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Exclusive Chapter 1 excerpt from Ann Coulter’s new book ‘Demonic’

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The Daily Caller has obtained exclusive excerpts of Ann Coulter’s new book “Demonic.”

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
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The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. It is the nihilis-
tic 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 grati-
fi cation, 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 politi-
cal purpose. “As so frequently happens when a crowd goes wild,” histo-
rian 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 propagan-
distic 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
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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 stam-
pede 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
benefi ts 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, un-
reasonable, and clueless, the “root cause” of these traits has generally
been neglected. More than a century ago, Gustave Le Bon perfectly cap-
tured 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 manufac-
turers? 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 reveal-
ing that liberals so fear Le Bon that they try to sully him as “controver-
sial” and “reactionary.” (Those particular complaints, incidentally, were
lodged by liberal activist George Monbiot, who has called for “citizen’s
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arrests” of former government officials from George W. Bush’s UN am-
bassador John Bolton to former British prime minister Tony Blair. No
wonder he doesn’t like psychological studies of mob behavior.)
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 be-
havior 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
transfi xed by images, a religious worship of their leaders, and a blind
hatred of their opponents.

Many of liberals’ peculiarities are understandable only when one re-
alizes 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 Privi-
lege! 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
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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 Wil-
liam 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 Mil-
lion Americans Can’t Be Wrong” is a wry observation, not an urgent call
to battle. “Annoy the Media, Vote Bush!” barely qualifies as a sugges-
tion. Conservatives write books and articles, make arguments, and seek
debates, but are perplexed by slogans. (Of course, another reason Re-
publicans 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. Ac-
cording 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 exag-
gerate, 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.”

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.” He could
be referring to the New York Times and other journals of elite opinion
when he describes periodicals that “manufacture opinions for their read-
ers and supply them with ready- made phrases which dispense them of
the trouble of reasoning.”

You will see all the techniques for inspiring mobs in liberal behavior.
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There are three main elements to putting an idea in a crowd: affirma-
tion, 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 pro-
found 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” al-
lowing “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 ob-
serves, “will soon extend to the whole flock.”

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 any-
thing stupid. But regular conservatives talk on TV as if they’re having a
normal conversation with their friends or neighbors. Liberals don’t know
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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.”

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 Na-
tion. If we can recoup from the very richest who brought us this finan-
cial 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.”

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 ask-
ing 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).
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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. Appar-
ently, 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.

Based on their public commentary, it appears that not one liberal
has the vaguest idea how the economy imploded. The only thing liberals
know is—as President Obama explained—“Republicans drove the car
into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now
they want the keys back. No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have
to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.” (It was always a
“ditch” and not a “pond” because a pond would have been offensive to
Teddy Kennedy.)

A liberal would stare at you slack- jawed if you explained that the
federal government, via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Department
of Housing and Urban Development, forced politically correct lend-
ing policies on the banks—policies that were attacked by Republicans
but ferociously defended by Democrats—and that the banks’ suicidal
loans were then bundled into mortgage- backed securities and dispersed
throughout the entire financial system, which poisoned the economy,
bringing down powerful institutions, such as Lehman Brothers, and de-
stroying innumerable families’ financial portfolios.

In light of the Democrats’ direct role in creating the policies at the
heart of the nation’s financial collapse, it’s not surprising that they prefer
metaphors to facts. What’s strange is that the image of a car in a ditch
is sufficient for the bulk of Democratic voters and commentators to
adjudge themselves experts on the economic crisis and refuse to listen to
explanations that aren’t images of Bush driving a car into a ditch.
Image is all that matters to the mob. Obama can take in the biggest
campaign haul from Wall Street in world history, as he did in 2008,
but the mob will never believe he is in the pocket of Wall Street bank-
ers. The top- three corporate employers of donors to Barack Obama,
Joe Biden, and Rahm Emanuel were Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and
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JPMorgan. Six other financial giants were in the top thirty donors to
the White House Dream Team: UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, Morgan
Stanley, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse Group.12 In
2008 alone, Goldman Sachs employees gave more to Obama—nearly
$1 million—than any other employer, with the sole exception of the en-
tire University of California, which has 230,000 employees—ten times
more than Goldman.

