State ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another ~ilana

 Between the State and the Corporation, Homo sapiens has been reduced to a Hobbesian, hedonistic version of homo economicus and a sad iteration of homo solitarius ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of “The Paleolibertarian Guide” (TPG) compendium.

“Deep Tech,” my preferred term for the high-tech sector, denotes how deeply the head honchos of high-tech have penetrated and poisoned the American public and private sectors. As a coinage, Deep Tech is superior to Big Tech. Drawn from the term “Deep State,” the term “Deep Tech” better captures Big Tech’s overarching, enervating and tentacular reach into state and civil society.

“Deep State,” of course, is no conspiracy. Before the Left turned the term against the Right; it had long since been deployed on the Left and by libertarians to denote the state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally. To all intents and purposes, Deep Tech has become almost as powerful as the State in molding the Little Guy into a right-thinking Global Citizen.

In The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, I make the case that state ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another. The State no longer merely silhouettes civil and commercial society; but is absorbing it. What’s more, corporate culture, my purview in this volume, has been thoroughly co-opted by the State. Willingly so.

It has become the reflexive habit of corporations, not necessarily malevolently, to work together as well as to collude with government, to snuff out all lineaments of subversion in labor. After all, the progressive ideology is a gospel which these industry leaders never cease to proclaim and act upon. And if you fail to conform to it; they’ll fire you, isolate you, expose you, silence you, cancel you for good. These observations apply across party-lines.

“The Aberrant Economy” in this work denotes the attitude of the multinationals toward economic growth. This attitude is today rooted not in healthy, community-based practices stateside and abroad, but in some aberrant economic gigantism. The derogatory diagnosis of economic elephantiasis undergirded by hubris, greed, and devout woke religiosity is warranted, I believe. Acromegaly is a physical deformity. In the human body it is caused by overproduction of certain compounds and is characterized by aberrant enlargement of the structure under discussion.

A diagnosis of economic acromegalia in Deep Tech is warranted ~ilana

The economic acromegalia or giantism diagnosed here in Deep Tech is one that manages to trample individual rights and other elementary decencies. Let us thus not confuse the metastatic multinational, motivated mostly by stratospheric wealth and a woke worldview—itself a gutter-like philosophy—with a business propelled by the good old-fashioned profit motive, whose growth is sustained by individuals and families tethered to corporeal communities, as opposed to colonies of imported laborers. Individuals, families, living in authentic, organic communities: These misty attachments are anathema to, and enemy of, the multinational’s clubby elites.

I underscore, as if in red ink, and deconstruct in detail how the awfulness of the COVID years, in particular, was underwritten by giant government, Big Pharma, and its latest malignant offshoot, the COVID Cartel—Disease X ad infinitum, if you will—in informal cahoots with social media. Again, a state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally.

Just how control is achieved—more reflexively than conspiratorially—I demonstrate by taking the reader through the COVID years, when “Agency And State Capture” were consolidated. I show how and why the Grand Old Party, Republicans, will always be missing in action on matters of individual and constitutional rights. On all matters, actually:

The overton window alludes to a range of ideas once considered unthinkable, but now normalized. With their flaccid, crushingly stupid responses to most situations—Republicans have helped to normalize tyranny ~ilana

And I touch on the deformed foundations of the American Third-Party run healthcare system, down to how Deep Pharma’s patent privileges subvert market-based profits and free market medicine. Fault Deep Pharma, I counsel, not China.

In fact, not mere jobs, but “the very stuff of life is outsourced” by High-Tech, which loathes a labor market. (Chapter 7.) After reading “Homeless In The Homeland” (Chapter 6), the most heartbreaking of the book’s chapters, the reader will understand not only how “High-Tech Compounds Homelessness,” but that “homelessness in the United States is both physical and metaphysical”:

When your home belongs to The World; it’s everybody’s home, and nobody’s home, not even yours, which means you could find yourself homeless ~ilana

Ultimately, the sundering of cherished natural and constitutional rights by entities whose market penetration and capitalization equal those of many countries combined is why a solution is urgent.

Free-traders such as myself contend that it is worse than corrosive for big, powerful business to usher in a mind-controlling creed which they enforce against the Little Guy—on pain of social and financial demise—so that his speech is confined to politically correct, do-or-die guiding lodestars, the kind that sap and leach away the individual’s native power. Such an immoral drive ought to have miscarried a long time ago. A solution is provided in Chapter 9, “Dispatching Deep Tech; Enforcing Natural Rights.”

In the “Epilogue: On Globalism & Giving,” I round up by juxtaposing global integration with regionalism and localism, and spotlighting the last inspirational capitalist heroes of international standing. I hope to leave the readers with thoughts about charity, grace and what distinguishes The Good Giver from the Showy Giver.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK

Analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, as mentioned, is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of The Paleolibertarian Guide (TPG) compendium. The TPG’s polemical impetus is analytical in nature. The framework of this and future works in the series will systematically demonstrate that analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science—and liberty itself.

To wit, certain propositions in life need no “empirical evidence” for their validation. If anything, the constant insistence on scientism is in itself evidence of a deep corruption of reason. While solid empirical data are never to be dismissed, these are supplemental to a solid philosophy of science.

Derived from the Aristotelian method, the method I follow, Austrian-School thinking, is based in the laws of reason. To the extent that research contradicts reason, to that extent research is rubbish. The idea that science without the philosophy of science is nonsense comes alive for readers in Chapter 2: “COVID’s Cartel Of Cretins,” where, vivid and fun examples of a priori truths are provided.

THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON of this volume and those to follow is how to repatriate thinking outsourced to the expert class. For, these days, the simplest of logical deductions often appear to evade the ordinary man or woman.

The cognitive class, a managerial malignancy now glommed onto the Managerial State, will often cloak itself in the raiment of “science” and is instrumental in generating consensus. The insidious Expert Class that shapes and manages perceptions about public affairs I see as an extension of James Burnham’s Managerial State.

New Yorker James Burnham (1905-1987) began his intellectual odyssey as a Trotskyist before abjuring Marxism altogether and becoming a passionate anticommunist. He coined the phrase “managerial revolution,” which was extremely influential in the 1940s, and which served as the title of his bestselling book, one that had a marked impact on Orwell’s philosophy.

