Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [7]
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 thyself 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 comest into thy kingdom.” And Jesus said, “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.”22
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.
TWO
AMERICAN IDOLS:
THE MOB’S COMPULSION
TO CREATE MESSIAHS
The mob characteristic most gustily exhibited by liberals is the tendency to idolize their political leaders, while considering “as enemies all by whom [their beliefs] are not accepted.”1
The creation of an idol is textbook mob behavior. Crowds, Le Bon says, can only grasp the “very simple and very exaggerated.”2 They respond to images that “assume a very absolute, uncompromising, and simple shape.”3 And so, just as Clinton and Obama, for example, represented everything good to the mob, Reagan and Bush represented everything loathsome.
Manifestly, liberals fanatically worship their leaders. FDR, JFK, Clinton, Obama, even Hillary, Liz Holtzman, and John Lindsay—they’re all “rock stars” to Democrats. They’re the Beatles, Elvis, or Jesus, depending on which cliché liberals are searching for. As Le Bon says, the “primitive” black-and-white emotions of a crowd slip easily into “infatuation for an individual.”4
Nearly seven decades after FDR was president and five decades after JFK was, we still have to listen to liberals drone on about their stupendousness. It’s as if Republicans demanded constant praise for Calvin Coolidge. Even Republicans are forced to pretend to admire these profligate Democrats in order to court Democrat voters. Republicans don’t mention Reagan as much and he was a better president.
Liberals worship so many political deities that they’re forced to refer to them by their initials, just to save time—FDR, JFK, RFK, MLK, LBJ, and O.J. When’s the last time you heard a conservative get weepy about “RWR”?
In a 1986 Time magazine cover story on Reagan, reporter Lance Morrow droned on about the sainted FDR, saying he “explored the upper limits of what government could do for the individual”—evidently by putting Japanese in internment camps and fighting a war against a race-supremacist regime with a segregated military. Reagan, by contrast, Morrow said, “is testing the lower limits”5—one assumes by ending Soviet totalitarianism and bequeathing America two decades of peace and prosperity.
The most Reagan-besotted conservative would never seriously refer to his presidency with something as hokey as “Camelot.” But in the bizarro-world of the Democrats’ Camelot cult, all we ever hear about is the youth, the vigor, the glamour, the “Kennedy mystique,” and the rest of the cant. We never hear about the drugs, the prostitutes, a certain mishap at a bridge in Massachusetts, the inept intervention in Vietnam—including ordering the assassination of our ally—and the complete calamity at the Bay of Pigs.
Bill Clinton was called a rock star so often, the expression