Demonic (16 page)

2. The family of Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, “failed to provide his passport, which had vanished mysteriously.”

Wow—that is mysterious! How could a passport simply vanish? This is how: Casey had died in 1987 and the congressional investigation didn’t begin until five years later, in 1992. Not being able to readily produce the passport of a man who passed away five years earlier is not especially mysterious.

3. “All this leaves open the possibility that members of the Reagan-Bush campaign may have interfered with the Carter Administration’s most delicate foreign negotiation.”

This is why you should never argue with homeless people claiming the government is controlling our minds with microwaves, kids! It’s easier to just let them write a column for the
New York Times
op-ed page.

It is inconceivable that there would ever be comparable congressional investigations by Republicans. It would be as if Republicans spent millions of dollars investigating Obama’s birth certificate—except there is such a thing as a birth certificate. There was no such thing as a secret meeting between the ayatollah’s representatives and Reagan’s people.

The allegedly serious Democrats aren’t just humoring their base. This is what they believe. Years after elected Democrats wasted taxpayer money running down the demented October Surprise conspiracy theory, the Clinton administration’s first contact with Tehran was to demand information from the baffled Iranians about the mythical October Surprise.
³⁰

Hitler falsely blamed the Reichstag fire on a communist to justify the mass arrests of communists and insurrectionists. But at least the Reichstag building really did burn down. Liberals just go about inventing news stories and then demanding the rest of us deal with it. This is the politics of hallucination.

Only a mob could impose their psychoses on the nation like this. Only a mob is illogical and paranoid enough to believe such fantastical stories. And only the liberal mob has professors,
Times
columnists, former presidents, and members of Congress willing to promote liberal delusions. You couldn’t get enough conservatives to believe such nonsense to support an Internet chatroom, much less a multimillion-dollar investigation. From beginning to end, the October Surprise lunacy was another project of the liberal mob.

As Le Bon says, the “improbable does not exist for a crowd.” Unable to reason, “deprived of all critical faculty,” a mob will believe anything.
³¹

PART II:
THE
HISTORICAL
CONTEXT
OF THE
LIBERAL

SIX
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION:

WHEN LIBERALS ATTACK

T
o understand liberals, one must understand the French Revolution.

It’s difficult to track the precise chronology of the French Revolution because there is no logic to it, as there never is with a mob. Basically, the mob would hear a rumor, get ginned up, and then run out and start beheading people. Imagine CodePink with pikes. From beginning to end, the French Revolution was a textbook case of the behavior of mobs. As Le Bon described mobs about a century after the French Revolution: “[A] throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. Like women, it goes at once to extremes. A suspicion transforms itself as soon as announced into incontrovertible evidence. A commencement of antipathy or disapprobation which in the case of an isolated individual would not gain strength, become at once furious hatred in the case of an individual in a crowd.”
¹

Liberals don’t like to talk about the French Revolution because it is the history of them. They lyingly portray the American Revolution as if it too were a revolution of the mob, but merely to list the signposts of each reveals their different character. The American Revolution had
the Minutemen, the ride of Paul Revere, the Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, and the Liberty Bell.

The markers of the French Revolution were the Great Fear, the storming of the Bastille, the food riots, the march on Versailles, the Day of the Daggers, the de-Christianization campaign, the storming of the Tuileries, the September Massacres, the beheading of Louis XVI, the beheading of Marie Antoinette, the Reign of Terror, and then the guillotining of one revolutionary after another, until finally the mob’s leader, Robespierre, got the “national razor.” That’s not including random insurrections, lynchings, and assassinations that occurred throughout the four-year period known as the “French Revolution.”

Here are the highlights of the French Revolution to give you the flavor of the lunacy.

As with most rampages during France’s revolution, the storming of the Bastille was initiated by a rumor. The mob began to whisper that the impotent, indecisive Louis XVI was going to attack the National Assembly, which had replaced the Estates General. For some reason, the people were particularly enraged over the king’s firing of his inept finance minister, who had nearly bankrupted the country with Fannie Mae–style accounting. The rabble needed weapons to defend themselves from this imaginary attack on their new populist assembly.

Massing in the streets for days after the presentation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to the Assembly, the people became more and more agitated. By the morning of July 14, 1789, about 60,000 French citizens armed with pikes and axes were running back and forth between the Hotel de Ville (Town Hall), and Les Invalides, a barracks for aging soldiers, demanding weapons and ammunition. Finally, the mob broke through the gate of the Invalides and ransacked the building, seizing 10 cannon and 28,000 muskets, but they could find no ammunition.

Then they rushed off to the Bastille for ammunition—and also because they considered the Bastille an eyesore. Once a fortress, then a jail, the Bastille was in the process of being shut down. It held only six prisoners that day. But the Parisian mob irrationally feared the Bastille based on its menacing appearance and false rumors of torture within its walls.

With legions of Parisians banging on the gates of the Bastille and demanding ammunition, the prison’s commander, Marquis de Launay, invited representatives of the mob inside to negotiate over breakfast. They requested that the cannon be removed from the towers because mounted guns frightened the people. De Launay agreed and the cannon were withdrawn.

Meanwhile, the mob outside became more frenzied, believing that their representatives inside, lingering over breakfast, had been taken hostage. The mob interpreted the withdrawal of the cannon to mean that the cannon were being loaded, in preparation for firing into the crowd.

As the mob grew larger and angrier, the Bastille’s guards warned them to disperse, shooing them away by waving their caps and threatening to fire. The people interpreted the waving of hats as encouragement to continue the attack.

