Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [122]
When the Duke lacrosse players were falsely accused of gang rape in 2006, once again we didn’t hear a peep out of Barry Scheck and the Innocence Project—even when none of the defendants’ DNA was found on the accuser, her underwear, or her fingernails—and this was using 2006 testing techniques. Only after their convictions were thrown out were the lacrosse players invited to an Innocence Project gala, to create the false impression that people released from prison on legal technicalities were as innocent as they.
Freeing the innocent is merely an accidental—and rare—by-product of the Left’s campaign to discredit legitimate criminal convictions. Liberals’ real goal is to foment disorder, release marauding criminals on society, and destroy the citizenry’s faith in institutions that protect their rights. The liberal intellectual mob creates anarchy in the courts in order to foist literal mobs on society. Don’t trust the courts; trust only the Show Trials.
Recall that Antron McCray’s mother said to him, “Tell the truth. We brought you up better than that.” With those parents, he probably was brought up better than that. But mobs allow people to “pass the moral buck,” as the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck says, so the moral conscience of the group becomes “so fragmented and diluted as to be nonexistent.”34
That’s more comprehensible than what motivates liberals. Why do they want to turn criminals loose on us?
Liberals defend criminal mobs to boost their own power and prestige. In a world of courts and rules, everyone is equal before the law. That’s no good. Liberals need to be above the rest of society in order to impose the Rousseauian “general will” on us. And so the same judiciary they trust to express the general will, when it is proclaiming rights for abortionists, pornographers, and Guantánamo detainees, is deemed utterly incompetent when involved in a simple criminal trial.
This is why liberals prefer to go straight to the Show Trials, where they can proclaim violent criminals innocent, while applying 22 Prairial—the accusation is proof of guilt—to politically incorrect defendants. Our all-seeing mob leaders will tell us who’s guilty on the TV networks and in the pages of the New York Times. In the world of the liberal, as in the world of Robespierre, there are no crimes, only criminals.
PART IV:
WHY WOULD
ANYONE
BE A
LIBERAL?
FOURTEEN
STATUS ANXIETY:
PLEASE LIKE ME!
The same mob mentality that leads teenaged girls to bully another teenager to the point of suicide compels people in all walks of life to engage in all sorts of appallingly bad behavior. Usually, the fragmented conscience of a mob means violence. But there’s also a species of intellectual mob, relying on praise and ridicule to enforce its views. Many people, especially in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, would rather be punched in the face than be sneered at by the elites. We call them liberals.
The mob mentality is irresistible to people with a desperate need to be popular, those who are perennially afraid of getting a bloody nose in the playground of life. This is why conservatives can never be a mob. By definition, it’s not a mob if it’s called a mob, denounced by the chattering class—the media, politicians, college professors, and celebrities. Anyone who doesn’t mind being sneered at by The Daily Show and other temples of the status anxious is not susceptible to groupthink.
Recent studies on high school bullies found that bullying behavior is driven by status anxiety. People with some status, but not the highest status, bully others because of their need to climb the social hierarchy.1
As the New York Times summarized the studies, bullying