Demonic

by Ann Coulter

  The case, apparently just another white-trash bust, was featured on every MSNBC prime-time program that night. You’d think Michael Steele had been arrested. On The Ed Show, guest Bill Press said, “Ed, I have to tell you, I don’t see any difference between what [conservative blogger] Erick Erickson said and what that militia did, the Hutaree.”

  Just making some back-of-the-envelope notes here: One difference is that Erickson wasn’t accused of plotting to murder police officers.

  Erickson, editor of the conservative Red State blog, had said on radio that he was perfectly happy to fill out the census form, but got worked up complaining about the detailed personal questions on the long form, saying, “This is crazy. What gives the Commerce Department the right to ask me how often I flush my toilet? Or about going to work? I’m not filling out this form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They’re not going on my property. They can’t do that. They don’t have the legal right, and yet they’re trying.”42

  Life with liberals is a constant game of Sesame Street’s “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.”

  Liberals are allowed to call us curs, dogs, and fascists, but conservatives must make precious measured statements, so that, in the end, perhaps, the truth may emerge. To take one example at random, just a few weeks before Erickson’s word crime, HBO’s Bill Maher commented on his TV show about the death of a deranged pothead who tried to shoot his way into the Pentagon, saying, “When we see crazy, senseless deaths like this, we can only ask why, why, why couldn’t it have been Glenn Beck?”43

  Two weeks after the Hutaree bust in Michigan, another group of anti-government extremists were arrested in New York City. New York police arrested more than a hundred violent extremists who had been caught on phone taps engaging in anti-government rhetoric, including a plot to shoot law enforcement officers. They had also already committed at least two murders, eleven shootings, and one home-invasion robbery, as well as some assorted drug crimes. But unlike the Hutaree, the New York group did not inspire media speculation about conservative rhetoric encouraging violence. The New York group was the Bloods and the Crips.44

  The liberal rule is: Any criminal act committed by white men with guns is a right-wing conspiracy, whereas any criminal act committed by nonwhites with guns is the government violating someone’s civil liberties. (If a black man ever shot an abortionist, liberal brains would explode.)

  Despite liberals designating all white male criminals “right wing,” right-wingers weren’t leaping to defend the Hutaree. They were planning on killing cops? Fine, lock ’em up.

  Incidentally, it isn’t a crime to own guns or to dislike the government. In fact, each one gets a shout-out in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. As I recall, liberals were rather hopped-up about allegedly intrusive governmental powers during the Bush years. Indeed, the very people who would have been screaming about fascism in America if the Hutaree had been Muslim completely forget their “civil liberties” concerns with any criminal conspiracy involving white men.

  Thus, for example, liberals portrayed the Lackawanna Six—six Yemenis who had attended an al Qaeda training camp with a Muslim terrorist involved in the bombing of the USS Cole—as high-spirited young lads in the wrong place at the wrong time. Evan Thomas sniffed in Newsweek that the evidence against them was “underwhelming.”45

  Reprising the McVeigh refrain, Washington Post columnist (and MSNBC’s genuine black person) Eugene Robinson said of the Hutaree arrest, “The danger of political violence in this country comes overwhelmingly from one direction—the right, not the left. The vitriolic, anti-government hate speech that is spewed on talk radio every day—and, quite regularly, at Tea Party rallies—is calibrated not to inform but to incite.” Meanwhile, back here on Planet Truth, not only weren’t the Hutaree “right wing,” but the Michigan militia, which is right wing, was working with law enforcement to build the case against the Hutaree.

  For the bow on top, it turned out … that the only member of the Hutaree who was registered with any party, Jacob J. Ward, was registered as a Democrat.46

  A review of the endless political violence from liberals in this country solves a sick puzzle from American history. In Juan Williams’s book Eyes on the Prize, he describes an ugly confrontation during the integration of the Little Rock high school after Democrat governor Orval Faubus—and friend of Bill—sent troops to prevent black students from entering. As Elizabeth Eckford was being blocked from entering the school, she said, “I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the mob.… I looked into the face of an old woman, and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.”47

  A normal person winces at that story and wonders how any American could treat a fellow citizen with such hatred. Who are these people?

  And then you remember Cindy Sheehan, also an innocent-looking older woman howling about “this lying bastard, George Bush” … “that filth-spewer and warmonger, George Bush” … “They’re a bunch of f**king hypocrites!” … “Is there yet any sane adult in this country whose skin does not crawl when this murderous liar [Paul Wolfowitz] opens his mouth and speaks?” … “The biggest terrorist is George W. Bush.”48

  And you remember the sixty-two-year-old woman delivering Bush-Cheney stickers to a friend on the Upper West Side of Manhattan before the 2004 election who was attacked in the lobby of her friend’s building by an eighty-two-year-old resident, who shouted, “Get out of here with that trash,” ripped up one of the stickers, and hit the woman with her cane.49

  You remember Weatherman Eleanor Raskin’s mother, whose behavior at Weatherman protests was described by a fellow liberal as “excessive,” “unseemly,” and “militant.”50

