by Ann Coulter
There are other hard comparisons to be made. No conservative has ever charged at a liberal testifying before Congress, waving bloody hands in the witness’s face—as was done to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (Or as liberals would put it if she were a Democrat: the first black female secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.)
No conservative has ever sneaked into a Democratic National Convention and heckled the speakers.
No Democratic politician has ever been rushed by a conservative and hit in the face with a stupid sign, as was done to Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul in 2010. Indeed, no conservative has rushed anyone, other than maybe a laggard waiter.
No conservative has ever thrown food at a prominent liberal. This is done all the time to conservative public figures. Limiting this review of liberal food-throwing to the baked dessert section—and liberals throw all sorts of food at conservatives—liberals have thrown pies at William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, Milton Friedman, Bill Kristol, David Horowitz, and G. Gordon Liddy, among others.
No conservative has ever demonstrated outside a private citizen’s home. This is done repeatedly by liberals—to the Duke lacrosse players;5 to AIG officials;6 to Republican House speaker John Boehner;7 to a Wal-Mart developer;8 to a Bank of America executive (who was a Democrat, but SEIU didn’t care);9 to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker; and to Wisconsin State Senate leader Scott Fitzgerald.10 (And that was despite a union rule prohibiting work on Tuesdays!)
When the Bank of America officer’s young son was trapped, alone and terrified, inside his home with fourteen busloads of Service Employees International Union thugs pouring out onto his front yard to protest, the police refused to arrest the trespassers so as not to “incite them.”11 His parents had both worked in the Clinton administration. Even liberals know that they are in danger of a physical assault only from their fellow liberals. But they still playact terror of anti-ObamaCare protesters.
It is possible that, somewhere, at some time, an audience of conservatives has shouted down an invited liberal speaker—though no such incidents come to mind. But it is not possible that conservatives would defend or embrace the hooligans. Conservatives think civil society needs to be, you know, civil.
We are not counting the voices in Maureen Dowd’s head that heard Representative Joe Wilson shout, “You lie, boy!” rather than “You lie!” during Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address. First of all, we’re in trouble if people can be found guilty for what Maureen Dowd knows they really meant in their hearts—especially since Maureen seems to base her experience of the world on having recently read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Second, if Democrats are going to be interrupting the president’s speech every three minutes with raucous standing ovations, that makes it a participatory speech. A rule condemning Wilson’s two-syllable shout-out “You lie!” would mean that only one side is allowed to participate. Third, and by the way, Wilson was roundly condemned by everyone but me and quickly apologized.
Liberals, by contrast, defend and even celebrate outrageous behavior on their side. By now, it has become so expected for liberals to aggressively disrupt and shut down conservative speakers that people hardly notice it anymore. They shout down conservatives with alarming frequency on college campuses—those crucibles of enlightenment—and are invariably protected by college administrators.
No conservative has ever tried to stage a “citizen’s arrest” of a political opponent. Republican presidents and their staff are constantly being threatened with “citizen’s arrests.” In 1984, liberal nut and third-party presidential candidate Sonia Johnson stood in front of the White House announcing that she planned to make a citizen’s arrest of President Reagan for “war crimes.” This was based on Reagan’s invasion of Marxist Grenada to rescue American medical personnel trapped there. Many considered this the high point of Sonia’s presidential campaign.
A few years later, Greenpeace employee Terry Fernsler showed up at the Westin Hotel in Seattle, where President Reagan was speaking, and tried to make a citizen’s arrest for his “war crimes” against the communist regime in Nicaragua in violation of “international law.”12 In 1987, the liberal group Pledge of Resistance plotted to kidnap a federal official in a “citizen’s arrest” if President Reagan invaded Nicaragua or El Salvador.13 Then, again, in 1988, liberal protesters at the G-7 meeting in Toronto tried to make citizen’s arrests of both Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, presumably for preventing the worldwide triumph of communism.
