Demonic (39 page)

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 behavior is correlated with “how much the student cares about being popular.”
²

People who think of themselves as sophisticated professionals who would never hiss “slut” at a girl for dating her friend’s boyfriend are driven by the same desperate need for social acceptance. They’re just appealing to a different in-group. As Eugene Lyons said of communist-sympathizing liberals in the 1930s, “Under the guise of a nobly selfless dedication they were, in fact, identifying themselves with Power.”
³

What most people care about is their standing in their own worlds—not what people they will never meet might think of them. The Dixie Chicks insult President Bush in London, not in Lubbock, Texas. The liberal mob operates not only by terrifying nice, law-abiding Americans with bottle-throwing lunatics, but also by imposing a powerful groupthink on public discourse. Le Bon says it is the human instinct to imitate that makes fashion so powerful. “Whether in the matter of opinions, ideas, literary manifestations, or merely of dress, how many persons are bold enough to run counter to the fashion?”
⁴

Self-styled intellectuals—virtually all residents of New York City—appeal to the imaginary
New York Times
editor they fantasize is listening to their every hoary declamation; lawyers take positions that will make them superstars at the next ABA convention; actors strike poses that they think will make them seem intelligent and passionate.

Who cares what people in Missouri think of them? Without a flicker of self-examination, craven suck-ups fancy themselves Thomas More standing up to King Henry VIII, when, in fact, they are Richard Rich, who testified falsely against More, resulting in More’s decapitation and Rich’s promotion.

Singer Lady Gaga has bragged that she is “mastering the art of fame,” which consists of an adolescent’s imitation of the in-crowd. The mob demands total chaos in sexual traditions, morals, and decorum—but fascistic uniformity when it comes to opinions. As Le Bon says, “It is by examples not by arguments that crowds are guided.”
⁵

Gaga has made a name for herself beyond her music for supporting gay marriage and denouncing the Clinton-era policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military. For this, she has been hailed as a visionary in the
Washington Post
, which called her “smarter than the average pop
star. Better read. More extensively traveled. Deeper. And she wants you to know it.”
⁶
She was ranked No. 1 on
dosomething.org
’s “Top 20 Celebs Gone Good,”
⁷
and praised on CNN as the “most socially conscious celeb of 2010,” because “she called for the repeal of ‘don’t ask/don’t tell,’ supported same-sex marriage and raised AIDS awareness.”

Never imagining the power of the mob could reach the crescendo it has in modern America, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1774, “Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art.”
⁸
By Thomas Jefferson’s lights, sixteen-year-old Canadian singer Justin Bieber is more of an American than native-born suck-up Lady Gaga.

When Bieber failed to pay obeisance to the mob’s position on premarital sex and abortion in a
Rolling Stone
magazine interview, he was roundly denounced as a jerk. Bieber told the interviewer he believed “you should just wait” until you’re in love to have sex. But most risky for his singing career, he said, “I really don’t believe in abortion,” because “it’s like killing a baby.”

Bieber was promptly ridiculed by the coven on
The View.
⁹
MSNBC’s Beltway blog bravely derided Bieber in an anonymous item intended to teach Justin “about keeping your mouth shut with reporters.” It wittily said, “Dear Biebs: You are simply adorable when talking about girls and music, but talking politics with
Rolling Stone
is not a wise move. We know you’re just a 16-year-old Canadian, but that’s all the more reason you shouldn’t be pontificating about American politics, abortion and rape.”
¹⁰

And there went Bieber’s chance of ever being named the “most socially conscious celebrity.”

Liberals speak with the fatuous lunacy of people in the old Soviet Union, passing out awards to one another for imaginary heroism and denouncing others for class crimes. Honesty is irrelevant—it would never occur to them as an issue. While Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of
South Park
and
Team America: World Police
, are mocking Scientologists, Barbra Streisand, and Militant Islam, actors think they’re speaking truth to power by opposing a proposition that banned gay marriage while living in 90 percent gay Hollywood.

Someone needs to sit down with Hollywood and explain to it what “courage” is. It is not, for example, going on CNN and ridiculing
Christians. It is not going on the Bill Maher show and being outspokenly pro-abortion. The first tip-off should be the standing ovation.
Uh oh, I thought what I was saying was courageous, but the audience is applauding, so it must agree with me
.

Liberal logic is exactly backwards. They think:
How do I know Lebron James just made a great shot? Answer: Because the cheerleaders cheered him
. They have no capacity to reason in the absence of thunderous applause or booing from the bleachers indicating what they should think.

It is so embedded in celebrities’ DNA to think whatever they do is courageous that they begin with the conclusion and reason backwards:
Okay what that singer just said was courageous. Now how do we get there? Oh, I know! It upset people in the red states!
Meanwhile, all traditional signs point to it being ass-kissy.

The mob’s craving for conformity is common to all primitive beings, Le Bon says. Look at how liberals dress alike,
¹¹
mimic their professors, use the same leaden platitudes, and laugh on cue at prominent conservatives’ names—and ask yourself if these are swashbuckling rebels.

People desperate for a badge of identity are highly susceptible to groupthink. Most people, Le Bon says, “especially among the masses, do not possess clear and reasoned ideas on any subject whatever outside their own specialty.”
¹²
Thus, they need someone to serve as their guide. In a crowd, “the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness.”
¹³
But the mere fact that a person is part of a crowd means “his intellectual standard is immediately and considerably lowered.”
¹⁴

Jon Stewart transmits the party line to idiots, who sit in the audience of
The Daily Show
and maniacally applaud everything he says. They don’t get all the jokes, but they know who they’re supposed to hate. For some people, nothing is more important than to think of themselves as smart and hip, way better than other people. The very act of applauding a joke—instead of laughing at it—serves no function apart from associating oneself with the crowd. Laughter is involuntary, like a sneeze. By contrast, applauding a joke is a public gesture intended to announce,
I’m with him!
—rather like a “Heil Hitler” salute.