Lilliputian Man now finds himself pinned down like a butterfly, incapable or unwilling to derive and arrive at the truth without outsourcing his thinking to some authority or another. Restore we must the ancient philosophical notion whereby some things are simply axiomatically true (or false, for that matter), for it has profound ramifications for liberty.

A free-thinking people does not outsource thinking—the very business of life—to anyone.

©2024 ILANA MERCER
WND, February 29
Unz Review, February, 23
The New American, February, 24

****

When it was first released, The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy claimed a nice No. 1 spot in the category of Ethics & Morality.

I’m buoyed to report that today, March 3, The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is No. 31 in the Kindle category of “Best Sellers in Philosophy Criticism.”

The post BOOK: The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

It is not capitalism that has failed, but crony capitalism ~Robert F. Kennedy Jr

The Constitution was built for hard times. It is the heart and soul of our country ~RFK, Jr 

THE GULF BETWEEN principles and practice, doxa and praxis, is eternal—all the more so when it comes to the politician.

When you think of a GOP candidate, in particular, you think of neither creed nor action, but, rather, of a list of talking points and policy positions to the exclusion of bedrock principles.

“God, groceries and gas” was how one gaseous hack smugly summed up what Americans need, to Sean Hannity of the near-defunct [chuckle] Fox News channel. That, and promises seldom kept.

Aside from a native intelligence, and to distinguish from his rotten party’s political plank—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., conversely, does articulate a creed that respects liberty. Whether he will act on this commendable worldview once in office is unknown.

As it emerged from the RFK, Jr., announcement for president, his worldview departs from that of the progressive Democrat Party’s, which he has decried as “the party of fear, war and censorship… neocons with woke bobble-heads.”

RFK, Jr’s philosophy of liberty, moreover, appears wedded to reality. He doesn’t jabber GOP-style about a return to small government and the passing of a balanced budget amendment.

Such totem Republican “small-government” words are as good as Orwellian News Speak in concealing the truth, as they are dumbly and dangerously unmoored from reality, and thus meaningless, mere reductive talking points.

With an accreting $31.8 trillion in national debt, and some $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities incurred by federal and state governments—the United States of America is beyond such asinine talk. There is no coming back from this kind of government gigantism; from such Federal Reserve and state-driven chicanery, with which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems familiar and to which he speaks knowledgeably.

Your columnist’s task over the decades has been to address reality, not to levitate in the arid arena of pure thought. Kennedy does the same. As does he appear to grasp that the natural law of the Constitution has been buried under piles of statute and administrative-law precedent. He knows this all too well, having spent his working life litigating against the Deep, Regulatory, Administrative, Security, Welfare-Warfare State.

LOCALISM

The thing that most inspires about an old-school presidential candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., other than his spirituality and intelligence—unusual relative to all other candidates—is his authentic Americanism, by which I mean his knowledge of and deep attachment to American history, community and patrimony.

This authentic Americanism is expressed in Robert F. Kennedy’s natural localism. From Kennedy’s abundant and important storytelling, as it emerged in his announcement for president; American history is the history of its people—not the history of the Federal Government’s gory, glory wars and its many conquests and usurpations. As he tells it, the history of America tracks with that of real families, like the old fishing families, who are no more. For centuries, these communities had lived off and along the Hudson River.

And so, he spoke at length about the villagers on-the Hudson, and their relationship to the river, both a source of food and fun—”their French Riviera”—before it was contaminated by the colluding quislings of industry and state.

Corruption invariably flows from state to society. RFK, Jr., thus also addressed classic agency capture, which is how regulations are implemented: by the regulated in-cahoots with the state, always against the interests of the people, be it the military-industrial complex and its stake in perpetual war, the Agribusiness conglomerates, Big Pharma, and its latest malignant offshoot, the Covid cartel.

Also pleasing to this paleolibertarian is Kennedy’s praise for free-market capitalism long-lost. The historic fishing families that fished along the Hudson River are gone, he argued, not because “their business plan did not work,” for “they had enriched the history, culture and palate of New York for three and a half centuries.” Free market capitalism had worked perfectly for them, protested RFK, Jr. Nature in her abundance had been a reliable social safety net—victims of the great depression could fish and feed their families. Now they must look to the welfare state for sustenance.

What eliminated these authentic communities is corporate, crony capitalism.

Is there another politician who speaks not only to the difference between free-market capitalism, RIP, and crony corporate capitalism, under whose yoke we labor—but also categorically praises the first and damns the last?

LOCKDOWNS

Robert F. Kennedy was all teeth and talons against the lockdowns back when it counted—and now. Never forget!

Tarting-up or forgetting the lockdowns won’t wash.

How right RFK, Jr. is when he says nobody wants to talk about the lockdowns, as both political factions promoted or failed to stop the invasion and occupation of American bodies and businesses.

You cannot have a stable democracy without a middle class, something upon which Pat Buchanan had always insisted. The lockdowns decimated the American middle class, destroying 3.3 million small businesses and resulting in the highest excess death rate in the world: America’s. The cost of lockdowns to the economy according to Harvard economist Larry Summers was $16 trillion. It constituted the biggest transfer of wealth in human history, argues Kennedy, with $4 trillion having been shifted from middle class to super rich.

Other than Naomi Wolf, Tucker Carlson (who, chuckle, destroyed the War Party News Channel) and Glenn Greenwald—few have been the public figures to describe the effects of the lockdowns on small-business owners (well-represented among the Kennedy-supporting crowd) with such persuasive passion, compassion and grasp of the facts, delivered extemporaneously.

THE CONSTITUTION

Certainly no politician has spoken with such emotion about the foundational right of free speech trashed, and about the crucial role of our cherished U.S. Constitution in commanding us to respect its First Amendment and practice due process of law.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. the historian reminded his audience how inviolable that Constitution is meant to be, by harking back to the Revolutionaries who did battle with Britain during many a deadly plague, state mitigation of which was never instantiated in the founding documents.

