In the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s book People of the Lie, he describes evil in the same terms that Le Bon uses to describe mobs, saying it is “a kind of immaturity.” Writing about an exorcism he participated in, he says when the possessed was asked if he was multiple demons or just one, Satan—speaking through the possessed—replied, “They all belong to me.”1 God oversees individual souls, but Satan has the mob.
The mob is satanic and Satan can only destroy. In the Bible, Jesus says to the crowd following the devil, rather than God, “You are the children of your father the devil, and you love to do the evil things he does. He was a murderer from the beginning. He has always hated the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).
Peck says there is nothing creative in the devil; his only will is to annihilate.2 Le Bon describes mobs in similar terms, saying that crowds are determined “to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization.”3 Crowds, he says, “are only powerful for destruction.”4
It’s not an accident that Saul Alinsky, forefather to community organizers like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, dedicated his book Rules for Radicals to “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.” (I suppose it could have been worse. He could have dedicated his book to George Soros.)
This is why liberals are shrieking oppositionists, braying, abortion-obsessed feminists, SEIU thugs, Earth Liberation Front loons, Bill Maher audiences, and querulous dissidents from every measure taken in defense of their own country. This is why they mock all that is good—America, religion, patriotism, chivalry, the rule of law, truth, the creation of wealth, life—while hysterically attacking those who oppose them.
The mob will never support defending America, only those who seek to undermine it. The mob will never side with those who seek to protect human life, only those who seek to destroy it. The mob will never support the creation of wealth, only those who seek to punish it. The mob will never defend traditional morality, only those who seek to subvert it. And if you oppose the mob, it will come after you like a pack of ravenous hyenas.
There is no coherence to the Left’s positions, except its will to destroy. When Islamic terrorists came along, liberals rushed to their defense, having more warmth of feeling for violent Muslims than, for example, a Methodist women’s Bible study. Liberals’ Islamic friends practice clitorectomies, honor killings, and dropping walls on gays. (Other than that, they’re mostly peaceful.) Is that part of the beautiful mosaic of multiculturalism? Do liberals suppose Osama bin Laden railed, What I cannot abide is that the United States didn’t sign the International Treaty on the Rights of the Child! … Hey, why can’t I get Two and a Half Men in my cave? … WHAT? THE UNITED STATES IS TRYING TO OUTLAW LATE-TERM ABORTION??? That is the last straw!
The only common thread is destruction. It’s the only move a mob has.
Liberals care less about achieving their vision of a centralized government than they do about destroying their enemies. Night after night, MSNBC hosts will maniacally fixate on some conservative they hate—Bill O’Reilly, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, David Koch, Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Glenn Beck—even beauty pageant winner Carrie Prejean. It’s impossible to imagine such obsessive public shamings on Fox News or even CNN. The sneering and snickering at opponents—out of all proportion to any principled disagreement—is a specialty of the Left.
Democrats didn’t love Soviet agents as much as they detested “red-baiters” like Joe McCarthy. They didn’t like Clinton as much as they hated Ken Starr, Linda Tripp, and the rest of the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” They didn’t even admire Saddam Hussein as much as they despised Dick Cheney. Some liberals still trundle off to the National Archives every Saturday to listen to the Nixon tapes so they can hate him even more. Please—it’s 2011.
Conservatives aren’t wild about their opponents, but only because of ideological disagreements. Conservatives didn’t want ObamaCare; they aren’t hoping Obama will slip on a banana peel so they can laugh at him. Ask yourself if liberals wish for that with Sarah Palin and you will see the difference in the right and left in America.
Conservatives wanted to liberate Iraq—and if liberals like Joe Lieberman and Alan Dershowitz did, too, we were happy to have them. Conservatives want a free market without burdensome government red tape—and if George McGovern agrees, we’re happy to have him. Conservatives believe in protecting unborn humans—and if Nat Hentoff, Christopher Hitchens, and Jack Nicholson agree, we’re happy to have them.
Liberals get excited about conservative defectors only when they’re dishing dirt on Sarah Palin’s e-mail account5 or about George W. Bush’s secret hatred of Christians.6
Ron Paul, Bob Novak, and Pat Buchanan all agreed with the Left on foreign policy, but liberals still shunned them. It’s not agreement with liberals on a particular issue that wins their phony “respect,” it’s attacking other conservatives. This is the basis of the expression “Strange New Respect,” which is what liberals accord those conservatives who so crave liberal approval, they will gratuitously attack fellow conservatives. It is the slutty girl’s path to popularity. Senator John McCain won “Strange New Respect” from the Left when in 2000—for no reason—he attacked Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance” who “shame our faith, our party and our country.”7
Liberals loathe conservative women beyond reason, perceiving them as the natural keepers of religious faith and morality. Republicans dislike Harry Reid about the same as they dislike Nancy Pelosi, and they dislike Hillary about the same as Bill. (And, of course, conservatives wouldn’t physically attack any of them.) But Democrats reserve unfathomable venom, often coupled with physical violence, for conservative women—Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Phyllis Schlafly, Condoleezza Rice, Christine O’Donnell, and Nikki Haley.
