ILANA Mercer is paleolibertarian author, essayist http://www.ilanamercer.com/weekly-column/and theorist. She has been doing verbal swordplay since 1999, to advance First Principles, as against American imperial wars  https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/war/ and hegemony; and for a multipolar world with national and individual sovereignty for all.

ILANA is Jewish. She grew up in Israel from which she fled, aged nineteen (decades back), never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF (Israel Occupation Forces), Israel’s compulsory military.

Starting in October of 2023, Mercer’s bailiwick has been Israel and its malign effects and influence on the greater Middle East and beyond. Her focus, in particular since October of 2023, has been genocide, https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/gaza/: A war against civilians is a war on civilization. Or, as one sage succinctly put it, “At a time of genocide; genocide is the only issue.”

Duly, ILANA has provided blow-by-blow coverage (empirical and analytical) of the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank for the Mises Institute
(https://mises.org/search?articles_prod%5BrefinementList%5D%5Bauthors.name%5D%5B0%5D=Ilana%20Mercer&articles_prod%5BrefinementList%5D%5Bentity_bundle%5D%5B0%5D=article
https://tinyurl.com/3wp8sa52 ) preeminent antiwar, anti-state, pro-market think tank.

At the Mises Institute’s May 2025 Revisionist History of War Conference (https://mises.org/podcasts/revisionist-history-war-conference), Mercer delivered a lecture, “The Real Israel vs. Hasbara History” (https://mises.org/podcasts/revisionist-history-war-conference/real-israel-vs-hasbara-history ) Impressions of the lecture and its impact are here (https://www.ilanamercer.com/raves-reviews/).

In November 2025, Mercer debated the Gaza Genocide  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0g2XEGSyDk&list=PLxbwCgvAh3w1HPH2ZshmmunEEOTz3RkEH) against Professor Walter Block on Tom Woods TV,  a libertarian podcast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Woods

Although it had been widely published in the US and Canada; since late in 2023, Mercer’s work has appeared predominantly on The Unz Review https://www.unz.com/author/ilana-mercer/, LewRockwell.com https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/ilana-mercer/, and the Mises Institute
https://mises.org/search?articles_prod%5BrefinementList%5D%5Bauthors.name%5D%5B0%5D=Ilana%20Mercer&articles_prod%5BrefinementList%5D%5Bentity_bundle%5D%5B0%5D=article
https://tinyurl.com/3wp8sa52

To wit, on arriving in the US from Canada, in 2002, Mercer’s Canadian weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after, due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. https://www.ilanamercer.com/2002/09/why-so-many-americans-don-t-support-attacking-iraq/. It likely didn’t help that she had likened Bush’s “bring ’em on grin” to the grimace “one can observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis.” (See “Bush’s 16 Words Miss The Big Picture” https://www.ilanamercer.com/2003/07/bush-s-16-words-miss-the-big-picture/ July 16, 2003.)

Beginning in Canada in 1999—for example: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/bushs-affirmative-action-ambush/article748379/  https://www.healthyplace.com/addictions/articles/stop-making-excuses-for-drug-addiction—Mercer had written for many Canadian and American publications newspapers (PDF copies of some of the articles and the newspapers in which these verses were published are available here https://www.ilanamercer.com/in-the-press/)

For approximately 21 years, Mercer was a regular, feature columnist for WND.COM, starting in 2002 https://www.wnd.com/author/imercer/  and terminating in 2023. Similarly, she was a regular feature essayist in The New American, until 2024. https://thenewamerican.com/author/ilana-mercer/

Some of the many publications in which Mercer’s work has appeared are The Financial Post https://www.ilanamercer.com/2001/01/how-things-would-work-in-a-copyright-free-universe/  (https://www.ilanamercer.com/in-the-press/, The Globe and Mail (Canada’s National Newspaper)—examples are https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/raise-a-toast-to-western-separatism-and-canadas-good-health/article1337394/, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/bushs-affirmative-action-ambush/article748379/  & https://www.ilanamercer.com/2003/09/bush-s-warfare-state/, The Vancouver Sun, The Report Newsmagazine, London’s Jewish Chronicle, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, and The New Individualist.

Mercer’s work had appeared regularly in The Ottawa Citizen, The Orange County Register, The Colorado Gazette, https://www.ilanamercer.com/2001/03/patent-wrongs/ and in other Freedom Communications, Inc. newspapers across the United States, including The Valley Morning Star, The East Valley Tribune, Jacksonville Daily News, Washington County News, Holmes County Register.

Additionally, Mercer’s work had also been published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Free Life: a Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought, the Foundation for Economic Education’s Ideas on Liberty—on intellectual property https://fee.org/articles/rights-in-ideas-infringe-rights-in-tangible-property/, in Insight On the News (an affiliate of The Washington Times) https://www.ilanamercer.com/2001/11/should-policymakers-trust-the-free-market-to-meet-urgent-demand-for-prescription-drugs/, and in Mises Daily https://mises.org/mises-daily/cipro-shortage-invented-scarcity, for which she has penned essays debating intellectual property.

An “independent scholar” https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-29608-6_47, Mercer is described as a system-builder https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/ilana-mercer-and-the-paleolibertarian-ideal/. Distilled, the Mercer modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events with verve, vim, and muscular style, so that what was penned 23 years back https://www.ilanamercer.com/weekly-column/ in her weekly column, begun in 1998 in Canada, is mostly true today and will be true years hence. The result: A systematic account of paleolibertarianism. The warp and woof—the very structure of the thing—is revealed. To wit, libertarianism’s axle is the nonaggression axiom. Ordered liberty, however, has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the axiom by which we all must live cannot endure.

A wickedly funny English wordsmith, a warrior against war, the state, statism, and against cultural, ethical, and intellectual degeneracy—Mercer deploys the art of deductive argument, praxeology, to decapitate, on paper and in pixels, liberty’s enemies. ~Libertarian Autobiographies: Moving Toward Freedom in Today’s World: A Woman of The Libertarian Right https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-29608-6_47 (September, 2023, Palgrave Macmillan).