He even let fly at Lincoln because the 16th president flouted the Constitution when he abolished habeas corpus, a right of petition currently suspended for many Americans who languish in jail without due process of the law. This disgrace Candidate Kennedy must openly eschew and remedy, as the Radical Republicans have failed to.

Free all January Six political prisoners; and rescue Julian Assange, the greatest libertarian alive, if barely.

Kennedy remarked not unfairly that, while “president Trump blamed for a lot of things that he didn’t do,” he is most certainly to “blame for the lockdown.” The Covid lockdowns were “the worst thing that [Trump] did to this country, to our civil rights, economy and middle-class.”

“President Trump, in fairness – let me make this point. President Trump, will say that the lockdown wasn’t my idea, the bureaucrats rolled me on it. I said we shouldn’t do it.”  “But that’s not a good excuse,” countered candidate Kennedy.

“You need a president in this time of history who can stand up to his bureaucracy.”

Over and above that Sisyphean task, America needs a president who can defang the bureaucracy for good.

THE HARD TRUTH companion podcast to this column is, “Tucker Removed by Fox. Robert Kennedy Jr. Against The Deep, Warfare, Woke, Industry-Captured State. We thank you for your Follow.

https://rumble.com/v2kbeyc-tucker-removed-by-fox.-robert-kennedy-jr-against-the-deep-warfare-woke-indu.html

©2023 ILANA MERCER
WND, May 18
Unz Review, May 18
The New American, May 19

*Image courtesy The Unz Review

The post RFK, Jr.: Authentic Americanism That Loves Liberty, Loathes Lockdowns, Upbraids Abe appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The anniversary of January 6 is upon us. In deranged Democrat nomenclature, “It was an insurrection”—apparently the deadliest in U.S. history. To their disgrace, Jan. 6 has indeed become the Democrat’s 9/11.

Deplorables should rejoice for the Democrats are having a fit, and that’s fun. Rejoice, but do not partake in or dignify the production. Ignore Jan. 6 as you would “spam for penis extensions.”

Stay away from the force-field of evil that is the Democrats’ Jan. 6 Psychological Operation (PSYOP). Much like the Russia hoax—it was a plot to unseat a president—the Jan. 6 monomania is meant to overthrow a people, MAGA America.

Since there is nothing much to commemorate, except for the cold-blooded, unpunished murder of an unarmed protester, Ashli Babbit, Jan. 6 must be viewed as a long-term, cynical political strategy. To alert you to this civilian PSYOP, here is my reply to a liberal friend, who emailed late in 2021, still preoccupied with the Trump wrecking-ball:

“I understand why you are unaware of what’s going on in Biden’s America, among regular Americans: As a news-consumer myself who must consume the repulsive, ethics-abnegating, fake progressive media—I see that most of the legacy media’s time is devoted to prosecuting an ex-president, Trump, and maligning into oblivion his Deplorable base, whom they now accuse of spreading The Disease (as the ‘unvaccinated’), and being a source of domestic terrorism. Media report not at all about Joe Biden’s policies and their impact on the average Joe.”

Put it this way, when Trump is dead and gone, the same fraudulent, outlets, conjuring this alternate-reality, will continue to “report” on the “legacy of Trump.” This, these fake-news frauds will frame as the news du jour.

It is the responsibility of thinking people, I urged my liberal friend, to know Trump is no longer president (ya think?) and no longer news. But, in defense of those who have been swept up with mainstream media’s Trump monomania, even the Associated Press and Reuters are similarly mum about the issues defining Biden’s America.

In any event, anticipate an orgy of network ninnies and imbeciles gathering at the scene of Jan. 6, delivering excitable diatribes about the near-demise of American Democracy courtesy of Trump voters. This the likes of Anderson Cooper, of CNN, will do in fussy falsettos. After all, menstrual America now rules MAGA America. And the purpose of a Jan. 6 commemoration is to single out MAGA America as an object for ignominy, while consecrating and celebrating menstrual America: the woke crybabies of Congress and the Capitol Hill cops who wailed the loudest when recounting their professional failings on that day.

Unlike Republicans, who threw Jan. 6 political prisoners in a briar patch from which there is no escape—Democrats admirably stand tall for their core beliefs, as repugnant as these mostly are. The Left most certainly didn’t rush forward to condemn the Black Lives Matter and Antifa louts, as they looted and killed their way across urban America leveling private property—the livelihoods and businesses of fellow countrymen. Instead, Democrats defended the criminal arm of their party. “Riots are the language of the unheard,” they preached, parroting MLK, who opposed violence.

That’s the Right’s blight. The anatomy of every single left-manufactured, network-news outrage sees our side always conceding to the legitimacy of the Left’s argument, accepting the premise of their gripe, and arguing on their terms of debate. And then going on the defensive, instead of playing offense.

Like them or not, our people are the ragtag bunch who would storm the plush seats of state power and corruption. The Democrats’ people are Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Be they illegal voters and criminal aliens, or just good old vandals, rapists and murderers—the criminal class is now the armed and shielded wing of the Democratic Party: Courageously and audaciously, Democrats lionize and give license to their criminal constituents.

Odious Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a Pelosi poodle and a Republican Jan. 6 reveler, is correct: There is a difference between a crime and a coup. Crimes against innocent fellow citizens are acts of cowardice; a coup against the State can be heroic–just like the American Revolutionary War was a coup against Britain.

Principled, conservative libertarians will therefore distinguish pro-Trump patriots from the criminal arm of the Democratic Party: BLM, Antifa and other riffraff. These weaponized Democrats, immunized by party leaders from criminal liability, romped through America, in the summer of 2020, causing billions in damages. Like locusts, these cultural revolutionaries descended on their neighbors to menace them in places where they shop and socialize, sadistically threatening, and often physically harming innocents, unless they knelt like slaves.

In contrast, the ragtag renegades of the MAGA movement, as misguided as they were, stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State. Once!

The pompous Jan. 6 Commissioners, led by that daughter of 60 dogs (an Egyptian expression), Liz Cheney, informs us that President Trump knew about the riot, was monitoring it and liked the way it unfolded.

