Ann Coulter Gets ‘Demonic’ (Yet another pull-no-punches tract from the Right’s Queen of Mean)

Pajamas Media ^ | Christian Toto

[SeekAndFind]

Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America

By Ann Coulter

Crown Forum (June 7, 2011)

Reviewed by Christian Toto

Liberals eager to find offense with Ann Coulter’s latest book need only thumb over to page 4, where the blond provocateur lumps left-wing protestors in with the Maoist gangs looting villages and impaling babies in China.

Or they can simply read the title.

Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America is yet another pull-no-punches tract from the Right’s Queen of Mean.

She’s as divisive as ever, lobbing red meat to her base while driving the Left to fits of rage. It’s in her DNA. But her tabloid style distracts from a larger truth. Few can illuminate the chasm between Right and Left like Coulter. You just have to endure her baiting prose to see it.

Demonic feels as packed as her political columns, and often nearly as riotous. At nearly 300 pages long — not counting the bibliography and various appendixes — it’s hardly a rush job. It’s the breadth of her examples which will leave readers gasping. Thank goodness for her fiery sense of humor. It’s a mandatory release valve for the anger her prose is sure to inspire.

What conservative wouldn’t get red-faced over the Left’s tactics, what Coulter describes as an amalgam of hate, insincerity, and outright deception.

Coulter ties the Left in knots via her mob mentality description, based on the 1896 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon — who might as well get a co-author credit here.

“Democrats activate mobs, depend on mobs, coddle mobs, publicize and celebrate mobs — they are the mob,” she writes. And if that weren’t scabrous enough, she’s just getting started.

“The Democrats’ playbook doesn’t involve heads on pikes — as yet,” she writes.

It’s Coulter being Coulter, and if you’re offended it would probably make her day.

Coulter boils down support for ObamaCare via the “mob mentality” lens: “it will provide health care for 30 million uninsured Americans, everyone’s health care will improve — and their plan would save money! … Only the mob could believe it,” she writes.

In “The Historical Context of the Left,” Coulter fashions herself a politically incorrect professor out to label the Left as the heirs to the French Revolution, a topic previously explored in Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.

“Liberals don’t like to talk about the French Revolution because it’s the history of them,” she writes, before recalling the beheadings and other atrocities from the era.

It’s an imaginative, if incendiary, way to view the likes of MoveOn.org and the union thugs, but Coulter wastes far too much pulp on the matter. A Coulter book should be read in a few intoxicating sittings.

She later turns her attention to the American Revolution, delivered in her own inimitable style. The text does support tea partier Sarah Palin when it describes how Paul Revere warned the British they would be massacred if it they went near Lexington Green.

One tenuous connection between the two revolutions was Thomas Paine, who inexplicably supported the mob-like tactics practiced by the French.

“He was a historical one-hit wonder, desperately trying to find that follow-up single that would put him back on top,” she writes.

At times, Coulter’s barely controlled contempt for liberals bubbles over, and she lets loose with a fusillade of offenses to buttress her points. It almost feels like a jazz riff, impassioned and intoxicating in its venom.

In between the partisan broadsides, Coulter blasts the revised decisions in the Central Park jogger case, gives props to Marie Antoinette for her courage in the face of death, and taunts the Left for its own conspiracy theories regarding “The October Surprise.” The latter makes birthers look like sober-minded scientists.

Need examples of the Left’s hypocrisy? How about noting the liberal rages against the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape back in 2006 and the silence of the left-leaning Innocence Project toward the players’ cause?

Or how did the Democratic Party’s racist recent past (Bull Connor) beget the rise of Al Sharpton?

“The Democrats simply traded one mob constituency for a new one. You might say they traded their white robes for a track suit and a giant medallion,” she writes.

Coulter stands astride two distinct sides of the punditry realm. On one, she marshals compelling facts and humor to hammer home her assaults against the liberal mindset. On the other, she takes every opportunity possible for hyperbole, trampling her salient points.

In the book’s final chapter, indelicately titled “Lucifer: The Ultimate Mob Boss,” Coulter swats liberal icon Saul Alinsky before urging conservatives not to meekly accepted the Left’s tactics. It’s a call to arms, a metaphorical one, mind you. Appeasement simply lets the mob win, she cautions, and that‘s not how you handle an unruly gathering with hate in its heart.

“A mob cannot be calmly reasoned with; it can only be smashed,” she states.

Demonic stands as a tonic for weak-kneed conservatives who might get wobbly as the 2012 presidential elections come into focus. And it’s the best way to make a liberal’s blood boil at room temperature.

Also read Andrew Klavan: Now I Am Happy.

Christian Toto is a freelance writer for The Washington Times. His work has appeared in People magazine, MovieMaker Magazine, The Denver Post, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and boxofficemagazine.com. He also contributes movie radio commentary to three stations as well as the nationally syndicated Dennis Miller Show and runs the blog What Would Toto Watch?

