RUSH: Ann Coulter, welcome to the EIB Network. Where are you? Are you in New York today; is that right?
COULTER: Yes, I am! The book just came out a few days ago.
RUSH: Yeah, I know, and I gotta ask you about “Demonic.” Who’s “demonic”? The actual title is “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America.” Who were you thinking of when you came up with the title “Demonic,” the girls on The View?
COULTER: (laughing) That would be one excellent example. I first got the idea for the book because I spend so much time around liberals, as you know — on college campuses, for example; going to their TV shows — and they do seem to exhibit mob-like behavior so I —
RUSH: Ann, do you mean…? In “mob,” do you mean physical, literal mob-like behavior, or do you mean intellectual mob-like? What kind of mob behavior do you mean here?
COULTER: That’s a great question, because it’s both, actually. The first quarter of the book is on how liberals are a psychological mob. It has to do with their slogans, how they formulate arguments. They get a lot of slogans, whereas conservatives just don’t speak in slogans and we don’t understand slogans, and for good reason: It’s always sort of glib and superficially appealing, but if you stop and actually think about it for five seconds, slogans never make sense. What does it mean to say, “You can’t hug a child with nuclear arms,” or, “Pro-choice, pro-child.” It means nothing, but that is perfect for appealing to a mob. It’s simple-minded. Gustave Le Bon, the father of groupthink, said, “Don’t ever use logic with a mob. It confuses them.”
RUSH: Gustave Le Bon. I want to ask you to explain who he is and how you came upon him, but your books are a series of many things, and one of them that I would say is, you’re constantly trying to define and explain liberals to your readers.
COULTER: Yes.
RUSH: Do you foresee the day…? I ask this question because we’re all in this in one degree or another. You know, I remain perplexed. We had, for example, eight years of robust economic recovery under Reagan, the eighties, and yet people have forgotten it. Liberalism is so easily seductive. You ever see the day where your books aren’t going to be necessary, when people understand who liberals are and how they operate and why?
COULTER: Oh, that’s a great question. I used to think, “Yes, someday we’re going to persuade them,” and every once in a while you feel like you’re making progress. But, first of all — as I now know from learning about mob psychology — in the moments of a mob, a man and a mob, you can set ’em down, you can educate ’em, you can show ’em the facts, and you finally persuade that one liberal; and then you come back a few days later, and he’s right back to spouting the same nonsense; and that itself is an example of groupthink. Having now covered in this book 200 years of the history of liberals, I think, “No, it will always be with us.” Mobs are demonic, and they will always be with us. They’ve been with us for 200 years. The most we can do is warn peaceable Americans that mobs are dangerous.
RUSH: Well, Gustave Le Bon, you stumbled across him as your latest vehicle to try to explain to people how liberals operate, how they achieve or attempt to achieve their objectives. Give us a little historical review of him.
COULTER: Yes. Well, I have this idea in my head that liberals are a mob and so I just started reading everything I could find on mobs, groupthink, herd behavior, riots — and I’d heard of Gustave Le Bon — and then finally I read Gustave Le Bon’s book, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,” and it was so clear, so beautiful; and of course he turns out to be the father of groupthink. He’s the first one to notice the psychological characteristics of someone behaving in a mob. Not surprisingly, he was French since the first mob revolt certainly in anything resembling modern times is the French Revolution. I date the beginning of liberalism to the French revolution. Just page after page you read through this book, and it’s liberals. It’s all of their peculiarities. I almost went back and started inserting some of the other statements from the other books I had read into this book to show that it was more than Le Bon, but he was just so clear and so right. In fact, he was so good — although the book is a warning about mobs — both Mussolini and Hitler studied his book in order to learn how to incite mobs.
RUSH: What are some of the characteristics of mobs?