But if Trump misjudged the situation during the short time he had, as he hunkered down in a bunker, then what can be said of the Democrats’ response, for months on end, to their national armies of mobilized rioters, looters and murderers? Democrats knew, too. Progressive leadership embraced, even bailed out, its terrorists as spawns not of the devil but as “Summer of Love” peaceniks.

If Democrats can defend their rioters, the Republican Party must represent theirs and secure them their Constitutional due-process rights still denied.

Above all, MAGA America must cancel Jan. 6; consider it a civilian Psychological Operation intended to “induce” and “reinforce behavior” meant to politically and psychologically pulverize the Democrats’ enemies: us.

WATCH “Deplorables, Cancel The January 6 PSYOP!” & SUBSCRIBE to ilana’s YouTube channel

WATCH: “Deplorables, Cancel The January 6 PSYOP!“

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, January 6
Townhall.com, January 6
Unz Review, January 6
The New American, January 6

* Image credit

The post Deplorables, Cancel The January 6 PSYOP! appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has agreed to release the data upon which it relied to license Pfizer’s mRNA Covid-19 vaccine by the year … 2076, over the course of the next 55 years!

What this means is that the FDA has de facto classified this data—belatedly requested, via the Freedom of Information Act, by “more than 30 professors and scientists from universities including Yale, Harvard, UCLA and Brown.”

It also implies that the menagerie of medical and media propagandists for the Pfizer “clot shot” have not seen or studied the data on which the government relied to license the company’s COVID-19 vaccine.

If that bit of “news” doesn’t get the sheeple “thinking,” nothing will. And no, this is not the onion.

The plaintiffs pleaded the obvious when their lawyer said,

It is difficult to imagine a greater need for transparency than immediate disclosure of the documents relied upon by the FDA to license a product that is now being mandated to over 100 million Americans under penalty of losing their careers, their income, their military service status, and far worse.

If this doesn’t tell you what the U.S. government and its bureaucracies think of The People, their rights and well-being; nothing does.

The 55-year transparency plan is Sir Humphrey Appleby funny; were it not so serious; it would tickle you pink. (Every serious student of the State is obliged to watch and worship the famed British satires about the Deep State: “Yes, Prime Minister” and “Yes, Minister.”)

Says superstar of the satire, the marvelously sardonic permanent secretary Sir Humphrey, to the PM: “Yes, Prime Minister, the 55-year timeframe to produce the Pfizer Covid vaccine data is well within the law. No need to rush, if you know what I mean [smiles deliciously]. But I’ll start the paperwork, shall I?”

To repeat: By making Pfizer’s COVID vaccine data essentially unavailable for scrutiny in their totality for decades to come—the FDA has in effect classified the data upon which it based a decision to license Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine.

A knee-capping of a different kind was delivered to an exceedingly vulnerable Caucasian America by influencer Candace Owens. To wit, Darrell Brooks is the black supremacist, who used his vehicle to mow down and murder white grannies and grandkids parading in Waukesha, Wisconsin. But if you had dared to consider the race of Brooks in a hate crime manifestly motivated by race—you were boorishly berated by Owens as “brainwashed”:

“Darrell Brooks is a scumbag murderer—his race is irrelevant. …Disagree? You’re brainwashed!”

America is now systemically and institutionally anti-white. Black-on-white hate crime is rife, but it’s invariably not reported, underreported, or if reported, masked as something other than what it really is, precisely as Owens has done—and now orders you to do. Ignore her ilk—Republicans who’re always boasting about their color-blindness and their blindness to white suffering. Your life and the lives of those you love, very plainly, depend on it.

HARD TRUTH with David Vance and yours truly debates these and other thorny issues and wishes our American Hard Truthers a happy Thanksgiving.

WATCH AND SUBSCRIBE, please: “FDA Makes Fools Of Pfizer ‘Clot-Shot’ Recipients; Candace Kneecaps Caucasians”:

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, November 25
Unz Review, November 25
The New American, November 26

The post FDA Makes Fools Of Pfizer ‘Clot-Shot’ Recipients; Candace Kneecaps Caucasians appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Kinzinger to crybaby Capitol cops: “you guys may, like, individually, feel a little broken. … But you guys won. You guys held.”

Menstrual America has gained the upper hand. Feminized America has been on display in all her undignified inauthenticity, in the crybabies of Congress and in the loud and proud quitting at the 2020 Olympics.

In Menstrual America, medals go to congressmen and cops who wail the loudest when recounting their professional failings on Jan. 6, 2021.

And props are given not to athletes who “bring it” despite the jitters; but to those who crumble and quit, and then crow about the authenticity of it all.

Menstrual America’s rich and famous belong to a fraternity of foolish, showy killjoys. They take a knee anywhere and everywhere, to show the world how gynocentrically great they are.

Speaker Pelosi, of course, is nothing like that; the woman is made of steel. For political effect, though, she lugs around all kinds of crybabies.

One such Pelosi poodle is Adam Kinzinger. The Republican from Illinoi is serving on the January 6th Select Committee at the behest of the speaker.

On Day One of this Democratic happening, Kinzinger denounced Republicans’ attempts to compare the Jan. 6 melee to violence during last summer’s race riots:

“I condemn those riots and the destruction of property that resulted,” Kinzinger whimpered. “But not once did I ever feel that the future of self-governance was threatened like I did on Jan. 6. There is a difference between breaking the law and rejecting the rule of law. Between a crime, even grave crimes, and a coup.”

Kinzinger is correct: There is a difference between a crime and a coup. Crimes against innocent fellow citizens are acts of cowardice; a coup against the State can be heroic–just like the American Revolutionary War was a coup against Britain.

Notwithstanding that Americans no longer live under the rule of law, and are not self-governing in any meaningful way—hardcore libertarians of the Right should take the opposite position to that of Nancy’s Republican poodle, regarding the storming of the Capitol Building, on Jan. 6.

Be they illegal voters, criminal aliens, or just good old vandals, rapists and murderers—the criminal class is now the armed wing of the Democratic Party.

Principled, conservative libertarians will thus distinguish pro-Trump patriots from the armed wing of the Democratic Party: Black Lives Matter, Antifa and other criminal riffraff.

This Democratic militia romped through America, in the summer of 2020, rioting, looting and leveling their countrymen’s businesses, causing billions in damages.

