by Ann Coulter
Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”6 (And now the Republicans are going to have to repeal it, so we can find out what’s not in it.)
Following the mob-rule playbook, Democrats spent decades creating a synthetic crisis in health care by issuing both federal and state government mandates dictating what insurance companies were required to cover. Politicians forced insurance companies to pay for everyone’s Viagra, prenatal counseling, shrinks, marital counseling, and drug rehab—all of which made health insurance ridiculously expensive (especially for those of you who aren’t likely to need treatment for a gambling addiction or self-esteem issues).
The whole idea of insurance is to insure against catastrophes, such as fires, diseases, accidents, or sudden marriages to a Kardashian daughter. But because of government intervention, the American consumer had no choice about whether to pay for everyone else’s shrinks and Viagra. In its infinite wisdom, the government also made it illegal to buy health insurance across state lines to prevent competition. They can’t keep Mexicans out of Laredo, but they can sure keep an Indiana State Farm agent out of Ohio.
Having wrecked the market for health insurance, liberals demanded a national health care system to “fix” the very problems their meddling had created in the first place. As usual, the Democrats’ solution to problems created by government intervention was more government intervention. This is like trying to sober up by having another drink—except at least trying to sober up by drinking more is fun.
And Democrats promised utopia: ObamaCare would provide health care for 30 million uninsured Americans, everyone else’s health care would improve—and their plan would save money! It was a delicious all-you-can-eat chocolate cake that actually burned calories!
Only the mob could believe it. When most Americans objected, liberals explained, We know you don’t want it, but my roommate and I are both Rhodes scholars and we worked it all out on paper. This will turn out fantastically well! As was said of Pol Pot, “It seemed that the only thing needed was sufficient willpower, and heaven would be found on Earth.”7
Frustrated that, in a democracy, they can’t implement their grand plans to save humanity with the ease of a dictator, liberals demonize those who stand in their way. That’s why Americans who objected to ObamaCare had to be anathematized for “obstructing” the plan for health care utopia.
The mob can make a person a pariah in an instant with rumors, outright lies, and the crowd’s trademark smirking. They did it to Marie Antoinette. They did it to Joe McCarthy. They did it to Richard Nixon, the shah of Iran, Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Halliburton, Margaret Thatcher, Dan Quayle, Bush I, Bush II, “neoconservatives,” Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Allen West—the list is endless. It’s important to liberals to express contempt for an adversary. Belittling people is pleasurable for them as well as tactically useful.
Instead of “counterrevolutionaries,” liberals’ opponents are called “haters,” “those who seek to divide us,” “tea baggers,” and “right-wing hate groups.” Meanwhile, conservatives call liberals “liberals”—and that makes them testy.
They make wild, lying accusations against conservatives, especially the Tea Partiers—to the point of accusing conservatives of complicity in a liberal lunatic’s shooting spree at a Tucson Safeway that left six dead and a dozen wounded.
They terrorize their political opponents by ginning up psychopaths to physically attack conservatives at the Republican National Convention, conservative rallies, Republican luncheons, book signings, speeches—even at the political opponent’s home. Then they turn around and claim to be afraid of Tea Partiers.
Violence from the Left is never criticized by allegedly respectable Democrats. Generally, it’s not even reported, allowing liberals to go on physically intimidating conservatives without everyone noticing their mob behavior. Just as they forget to mention the entire history of the French Revolution, they forget to report the constant mayhem and tumult being created by liberals.
When liberal activists used fake press credentials to sneak into the 2008 Republican National Convention and disrupt Sarah Palin’s speech, only two newspapers in the country bothered to mention it in their pages—the Idaho Falls Post Register and St. Paul Pioneer Press. The protesters were major Obama fundraisers, Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin of CodePink—a group whose raison d’être is to assault conservatives.
After illegally sneaking into the convention hall, the protesters waited for Palin—a major party’s vice presidential candidate—to begin speaking and then stripped to reveal their costumes, pink dresses with anti-Palin slogans. They unfurled banners denouncing Palin, and began screeching. Although not as scary as a Tea Partier peacefully protesting ObamaCare in a public place, isn’t that newsworthy?
When CodePink activists returned to the Convention Hall the next night to heckle John McCain’s speech, again, only a handful of newspapers reported this shocking assault on a party’s political convention. Earlier in the day, CodePink loons had violently disrupted a pro-life luncheon, storming the stage and ripping the microphone from Phyllis Schlafly’s hand.
If a couple of John Birchers had stood up and started shouting during Barack Obama’s convention speech, would that have been considered newsworthy?
One of the rabble-rousers, Jodie Evans, not only was a bundler for Obama but also had served in the cabinet of California governor Jerry Brown during his first administration. She ran Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign and held fundraisers for him during his 2010 gubernatorial run.
She’s also led protests in Santa Monica against the Israeli skin care company Ahava8 and tried to stage a citizen’s arrest of Karl Rove. And yet Evans is as welcome in the Democratic Party as the Koch brothers are in the Republican Party.