COULTER: Myth-making, contradictory thinking, creating messiahs and turning those who disagree with you into opponents, simple-mindedness, inability to grasp logic. You see a lot of this in Weinergate. It’s funny, now when I watch liberals on TV, whatever they’re doing, I think, “Oh, yeah, that’s myth making, and that’s contradictory thinking.” Last night at the beginning of the Rachel Maddow Show she got a long segment denouncing, of course, in the middle of Weinergate: David Vitter, Senator from Louisiana. He is the only Republican ever caught in a sex scandal who didn’t resign immediately or lose his reelection, but of course his scandal was very different from every other one I can think of. The DC madam released his name — I’m sure there were a lot of Democrats on that same list but their names weren’t released — and what we found out was that seven years earlier he had gone to a prostitute twice; told his wife about it, apologized to her, confessed to her, confessed to God. She has forgiven him, the marriage had continued, and seven years later we find this out. As soon as his name, David Vitter’s name was released from the DC madam’s list he went straight out, apologized, admitted it; held a press conference. He’s standing there with his wife saying, “I told her seven years ago. He didn’t turn around and start denouncing the press and claiming he’d been hacked — and after all of this, this on Rachel Maddow denouncing Vitter as if his sex scandal were somehow worse rather than less bad — I mean, we do have forgiveness — this Rachel Maddow concerned with, you know, the misogyny and the ugliness of David Vitter having visited prostitutes seven years before we found out, interviews as her expert interview on this Larry Flynt. He’s your expert on misogyny here. (laughing)
RUSH: (laughing) Isn’t that…? That kinda fits with Woody Allen at one point was held up as the poster boy for Democrat morality back in the early ’90s when he ditched his wife for the daughter, for the adopted daughter. Now, would you say the opposition to Governor Walker in Wisconsin, that was a mob? ACORN’s a mob; the Arab spring, all of these things that pop up that have mass movements to them. Social media are responsible, it is said, for what happened in Egypt and so forth. That’s all mob-oriented. Is somebody organizing all of this stuff. Is there some grand council, Grand Wizard council knows how to manipulate the rank and file, turn the mob out, inform the mob, give it its marching orders and talking points?
COULTER: Yes. I mean, as it’s described by historians, for example, who have reviewed various mob movements, it could be anyone. It’s the person who shouts the loudest — and, by the way, you’ve segued right from psychological mobs into literal mobs. That’s part of what makes mob psychology so dangerous: There’s always the threat of violence. In the, I guess the last third of the book I look at actual violence here in the United States in a 200-year history, and the violence in America — political violence — has always been committed by the left. Liberals keep talking about how terrified they are of Tea Partiers and conservatives and, ooooh, our violent rhetoric. Well, they’re afraid of their own fears. That’s what we’re supposed to worry about, that they’re afraid of something. We’re afraid of them actually punching us, biting off a finger, or shooting us. Every presidential assassination attempt, for example, has been — at least the ones that were political at all; some were just committed by pure nuts. The ones that had a political basis were all committed by liberals. Not a single conservative has attempted to assassinate a president, and there are about a dozen of them. Even at the recent Tea Parties and town halls, the only violence was committed by liberals including one liberal biting a guy’s finger off.
RUSH: Right, but how would you say that the Tea Party’s not a mob in the nonphysical sense? I mean, the Tea Party sprung up, they attended all these town hall meetings. It did effervesce from the grassroots, didn’t seem to be any single leader or organizer. I’m sure the liberals who listen to this program in legion are probably shouting at their radios right now, “Hell, the Tea Party’s a mob, the way she’s talking!” What do you say to them?
COULTER: Well, a mob isn’t just any assemblage of like-minded people — you know, or every book club would be a mob. So, for one thing, there has to be violence or the prospect of violence and so just straight out of the chute you look at these Tea Party rallies, and they leave the parks that they gather in cleaner than when they showed up. But also it is the Tea Party actually is, in keeping with its name, more in the tradition — or in the tradition, not “more in the tradition;” in the tradition — of the American Revolution. These are people who are reading the Constitution, who are reading the Federalist Papers, who are making arguments. You know, I list about four dozen, three dozen slogans of the left in Chapter One. I don’t know what the Tea Party slogan is. I’ve seen some signs that are relatively clever, most of the time — usually, you know, anti-Obamacare — “Read the bill,” that sort of thing. There’s no slogan for the Tea Party. There’s no violence. It is an argument of ideas, whereas the Democrats are using the Rousseauian method of ginning people up by frightening them — “They’re gonna take your health care way! Here’s Representative Ryan pushing an old lady in her wheelchair off a cliff” — and conservatives are reading things and coming up with arguments. With Medicare and Social Security about to go bankrupt, they’re look at a plan, not looking at slogans or pictures of a representative throwing an old lady off a cliff.