House Republicans voted to block federal funding of abortions in the 2012 budget and the New York Times responded with an angry editorial titled “The War on Women.”8 But when a Palin-obsessed liberal journalist rented the house right next to Sarah Palin’s home for more convenient stalking, liberals couldn’t understand the fuss.
The Left’s constant prattle about the “right-wing hate machine” is not merely a tactical device to make conservatives look bad. It reveals leftist thinking: They can’t imagine an opposition that isn’t a “hate machine” because that’s their view of politics—one hate machine against the other. Historians say that Stalin was paranoid. But perhaps he wasn’t paranoid as much as he was projecting: He simply assumed that everyone was in a conspiracy to provoke chaos and violent subversion—just as his Bolsheviks were. Like liberals, he couldn’t conceive of an organized political group that made appeals to logic and argument.
Politics for liberals is: Our mass against their mass. Except conservatives don’t have a mass; liberals do. (But enough about Michael Moore.)
This is why conservatives and all law-abiding Americans have been under nonstop attack from liberal mobs since the founding of this nation. But lately, instead of recognizing mobs as a threat to the nation to be thwarted, conservatives have been bowing and scraping and apologizing to the barbarians.
Despite endless, epic mob violence from the left, lily-livered Republicans can’t stop appeasing liberals. When Democrats slandered anti-ObamaCare protesters by falsely claiming that some of them had shouted the N-word at black members of Congress, then–House minority leader John Boehner immediately went on NBC’s Meet the Press and said “there were some isolated incidents on the Hill yesterday that were reprehensible.”9
After the continuous stream of hoax racism charges over the past few decades—from Tawana Brawley to the Duke lacrosse players—Republicans might consider waiting twenty-four hours before leaping to the conclusion that such accusations are always true.
When the two Obama supporters sneaked into the Republican Convention and began screeching in the middle of Palin’s speech, convention security guards did nothing. Two lunatics were approaching a major party’s vice presidential candidate, but the male guards stood frozen, whispering into their walkie-talkies, as if they were Louis XVI, paralyzed with fright. The crazed women were able to walk toward the stage in the middle of a nationally televised, $100 million, years-in-the-making convention.
The protesters must have been as stunned as Palin that security let them carry on so long. But the convention’s sergeant at arms later bragged that the protesters didn’t actually make it onto the stage. “That’s why you hire good people,” convention chairman Mike Duncan said.10 This is a bit like the head of security at Ford’s Theatre boasting, Mrs. Lincoln didn’t get a scratch on her! The deranged Obama supporters weren’t charged with so much as a misdemeanor. Instead, they were firmly asked not to do it again. (That’s why you hire good people.) Guess what they did again the next night during John McCain’s speech?
Next time, Republicans: Hire Rand Paul supporter Tim Proffit to do convention security. (Or let Sarah bring her hunting rifle.)
In 2010, when Proffit stepped in to protect Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul from an attack by a vile creature with a criminal record, liberals screamed bloody murder and conservatives prostrated themselves. Paul was arriving at a candidates’ debate when he was attacked through his car window by left-wing agitator Lauren Valle. A professional rabble-rouser and lawbreaker, Valle ran at Paul’s car and shoved a large cardboard sign through the window, hitting him in the face. Try doing that to a Democratic Senate candidate and see what happens.
After her second run at Paul, Valle threw herself on the ground and Proffit roughly stepped on her shoulder to hold her there. He was instantly accused of “stomping” on Valle’s “head” throughout the media, despite the videotape showing no such thing. Nonetheless, the Paul campaign fired him and banned him from attending future events. Republican Fayette County prosecutor Ray Larson’s office brought charges against Proffit—not Valle—for assault.
And then conservatives all congratulated themselves for “policing their own.”
Who’s going to police liberals? The attorney general of the United States won’t prosecute armed thugs standing outside a polling place threatening voters, but Proffit faces criminal charges for assault.
Liberals who do not want to be manhandled by conservatives must do the following: Don’t physically attack a Republican. Conservatives who want to avoid being manhandled by liberals must do … what? Not give a speech at your party’s convention? Never roll your car window down in the presence of liberals? Not attend your own candidates’ debate? Never give a speech on a college campus? Not attend the Bridgehampton arts fair?
Compare Proffit’s nonexistent “head-stomping” with what a liberal protester did to a New York City cop at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Officer William Sample was knocked down by the crowd and then beaten and stomped on so badly by a liberal that he lost consciousness and had to be carried from the scene by other officers. He was hospitalized for a serious head injury.11
Too bad Proffit wasn’t there.
Google the names “William Sample” and “Lauren Valle” to see which incident was deemed the greater threat to the body politic. The alleged assault on Valle was discussed on CBS’s Early Show, the CBS Evening News, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and every five minutes on MSNBC. The vicious beating of police officer William Sample—whose head actually was stomped on—wasn’t mentioned by a single TV network.
Conservatives never make a fuss about such things. In the bizarro world of modern America, right-wingers are hawks when it comes to the nation’s foreign enemies, but doves when it comes to anarchists at home.