The incidence of citizen’s arrests came to a suspicious halt throughout the Clinton presidency—rape and perjury being deemed “personal matters” rather than “crimes”—but, strangely enough, the trend came roaring back for the second President Bush.
Liberals tried to make a citizen’s arrest of President Bush in Britain in 2001 for crimes against the planet;14 at the European-American Summit in June 2004;15 again in 2004 in Ottawa;16 and back here in the good old U.S. of A. at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York (on the grounds that he was “responsible for the misfortune of everyone who’s disabled”).17
Anti-war protesters issued warrants for the citizen’s arrest of Bush in the United States,18 in Britain (for having caused “grievous harm to thousands of people in Iraq”),19 and in Paris, where a mock arrest was made of a Bush impersonator in lieu of the real thing.20
Even after Bush left office and happiness reigned throughout the world, liberals stormed a luncheon where Bush was speaking in Alberta, Canada,21 and so many protesters threatened to derail a scheduled January 2011 Bush speech in Geneva that the event had to be canceled.
Even Bush’s advisers have been—and continue to be—threatened with citizen’s arrests, including Bush’s UN ambassador John Bolton at the Hay Festival in Wales in May 2008—years after the end of his employment with Bush.22 Bush adviser Karl Rove has been repeatedly threatened with citizen’s arrests—by the Des Moines Catholic Workers Party when he was giving a speech in Iowa,23 by a college student when he was giving a speech at Oberlin College,24 and by liberals throughout the country who show up to disrupt his book events, which are often canceled because of the liberal hordes.
Conservatives make documentaries of people talking, explaining things, arguing points. Michael Moore makes documentaries showing him trying to make citizen’s arrests or otherwise ambushing private citizens.
These aren’t just a few random nuts that might turn up on either side of the political spectrum. Otherwise, conservatives would be staging citizen’s arrests of Bill Clinton for allegedly raping Juanita Broaddrick, of Al Gore for committing fraud when he babbles about global warming in the middle of a blizzard, and of Joe Biden for “Recovery Summer.” Conservatives wouldn’t do it.
If someday, someplace in America, a conservative mob ever shuts down a liberal speaker, tries to make a citizen’s arrest, throws food at a liberal public figure, or assaults a congressional witness, it won’t be defended by other conservatives. You won’t find conservatives writing letters to the editor praising nitwits trying to make a citizen’s arrest, saying they “deserved a laurel,” as was said in the Toronto Star about the violent Reagan and Thatcher protesters.25 You won’t find a Republican U.S. attorney general refusing to prosecute Republicans captured on tape standing outside a polling precinct, making armed threats on election day. You won’t find a Republican member of Congress defending a criminal for dropping a cement block on a trucker’s head.
Liberals constantly engage in mob violence—and allegedly respectable liberals encourage the ruffians. The Guardian, billing itself as “the world’s leading liberal voice,” ran a column by the nut who tried to arrest Bolton, in which he encouraged others to make a citizen’s arrest of Tony Blair.26
It is simply taken as a given that Michael Moore and James Carville can stroll undisturbed through the most conservative parts of the country—even through the Republican National Convention!—while conservative public figures need bodyguard
s anywhere liberals might be.
Indeed, it’s nonstop physical confrontation for conservatives. To take an example at random: Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani was strolling out of the Bridgehampton arts fair in May 2009 when a “slim, well-dressed man,” identified as sixty-nine-year-old John McCluskey of East Hampton, came charging at him, screaming “I’m gonna punch your lights out,” and poking Giuliani in the chest.27 Nothing like this has ever happened to a liberal, and if it did, right-wing publications wouldn’t turn the nut into a hero. Meanwhile, the deranged McCluskey was hailed by the liberal Gawker website—in a brave, untitled piece—as “a true New York hero,” while Giuliani, who was merely attending a local art show, was called a “perpetual asshole.”28
But Keith Olbermann stormed out of the 2008 Republican National Convention early because MSNBC wouldn’t double his security in the presence of scary Republican delegates.
