Ann Coulter’s books are never tame.
Her latest book, “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America,” will start enraging liberals with its very title – which is par for the course for the author of such liberal-bashing classics as “Godless” and “Treason.”
The Daily Caller has put together the top 10 quotes and arguments from her latest tome that are most likely to make Chris Matthews’s head explode – and possibly even disturb some on the right.
10.) Democrats are anti-science
Reversing the Democratic mantra that Republicans are “anti-science,” Coulter says it is really the Democratic mob that abhors science and technological innovation.
“The Left’s abject terror of technological development is yet another mob attribute,” she writes.
Quoting Gustave Le Bon, whose theory on mobs is the main intellectual foundation of her book, Coulter writes, “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.”
But, Coulter argues, “Our liberals are even worse than Le Bon imagined. Democrats don’t merely want to block scientific progress, they want to stop scientific progress, they want to roll it back.”
She then cites, as examples, Al Gore’s call in his “global warming fantasy book Earth in the Balance” for the elimination of the internal combustion engine within 25 years, the Democrat’s 2007 bill to eliminate the incandescent light bulb by 2014, Obamacare, which she says will hamper medical innovation, and the Democrats’ incessant hectoring of the oil and pharmaceutical industries – industries, Coulter writes, that “are two of the most innovative.”
She goes on: “Indeed, the only way to get liberals interested in novel scientific research is to propose going after human embryos,” citing liberals love of embryonic stem cell research over adult stem cell research when the science on the latter is more promising according to her.
9.) Liberals are not a part of the American tradition
“The men behind the American Revolution – the militias, the Minutemen, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the framers of the Constitution – were the very opposite of the mob. Today we would call them ‘Republicans,’” she writes at one point in the book
“Liberals’ history is not this country’s history – theirs is the history of the mob,” she writes in another.
8.) Liberal social consciousness manifests itself in the killing of American soldiers
Though a joke, this one will still enrage:
“If the Weatherman had succeeded in transporting their bombs to the Fort Dix dance, instead of blowing themselves up, they would have murdered lots of U.S. serviceman and their dates. For liberals, that’s social consciousness,” she writes.
7.) Republican “Southern Strategy” was not racist
“The entire basis of the liberals’ ‘Southern Strategy’ myth is the sophisticated belief that anyone who votes Republican must be a racist,” Coulter writes.
“If Nixon had planned to appeal to white racists, speeding up desegregation was not an effective strategy. But he turned around and won an even bigger landslide in 1972, running against George McGovern and the party of acid, abortion, and amnesty,” she argues.
6.) The left (and crazy people) are responsible for all political violence in the United States
“Somewhat astoundingly, in the entire nation’s history, there’s never been a presidential assassination attempt by a right-winger. There have been more than a dozen by left-wingers,” she writes.
“Conservatives, we’re endlessly told, create ‘an atmosphere of hatred and fear.’ This is as opposed to liberals who just go around shooting elected officials.”
After spending an entire chapter – entitled “Imaginary Violence From the Right Vs. Actual Violence From The Left” – documenting her case, Coulter concludes,
“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.”
5.) Democrats’ schemes are similar to the schemes of history’s worst regimes
In a chapter detailing the 20th century’s most brutal regimes, from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Hitler’s Germany to Mao’s China to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Coulter writes, “You will note the similarities in all these totalitarian plans to many of the Democrats’ schemes.”
4.) The GOP has always been the party supporting civil rights, not the Democratic Party
“Angry violent mobs are always Democratic: Code Pink, SDS, The Weathermen, Earth First!, anti-war protesters, and union protesters in Wisconsin,” Coulter writes.
“Like them, the Ku Klux Klan was, of course, another Democratic undertaking, originally formed to terrorize Republicans, but later switching to terrorize blacks. It was Democratic juries that acquitted Klansman after Klansman. It was Democratic politicians who supported segregation, Democratic governors who called out the National Guard to stop desegregation, Democratic commissioners of public safety who turned police dogs and water hoses on civil rights protesters.”
Also: “Democrats only came around on civil rights when blacks were voting in high enough numbers to make a difference at the ballot box – and then they claimed credit for everything their party had ferociously blocked since the Civil War.”
3.) Coulter stands up for the killings at Kent State
“On May 4, National Guard officers were trying to disperse thousands of violent protesters in the middle of the campus. According to the recent reporting of James Rosen, the guardsman were fired upon first, leading twenty-nine guardsman to shoot back at the protesters, killing four students in thirteen seconds,” Coulter writes.
“If Louis XVI had been that decisive, 600,000 Frenchmen might not have had to die. As his grandfather, Louis XIV, had said: When war is necessary, it is a ‘grave error to think that one can reach the same aims by weaker means.’ Though decried throughout the land – and in a Neil Young song! – the shooting at Kent State soon put an end to the student riots.”
This fits nicely with a major theme of Coulter’s book, which is encapsulated in its very last words.
“This nation’s heroes knew what Louis XVI did not: A mob cannot be calmly reasoned with: it can only be smashed,” Coulter writes. “When faced with a mob, civilized society’s motto should be: Overreact!”
2.) Coulter takes on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Martin Luther King Jr. was the heir to Rousseau. He used images in order to win publicity and goodwill for his cause, deploying children in the streets for a pointless, violent confrontation with a lame-duck lunatic: Theophilus Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor,” she writes.
In attacking King’s legacy, Coulter uses the words of liberal icon Thurgood Marshall, who became the first black justice of the Supreme Court, to aid her in tarnishing King’s reputation. “Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King’s methods, calling him an ‘opportunist’ and ‘first rate rabble-rouser,’” Coulter writes. “Indeed, when asked about King’s suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men’s work and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was ‘a boy on a man’s errand.’”
Coulter concludes, “The civil rights movement had made mobs respectable, to the great misfortune of the nation. In no time, liberals began engaging in what I believe Gandhi called ‘active resistance’ every time they didn’t get their way through legitimate legal processes.”
In a later chapter, she says, “If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we’d be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day.”
1.) Expressing understanding of anti-abortion violence
“But more important, abortion clinic violence should not be filed under ‘Political Violence’ at all. It should be filed under ‘Things Liberals Won’t Let Americans Vote On.’…When there is no legal process for pro-lifers to pursue to outlaw abortion – unlike every policy liberals violently protest – some pro-lifers will inevitably respond to lawlessness with lawlessness,” Coulter writes. “In the first few years after [Planned Parenthood v. Casey], about six more people were killed in attacks on abortion clinics. Most of the abortionists were shot or, depending upon your point of view, had a procedure performed on them with a rifle.”
“There were no more constitutional options left to fight judicial tyranny on the little matter of mass murder,” she concludes. “Thus, abortion clinic violence is more akin to the Tiananmen Square protests in Communist China than any liberal riot in America. Want to stop violence at abortion clinics? Repeal Roe and let Americans vote.”