RUSH: We’re talking with Ann Coulterabout her new book is “Demonic.”
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RUSH: By the way, welcome back. Ann Coulter is our guest for the remaining part of the hour. You make a point in the book — you make a case in the book — that since the civil rights movement of the sixties, the American people lost their natural, inherited aversion to mobs. Now, this is fascinatingly interesting to me because in my lifetime I can remember. Ann, the American people were livid at Kent State. They were livid at what happened. They were livid at the protesters of the sixties. They were livid! They had a total aversion to this kind of behavior. We’ve lost that aversion now. Now there’s a reaction, it seems, culturally where we say, “Well, we must attempt to understand their rage.” When did this happen and why?
COULTER: I think it’s the civil rights movement because that was the first “mob,” so to speak, a street protest, that was on behalf of a good cause. Every other mob there was no sympathy for. In fact, it was Shay’s rebellion immediately after the revolution that caused us to become one country rather than 13 confederated states. People were concerned that if there wasn’t one central national government there will be no controlling of mobs. Abraham Lincoln sends the troops in to New York City during the Civil War when, of course, Democrats rose up in a rabble and started lynching blacks. Abraham Lincoln crushes the mob, goes back, wins the war, and then he carries New York state. So there have always been these mob uprisings. The first time a mob uprising was on behalf of a good cause was the civil rights movement.
I contrast Martin Luther King with Thurgood Marshall, who suddenly has become sort of a hero for me. When I first read about him in law school he was just signing on to everything with William Brennan and I just thought he was another poopy-headed liberal. But I place Thurgood Marshall in the tradition of the American Revolution. He was making arguments; he was winning cases in court. He won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 — and, by the way, we never would have needed a civil rights movement if Richard Nixon had won the 1960 election rather than Kennedy. But these Democrats, because they always appeal to the mob — and their mob at that time, at least part of it, including racist, segregationist Democrats — the Democrats, both Kennedy and Johnson, kept dragging their feet on civil rights enforcement. So then you have Martin Luther King’s movement.
That was much more in the French revolution tradition. Martin Luther King stages a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, after Bull Connor — a Democrat who was an insane racist — had already been voted out of office. First the good people of Birmingham eliminated Bull Connor’s office, once they discovered they had an insane public safety officer. He ran for mayor and lost. The Kennedy Justice Department called King and pleaded with him not to stage his march anyway because Bull Connor was still a lame duck public safety officer. The blacks in Birmingham begged Martin Luther King not to stage the protest, but he did it anyway, sending in children against this insane racist Bull Connor. Images are broadcast around the world and this gave a big jolt to Martin Luther King’s movement. People were sympathetic because it was a good cause, and now you’ll notice liberals every time they run atyou in the streets, every time they start smashing Starbucks windows, they say, “Oh, well it’s the new civil rights movement!”
No, there was only one civil rights movement.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, what makes these people so easy to control? I’m down toabout two minutes here but I’m always fascinated by this myself. Why are the Democrats or these mobs they use so easily controlled, so easily possessed? How are they able to organize so many people into this groupthink?
COULTER: Well, two things. First of all, look at who their voters are. They openly brag about having the least informed voters. They’re very upset when Republicans and other people who don’t want voter fraud request IDs simply in order to be able to vote. They want illegal aliens, they want felons, they want soccer moms, they want nonnative English speakers — they have college kids — so, you know, they have the most easily fooled, naive, and perpetually alarmed members of the country as their base; and secondly, I have a whole chapter on status anxiety and — and how some people are really obsessed with what others think of them. And we call them liberals.
RUSH: Yeah.
COULTER: I give a number of examples of that — and that’s why I think conservatives are, by and large, immune from that because they tend to believe in a real God. So it’s an up and down relationship and you don’t have to care what people around you think.
RUSH: Well, you’re right about that. As I say: If we could get rid of that characteristic in people, worrying about what people think of them, we could come up with a good nominee.
COULTER: Yes! (chuckles) Yes.
RUSH: Ann Coulter. “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America,” is out since Tuesday, and we wish you the best of luck with it, and as always, thanks for your time here. You’re great.
COULTER: Thank you. Great to talk to you, Rush.
RUSH: Ann Coulter.
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