Like locusts, these Democrat cultural revolutionaries descended on their neighbors to menace them in places where the latter shop and socialize, sadistically threatening, and often physically harming innocents, unless they knelt like slaves.

In contrast, the ragtag renegades of the MAGA movement stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State. Once!

Yet, in reply to the fact that “entire cities were burned to the ground” by BLM troops (the Democratic Party’s militia), some of the staunchest of conservatives have echoed Kinzinger. “Storming the Capitol building,” many have asserted, unthinkingly, is much worse than “burning down strip malls.”

Wrong!

Like us or not, the radical property-rights libertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway—will strongly disagree with the Trump-blaming conservatives.

A certain kind of libertarian, the good kind, distinguishes clearly between those who, like BLM, would trash, loot and level private property—the livelihoods and businesses of private citizens—and between those who would storm the well-padded seats of state power and corruption.

Libertarians who live by the axiom of nonaggression will always prefer the man who proceeds against the State, to the man who destroys private property.

That is because the State is governed by aggression; whereas the institution of private property is largely rooted in peaceful, voluntary transactions between consenting participants.

It’s no secret that rock-ribbed libertarians—as opposed to the lite, fluffy establishment libertarian—view the State, certainly in its current iteration, as a criminal enterprise.

Coupled with the use of COVID-19 as a political cudgel to reflexively fatten State stooges and increase their sphere of influence—the sight of tens of thousands of criminal aliens streaming across the Southern border, by State invitation, funded by the forsaken American taxpayer, must surely cement the status of the United States government as a treacherous entity, having forsaken the legitimate defense of the lives, liberty and property of its citizens.

And, if tempted to argue the theoretical point that the State operates without the consent of the governed, think only of the meaning of the 2020 election:

Upwards of 81 million people, or 51.3 percent of those who voted, not of the people, get to impose their will on more than 74 million, or 46.8 percent of the voters, as well as on the millions who didn’t vote.

Moreover, the winner in an election is certainly not the fictitious entity referred to as “The People,” but rather the representatives of the majority. And while it seems obvious that the minority in a democracy is openly thwarted, the question is, do the elected representatives at least carry out the will of the majority?

No is the answer! In reality, the majority, too, has little say in the business of governance – they’ve merely elected politicians who have been awarded carte blanche to do as they please.

Carte blanche because we are no longer a republic in which central authorities have only limited and clearly delimited powers. Certainly, all the people in the commonwealth are compelled to do as the Permanent State and the new, incoming state dictate.

No! Government governs without the consent of the governed, for the most, and with the backing of often-brutal police powers.

Like Kinzinger, one never Trumpkin conservative at the Spectator whined that he couldn’t tell the difference between the Red Hats and Antifa, decrying that, “They [the Red Hats] were desecrating something they pretend to love.”

The non-statist libertarian has no problem telling the difference.

To us, those “citadels of democracy” mean very little that is good. Loss of life we lament—but the song-and-dance about the Jan. 6 trampling of the Capitol Building we consider overheated.

Our country is not to be equated with the Capitol.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, July 29
Townhall.com, July 30
Unz Review, July 29
The New American, July 30
Quarterly Review, July 30

Listen to Podcast of “Menstrual America Vs. MAGA America”:
https://HardTruthWithDavidVanceAndilanaMercer.podbean.com/e/January-6-committee-menstrual-america-vs-maga-america/

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Following the show of incompetence at the Democratic Iowa caucus, columns on competence proliferated. One stood out for its ineptness: “Make America Competent Again” by David French at the Dispatch.

Mr. French is an attorney and decorated Iraq War veteran, who was prominent among National Review’s “Against Trump” writers.

Back in June of 2016, when the anti-Trump cabal was engaged in a political blood sport as degrading as dwarf tossing—Mr. French came into focus as the object of neoconservative Bill Kristol’s fantasies.

To wit, never Trumpsters like Kristol imagined that from the ashes of the Republican primaries would rise a man to stand for president against the victor, Donald J. Trump. This Sisyphean task had been attempted and failed by 17 other worthies.

One of the political dwarfs tossed at Donald Trump by the aforementioned Mr. Kristol was Mr. French, who is vested in an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy, and is a tool of democratic internationalism.

The first sign of incompetence in “Make America Competent Again” is that the column is hopelessly littered with the Imperial “I”:

“I THOUGHT—after federal officials let Jeffrey Epstein kill himself in prison—that I COULD no longer be shocked by incompetence. Yet, HERE I AM, the day after the Iowa caucuses, shocked again.   … If you follow MY WRITING at all, you know that I THINK that …  As I TYPE this newsletter …”  On and on.

This amounts to a big fat epistolary selfie.

Entitled “The French Press,” French’s blog would be better called “I, David.” The reference is to I, Claudius (1934), an historical novel about the Roman Emperor Claudius. Written “in the form of an autobiography,” I, Claudius was turned into an award-winning television series.” (Which this writer watched as a child growing up in … Israel. That’s what once passed for kiddie entertainment!)

In any event, the use of the first-person pronoun in opinion writing is a cardinal sin. To get a sense of just how bad someone’s writing is, count the number of times he defers to himself solipsistically on the page. The late, sphinxly Charles Krauthammer, who wrote a tight column, considered a single “I” in a piece to be a failure.

The Imperial “I” is fine when you’re a Roman emperor, or when the writer has earned the right to rhetorical self-absorption, due to his relevance to the story. That excuse does not obtain in the case of the French puffery.

The promiscuous use of the first-person should be considered as bad as the ghastly catchphrase, “I feel like,” which prefaces every sentence spoken by a millennial.

Mr. French is doubly diminished when he declares:

“If you follow MY WRITING at all, you know that I THINK that policy is far less consequential to American life than culture.”

Oh, the sins we commit when we omit. Naturally enough, strong, competent writers credit those who inspire them; they don’t crib from them.

Mr. French, on the other hand, appears to take a bow for a philosophical bent that belongs to classical conservatism: “The culture is upstream from politics.” Or, as Russell Kirk, the father of American conservatism, put it, “At heart, all political problems are moral and religious problems.”

