Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama
Ann Coulter
MUGGED
SENTINEL
MUGGED
RACIAL DEMAGOGUERY FROM
THE SEVENTIES TO OBAMA
ANN COULTER
SENTINEL
SENTINEL
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Copyright © Ann Coulter, 2012
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Coulter, Ann H.
Mugged : racial demagoguery from the seventies to Obama / Ann Coulter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-101-60444-1
1. Race–Political aspects–United States. 2. United States–Race relations–Political aspects. 3. United States–Politics and government–20th century. 4. United States–Politics and government–21st century. I. Title.
E184.A1C658 2012
305.800973—dc23
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ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For the freest black man in America
CONTENTS
1 RACE WARS OF CONVENIENCE, NOT NECESSITY
2 INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN WHITE
3 GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN BLACK
4 HEY, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THAT STORY…
5 THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC
6 PEOPLE IN DOORMAN BUILDINGS SHOULDN’T THROW STONES
7 LIBERAL-BLACK RELATIONS: THEIR LANDLORD AND THEIR FRIEND
8 RODNEY KING—THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE EDIT IN HISTORY
9 TRIAL OF THE CENTURY: MARK FUHRMAN’S FELONY CONVICTION
10 POST-OJ VERDICT: PARADISE
11 LIBERALS ARE THE NEW BLACKS
12 CIVIL RIGHTS CHICKENHAWKS
13 YOU RACIST!
14 DREAMS OF MY ASSASSINATION
15 OBAMA, RACE DEMAGOGUE
16 THE MEDIA CRY “RACIST” IN A CROWDED THEATER
17 WHITE GUILT KILLS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
APPENDIX
NOTES
INDEX
CHAPTER 1
RACE WARS OF CONVENIENCE, NOT NECESSITY
The Democrats’ slogan during the Bush years was: “Dissent is patriotic.” Under Obama, it’s: “Dissent is racist.”
Liberals luxuriate in calling other people “racists” out of pure moral preening. They seem to imagine that in African American households throughout the land you’ll find mantel portraits of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and Keith Olbermann. (More likely, those mantels would have portraits of Bernie Goetz.)
Beginning in the seventies, there was constant racial turmoil in this country, stirred up by the media, academia and Hollywood to promote their fantasy of America as “Mississippi Burning.”
This was madness. There had been a real fight over civil rights for a century, especially in the previous two decades, but by the end of the sixties, it was over. Segregationist violence was gone, and all public places integrated. But in their minds, liberals lived in a heroic past, where they were the ones manning the barricades and marching against segregation. Liberals were hallucinating—about the present and the past.
Contrary to the myth Democrats told about themselves—that they were hairy-chested warriors for equal rights—the entire history of civil rights consists of Republicans battling Democrats to guarantee the constitutional rights of black people.
Not all Democrats were segregationists, but all segregationists were Democrats and there were enough of them to demand compliance from the rest of the party, just as today’s Democrats submit to the demands of the proabortion feminists. The civil rights protests brought attention to injustice, and voters needed to know what was happening in the Democratic South. But the hoopla was unnecessary.
What really made the Democrats sit up and take notice was that blacks began voting, and would soon outnumber the Democrats’ segregationist wing. That was accomplished by Thurgood Marshall winning cases in the Supreme Court, Republicans in Congress passing civil rights laws and Republicans in the White House enforcing both the court rulings and the laws—sometimes at the end of a gun.
Despite lingering hard feelings over the Civil War, Republican Dwight Eisenhower snatched large parts of the South from the Democrats in the 1952 presidential election.1 Boosted by his war record in the patriotic, military-admiring South, this Republican candidate carried Tennessee, Virginia, Florida and Texas—and he nearly won Kentucky, North Carolina and West Virginia, losing Kentucky by a microscopic .07 percent. The Democrats’ dream team that year was Adlai Stevenson—and Alabama segregationist John Sparkman.
(Eisenhower started a trend, but as far back as the 1920s Republicans were sporadically winning southern states. In 1920, Warren Harding won Tennessee and in 1928 Herbert Hoover won Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Texas. Between Hoover and Eisenhower, Republicans didn’t win a single presidential election, much less the South. The Hoover/Eisenhower southern states were the same states Nixon and Reagan would do best in—not the states Barry Goldwater carried in 1964. More on that to come.)
