Ann Coulter To Mediaite: Jon Stewart’s Audience Is ‘A Bunch Of Losers’ And Other Enlightening Bon Mots

How do you respond to many within the mainstream media arguing that the worrisome mob is actually the Tea Party, that here are these masses of people getting together and saying things that some of the left describe as dog whistles or otherwise language meant to inspire animosity within the country?

They have to talk about code words and how we’re secretly trying to gin up violence. For one, there’s never any violence. There is violence from the left, and they’re not using code words. And they’re coming out, and not in a hyperbolic way or a joke, comparing George Bush and Karl Rove to Nazis, as Vanity Fair and George Soros have. New York Times op-ed writer Anthony Lewis compared George W. Bush to Osama bin Laden. These weren’t supposed to be jokes. They weren’t supposed to be hyperbolic, and the people who read them or listened to them took them seriously. As a consequence, George Bush has to cancel speeches he’s giving in Europe– one in Vienna this year I think– because of protests. You see Karl Rove since his book has come out going around to these book signings, he can’t give one without coming under physical attack. James Carville can walk anywhere in this country. He can put a book out, George Stephanopoulos can, and you don’t have conservatives rushing them or standing up and screaming when they’re trying to speak. Not only do you have serious demonization– not just belittling and ridiculing an opponent– but serious demonization, and that’s the way it’s interpreted and the proof is in the pudding.

But the Nazi language– the extreme rhetoric– you tend to see that on both sides and could just be a product of so many people talking all the time with the advent of new media and so many new voices.

I do think there is a qualitative difference. I can’t think of any serious, respectable conservative who would seriously– not as a joke– compare Obama to a Nazi. You could probably find a blog someplace where it’s been done, but we’re talking about James Walcott at Vanity Fair and Al Gore talking about Bush’s “brownshirts” and George Soros comparing George Bush to a Nazi. These weren’t supposed to be jokes and these are people that would be welcome at any Democratic fundraiser.

“Not only do you have serious demonization– not just belittling and ridiculing an opponent– but serious demonization, and that’s the way it’s interpreted and the proof is in the pudding.”

Is the argument that someone like Glenn Beck, who uses plenty of Nazi language, is actually doing it as a joke, or that the reaction from the base of listeners is different when they hear rhetoric about Nazis and Communists, the way Newt Gingrich talked about them during the debate the other night?

You’re allowed to talk about the Nazis– I talk about the Nazis in my books. To make an historical reference to them is different than saying “Obama is a brownshirt” or “Obama is the equivalent of Osama bin Laden.” Those are things that were said. To talk about now– yes, you had to be careful in the Cold War not to let Nazis into the government, I think that was basically the gist of what Newt Gingrich was saying, or to talk about it as I do, how the Nazis picked up some of their tricks from the French Revolution. It’s not like I think people shouldn’t talk about history or ever mention the Communists or Nazis, but when you say “Bush is the equivalent of a brownshirt” or James Walcott saying that he imagined Karl Rove as the Goebbels to George Bush’s Hitler– that isn’t giving a historical point; that’s making a comparison to someone living now. Even Glenn Beck isn’t saying Obama is the equivalent of Adolf Hitler.

The French Revolution seems to be very key to your understanding of what you call the “liberal mob.” Why specifically that event? Why not, say, the Russian Revolution or any other uprising.

The Russian Revolution was inspired by the French Revolution. I’m sure there have been mob uprisings and mob revolts and brutalities through history, but I think that’s sort of the beginning of the liberal mob. It inspired the Russian Revolution and, to some extent, the Nazis and Pol Pot, who actually studied in Paris. That was the paradigm. It’s kind of crazy to contrast the French Revolution and the American Revolution, and not only was the French Revolution just a barbaric, bloody uprising, but it didn’t lead to a republic or freedom. It led the French people to throw themselves into the arms of a dictator, and then another monarchy, and then another dictator, and then another monarchy and they finally get something resembling a republic 80 years later. Whereas our revolution, fought by thinkers and debaters, actually was successful and did create something all-new in the science of governments, as I think Hamilton described it– new discoveries in the science of government that led to unimaginable freedom, unprecedented prosperity. But theirs is the revolution that gets copied because I suppose it’s more fun to be the leader of a mob revolt than to be just one of many individuals in a country based on individual rights and the rule of law.

Do you think that has more to do with the nature of the mob that fed the revolution or the leaders that spurred them? I ask in order to get to how you contextualize this in terms of leadership on the left today, and if there is a fear here of America ending up at the place France was in 1789.

Both the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution– that’s why I quote Dostoyevsky in Demons as prescient about the Russian Revolution as Burke was about the French Revolution— what Dostoyevsky described in Demons was older Russians feeling like nothing will go wrong. “Yes, our children are radicals and they’re playing with revolt and revolution and everything is confined for so many decades that we really don’t have to worry about it.” My point is, you do always have to worry. You see nothing like that now, but the country did have something that could have developed into something like the French Revolution back in the 1960s with the Weathermen and the SDS blowing up buildings, killing cops, and it is to remind Americans what they have known for most of their history: that mobs are almost always dangerous things.

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