Relinquish the ego. Quit letting your reptilian brain lead you, and allow, in a sentence or two, that the stuff “I THINK” in “MY WRITING,” to parrot Mr. French, belongs to a proud conservative tradition.

That tradition might need revision. For the world, political and cultural, has changed, metaphysically.

Although a man of the left, Canadian columnist Rick Salutin had, without doubt, advanced astute observations about the relationship between culture and politics. Because they comport with the metaphysical changes alluded to, Salutin’s observations are the better ones.

Back in 1998, Salutin offered up a prescient, if distressing, view of politics as culture, following “the capitulation of most sources of opposition to the neoconservative … agenda.”

Wrote Salutin: “In a culture of imagery and spectacle, politics has become mostly a show, entertainment.”

“[F]or the moment, politics in the democratic, electoral sense, is no longer about making choices [left or right] regarding social and economic direction.”

“What’s increasingly clear to voters is that they are not choosing the direction of their society—that has already been settled; they are voting for a cast of characters who will play the role of The Government on television and on [Capitol Hill] for the next [couple of] years.The scrip is set, but you get to decide who plays the parts on TV.”

If Deep State durability has proven anything, it is that not even a fire-breathing political dragon like our president can fumigate the snake pit that is the Permanent State.

Neoconservatives like David French and the attendant ideology they promote—foreign-policy bellicosity, endless immigration, mindless consumerism, racial shaming and “cancelling” of deviationists, conformity to an American identity that’s been melted away in vats of multiculturalism—these are in our country’s bone marrow, by now.

That’s politics qua culture

**
See Part 2: “No Pardon for Neocon War Crimes”

©2020 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
WND.COM
February 13

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It takes no time at all. You listen to Bob Woodward’s halting speech. You read his lumpen prose, and you get right away what undergirds his Trump-phobic tome, “Fear: Trump in the White House.”

Naively, the president had expected to fulfill his revolutionary campaign promises to the American voters, an assumption that threw Woodward and the D.C. elites for a loop.

If past is prologue, voters don’t—and should not—get their way. After all, the views of Trump voters on American power are polar opposites of those held by the permanent state.

What does “Boobus Americanus” know? Nothing!

Woodward and the New York Times’ anonymous anti-Trump whistleblower consider the president to be stark raving bonkers for not grasping that Rome on the Potomac moves to its own beat. It does not respond to voters, except to mollify them with “bread and circuses.”

Mostly reflexively, not always consciously, The Powers That Be seek to retain and enlarge their sphere of influence. Nothing, not even the venerated vote, is allowed to alter that “balance.”

This means that established fiefdoms and the “thinking” underlying them are to remain unchanged and unchallenged. Foreign affairs, war-making, the post-war economic order and globally guided crony capitalism are examples.

Against this command-and-control apparatus, 60 million Americans rebelled. They liked Trump’s America First ideas enough to elect their champion as president.

The president promised to upend “the post-1945 rules-based international order,” and Deplorables applauded him for it.

Had Woodward and his publisher missed the 2016 Trump Revolution?

Apparently so.

Incredulous, Woodward grumbled at one Fox News host (she shares his “concerns”): “People need to wake up to what’s happening under Trump.”

Again, Woodward is hardly original in his endeavor. In the tradition of the Never Trump Resistance, within and without the administration, he and those for whom he speaks have resolved to thwart and discredit the political plank on which Trump ran.

The washed-out journalist then blurted out this in disbelief: “Trump said the ‘World Trade Organization is the worst organization in the world.’”

Hyperbole? Maybe. The FBI under James Comey, Andrew McCabe and now Christopher Wray are easily worse than the WTO.

Like the New York Times’ anonymous, op-ed writer, purportedly a member of the Trump administration, Woodward is exposing the Trump White House for nothing more than its attempts to fulfill voter demands.

Withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement was one such goal. 

These senile subversives would like you to believe the president is insane for expecting to move on promises made to American voters. If not to withdraw from international agreements that have compromised ordinary Americans, at least to rework them so they don’t further pauperize our workers.

Who can argue that successive U.S. administrations had ceded the sovereignty of citizens to various supranational systems through international treaty making?

That Deplorables wished to reclaim their sovereignty is nevertheless news to seasoned newsman Bob Woodward.

The Woodwards of the D.C. Swamp want multilateral trade agreements maintained. The smart set call it “sovereign multilateralism,” which is Orwellian for a loss of citizen sovereignty through undemocratic, international treaties.

American workers don’t want their interests lost in this maze of multilateralism. 

Thank goodness, gasps Woodward, that the globalist grandees with whom he stands so courageously, and who surround the president (likely directed by his ambitious daughter and the “Kushner-Cohn Democrats”), saved the day:

“[D]rafts of a proposal to get out of the Paris climate accord … were removed from the president’s desk,” Woodward says. “[There were] draft statements about withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement—which would have been a disaster—and [former economic adviser Gary] Cohn just took it off the desk.”

To repeat, this was promised on the campaign trail and in Trump position papers. We now know who stole those promises from the American people.

In fact, until Woodward’s revelation, I was under the impression that, in June of 2017, President Trump had extricated the U.S. from the Paris Accord!

The thing was nothing but a wealth grab from the constituents Trump vowed to protect, with no benefits to the environment, which we all cherish. Besides, the U.S. has strong in-house environmental protections, including emission controls.

Thanks to Woodward, we now know that the ditching of the Paris Accord never happened.

The outrage animating Woodward—he insinuates that he’s driven by truth, not politics—is shared by the New York Times’ anonymous op-ed scribe aforementioned.

This yellow-bellied purveyor of yellow journalism claims to be a “senior official in the Trump administration,” who “vowed to thwart parts of [the Trump voters’] agenda and temper the president’s “worst inclinations.” (All the good things listed above.)

We thank you, oh overlord who art in D.C.

In his piece of pomposity, this anti-Trump White House employee invoked scripted Republican policy for his screed, while congratulating himself for being a “first principles” guy or gal (or amalgam).

He, too, has cast as dangerous the Trump positions millions of American voters considered wise. To wit, diplomacy with “President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un” and a cessation of America’s hobby wars.