  You remember Vietnam veterans being spat upon, incidents that were called an “urban myth” by liberals, until Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene asked in his newspaper column if any Vietnam veterans were personally spat upon when they returned to the United States. He received more than a thousand replies, sixty of which are included in his book Homecoming.51

  And you remember Tom Hayden, former SDS leader and current Occidental College professor, hoping in 2004 that liberal protesters would force New York City police into “defending the GOP convention as if it is the Green Zone in Baghdad,” so that voters would see that the reelection of Bush could “plunge the country into strife not seen since the ’60s.”52

  And you remember how, in 2006, the Columbia University students violently drove conservative speakers Jim Gilchrist and Marvin Stewart from the stage, turning over tables and chairs to seize control of the event.53

  Indeed, you remember hateful attacks on any conservative who shows up to give a speech on a college campus—or shows up in public merely to dine at a restaurant or go to an art show.

  You also remember delegates and cops at the 2004 and 2008 Republican National Conventions being beaten and sprayed with foul substances by liberal protesters.54

  Is it becoming clearer now who that old woman who spat at Elizabeth Eckford was? What kind of person would engage in an ugly physical confrontation with a stranger? It’s always a liberal.

  What’s confusing is that liberal historians keep telling us that those angry, contorted faces screaming at black people are “Southerners”—probably someone like Phyllis Schlafly. Only when you realize they are all Democrats—usually liberal, “progressive” Democrats, in the mold of Wilson, Faubus, and Ervin—do the pictures make sense.

  It’s always liberals: Like Robespierre, they commit violence for the greater good.

  THIRTEEN

  RAPED TWICE:

  LIBERALS AND THE

  CENTRAL PARK RAPE

  In 2006, when the Duke lacrosse players were accused of gang-raping a stripper—falsely, it turned out—mobs of students appeared outside the players’ homes to bang pots and pans. One of these blithering idiots, Manju Rajendran, e
xplained on MSNBC that the “symbolic” banging of pots and pans was borrowed from Latin American protesters:

  Women in Lima, Peru, initiated this as a way of surrounding the houses of women who were being assaulted by their husbands or by their partners. And it was a very confrontational way of saying, “We demonstrate solidarity with the women who are being attacked in this way or by anyone who’s being persecuted in this fashion.” We challenge the racism and the sexism and the classism implicit in these actions. We want to shame the attackers, and we want to invite the witnesses to step forward and come clean.1

  In America—unlike Peru, evidently—we have a system of justice based on rules, a presumption of innocence, and a fair hearing. The fact that the Duke lacrosse players later turned out to be completely innocent of the charges illustrates one of the benefits of that system compared with mob lynchings. But as Le Bon says, Latin people are easily whipped into a frenzy on the basis of the most tenuous facts. Crowds, he says, “are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics, but Latin crowds are the most feminine of all.”2

  Liberals despise the rule of law because courts interfere with their ability to rule by mob. They love to portray themselves as the weak taking on the powerful, but it is the least powerful who suffer the most once the rule of law is gone. The only purpose of government—as opposed to the state of nature—is to replace “might makes right” with a system of justice. The Left’s relentless attack on the judicial system is yet another example of their Jacobin lunacy in opposition to calm order.

  One of the main differences in the political systems to emerge from the French and American revolutions is the prominence of the judiciary in America. While this has had malignant effects, such as John Edwards, the idea was that the courts would be a bulwark against tyranny by protecting individuals from the popular passions of the majority. Our Constitution not only places strict limits on Congress’s powers, but also elevates the judiciary to nearly equal standing with the legislature, allowing the courts to review laws as an additional protection for individual rights.3

  Of course, those who benefit from mobs have never cared for the American form of government. From their contempt for the Constitution to their “Europeans Need Not Apply” immigration policies, liberals apparently would prefer to live in a country more like Zimbabwe. Their fondness for powerful governments is premised on the assumption that they would get to be Mugabe. It never occurs to them that they might be Mugabe’s dinner. Robespierre and his cohorts had the same idea.

  The two main impulses of the Legal Left in America appear totally contradictory to a normal person. On one hand, they act as if judges are all-seeing visionaries capable of expressing the “general will” in accordance with Rousseau. But at the same time, liberals don’t trust judges to do their jobs, which is to hold trials.

  While Justice William Douglas’s crayon scribblings on the Constitution are treated like Moses’ stone tablets, liberals believe no judge can possibly preside over a fair criminal proceeding, unless the defendant is (1) a white male, and (2) accused of rape, blowing up a building in Oklahoma City, or shooting an abortionist.

  In all other cases, liberals automatically denounce criminal trials as unfair. This is why the record for the fastest trial-to-execution in the second half of the twentieth century is held by Timothy McVeigh. If only he had claimed he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to protest U.S. imperialism, courts would still be hearing his appeals.

  This is not only because liberals admire marauding violent criminals—which they do—but also because they want to create widespread distrust of the justice system. Liberals would prefer it if courts limited themselves to abortion policy and war strategy and steered clear of actual trials.