No matter how much liberals wail about the threat of right-wing violence, all the nontheoretical violence keeps coming from the Left.
This is why it was laughable, even to themselves, when liberals began trying to portray Tea Partiers as potentially violent. These endlessly violent liberals never pass up an opportunity for indignation. Whenever it suits their purposes, they will transform themselves from supporters of violent anarchists into fainting Victorian virgins—“I can’t believe my opponent would stoop so low!” Liberals believe anything ever said by a Republican is an incitement to violence. But when no violence ensues, we never hear, “Oh, okay, I overreacted.” As soon as liberals think they can get away with it, they reintroduce their hoax charges. It didn’t get much press that our accusation was a lie—let’s run with it.
The Democratic National Committee called the Tea Party movement “rabid right-wing extremists” and “angry mobs.”29 ABC called them a “mob.” CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux introduced a segment on the Townhalls asking, “What is all this shouting about?”30 CNN called them “rabble-rousing critics” of the president. Representative Brian Baird (D-WA) said citizens opposed to ObamaCare had a “lynch mob mentality” and were using “close to Brown-shirt tactics.”31 (Meaning what? Light brown shirt tactics? Beige, maybe? Taupe? Ecru?) The AFL-CIO—yes, the AFL-CIO—said the anti-ObamaCare citizens were “using mob rule.”32
In an unexpected twist, Democrats also attacked the Tea Partiers for being too well dressed. (You’re always arguing from a real position of strength when you attack your opponent’s clothes.) White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said they looked like the “Brooks Brothers brigade.” Senator Barbara Boxer complained that the ObamaCare protesters were suspiciously “well dressed.” Chris Matthews repeated Gibbs’s “Brooks Brothers brigade” line, demanding to know who these “well-dressed, middle-class people in pinks and limes” were.33 Liberals don’t consider protesters believable unless they’re homeless people hired to protest by SEIU with a free T-shirt and a box lunch. They would find out in the next election just how real those protests were.
With the “too well dressed” attack not making much of an impact, liberals reverted to calling the anti-ObamaCare protesters a dangerous mob.
Senator Harry Reid called them “evil-mongers”—twice, to be sure he was understood.34 Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer wrote an article in USA Today calling them “un-American” for allegedly shouting down speakers. Pelosi and Hoyer should come to one of my college speeches.
Liberals acted as if they had encountered the Night Riders every time they saw a sign that said “T(axed) E(nough) A(lready).” It seemed perfectly plausible to liberals that a bunch of out-of-control, badass headbangers would call their rallies “Tea Parties.” But while we kept hearing about the violent, racist rednecks at conservative rallies, the only violence at the Tea Parties and Townhalls kept being committed by liberals.
At a Townhall meeting on ObamaCare in St. Louis on August 6, 2009, Kenneth Gladney, a conservative black handing out pens and buttons, was punched in the face by union thugs yelling racial slurs—“What kind of nigger are you?” According to the police report, Gladney’s assailants, Elston McCowan and Perry Molens, are both members of the SEIU. In all, six union thugs were arrested that day.35
About a month later, on September 3, 2009, sixty-five-year-old ObamaCare opponent Bill Rice had his finger bitten off at a health care rally in Thousand Oaks, California, by an ObamaCare supporter.36 To repeat: A man had his finger bitten clear off by another human being at a political rally. Oh and by the way, the New York Times never mentioned it. Only two news outlets carried the story, according to Nexis: the Washington Times and Neil Cavuto, who interviewed the victim on Fox News. Ironically, having your finger bitten off by a left-wing crackpot while protesting ObamaCare is not covered by ObamaCare, but erectile dysfunction therapy for federal inmates is.
In January 2011, radio host Michael Smerconish was babbling to Chris Matthews about his terror of some angry birthers he had seen eighteen months earlier at a Mike Castle Townhall meeting in Delaware. He said, “I looked at that video and I was frightened. These are people who are on the edge and if somebody pushes them over, God help us all.”37
Perhaps the good Lord stepped in—or perhaps the excitable attendees at the Castle meeting were never especially dangerous. Even the nutty birthers at the Mike Castle Townhall seemed to have managed not to attack anyone in the eighteen months since Smerconish had been “frightened” by what he saw there. If these wacky right-wingers are constantly on the verge of violence, why isn’t there ever any violence?