Eisenhower put a slew of blacks into prominent positions in his administration—unlike Barack Obama he chose competent ones—and quickly moved to desegregate the military, something President Harry Truman had announced, but failed to fully implement.2
It took a lifelong soldier who had smashed the Nazi war machine to compel total racial integration in the military. Eisenhower may have felt as his fellow Republican and soldier Senator Charles Potter did when he stood on crutches in the well of the Senate—he lost both legs in World War II—and denounced the Democrats for refusing to pass a civil rights bill. “I fought beside Negroes in the war,” Potter said. “I saw
them die for us. For the Senate of the United States to repay these valiant men…by a watered-down version of this legislation would make a mockery of the democratic concept we hold so dear.”3
When Eisenhower ran for reelection in 1956, the Republican Party platform endorsed the recent Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education desegregating public schools. The Democratic platform did not. Indeed, a number of Democratic governors proceeded to ignore the landmark decision. Ike responded by sending in the 101st Airborne to walk black children to school.
In his second term, Eisenhower pushed through two major civil rights laws and created the Civil Rights Commission—over the stubborn objections of Democrats. Senator Lyndon Johnson warned his fellow segregationist Democrats, “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again.” Liberal hero, Senator Sam Ervin told his fellow segregationists, “I’m on your side, not theirs,” adding ruefully, “we’ve got to give the goddamned niggers something.”4
Vice President Richard Nixon pulled some procedural tricks as president of the Senate to get the 1957 bill passed, for which he was personally thanked by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But LBJ had stripped the first bill of enforcement provisions, so Eisenhower introduced another, stronger civil rights bill in 1960. All eighteen votes against both bills were by Democrats. Democratic opposition to civil rights was becoming what we call “a pattern.”
Unfortunately for the cause of equality, Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election and there wasn’t much enthusiasm for aggressively enforcing civil rights laws in either the Kennedy or Johnson administrations. That would have to wait for Nixon’s return.
But with the electoral tide turning—thanks in large part to Eisenhower’s civil rights laws and Thurgood Marshall’s lawsuits—LBJ did a complete turnaround as president and suddenly decided to push through a dramatic civil rights bill. Black people were voting in large enough numbers that Democrats were either going to have to abandon the segregationists or never win another national election, so Johnson switched sides out of a sincere commitment to civil rights. (Northern blacks had begun moving to the Democratic Party with President Franklin Roosevelt’s usual enticement of government largesse.)
Even with a Democratic president behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a far larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for it. Eminent Democratic luminaries voted against it, including Senators Ernest Hollings, Richard Russell, Sam Ervin, Albert Gore Sr., J. William Fulbright (Bill Clinton’s mentor) and of course, Robert Byrd. Overall, 82 percent of Senate Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, compared to only 66 percent of Democrats. In the House, 80 percent of Republicans voted for it, while only 63 percent of Democrats did.
Crediting Democrats for finally coming on board with Republican civil rights policies by supporting the 1964 act would be nearly as absurd as giving the Democrats all the glory for Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts—which passed with the support of 99 percent of Republicans but only 29 percent of Democrats.5
Nixon launched his national comeback with a 1966 column bashing Democrats as “the party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace” trying “to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.” One can see why Democrats would later be desperate to impeach him, especially Sam Ervin, a major segregationist who headed the Senate Watergate panel.
One of the main reasons Nixon chose a rookie like Spiro Agnew as his vice presidential nominee was Agnew’s sterling civil rights record. Agnew had passed some of the first bans on racial discrimination in public housing in the nation—before the federal laws—and then beaten segregationist George Mahoney for governor of Maryland in 1966. That was the Mahoney in “Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace.”
With the segregationist vote split between Democrat Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election,6 Nixon won. In his inaugural address, he said, “No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not. To go forward at all is to go forward together. This means black and white together, as one nation, not two. The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what is in the law: to ensure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are born equal in dignity before man.”
President Nixon proceeded to desegregate the public schools with lightning speed. Just within Nixon’s first two years, black students attending segregated schools in the South declined from nearly 70 percent to 18.4 percent.7 There was more desegregation of American schools in Nixon’s first term than in any historical period before or since.
During the campaign, Nixon had said, “people in the ghetto have to have more than an equal chance. They should be given a dividend.” As president, he followed through by imposing formal racial quotas and timelines on the building trades. The construction industry got a lot of business from the federal government and yet had doggedly refused to hire blacks. They had been given long enough do so voluntarily. Nixon was fed up with the union’s foot dragging and demanded results.
