Republicans and blacks in the South; it is the 1992 Los Angeles riot that left fifty dead and did $1 billion of damage after the first Rodney King verdict; it is the bloody riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; it is the masked hoodlums smashing up Seattle when bankers came to town; it is the 500,000 illegal aliens marching under a foreign flag in Los Angeles; it is throngs of Islamic fanatics attending the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s funeral, tearing his body out of its coffin; it is left-wing protesters destroying property and attacking delegates at the Republican National Conventions.
Everything else changes, but mobs are always the same. A mob is an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group. Intoxicated by messianic goals, the promise of instant gratification, and adrenaline-pumping exhortations, mobs create mayhem, chaos, and destruction, leaving a smoldering heap of wreckage for their leaders to climb to power.
The Democratic Party is the party of the mob, irrespective of what the mob represents. Democrats activate mobs, depend on mobs, coddle mobs, publicize and celebrate mobs—they are the mob. Indeed, the very idea of a “community organizer” is to stir up a mob for some political purpose. “As so frequently happens when a crowd goes wild,” historian Erik Durschmied says, “there is always one who shouts louder and thereby appoints himself as their leader.”1 Those are the people we call “elected Democrats.”
The Democrats’ playbook doesn’t involve heads on pikes—as yet—but uses a more insidious means to incite the mob. The twisting of truth, stirring of passions, demonizing of opponents, and relying on propagandistic images in lieu of ideas—these are the earmarks of a mob leader.
Over and over again, one finds the Democrats manipulating the mob to gain power. It is official Democratic policy to appeal to the least-informed, weakest minded members of the public. Their base consists of soccer moms, actresses, felons, MSNBC viewers, aging Red-diaper babies, welfare recipients, heads-up-their-asses billionaires, and government workers—who can never be laid off. The entire party gave up on attracting the votes of white men decades ago. It’s easier to round up votes by frightening women about “assault weapons” and promising excellent free health care to non–English speakers. Yes, a free health care system that is so superior that Democrats exempt themselves and their friends from being in it.
Liberals frighten people about their health care in order to stampede through ObamaCare. They claim the Earth is overheating in order to seize taxpayer money for solar panels and compact fluorescent light-bulbs. They call out union thugs to force politicians to accede to insane benefits packages. They stage campaigns of calumny to get their way on gay marriage. Faddish ideas that would never have occurred to anyone fifty years ago—or even twenty years ago—are suddenly foisted on the rest of us by the liberal mobs.
Although the left in America is widely recognized as hysterical, unreasonable, and clueless, the “root cause” of these traits has generally been neglected. More than a century ago, Gustave Le Bon perfectly captured the liberal psychological profile in his 1896 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon—a French physician, scientist, and social psychologist—was the first to identify the phenomenon of mass psychology. His groundbreaking book The Crowd paints a disturbing picture of the behavior of mobs. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini used his book to learn how to incite a mob. Our liberals could have been Le Bon’s study subjects.
Even the left-wing Guardian has admitted that Le Bon’s study of crowd behavior was “possibly the most influential work of psychology ever written.” Presumably recognizing themselves in his psychological profile, liberals have recently tried to undermine Le Bon.
They
have complained that he merely “articulated the propertied classes’ fear of the mob.” Who likes mobs? Renters? Window manufacturers? Rope salesmen? Liberals also objected that Le Bon did not hold the police accountable for a mob’s behavior—which is like demanding that we take into account the length of a rape victim’s skirt.2 It is revealing that liberals so fear Le Bon that they try to sully him as “controversial” and “reactionary.” (Those particular complaints, incidentally, were lodged by liberal activist George Monbiot, who has called for “citizen’s arrests” of former government officials from George W. Bush’s UN ambassador John Bolton to former British prime minister Tony Blair. No wonder he doesn’t like psychological studies of mob behavior.)3
It was all the usual claptrap, but the piercing truth of Le Bon’s study speaks for itself. Liberals wouldn’t go after him if, even a century later, his theories didn’t still ring true. All the characteristics of mob behavior set forth by Le Bon in 1895 are evident in modern liberalism—simplistic, extreme black-and-white thinking, fear of novelty, inability to follow logical arguments, acceptance of contradictory ideas, being transfixed by images, a religious worship of their leaders, and a blind hatred of their opponents.