The conservative ObamaCare protester who had his finger bitten off by a Moveon.org liberal, Bill Rice, told Neil Cavuto he wouldn’t press charges. “No, sir, I don’t wish to sue anybody,” he said, “I’m not a litigious person.”12 (Of course, he wouldn’t be able to point out his attacker, anyway.)
That’s a good conservative instinct when your McDonald’s coffee is too hot. But when you’ve been physically attacked by a liberal because of your politics, you’re putting all conservatives in danger by ruling out a criminal prosecution. Having your finger chomped on by a liberal is not a slip-and-fall case. Our founding fathers set up a constitutional republic with a powerful judicial branch precisely in order to protect individual rights—such as the right not to have body parts bitten off by liberals. You won’t become John Edwards if you press charges. (Unless, during his final summation to the jury, your lawyer channels the final thoughts of your severed finger.)
Say, did Tim Proffit sever any of Lauren Valle’s appendages?
Unless conservatives stop capitulating and start defending the nation from liberal ferocity, it will never end. Faced with a mob, a physical attack is not your personal business—it’s a battle for the country. As Nixon said of the student riots in the sixties, “This is the way civilizations die.” He cited Sinclair Lewis, saying, “None of us has a right to suppose that it cannot happen here.”
The slippery slope is always real with a mob because mobs are completely irrational and emotional. Arrest, press charges, call out the police, the National Guard, and the military. Hire Tim Proffit. To appease a mob is to play Russian roulette with civilization.
For those who will look, this is the lesson of history. Although it is accepted wisdom that the Allies were too harsh on Germany after World War I, leading to World War II, in fact, the truth is the opposite. We didn’t crush Germany sufficiently the first time. Consequently, in 1919, a lot of Germans accepted the claim that they had not really been defeated but had just been “stabbed in the back” by civilians. No one said that in 1946; Germany’s defeat was monolithic.
The belief that Germany had been treated unfairly after World War I was concocted by documented crackpot John Maynard Keynes in his 1920 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace.13 When the Nazis came to power and war broke out, Keynes’s insane thesis was immediately enshrined as a form of religion among foreign policy experts. You see! If only we had appeased the Teutonic brutes and rebuilt their cities, this never would have happened!
The stabbed-in-the-back theory was easy to implant because when World War I ended, there were no foreign troops on German soil. Having no firsthand experience of the devastation of war, Germans weren’t particularly averse to it. (In that sense, they were like modern liberals who have no idea what it’s like to be physically attacked, and are therefore not particularly exercised when it happens to conservatives.)
A contrary theory was tried on the Germans in World War II, when the Allies announced that they would accept nothing but “unconditional surrender” from the Axis powers. By the time Germany surrendered, Allied troops had seized control of every part of the country.
This time, they got the message. Germany has been as peaceful as a lamb since then—other than during World Cup soccer season. It’s always a liberating moment when you realize some timeworn shibboleth was just a cockamamie liberal idea that’s been repeated so often even you believed it.
Japanese kamikazes were pretty fanatical, too. Who would have imagined the architects of the Pearl Harbor attack were governable? Two well-placed nuclear bombs put an end to the legendary Japanese belligerence.
Similarly, Russian tsars are criticized for overreacting to peaceful protests in 1905 by firing on the crowd—which historians claim led immediately to the revolution of 1910 (leaving the question of how “immediate” it was with a five-year time lapse). Another view is that the tsars shut down the mobs quite effectively in 1905 but compromised with the mobs when they rose again in 1910, and that it was the appeasement the second time around—not what had happened five years earlier—that was ineffective.
By the time Nixon became president of the United States, it was almost too late for this country. But the mob knew Nixon wouldn’t tolerate riots. Even after the butterfingered Weathermen blew up some of their own, they kept setting bombs. That didn’t stop them. But the shooting at Kent State shut down campus riots pretty quickly.
The same was true for New York City when Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. In a city that had been a criminal bacchanal, he enforced a “zero tolerance” policy toward crime, arresting every turnstile jumper—to the evident displeasure of the New York Times. Within a few years, the “ungovernable city” was the safest big city in the country and property values went through the roof.
Napoleon said that if only King Louis XVI had shown any force against the revolutionaries, “victory would have been his.”14 Would you worry more about someone who hates your guts, or someone who hates your guts and has just had the crap beaten out of him? With liberals, as with Muslim terrorists, it’s more important that they fear you than they like you.
It is the rare individual who does not succumb to horrendous physical pain. Unfortunately, benign and advanced civilizations generally lack the will to apply it.
Tranquil, law-based societies are the most vulnerable to attack because those with an interest in defending it are calmly following the law. They don’t like disorder even in defense of order. But as Evelyn Waugh said, barbarism “is never finally defeated.” And if our present society falls, he warned, “we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.”15
Republicans are the party of peaceful order; Democrats are the party of noisy, violent mobs. Republicans would do well to remember that George Washington sent troops to crush the Whiskey Rebellion. Abraham Lincoln used the U.S. military to squash racist—and Democrat-led—riots in New York City. This nation’s heroes knew what Louis XVI did not: A mob cannot be calmly reasoned with; it can only be smashed.
When faced with a mob, civilized society’s motto should be: Overreact!