We Deplorables disagree with the New York Times’ unelected, “lodestar” for all things honorable and conservative.

Never Trumpers and Trump haters are on a quest to scuttle an agenda seconded by millions of American voters. To them, the positions emanating from the Trump White House are a crisis of crazy.

To these saboteurs of the president, “crazy” is, very plainly, keeping campaign promises.

©2018 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
Townhall.com, Constitution.com, American Greatness
Reckonin‘
September 13

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©2018 By ILANA MERCER

Peter Strzok, the disgraced and disgraceful Federal Bureau of Investigation official, is the very definition of a slimy swamp creature. Strzok twitched, grimaced and ranted his way to infamy during a joint hearing of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, on July 12.

In no way had he failed to discharge his professional unbiased obligation to the public, asserted Strzok. He had merely expressed the hope that “the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating such horrible, disgusting behavior.”

But we did not elect YOU, Mr. Strzok. We elected Mr. Trump.

Strzok is the youthful face of the venerated “Intelligence Community,” itself part of the sprawling political machine that makes up the D.C. comitatus, now writhing like a fire breathing mythical monster against President Donald Trump.

Smug, self-satisfied, cheating creature that he is, Strzok can’t take responsibility for his own misconduct, and blames … Russia for dividing America. In the largely progressive bureau, moreover, Agent Strzok is neither underling nor outlier, for that matter.

He’s an overlord, having risen “to become the Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, the second-highest position in that division.”

As Ann Coulter observed, the FBI is not the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover.

Neither is the Intelligence Community Philip Haney’s IC any longer.

Haney was a heroic, soft-spoken, demure employee at the Department of Homeland Security. Agents like him are often fired if they don’t get with the program. He didn’t.

Haney’s method and the authentic intelligence he mined and developed might have stopped the likes of the San Bernardino mass murderers and many others. Instead, his higher-ups in the “Intelligence Community” made Haney and his data disappear.

Post Haney, the FBI failed to adequately screen and stop Syed Farook and blushing bride Tashfeen Malik.

A “blind bootlicking faith in spooks” is certainly unwarranted and may even be foolish.

What of odious individuals like former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and his predecessor, James Comey, now openly campaigning for the Democrats? Are these leaders outliers in the “Intelligence Community”?

As Peter Strzok might say to his paramour in a private tweet, “Who ya gonna believe, the Intelligence Community or your own lying eyes?” The Bureau in particular and the IC cabal, in general, appear to be dominated by the likes of the dull-witted Mr. Strzok.

Similarly, it’s hard to think of a more partisan operator than John O. Brennan—he ran the CIA under President Obama. True to type, he cast a vote for Communist Party USA, back in 1976, when the current Russia monomania would have been justified. Brennan has dubbed President Trump a traitor for having dared to doubt people like himself.

The very embodiment of the Surveillance State at its worst is Michael V. Hayden. Hayden has moved seamlessly from the National Security Agency and the CIA to CNN where he beats up on Trump.

The former Bush employee hollered treason:

“One of the most disgraceful performances of an American president in front of a Russian leader,” Hayden inveighed. Not only had POTUS dared to explore the possibility of a truce with Russia, which is a formidable nuclear power; but the president had the temerity to express a smidgen of skepticism about a community littered with spooks like … Mr. Hayden.

As one wag noted, not unreasonably, ours is “a highly-politicized intelligence community, infiltrated over decades by cadres of Deep State operatives and sleeper agents, whose goal is to bring down this presidency.”

The latest pillorying heaped upon the president by the permanent establishment has it that, “Trump chose to stand with Vladimir Putin, instead of the American People.” Trump, to be precise, had the temerity to “openly question his own intelligence agencies’ firm finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S.”

Pray tell, since when does the Deep State—FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, DNI, (Director of National Intelligence), on and on—represent, or stand for, the American People? The president, conversely, actually got the support of at least 60 million Americans.

That’s a LOT of support.

Outside the Beltway, ordinary folks—Deplorables, if you will—have to sympathize with the president’s initial and honest appraisal of the Intelligence Community’s collective intelligence.

This is the community that has sent us into quite a few recreational, hobby wars.

And this is the community that regularly intercepts but fails to surveil and stop the likes of mass murderers Syed Farook and bride Tashfeen Malik. Or, Orlando nightclub killer Omar Mateen, whose father the Bureau saw fit to hire as an informant. The same “community” has invited the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Arab-American Institute to help shape FBI counterterrorism training.

The FBI might not be very intelligent at all.

About the quality of that intelligence, consider: On August 3, 2016, as the mad media were amping up their Russia monomania, a frenzied BuzzFeed—it calls itself a news org—reported that “the Russian foreign ministry had wired nearly $30,000 through a Kremlin-backed bank to its embassy in Washington, DC.”

Intercepted by American intelligence, the Russian wire stipulated that the funds were meant “to finance the election campaign of 2016.”

Was this not “meddling in our election” or what? Did we finally have irrefutable evidence of Kremlin culpability? The FBI certainly thought so.

“Worse still, this was only one of 60 transfers that were being scrutinized by the FBI,” wrote the Economist, in November of 2017. “Similar transfers were made to other countries.”

As it transpired, the money was wired from the Kremlin to embassies the world over. Its purpose? Russia was preparing to hold parliamentary elections in 2016 and had sent funds to Russian embassies “to organize the polling for expatriates.”

While it did update its Fake News factoids, Buzzfeed felt no compunction whatsoever to remove the erroneous item or publicly question their sources in the unimpeachable “Intelligence Community.”

Most news media are just not as inquisitive as … President Trump.

©2018 ILANA MERCER
Quarterly Review, The Unz Review, WND.com,
The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom,
Constitution.com
July 19

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Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s sin was lying to liars, not colluding with Russians.

When he spoke to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, following Donald Trump’s 2016 election, former National Security Advisor Flynn was discharging a perfectly legal and patriotic duty to the electorate.

In a fit of pique, then-President Barack Obama had expelled Russian diplomats from the United States. K. T. McFarland, Flynn’s deputy in the Trump transition team, worried that Obama’s expulsion of the diplomats was aimed at “boxing Trump in diplomatically,” making it impossible for the president to “improve relations with Russia,” a promise he ran on. For her perspicacity, McFarland has since been forced to lawyer-up in fear for her freedom.