Many of liberals’ peculiarities are understandable only when one realizes that they are a mob. For example, a crowd’s ability to grasp only the simplest ideas is reflected in the interminable slogans. Liberals have boatloads of them: Bush Lied, Kids Died! Our Bodies, Our Selves! No Blood for Oil! No Justice, No Peace! Save the Whales; Love Your Mother (Earth); Ban the Bomb; Make Love, Not War; Friends Don’t Let Friends Vote Republican; Diversity Is Our Strength! Save the Planet! Pro-Choice, Pro-Child! Support Our Troops, Bring Them Home! Co-Exist! Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today? Dissent Is Patriotic! War Is Not the Answer! Go Green! Health Care Is a Right, Not a Privilege! Imagine Peace; Celebrate Diversity! Beat the Bushes for Peace! No Nukes! Give Peace a Chance; Think Globally/Act Locally; No Tax Cuts for the Rich; Save the Planet! Venceremos! One, Two, Three, Four, We Don’t Want Your F—King War! Bush = Hitler; Hell No, We Won’t Go! Off the Pig! Eat the Rich! Die Yuppie Scum! Peace Now! We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For! Solidarity Forever! Bring America Home! You Can’t Hug a Child with Nuclear Arms; Meat Is Murder! Books Not Bombs! Fight the Power! Yes We Can!
And those are just the ones on my neighbor’s car.
What is the Tea Party’s slogan? There is none. Republicans almost never have slogans, certainly none that anyone can remember—except when our presidential candidates are forced to come up with some short-lived catchphrase for their campaigns.
There are only three memorable Republican slogans in the past half century—unless you count what Dick Cheney said to Pat Leahy on the Senate floor in 2004, in which case there have been four. There was “27 Million Americans Can’t Be Wrong,” after Goldwater lost in a historic landslide in 1964. There were the YAF buttons made in tribute to William F. Buckley’s mayoral campaign platform in 1965: “Don’t Let Them Immanentize the Eschaton!” And when there were few other reasons to vote for the reelection of the first President Bush in 1992, there was “Annoy the Media, Vote Bush!” Republicans display crosses and fish, college and sports decals, and a few parodies of liberal slogans (“Imagine an Unborn Child”), but there are no bossy demands on our bumper stickers.
Conservatives don’t cotton to slogans. When they finally produce one, it’s never the sort of rallying cry capable of sending people to the ramparts, such as “Yes We Can!” or “Bush Lied, Kids Died!” “27 Million Americans Can’t Be Wrong” is a wry observation, not an urgent call to battle. “Annoy the Media, Vote Bush!” barely qualifies as a suggestion. Conservatives write books and articles, make arguments, and seek debates, but are perplexed by slogans. (Of course, another reason Republicans may avoid bumper stickers is to prevent their cars from being vandalized, which brings us right back to another mob characteristic of liberals.)
By contrast, liberals thrive on jargon as a substitute for thought. According to Le Bon, the more dramatic and devoid of logic a chant is, the better it works to rile up a mob: “Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. An orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusive use of violent affirmations. To exaggerate, to affirm, to resort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known to speakers at public meetings.”4
Liberals love slogans because the “laws of logic have no action on crowds.” Mobs, Le Bon says, “are not to be influenced by reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas.”5 He could be referring to the New York Times and other journals of elite opinion when he describes periodicals that “manufacture opinions for their readers and supply them with ready-made phrases which dispense them of the trouble of reasoning.”6
You will see all the techniques for inspiring mobs in liberal behavior. There are three main elements to putting an idea in a crowd: affirmation, repetition, and contagion. The effects take time, Le Bon says, but “once produced are very lasting.” It’s the same reason annoying TV commercials are so effective. “Head On! Apply directly to the forehead. Head On! Apply directly to the forehead. Head On! Apply directly to the forehead.”