To truly witness the horrible spectacle of a man desperately in need of the crowd’s approval, we turn to financial reporter Jim Cramer.

Cramer got in trouble with the mob when he criticized the angel Obama on March 3, 2009, calling Obama’s agenda “radical” and saying “this is the most, greatest wealth destruction I’ve seen by a president.”
The Daily Show
’s Jon Stewart—remembering that his role as a comedian required him to do something important—began repeating the White House line on Cramer, denouncing him for faulty financial predictions he made on CNBC.

At that point, Cramer had to choose: Make a Damascus Road conversion like Dennis Miller, Bernie Goldberg, and Brit Hume or go the whimpering sycophantic route of Chris Matthews.

The day he was to appear on Stewart’s
Daily Show
, Cramer did a round of appearances on NBC programs to prepare for his monumental suck-up that night. On the
Martha Stewart Show
he droned on about his tremendous support for Obama, “I happen to support his agenda.… I’m a lifelong Democrat. There isn’t a part of his agenda I don’t support.”

He called Stewart his “idol” and said, “This is killing me. My kids only know I have a show because Jon Stewart is skewering me. ‘Dad’s got a show! Holy Cow!’ No he’s the best there is.” The boundless sycophancy continued as they made a banana cream pie: “How bad is it going to be? … Is he going to kill me? … Well, it’s his home turf so I will pay homage.… Can I tell him that you said it was okay that I was on?”

Finally, for the cherry on top, Cramer said, “The reason why it’s been so hard for me, the attacks, is that early on I patterned my show off of his.”
¹⁵

Cramer’s actual appearance on Stewart’s show was even more humiliating. The opening exchange got the ball rolling:

Stewart:
How the hell did we end up here, Mr. Cramer? What happened?

Cramer:
I don’t know. I don’t know. Big fan of the show. Who’s never said that?

The key to understanding liberals is that “It is the need not of liberty, but of servitude that is always predominant in the soul of crowds.”
¹⁶
It’s striking how people in thrall to groupthink will, as Le Bon says, obey
their designated leaders “much more docilely than they have obeyed any government.”
¹⁷

As Stewart relentlessly badgered and insulted him, Cramer rolled on his back, bleating, “I got a lot of things wrong.… I don’t think anyone should be spared in this environment.… I try really hard to make as many good calls as I can.… You had a great piece about short selling earlier.… Absolutely we could do better. Absolutely.… I should do a better job at it.… I’m trying. I’m trying. Am I succeeding? I’m trying.… How about if I try it? Try doing that. I’ll try that.… I’m sorry. You’re absolutely right.… Look, I have called for star chambers—I want kangaroo courts for these guys.… Okay. All right. You’re right. I don’t want to personalize it.… True. True. I think, as a network, we produce a lot of interviews where I think that we have been—there have been people who have not told the truth. Should we have been constantly pointing out the mistakes that were made? Absolutely. I truly wish we had done more.… I wish I had done a better job.…”
¹⁸

The next day, Cramer failed to show up for his scheduled appearance on MSNBC’s
Morning Joe
, presumably because he was still showering off the humiliation. The herd was ecstatic—they had forced a loudmouthed liberal to issue obsequious, abject apologies for deviating from the party line on Obama. James Fallows exclaimed in the
Atlantic
, “Jon Stewart has become Edward R. Murrow” and compared Stewart’s idiotic grandstanding to David Frost interviewing Richard Nixon.
¹⁹

What was the point of Stewart’s holier-than-thou showboating? Cramer and others on CNBC made lots of bad calls. So what? Some of their calls were accurate and some were not. Showing video of the specific bad calls to prove an analyst sucks is like showing video of Alex Rodriguez striking out a dozen times to prove he’s a lousy baseball player.

It was just the ritualistic bloodletting to show that you must never diverge from liberal groupthink, rather like the ceremonial execution of the admiral in Voltaire’s
Candide
for the minor offense of failing to engage a French fleet at a closer distance. His merciless execution was necessary, Candide is told, “to encourage the others.”
²⁰

Wanting the good opinion of Jon Stewart, two months after Stewart had gone on CNN’s
Crossfire
back in 2004, and attacked the show for
“hurting America,” then–network president Jon Klein announced that he was canceling
Crossfire
and cutting all ties to co-host Tucker Carlson. Klein explained that his decision to dump Carlson was inspired by Stewart’s
Crossfire
appearance. “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise,” he said.
²¹
Carlson’s co-host, Paul Begala, was presumably as guilty of “hurting America” as Carlson, inasmuch as he was one-half of the same debate show. But Begala was a liberal, so he was off the hook. The problem, evidently, had less to do with the debate format than the participation of a conservative.

Sarah Palin is catnip for very insecure people trying to make their bones with liberal elites. If your politics are sincerely Hollywood liberal, this is a very good time to be an American. You can make a lot of money sneering at Sarah Palin.

No one is more desperate for acceptance by liberal intellectuals than ex–morning show hosts whose idea of a major “get” is the co-inventor of the Snuggie. You don’t win any points at the
New York Review of Books
by dropping names like “Katie Couric” or “Charlie Gibson” around the editorial offices. But in 2008, Couric and Gibson finally had a chance to establish their heavy-duty intellectual bona fides by kicking Palin’s butt in an interview. Obviously, this was important to both of them.