  Both hallucinatory constitutional rulings and attacks on the criminal justice system have the same goal: undermining the rule of law in order to establish mob rule and anarchy. Trust only the media; liberals will tell you who’s guilty. In the world of the liberal, as in the world of Robespierre, there are no crimes, only criminals. And the criminal is usually Sarah Palin.

  The crown jewel for the Left in destroying people’s faith in the courts was the Central Park jogger case, one of the most shocking, brutal crimes in the nation’s history.

  On April 19, 1989, a twenty-eight-year-old investment banker working at Salomon Brothers went for a run through Central Park around 9 p.m. During her run she was attacked, dragged into the woods, savagely beaten, raped, and left for dead. It wasn’t until 1:30 a.m. that night that police found a bloody, disfigured creature moaning in a puddle of mud. The jogger had been dragged 200 feet down a muddy ravine. She was barely alive, still thrashing four hours after the attack.

  By the time the police found her, she was semiconscious, still gagged, bound, and bleeding. She had lost three-quarters of her blood. The police couldn’t tell at first if she was male or female, a homeless person or an investment banker. The homicide unit of the Manhattan DA’s office initially took the case because not one of her doctors believed she would be alive in the morning.

  The New York City Police Department, the best in the world, gathered evidence; cases were assembled and brought to trial. About a year later, three teenagers—Antron McCray (fifteen), Yusef Salaam (fifteen), and Raymond Santana (fourteen)—were convicted in one trial and two more, Kevin Richardson (fourteen) and Kharey Wise (sixteen), were convicted in a second trial of various crimes against the jogger.

  Those convictions were based almost entirely on the defendants’ detailed, videotaped confessions. When they confessed, they were subjecting themselves to criminal prosecution and lengthy prison terms. They didn’t know what the evidence would show, what the other suspects would say, or even if the jogger would emerge from her coma and identify them. (She did not identify them, having blocked all memory of the attack.)

  Those confessions were obtained in accordance with due process, admitted by the judge after a six-week hearing, played for the jurors, and attacked by defense counsel.

  In the trials, evidence was ruled on by the judge and tested in court. Witnesses were presented for both sides, subjected to cross-examination and argument. The defendants were given the right to testify in their own defense. Two unanimous, multiethnic juries found the defendants guilty of some crimes and acquitted them of others. Their convictions were later upheld on appeal by other judges.

  The only way liberals could get those convictions thrown out was to change venues from a courtroom to a newsroom.

  And so, thirteen years later, the convictions were vacated based not on a new trial or on new evidence, but solely on the confession of Matias Reyes, a career criminal, serial rapist, and murderer who had nothing to lose by confessing to the rapes—and much to gain by claiming he acted alone.

  As in the French tribunals, the Show Trials were based on a lie—to wit, that Reyes’s confession constituted “new evidence” that might have led to a different verdict at trial.

  In fact, Reyes’s admission that he had raped the jogger changed nothing about the evidence presented in the actual trials. It was always known that others had participated in the attack on the jogger, which is why prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer said in her summation to the jury, “Others who were not caught raped her and got away.” It was known at the time that semen from the the jogger’s sock and cervix did not match any of the defendants’. The only new information Reyes provided was that he was one of those who “got away.”

  Reyes might have been part of the wolf pack attacking the jogger, he could have joined the wolf pack in progress, or he might have come along afterward and raped the beaten, semiconscious jogger. No barbarity was out of the question with Reyes—this is a man who had sexually assaulted his own mother and raped and killed a pregnant woman in front of her children.

  Although Reyes made the shocking claim that he had acted alone, there was no new evidence suggesting that this was true—apart from his own word. Unlike the detailed, videotaped confessions given in the d
ays after the rape from all five convicted of rape in the real trials, Reyes’s confession was never subjected to cross-examination. He faced no penalty for his confession.

  Reyes’s confession not only cost him nothing, it helped him. When he confessed, he happened to be imprisoned with one of the convicted Central Park rapists, Kharey Wise, who was a leader of the prison Muslim community and a member of the Bloods gang. Before Reyes made his confession, he requested a transfer to one of the most desirable prisons in New York on the grounds that he feared retaliation from Wise’s gang.

  Inasmuch as the statute of limitations for rape in New York was five years4 and the Central Park jogger’s rape occurred in 1989, Reyes could have confessed in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, or 2001 and risked nothing. But it was not until Reyes was incarcerated with Wise that he decided to announce that he had raped the jogger all by himself and win a favorable prison transfer.

  It’s remarkable how many “confessions” purporting to exonerate others come from people who will face no penalty for the confession, either because the statute of limitations has run out or because they are already serving thirty-three years to life in prison or both—as in Reyes’s case. Confessions that clear the convicted dramatically improve an inmate’s standing in the prison pecking order by sticking it to the authorities, even without an advantageous transfer.

  But liberals put enormous pressure on the doddering district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, to vacate the convictions. The entire left-wing apparatus, from the media to the defense bar, was fixated on getting those convictions overturned—and overjoyed when they were. Another victory for the Innocence Project!

  For the Central Park rape convictions to be vacated was almost as much a blow to civilization at the attack itself. If those juries, under those circumstances, could convict wholly innocent young lads, then the whole legal system was a scam and a fraud.