[SeekAndFind]

I just read Ann Coulter's book ( actually listened to it narrated while driving ).

Her book gave me a greater appreciation of the difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution and made me even more thankful that we have such enlightened and Godly men as George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as our founding fathers instead of the unenlightened ones they had in France.

While we were busy building a nation here via our constitution based on God's principles, the French were creating their own reign of terror by repudiating their Christian influence, culminating in orgies of brutality described in chilling detail in Coulter's book.

Coulter's chilling two-chapter recapitulation of the madness of the French Revolution is worth well more than the price of her new book ( makes me wonder why the French even CELEBRATE this horrible event as their independence day).

Coulter takes us on a gripping tour of the murderously barbaric and ghoulishly bloody years of the French Revolution and its philosophical underpinnings, which were inspired in part by Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau, as you know, is one of the left's celebrated secular political philosophers. Anticipating modern liberals, he twisted words and concepts to turn common sense on its head.

Rousseau was a proponent of the "general will," but his idea of the general will did not remotely resemble any bottom-up expression of the people en route to republican government. It more closely resembled the process whereby autocrats impose their "superior" ideas on the masses in the name of carrying out the people's will.

As Coulter puts it, "a select group of elites with absolutely no grasp of human nature will figure out the program, inflexibly impose it on the people and thereby regenerate mankind."

Coulter's guided tour of the French Revolution (and her contrasting summary of the American Revolution) is hardly a mere historical joyride. For in the book's last section, she makes her closing argument, highlighting the inescapable parallels between today's liberals and the revolutionary French.

She writes that "all the bloody totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century have drawn inspiration from Rousseau and the French Revolution." All the "great liberal 'reformers' of the twentieth century, from Lenin to Mao to Hugo Chavez," got their "playbook from Robespierre" — probably the worst and most radical of the French revolutionaries — "who argued, following Rousseau, that a 'Republic of Virtue' could only be achieved by 'virtue combined with terror.'"

Democrats, says Coulter, "are heirs to the French Revolution, the uprising of a mob," whereas "conservatives are heirs to the American Revolution and the harmonious order of a republic."

[tumblindice]

Good book report. Thanks for saving me from having to read it.

[papertyger]

Typical... “She doesn’t say anything wrong, but she’s still bad...”

God save us from “Goldilocks” writers.

[Tamar1973]

I read it on the airplane a while back on my little iPhone screen. It is a great read, but can be a mild annoyance to your ca inmates as you alternate between gasps of horror and ROTFLMAO.

[PetroniusMaximus]

Why is Ann playing friendly with the gay GOProud crowd?

Doesn’t she understand that their goals are antithetical to true conservatism.

I won’t support her - or buy her book - till she gets her head back on straight.

[Mikey_1962]

Her book gave me a greater appreciation of the difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution

There were two "Enlightenments" and two "Revolutions".

The American Revolution and enlightenment was battling with the control of government.

The French enlightenment and revolution, was battling church and state.

The Iranians should have chosen the American model, but since the ruling class were all schooled in France they chose the wrong Enlightenment and the wrong Revolution.

[Tax-chick]

I was first on the library reserve list when it came out. Terrific book.

[SeekAndFind]

I see a lot of parallels between China’s Cultural Revolution and the French Revolution.

Both revolutions transferred the concept of ‘equality’ from religious and metaphysical level, right into politics.

God did not create humans equal. The revolution in France (1789) and the Chinese revolution (1949) gave a powerful “popular” angle to equality.

Hence, in both revolutions, the idea of religion and God had to be eliminated and the idea of loyalty to the “revolution” takes its place.

The result — anybody who disagrees with this had to be either eliminated/killed or re-educated.

When I learned that Chinese Communist leaders were foreign students in France ( e.g. Zhou En Lai, Deng Xiao Ping, etc.), I was not surprised at all.

[mjp]

Gangs of brutes are composed of those with the mentality of emotionalism, collectivism, social metaphysics, mindless activism,and subjectivistic egoism. They can be manipulated by demagogues who use pragmatism and dogmatism.

[RavenATB]

Please observe the “Coulter Rule”...

[JudgemAll]

I suppose it’s a queero world where she might enjoy the role of man next to those GOP girlies.

They are hard to avoid these days, after all... but I get your point, gays are a dangerous poison.

[JudgemAll]

yep, and in other words a bunch of whiney b!tchs who could care less about real business but that of the subjection of their next of kin.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Good book report. Thanks for saving me from having to read it.

I just gave you two chapters of report, aren’t you interested in the rest...? :)

[SeekAndFind]

RE:Please observe the “Coulter Rule”...

Here's the hottest picture I could find...

[longtermmemmory]

coulter rule was abolished after the homosexual cpac fiasco. Given her joining the “log” “cabin” club, it is firmly dead.