And still Republicans are called the Party of Wall Street. Bush let
Lehman Brothers go under—what else do Republicans have to do?
Liberals latched on to the image of Bush, Cheney, and even Rep-
resentative Tom DeLay as “oilmen” to blame them for everything from
Enron’s collapse to blackouts and high oil prices.

In 2006, Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed “oilmen” in public office for
high oil prices—and hearing Pelosi try to craft a syllogism is like watch-
ing Michael Moore attempt ballet. She said, “We have two oilmen in the
White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3- a- gallon gasoline.
It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect.” That’s all
liberals needed to know. Two “oilmen” in the White House—cause and
effect. Strangely, though, a barrel of oil costs the same on the world mar-
ket for all those other countries that were not being run by “oilmen.”
A few years earlier, she had blamed Bush and DeLay for the black-
out throughout the Northeast United States and parts of Canada—pre-
sumably because they are both from Texas—saying they had “put the
interests of the energy companies before the interests of the American
people.” In fact, the blackout was due to a failure of humans operating
electric power; it had nothing whatsoever to do with oil.

The New York Times’s Paul Krugman has written more than a dozen
columns making hazy connections between Bush and the corrupt and
collapsed Enron—“Some cynics attribute the continuing absence of
Enron indictments to the Bush family’s loyalty code”15—despite Bush’s
having absolutely nothing to do with the company, other than being
from Texas. By contrast, Krugman was on Enron’s advisory board while
he was writing encomiums to Enron in Fortune magazine.16 Once a year,
when I don’t feel like writing a column, I think I’ll reprint Krugman’s col-
umn singing Enron’s praises—although, again, in fairness, he was being
paid by Enron at the time.
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Democrats wouldn’t make such absurd statements if absurdity didn’t
seem perfectly logical to their base. This is how Democrats communi-
cate with their constituents: They use mob tactics to rile up the irra-
tional masses. Crowds can’t grasp logic, only images. “These imagelike
ideas,” Le Bon says, “are not connected by any logical bond of analogy
or succession, and may take each other’s place like the slides of a magic-
lantern which the operator withdraws from the groove in which they
were placed one above the other.”

Republicans love Wall Street—oh look, Wall Street just made historic
campaign contributions to Obama; he must be really cool. . . . Republicans
hate the poor because they’re trying to block government policies promoting
easy mortgages. . . . Oops, I wonder why the economy just tanked. It’s be-
cause Bush drove it into a ditch! Enron collapsed and Paul Krugman says it’s
Bush’s fault. Krugman was paid by Enron and Bush wasn’t? Bush lied, kids
died! . . . Oil prices went up under Bush—it’s his fault—he’s an oilman! Oh
but then oil prices went down under Bush. . . . Hey, look over there! A shiny
object!

Despite their perennial enthusiasm for revolution and “change” in
almost any form, Le Bon says, crowds are wildly conservative when it
comes to scientific progress. Want to scare a liberal? Mention nuclear
power plants, genetically modified fruits, new pharmaceuticals, food ir-
radiation, or guns with plastic frames. We could probably get a crowd
of liberal protesters to scatter just by coming at them with a modern
vacuum cleaner. It certainly works on dogs and cats. The Left’s abject
terror of technological development is yet another mob attribute.
Le Bon says that the mob’s “unconscious horror” of “all novelty
capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very
deeply rooted.” While mobs go about changing the names of institu-
tions and demanding radical changes to society, he says, when it comes
to scientific progress, crowds have a “fetish- like respect” for tradition.
Thus, according to Le Bon, if “democracies possessed the power
they wield today at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of
the introduction of steam- power and of railways, the realization of these
inventions would have been impossible.” It is lucky “for the progress of
civilization that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great
discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.”
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Our liberals are even worse than Le Bon imagined. Democrats don’t
merely want to block scientific progress, they want to roll it back. Al
Gore’s global warming fantasy book Earth in the Balance called for the
worldwide elimination of the internal combustion engine within twenty-
five years.20 (Which, if nothing else, would have ruined Obama’s “car in
the ditch” catchphrase.)

In 2007, Democrats in Congress banned the incandescent lightbulb,
currently scheduled for elimination in 2014. Indeed, banning Thomas
Edison’s invention was among the very first acts of the new House ma-
jority elected in 2006, in a bill cosponsored by 195 Democrats and only
3 Republicans (two of whom are no longer in office). When Democrats
came up with the idea of banning the lightbulb, what image appeared in
their heads? A lit candle? Only four Democrats voted against the bill in
both the House and then Senate, with the vast majority of Republicans
voting against it in both chambers.