You could throw a glass of cold water on a liberal in the middle of the night and he’d wake up denouncing “right-wing rhetoric.”
Liberals keep warning us about right-wing violence—the Tea Partiers, the gun nuts, the militias, the abortion protesters, the Republicans in Hush Puppies terrorizing Jesse Jackson during the 2000 Florida recount. But they can never produce any examples. And when they do, it turns out to be a liberal.
In June 2009, liberals thought they finally had an act of violence they could pin on a right-winger—besides the old McVeigh chestnut—when there was a shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, killing a black security guard.
The night of the shooting, Keith Olbermann hysterically warned, “Five months—less than five months actually, into this presidency of this Democratic president, half-white, half-African-American, and a shooter opens fire in the National Holocaust Museum. Eleven days after an OB-GYN in Kansas is assassinated and his women’s health clinic closes its doors apparently for good. Is this a coincidence of timing that these attacks are happening now?”38
The next night, Rachel Maddow noted that the Holocaust museum shooter was a birther, adding that such thinking was common among conservatives: “At the conservative tea parties that were held across the country in April, you couldn’t get away from it.”39
That day on the Ed Schultz show, Ed raised the prescience of the Department of Homeland Security report warning of an upsurge in violence among conservatives, sneering that “it was mocked by a lot of conservatives … but this guy that committed this crime yesterday, we knew what he was all about.”40
In fact, however, the shooter, James Von Brunn, was every bit as angry about Bush’s election as Obama’s. On his webpage—about to be sold to AOL for $315 million—he raged against Bush, McCain, and all “neoconservatives.” In addition to apparently being a birther, he was a 9/11 truther and—naturally—detested Christianity.41
Not every liberal will commit political violence, but all political violence keeps being committed by liberals.
Liberal hearts again leapt with anticipation on February 18, 2010, when a nut flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas. Those of you who are familiar with my previous work can probably guess what’s about to happen.
The pilot, Joseph Stack, turned out to be a Marxist. Stack was upset not only about his IRS audit but also about the fact that America didn’t have national health care. In what could have been a script from MSNBC’s Countdown with Keit
h Olbermann, Stack’s suicide note complained that “the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year.” He concluded his suicide note—Stack, not Olbermann—by denouncing capitalism and praising communism: “The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.”
And just like that, what could have been a brilliant career as an MSNBC prime-time host came to a fiery end.
Just a week before Stack flew his plane into the IRS building, on February 12, 2010, University of Alabama professor Amy Bishop shot up a room full of professors, hitting six and leaving three of her colleagues dead. We didn’t hear much about Bishop’s massacre of her colleagues, probably because, according to the Boston Herald, Bishop “was a far-left political extremist who was ‘obsessed’ with President Obama to the point of being off-putting.” That fact was never acknowledged by the New York Times or other major media, except inadvertently by the mainstream media’s instantaneous dropping of all mention of the rather spectacular crime.
It was the same with the satanic cult the “Westboro church,” which protests outside soldiers’ funerals with charming signs saying things like “God hates fags.” The patriarch of the cult, Fred Phelps, has run for office five times—as a Democrat. The New York Times submitted an amicus brief on his behalf in a lawsuit brought by the father of a soldier whose funeral Phelps’s crew had disrupted.
Then, in late March 2010, there was exultation throughout the media when federal law enforcement officials arrested nine members of an alleged “Christian militia group” based in Michigan. The group, calling themselves the “Hutaree,” was charged on weapons and drug offenses, and also with plotting to kill law enforcement officers. Inasmuch as they had not actually committed any violence yet, if the Hutaree had been Muslims, liberals would have been wailing about their civil rights.