LBJ has been heaped with praise merely for having proposed an affirmative action plan for the building trades. But he backed down from pursuing the plan as soon as the first objection was raised. As with Truman’s unenforced executive order desegregating the military, it took a Republican president to actually get it done.
The century-long struggle for civil rights was over. Attorney Thurgood Marshall had won his cases before the Supreme Court. President Eisenhower made clear he was willing to deploy the U.S. military to enforce those victories. President Nixon had desegregated the schools and building trades. Racist lunatic—and Democrat—Eugene “Bull” Connor was voted out of office by the good people of Birmingham, Alabama. The world had changed so much that even a majority of Democrats were at last supporting civil rights. After nearly a century of Republicans fighting for civil rights against Democratic segregationists, it was over.
That was the precise moment when liberals decided it was time to come out strongly against race discrimination.
For the next two decades liberals engaged in a ritualistic reenactment of the struggle for civil rights—long after it had any relevance to what was happening in the world. Their obsession with race was weirdly disconnected from actual causes and plausible remedies. They simply insisted on staging virtual Halloween dress-up parties, in which some people were designated “racists,” others “victims of racist violence” and themselves, “saviors of black America.”
The fact that New York City was the crucible of so much racial agitation in the seventies and eighties shows how phony it was. There was never any public segregation in New York. No one was moved to the back of the bus. There were no “whites only” water fountains. There were no segregated lunch counters. (Blacks could even get a sixteen-ounce soda in New York City back then!) But liberals love to drape themselves in decades-old glories they had nothing to do with.
Defending himself on Hannity & Colmes in 2004 after sneering about the competence of Condoleezza Rice, the first black female secretary of state in U.S. history, Democratic operative and fatuous blowhard Bob Beckel boasted: “I spent a lot of time out in the vineyards on the civil rights movement.” Proving it, he said, “I’ve got scars on the back of my neck.”8
Beckel was between twelve and fifteen years old during the big civil rights struggles—such as the 1961 Freedom Rides and the murders of three CORE workers by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. He was still in high school when Martin Luther King was transitioning from civil rights to the “poor people’s campaign” and white liberals were moving on to antiwar protests. Next, Beckel will be claiming to have been a member of 1927 Yankees.
Once-respected Mount Holyoke history professor Joseph Ellis also bragged about his work in the civil rights movement. He told one reporter that he had been followed and harassed by racist southern cops while on the Freedom Trail in Mississippi. In June 2001, the Boston Globe looked into the facts and discovered that this, along with many of Ellis’s other fantasies, was a complete fabrication. He had never be
en a civil rights worker.9
For Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporter whose famous Watergate reportage with Bob Woodward became a book and movie, All the President’s Men, the moment of civil rights heroism came when he was on a B’nai B’rith youth trip through the South when the train broke down in Greensboro, North Carolina. Carl alleges that he led the other teenagers in a sit-in at the train station cafeteria, refusing to leave the black restaurant and nearly getting arrested. For this act of brave defiance, Bernstein claims in his book, Loyalties, he was later reprimanded by B’nai B’rith leaders.
Reporter and author Adrian Havill searched for any evidence of the alleged sit-in for his book, Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. He interviewed dozens of people who ought to have known about it—other students on the trip, locals involved in trying to desegregate the station, B’nai B’rith leaders. Not one recalled such an incident. One friend on the trip said, “It is apocryphal at best.” No Greensboro newspapers mentioned it, and several Jewish leaders denied it ever happened.10
As long as they are in no real danger, liberals love to hallucinate racist violence, with themselves playing the heroes defending poor blacks in imaginary physical confrontations—or at least blistering editorials. Every liberal over a certain age claims to have marched in Selma and accompanied the Freedom Riders.
A favorite liberal taunt is to accuse conservatives of clinging to an idealized past. Poor, right-wing Americans vaguely sense the world is changing and now they’re lashing out. What about the idealized past liberals cling to? They all act as if they were civil rights foot soldiers constantly getting beat up by 500-pound southern sheriffs, while every twenty-year-old Republican today is treated as if he is on Team Bull Connor. At best, the struggle for civil rights was an intra–Democratic Party fight. More accurately, it was Republicans and blacks fighting Democrat segregationists and enablers.