Consider that the two industries that provoke the most fear and
loathing in liberals are two of the most innovative: the oil and pharma-
ceutical industries. When a majority of the country objected to national
health care because, among other things, it would mean the end of in-
novation in medicine once the government took over, liberals stared in
blank incomprehension. (It was almost as if they’d been drugged.) They
believe every drug, every diagnosis, every therapy, every cure that will
ever be invented has already been invented. Their job is to spread all the
existing cures, not to worry about who will discover new ones.
The only traditions liberals are eager to smash are moral and sexual
ones, such as monogamy and protecting the unborn. Crowds are too im-
pulsive to be moral, according to Le Bon, which explains why liberals
are mad for innovation with respect to thousand- year- old institutions
like marriage, but, when it comes to scientific innovation, they are hide-
bound traditionalists.

Indeed, the only way to get liberals interested in novel scientific
research is to propose going after human embryos. When adult stem
cell researchers had already produced treatments for eighty different dis-
eases, while embryonic stem cell researchers were stuck in the dark
ages, the failed researchers won liberal hearts by pointing out that their
method destroyed human fetuses, while adult stem research did not.
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As long as Democrats can win elections by demagoguing the mob,
they are perfectly happy to turn America into a banana republic. With
the country drowning in debt and Medicare and Social Security putting
us on a high- speed bullet train to bankruptcy, the entire Democratic
Party refuses to deal with entitlements. Instead, they will gin up the
mobs to throw out any politician who cuts these increasingly theoretical
“benefits.” The country will have the economy of Uganda, but Demo-
crats will be in total control.

Rich liberals want chaos for everyone except themselves, confident
that they can afford a “green” lifestyle and their children will still attend
Sidwell Friends. The rest of us are forced to live in a lawless universe of
no energy, gay marriage, girl soldiers, and marauding criminals because
liberals can’t enjoy their wealth unless other people are living in complete
havoc. They promote anarchy, believing the middle class should live in
squalor, while liberals will be protected by their wealth from the mob.
The seminal event of the New Testament—Jesus’ crucifi xion—is a
dramatic illustration of the power of the mob.

When the mob was howling for Pontius Pilate to sentence Jesus to
death, even Pilate’s wife couldn’t convince him to spare Jesus. After hav-
ing a dream about Jesus, Pilate’s wife sent her husband a note saying
Jesus was innocent—a “just man.” Pilate knew it to be true and that the
mob hated Jesus out of “envy.” But not his wife, not even his own com-
mon sense, was enough for him to resist the mob.

Three times Pilate told the “multitude” that Jesus was innocent and
should be spared. He pleaded with the mob, proposing to “chastise him,
and release him.” But the mob was immovable, demanding Jesus’ cruci-
fixion. Pilate was required to release one of the prisoners, so he gave the
mob the choice of Jesus or Barabbas, a notorious murderer and insur-
rectionist—in other words, someone who incites mobs. Again, the mob
“spoke with one voice,” demanding “with loud shouts” that Jesus be
crucified.

Capitulating to the mob, Pilate ordered Jesus’ death.
Even one of the mob’s victims, a thief being crucified alongside Jesus,
joined the mob’s taunting, saying to Jesus, “If thou be Christ, save thy-
self and us.” The other thief rebuked him, noting that they were guilty,
whereas Jesus was not. He said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when thou
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comest into thy kingdom.” And Jesus said, “Today shalt thou be with me
in paradise.”

Pilate gave in to the mob out of fear. The thief joined the mob to
side with the majority. The mob itself was driven by envy.
Although it all worked out in the end—Jesus died, darkness fell
over the Earth, the ground trembled, and the temple veil was ripped in
two, and three days later, Jesus rose from the dead, giving all people the
promise of everlasting life—here was the stark choice, to be repeated
like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence: Jesus or Barabbas?

Liberals say Barabbas: Go with the crowd. C’mon, everybody’s doing
it—it’s cool. Now let’s go mock Jesus. (As is so often the case, the mob
said, “Kill the Jew.”)
Conservatives—sublimely uninterested in the opinion of the mob—
say Jesus.
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