Affirmation is the creation of a slogan “free of all reasoning and all proof.” Indeed, the “conciser an affirmation is, the more destitute of every appearance of proof and demonstration,” he says, “the more weight it carries.” This is “one of the surest means of making an idea enter the mind of crowds.”
Affirmation only works if it is “constantly repeated, and so far as possible in the same terms.” The power of repetition “is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged. At the end of a certain time we have forgotten who is the author of the repeated assertion, and we finish by believing it.”
Short slogans endlessly repeated create a “current of opinion” allowing “the powerful mechanism of contagion” to operate. Ideas spread through the crowd as easily as microbes, Le Bon says, which explains the mass panics common to rock concerts, financial markets, street protests, and Prius dealerships. “A panic that has seized only a few sheep,” he observes, “will soon extend to the whole flock.”7
Liberals have it down to an art: The cacophonous method of yelling until conservatives shut up just because they just want to go home, the purblind assertions—No WMDs in Iraq! Civilian Deaths! Violence at Tea Parties! Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!—and overnight the entire mass of liberals is robotically repeating the same slogans.
It isn’t only in their incessant street demonstrations that liberals talk in slogans. This is how liberals discuss serious policy matters with the public. It’s as if they’re speaking to a vast O.J. Simpson jury, mesmerized by a pair of gloves and a closing argument that rhymes (“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”). Conservatives talk the same on TV as off TV—unless they are inarticulate politicians using sound bites to avoid saying anything stupid. But regular conservatives talk on TV as if they’re having a normal conversation with their friends or neighbors. Liberals don’t know how to do this because they don’t have normal friends and neighbors—only fellow demonstrators. Their self-image is as little Lenins, rousing the masses at the Finland Station, which is why they always sound as if they’ve gotten control of the PA system and are broadcasting from Big Brother, Inc.—or if they’re Al Gore, addressing a kindergarten class.
Here, for example, is Stephanie Bloomingdale, of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, being interviewed on MSNBC about the union’s beef with Governor Scott Walker: “Well, America, we need all of you to help us with our fight. Because this is a fight to reclaim the values of the middle class. This is the movement of our time. And we need people all across America, working people, to stand up and say, this is the time we need to restore economic justice. And we know that the only—that the union movement
is the only thing that stands between unbridled corporate greed and a true economic democracy. And we—what I would like to say is, America, stand with us, stand with us who are fighting for justice and economic justice in our society.”8
The next night, Katrina vanden Heuvel was engaging in the same sort of “Internationale” hectoring: “People are waking up. And they’re in the streets. There are going to be fifty rallies around this country. Maybe a million people in the streets of this country. And what are they saying? Enough! You’re giving our people’s money away. Invest in our country, invest in jobs, invest in education. Keep cops on the street, keep teachers in the classrooms. Enough with these perks for corporations. There’s a movement called U.S. uncut, which is inspired by an article in The Nation. If we can recoup from the very richest who brought us this financial crisis and from corporate tax dodgers, we can balance budgets in a fair way. Justice, fairness, concepts that may be coming back to America in this moment.”9
The advantage of slogans like these—“working families,” “economic justice,” “unbridled corporate greed,” and “invest in our country, invest in jobs, invest in education”—is that liberals never have to talk about the actual issues being discussed. You’d never know in the fog of jargon that the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, was only asking government employees to start paying 6 percent of their pension contributions (up from zero percent) and 12 percent of their health care insurance (up from six percent).10
Similarly, the pro-abortion movement depends on never ever using the word “abortion”—only cant, such as “choice,” “family planning,” and “reproductive freedom.”
The Left’s robotic speaking style helps explain why liberals have never been able to make a dent in talk radio, despite many tries. Apparently, even the people who get bused in to their rallies can’t be paid to listen to liberals hectoring them on talk radio. Being endlessly lectured by deadly earnest liberals is boring. Ask any Cuban.