Part of what gives mob movements their fury is that they’re always claiming to be righting the wrongs of the past—the corrupt royalty and clergy in France, the oppressive tsars in Russia, the hyperinflationary Weimar Republic in Germany, the inept Kuomintang in China. You will find that the most bloodthirsty regimes in history are those claiming to be redressing the wrongs of previous regimes.
In America, it’s “discrimination” and “white male patriarchy” that’s always being redressed, naturally with even more discrimination. We’ve gone from Democrats imposing discriminatory laws on blacks in the South to national Democrats imposing federally sanctioned, government-supported race, gender, and disability quotas on the entire country.
Following their totalitarian forebears, liberals went from punishing acts to punishing thoughts and motives in the blink of an eye. In lieu of class crimes and counterrevolutionaries, American liberals have given us “hate crimes,” “disparate impact” rules, “sexists,” and “bigots.” Acts are irrelevant; your motives are on trial. You are presumed guilty and acquittals are rare.
The American Left also shares the French revolutionaries’ blind hatred of tradition when it comes to morals and culture. Ironically, liberals are hidebound reactionaries when it comes to recent innovations such as government pensions: It’s the thousand-years-old building blocks of civilization they want to shatter. The definition of “family” and “human life” are up for grabs, but the retirement age for Social Security is written in stone tablets.
Liberals never bother to ask whether there might have been a reason for a thousand-years-old convention such as marriage. They don’t care. Their approach is to rip out society’s foundations without considering whether they serve any purpose. Why do we need immigration laws? What’s with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Why do children have to have a mother and father? Hey, I like Keith Richards—why not make heroin legal? Let’s take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens!
Liberals even manipulate children to falsely accuse their elders, a sp
ecialty of all totalitarians. There is something so vile about turning a child against his parents as to be bone-chilling. But for liberals, it’s just one more weapon in their quest for power.
Just as Marie Antoinette’s son was brainwashed into accusing his mother of incest, a slew of American children in the eighties were manipulated by liberals into accusing completely innocent adults of child molestation. The psychologist Le Bon says the appeal of children’s testimony to a mob is that children are easy to manipulate. “It would be better to decide the fate of an accused person by the toss of a coin,” he says, “than, as has been so often done, by the evidence of a child.”9
Dade County, Florida, state attorney Janet Reno made a name for herself as one of the leading witch-hunters in the child-abuse hysteria era. In the similarly ludicrous Fells Acres case, brought by then–district attorney Scott Harshbarger in Middlesex, Massachusetts, Gerald Amirault served eighteen years in prison, and his mother and sister served eight years, for imaginary crimes. Without a shred of physical evidence to support the allegations, children coached by liberal therapists with naked dolls and “let’s pretend” games made preposterous claims of rape with butcher knives, naked children tied to trees, and animal sacrifices.
Not one child ever spontaneously claimed to have been abused. Indeed, no allegations of abuse arose until the child therapists showed up. More than a decade after their convictions, when defense lawyers played the tapes showing how child therapists had coaxed accusations from the children, reporters from Miami to Boston gasped, “Oh my God!”10
And yet mostly liberal prosecutors put innocent people in jail on the basis of fantastical stories that had been implanted by alleged therapists. It is terrifying that this could have happened in America. This was one of the most egregious mass violations of people’s rights in U.S. history. (A decade later, Reno would top it by killing nearly eighty civilians in Waco, Texas.)
Almost all of these cases were brought and defended by liberals—Janet Reno, Scott Harshbarger, and Martha Coakley. The ACLU was too busy forcing a small town in South Dakota to take down a crèche to notice the mass imprisonment of people for crimes that had never happened.
Harshbarger used the case as a launching pad to run for attorney general and then governor of Massachusetts. After losing his gubernatorial bid, he was made president of the liberal group Common Cause, where he lobbied for campaign finance reform. Janet Reno went from imprisoning innocent people in Florida to being appointed attorney general by Bill Clinton (and not imprisoning guilty people).
When similar claims of sexual molestation and ritual satanic abuse at Breezy Point day care center in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, were presented to the Republican district attorney, Alan Rubenstein, he concluded that the charges were utterly baseless. Indeed, after he discovered that the child-abuse “expert” was actually an unemployed plumber, Rubenstein warned him that if he set foot in Bucks County, he’d be arrested for fraud.11
This is not the only way liberals have used children for political gain. Liberals specialize in promoting the backstabbing children of prominent conservatives. In 2004, the Democrats featured Ronald Reagan’s son, incorrectly known as Ron Reagan Jr., speaking in favor of embryonic stem cell research, a policy that would have been detested by his staunchly pro-life father. There was no reason for anyone to care what “Ron Jr.” had to say about stem vegetables, much less stem cells—other than as a postmortem rebuke to his father.
In 2008, Ron triumphantly endorsed Barack Obama. In 2011, he wrote a book absurdly announcing that his father had Alzheimer’s as president—a medical diagnosis that was promptly dismissed by Reagan’s White House doctors, as well as disproved by his medical records.12
Most despicably, while Reagan was still alive, Playboy magazine put a full nude torso shot of Patti Reagan on its cover, with only a black man’s hands covering her breasts. “Ronald Reagan’s Renegade Daughter,” the skin magazine proclaimed.
