Ann Coulter joins Rush Limbaugh to articulate what I’ve been trying to tell you for years:
RUSH: By the way, welcome back. Ann Coulter is our guest for the remaining part of the hour. You make a point in the book — you make a case in the book — that since the civil rights movement of the sixties, the American people lost their natural, inherited aversion to mobs. Now, this is fascinatingly interesting to me because in my lifetime I can remember. Ann, the American people were livid at Kent State. They were livid at what happened. They were livid at the protesters of the sixties. They were livid! They had a total aversion to this kind of behavior. We’ve lost that aversion now. Now there’s a reaction, it seems, culturally where we say, “Well, we must attempt to understand their rage.” When did this happen and why?
COULTER: I think it’s the civil rights movement because that was the first “mob,” so to speak, a street protest, that was on behalf of a good cause. Every other mob there was no sympathy for. In fact, it was Shay’s rebellion immediately after the revolution that caused us to become one country rather than 13 confederated states. People were concerned that if there wasn’t one central national government there will be no controlling of mobs. Abraham Lincoln sends the troops in to New York City during the Civil War when, of course, Democrats rose up in a rabble and started lynching blacks. Abraham Lincoln crushes the mob, goes back, wins the war, and then he carries New York state. So there have always been these mob uprisings. The first time a mob uprising was on behalf of a good cause was the civil rights movement.
I contrast Martin Luther King with Thurgood Marshall who suddenly has become sort of a hero for me. When I first read about him in law school he was just signing on to everything with William Brennan and I just thought he was another poopy-headed liberal. But his early place I place Thurgood Marshall in the tradition of the American Revolution. He was making arguments; he was winning cases in court. He won Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 — and, by the way, we never would have needed a civil rights movement if Richard Nixon had won the 1960 election rather than Kennedy. But these Democrats, because they always appeal to the mob — and their mob at that time, at least part of it, including racist, segregationist Democrats — the Democrats, both Kennedy and Johnson, kept dragging their feet on civil rights enforcement. So then you have Martin Luther King’s movement.
That was much more in the French revolution tradition. Martin Luther King stages a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, after Bull Connor — a Democrat who was an insane racist — had already been voted out of office.
First the good people of Birmingham eliminated Bull Connor’s office, once they discovered they had an insane public safety officer. He ran for mayor and lost. The Kennedy Justice Department called King and pleaded with him not to stage his march anyway because Bull Connor was still a lame duck public safety officer. The blacks in Birmingham begged Martin Luther King not to stage the protest, but he did it anyway, sending in children against this insane racist Bull Connor. Images are broadcast around the world and this gave a big jolt to Martin Luther King’s movement. People were sympathetic because it was a good cause, and now you’ll notice liberals every time they run on you into the streets, every time they start smashing Starbucks windows, they say, “Oh, well it’s the new civil rights movement!”
No, there was only one civil rights movement.