And so it went, with periodic gunplay interrupted only by De Launay’s repeated attempts to surrender. The mob secured its own cannon and began firing at the prison, hacking at the drawbridge, and scaling walls into the courtyard of the Bastille. Facing tens of thousands of angry citizens, De Launay made a final offer to surrender total control of the Bastille to the mob, provided it be accomplished peacefully. He threatened to blow up the entire city block unless his demand for a bloodless transition was agreed to.

His offer was refused amid angry cries of “No capitulation!” and “Down with the bridge!” De Launay surrendered anyway.

The mob poured in and ransacked the entire fortress, throwing papers and records from the windows, killing some guards, and taking others as prisoners. One captured guard who was marched through the street said there were “masses of people shouting at me and cursing me,” as “women gnashed their teeth and brandished their fists at me.”

De Launay was triumphantly paraded through the streets of Paris with the people cutting him with swords and bayonets until he was finally hacked to death, whereupon the charming Parisians continued to mutilate his dead body. A cook was given the honor of cutting off De Launay’s head, which he accomplished with a pocketknife, kneeling on his hands and knees in the gutter to do it. De Launay’s head, along
with the head of a city official, Jacques de Flesselles, who had failed to assist the mob’s search for weapons that day, were stuck on pikes and waltzed through the streets of Paris for more celebratory jeering.
²

This is the revolutionary event celebrated by the French—the murderous barbarism of a mob.

Or as Parisians called it, “Tuesday.” The incident at the Bastille was merely a particularly aggressive version of the rampaging and pillaging they had been doing for weeks, all based on this or that rumor.

Apart from the feral viciousness of the attack on the Bastille, the madness of it was that the Third Estate—peasants and the middle class—had already won themselves a Republic. Under the old system, the French people had had a legitimate grievance: The Third Estate, composed of the great mass of citizens, paid all the taxes but got none of the government jobs. Those were reserved for the nontaxpaying nobility and clergy. (It was much like rich Democrats today—Tim Geithner, who failed to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes but was still confirmed as Obama’s treasury secretary; U.S. senator Claire McCaskill [D-Missouri], who failed to pay $287,000 in taxes on a private plane; Tom Daschle, proposed Obama nominee to be Health and Human Services Department secretary, who failed to pay all his taxes; Nancy Killefer, proposed Obama nominee to be White House chief performance officer, who failed to pay all her taxes; Zoë Baird, proposed Clinton nominee as attorney general, who failed to pay all her taxes; and Charlie Rangel, Democratic congressman censured by the House Ethics Committee for failure to pay all his taxes.)

When the Third Estate walked out on the Estates General and formed the new, classless National Assembly, asserting that only it could make laws, and the king recognized this new legislative body, they had won.

Nonetheless, the people decided the utterly pointless attack on the Bastille had been a tremendous success. And so, a few months later, Parisian peasant women decided to storm the Palace of Versailles and murder the queen, Marie Antoinette.

As Alexander Hamilton politely warned American Revolutionary hero the Marquis de Lafayette, after the storming of the Bastille, “I dread the vehement character of your people, whom I fear you may find
it more easy to bring on than to keep within Proper bounds, after you have put them in motion.”
³

Initially, the mob had worshipped Maria Antonia, the Austrian princess, christened “Marie Antoinette” upon her arrival in France to marry the future king, Louis-Auguste. Antoinette was young—only fifteen years old—slender, fair, and beautiful. Mobs like that sort of thing, so the people worshipped her. When Antoinette made her first public appearance in Paris, the cheering crowds were so thick, her carriage was frequently stopped for an hour at a time. The besotted Parisians presented the princess with flowers, fruits, salutes, and speeches all along her ride. Most enthusiastic were the common people. As Antoinette stood on a balcony gasping in astonishment at the throng cheering her, a nobleman, Marechal de Brissac, told her, “You have before you two hundred thousand persons who have fallen in love with you.”
⁴

When Louis-Auguste assumed the throne a few years later, the masses hailed a new era of youth, freedom, hope, and change under their twenty-year-old king and nineteen-year-old queen. Though the new king and queen had done nothing and promised nothing, the masses adored them, putting their portrait up in all the shop windows.
⁵
They were the French Obamas!

But as so often happens with mobs, the people’s passionate love would soon turn into equally passionate hate. As described by Le Bon, mobs “only entertain violent and extreme sentiments,” so “sympathy quickly becomes adoration, and antipathy almost as soon as it is aroused is transformed into hatred.”
⁶

One sees traces of the phenomenon today in liberals’ love-to-hate feelings toward Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Tony Blair, Joe Lieberman, Israel, the Supreme Court, wood-burning fireplaces, free speech, cigarettes, and warm weather. Liberals went from love to hate with Christopher Hitchens when he attacked Clinton—but then he won them back with his attack on God. (What a Cinderella story!)

Inflamed by ugly gossip as well as food shortages and fiscal crises, the crowd began to detest the queen. She was called
“l’Autrichienne,”
meaning the Austrian, but with the stress on “chienne,” meaning “bitch.” In pamphlets and gossip, Antoinette was accused of being a
nymphomaniac and a lesbian, of holding sex orgies in the palace, and of engaging in unnatural acts with her dog and infant son.
⁷

Antoinette was nearly the exact opposite of the image invented by the mob and passed down in popular mythology. She was genuine, charitable, kind, and good-natured—more like Audrey Hepburn in
Roman Holiday
than Hillary Clinton pocketing the White House silverware. She was not given to excess, avoided ostentation in her decorating style,
⁸
and was compassionate toward the poor. Antoinette eliminated the class-based segregated seating at the royal palace and often invited children from working-class neighborhoods to dine with her children.