The son of the great Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer attacked his father as a fraud and con man in a book called Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. Solely because of who his father was, Schaeffer was given a platform by the Left to launch venomous attacks against the entire evangelical movement. In no time, he was writing for the Huffington Post and appearing on MSNBC’S Rachel Maddow Show.
Sadly for liberals, they have been unable to turn any of Sarah Palin’s actual children against her and had to settle for risible attacks from the nitwit biological father of Palin’s illegitimate grandchild, Levi Johnson.
It isn’t random which children turn on their parents. The benefits flow only to those who tattle on conservative parents. Who could write a better “Mommy Dearest” book than Chelsea Clinton? How about Amy Carter? But no conservative publisher would seek out such a book. Conservatives don’t use children as weapons against their political opponents.
As with the vile accusations against Marie Antoinette, liberals revel in obscene bacchanals—while hurling accusations of sexual depravity at their enemies. Soviet spy Alger Hiss’s partisans started a rumor that his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, had committed incest with his brother who later committed suicide. When told of the disgusting slander, Chambers exclaimed, “What kind of beasts am I dealing with?” Only minds “deformed by something more than malevolence could have excreted it.”13
The first George Bush was falsely accused of having an affair, John McCain was falsely accused of having an affair, Sarah Palin was falsely accused of having an affair—and also of not having given birth to Trig—Clarence Thomas was falsely accused of talking dirty to a coworker, and on and on. This, from the party whose motto is “Everybody does it.”
During the investigation of Bill Clinton’s actual sexual congress with a White House intern and associated felonies, Clinton adviser and Hustler magazine magnate Larry Flynt offered a reward for information about sexual affairs of any Republican members of Congress.
After Clinton’s impeachment, his partisans sponsored an investigation by writer and fantasist John Connolly into the sex lives of wholly private citizens to punish them for having supported Clinton’s impeachment. Commissioned by Tina Brown’s Talk Miramax, the book was canceled after it was spectacularly revealed that Connolly had hired a detective to snoop into private individuals’ sex lives.14
Liberals will even dirty up the founding fathers’ sex lives for political gain. They have absurdly accused Abraham Lincoln of being gay based on his sleeping in the same bed with a male friend, as was common in the era before reliable indoor heating.
They have accused Thomas Jefferson of having an affair with his slave Sally Hemings in order to help Bill Clinton in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. This was in defiance of evidence that overwhelmingly suggests that Hemings’s only Jefferson consort was the president’s younger brother, Randolf, who frequently socialized with the slaves. (At least they were holding Jefferson clear of being gay.)
Strikingly, with every mob uprising we see the recrudescence of hatred toward religious morality—from the French Revolution to Nazi and communist ideologies to Islamic barbarians and our liberal friends in this country. “History tells us,” Le Bon says, “that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilization rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough as barbarians.”
In his book on the French Revolution, the British historian Simon Schama describes a moral weakening of the entire country that paved the way for the coming massacre. None of the libelous attacks on Marie Antoinette, Schama says, “would have been possible had there not already been a rich and unsavory vein of court pornography to tap.” Although pornography wasn’t new, Schama says, “it evolved into a particularly ripe phase during the last years of Louis XV”—on account of the king’s openly acknowledged mistress and his private brothel at Versailles.15 Schama says
, “Virtually everything short of outright atheism, tracts preaching regicide and pornography got published” between 1750 and 1763.16
It was a small step from there for the porn peddlers to turn on the queen—to make their material politically relevant. In no time, pamphlets attacking the demure Princess Lamballe leeringly alleged that the princess widened Antoinette’s labia so that the king’s soft penis could enter.17
During the revolution, one mob commander of the French Revolution, P. J. Picot-Bellac, went straight to the churches in every town he besieged in order to give mock “sermons” in which he called the Virgin Mary a “whore” and said Jesus had “scored”—using a French vulgarity—with Mary Magdalene.18
Compare that with Amanda Marcotte, blogger for the campaign of John Edwards—an apparently serious Democratic presidential candidate. She wrote, “Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit? A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.” Another of Marcotte’s charming observations was: “[Y]ou motherf**kers who want to ban birth control will never sleep. I will f**k without making children day in and out and you will know it and you won’t be able to stop it. Toss and turn, you mean, jealous motherf**kers. I’m not going to be ‘punished’ with babies.”
After writing those gems, Marcotte was hired by Edwards—and not to sweep floors but to write for his blog, based on her earlier oeuvre. Perhaps it is not surprising that such a person as this would find work with a smarmy pro-abortion hustler, who, while he was running for president, cheated on his cancer-stricken wife with a New Age flake, got her pregnant, and then lied about it even after getting caught. Still, Edwards isn’t Dennis Department-of-Peace-guided-talking-dolphins Kucinich. He was the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate in 2004. Marcotte fits comfortably within the mainstream of the Democratic Party in America—the party of abortion, adultery, and everything bestial in society.