Copyright 2012 by John T. Reed

Ever since grad school, liberals have been threatening me with black riots when I espoused free market policies.

In her new book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the seventies to Obama, Ann Coulter says,

White Liberals Are Always Threatening Black Riots Whenever They're About To Lose An Election.

It happened to me in mid-October at a Harvard Business School class for alumni attending a reunion. The discussion was about why can’t the right and the left agree on tax policy. I said they should with regard to never raising tax rates to the right of the peak of the Laffer Curve because that reduces revenues and neither side wants that.

But that Democrats have another agenda: to stick it to wealthy, successful, for-profit businesspeople. To cut off the national nose to spite the rich. And I cited the legendary exchange between George Stephanopolous and Obama during a 2008 presidential primary debate. Three times, Stephanopolous asked why Obama why he wanted to raise capital gains tax rates knowing that would reduce revenue to the government. (scroll the YouTube to 3:10 into the clip)

Obama finally said you would do that even though it would reduce revenue in the interest of “fairness.”

“Fairness” and “social justice” are liberal code words for sticking it to the rich, even it hurts the poor.

Anyway, an alum with a British accents responded by saying that the British understood these things better because they had a nineteenth century and essentially threatened that the poor would riot if government policy did not redistribute wealth downward. (Did’t we also have a nineteenth century?)

I wanted to answer, but did not get called on, along these lines.

When you open a candy store in New York City, you get a visit from a goon who says, “You got a nice place here. I wouldn’t want to see it get messed up.” Then he offers to protect you and it for $1,000 a week or some such. What the Charles Dickens reenactor just said to me and us was the same thing: a gangster threat of ‘your money or your life.’

Nice little society you got here. I’d hate to see it violently messed up because you voted against my guy for president.

The Doonesbury comic strip on Sunday 10/28/12 said essentially the same thing.

Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau, apparently a mere liberal when he is having one of his right-wing days, has lately been railing against the Republican “voter suppression” of requiring a photo ID to vote. In Sunday’s strip, he said a Romney victory would be illegitimate because of the “voter suppression” (we might want to wait to see the margin of victory and have documented net persons who would have voted for Obama being prevented from doing so before we draw that conclusion).

Trudeau then threatened Romney voters with black riots resulting from the possible “illegitimate” Romney victory. Trudeau threatened the riots, enabled them, authorized them, justified them, and apparently is looking forward to them. I hope he is named as a defendant in the event of any such riots. He would probably get off on freedom of speech but I believe courts have said inciting a riot is not free speech.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that government may not prohibit speech that advocates illegal or subversive activity unless "such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" (Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395U.S. 444, 89 S. Ct. 1827, 23 L. Ed. 2d 430 [1969]).

Hoover Fellow Thomas Sowell, a black, highly recommends Coulter’s book.

The good news is that Trudeau is apparently delusional about who reads his strip. I doubt many young, black, male riot types do. They do not read, period. So its effect, if any, will probably just be to piss off readers like me and to scare the sorts of whites who voted for Obama in 2008 because he was half black.

John T. Reed