To defuse President Obama’s spiteful maneuver, Flynn spoke to Ambassador Kislyak, the upshot of which was that Russia “retaliated” by … inviting US diplomats and their families to the Kremlin for a New Year’s bash.

A jolly good diplomatic success, wouldn’t you say?

Present at the Kislyak meeting was Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Kushner likely instructed Flynn to ask Russia to disrupt or delay one of the UN Security Council’s favorite pastimes: passing resolutions denouncing Israeli settlements. Kushner, however, is protected by Daddy and the first daughter, so getting anything on Jared will be like frisking a seal.

One clue as to the extent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s violations, here, is that Flynn had committed no crime. Laying the cornerstone for the president-elect’s promised foreign policy—diplomacy with Russia—is not illegal.

Perversely, however, lying to the US Federal Government’s KGB (the FBI), a liar in its own right, is illegal.

The US Government enjoys a territorial monopoly over justice. If you doubt this, pray tell to which higher judicial authority can Flynn appeal to have his state-designated “criminal” label reconsidered or rescinded? Where can he go to recover his standing?

Nowhere.

By legislative fiat, the government has turned this decent man and many like him into common criminals.

An easy way for the government to create criminality where there is none is to make it a crime to lie to its agents, in this case the FBI, which is Deep State Central. The object of creating bogus categories of crime, naturally, is to leverage power over adversaries; to scare them.

Likewise was Martha Stewart imprisoned—not for the offense of insider trading, but for lying to her inquisitors. During interrogation, the poor woman had been so intimidated, so scared of conviction—wouldn’t you?—that she fibbed. The lead federal prosecutor in her case was the now-notorious James B. Comey. (See “Insider Trading Or Information Socialism?”)

This kind of entrapment—the criminalization of the act of lying to the government, in Flynn’s case about a non-crime—is facilitated under the unconstitutional Section 1001 of Title 18, in the United States Code. It makes it an offense to make “a materially false” statement to a federal official—even when one is not under oath.

It’s perfectly fine, however, for said official to bait and bully a private citizen into fibbing. By such tactics, The State has created a category of crime from which a select few are exempt.

Is this equality under the law or inequality under the law?

Section 1001 neatly accommodates a plethora of due-process violations.

Yet another tool in the Deep State toolbox is to lean on family members in order to extract a confession. To get Flynn senior to confess, U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is purported to have threatened the junior Mike Flynn with a legal kneecapping.

Ultimately, The State has overwhelming power when compared to the limited resources and power of an accused. The power differential between The State and an accused means he or she, as the compromised party, will cop a plea.

The Flynn guilty plea bargain, if you will, is nothing more than a negotiated deal which subverts the very goal of justice: the search for truth.

In the process of hammering out an agreement that pacified a bloodthirsty prosecutor, Flynn’s punishment for doing nothing wrong has been reduced.  President Trump’s former national security adviser will still have to sell his home to defray the costs of a federal onslaught.

Is this the rule of law, or the law of rule? The question is a rhetorical one.

©2017 ILANA MERCER
Mises.org, The Unz Review, WND.com, The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom, The Liberty Conservative, Constitution.com, Storia.me
December 6

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We’ve arrived at the perennial point in the TV series “24,” in which the terrorist-fighting protagonist, Jack Bauer, is once again chained by his “colleagues,” and “escorted” to the Los Angeles Counter Terrorist Unit’s “holding cells.” These hermetic chambers are used mostly to confine and torture America’s enemies, which include some of CTU’s finest. Or agents who’ve been tortured by the enemy and must now be counter-tortured by CTU. Assets have to be utilized to the full.

The last to receive The Treatment was poor Audrey Raines, an “Inter-Agency Liaison” assigned to CTU, who’d fallen into the clutches of the Chinese. China is 24’s new bugaboo. Could it be that delving into the Muslim threat got too realistic for Hollywood? It so happens that the People’s Republic of China funds our government’s debt. It could easily damage our economy by dumping dollars. Yet it doesn’t. While America is becoming more militaristic; China is growing increasingly capitalistic. As America’s middle-class dwindles due to government’s wastrel ways, China’s middle class is 200-million strong and growing. The Chinese have money on their minds; murder, not so much.

In any event, for her loyal, long-suffering service to the US, Raines is abandoned—first to the diabolical devices of the Chinese, and then to CTU’s resident Mengele, who can’t wait to plunge his syringes into her collapsed veins. The buccaneering Bauer rushes to Raines’ rescue. For this, the government locks him up in one of those “holding cells”—the state uses, abuses, but never trusts Bauer.

Bauer himself is fresh from the Chinese dungeons, where he languished for two years. The American government had forsaken the CTU agent to the Chinese, but quickly sprung him when a new terrorist threat appeared on the horizon: Abu Fayed. Fayed had promised to stop unleashing suicide-bombers on American cities in exchange for Bauer, who killed his brother in better times.

Certain themes in the cult series never change. One is Bauer’s eternal willingness to be chewed and spat out by the successive governments he serves. As Bauer’s Chinese jailers hand him over to his American handlers, the latter chain him like a dog to a fence. But Bauer is accustomed to being manacled by his owners. The Top Dogs just don’t trust their lapdog, despite his devotion.

Or is Bauer’s a zombie’s obedience? As a reader put it, “Jack Bauer is the unstoppable, undead agent who has actually been killed and brought back to life, in service—and thrall—to the state. Instead of the ‘brains’ that ‘regular’ zombies devour, the Federal Zombie feeds on ‘intelligence.’” Jack’s response to his mistreatment is to mutter about his approaching meaningful end—the prospect of giving his life for the Greater Good. Some individualist.

Other abiding Hollywood themes: In real life, the typical Islamic organization—take the Council on American-Islamic Relations—is staffed by media-savvy mouthpieces for militant Islam. “24,” however, has created a chimerical CAIR full of American patriots. One of the central heroes—was it Karen Hayes?—even laments that we are alienating the very community upon which we depend to fight terrorism. On the other hand, suburban Americans are depicted as rabid Islamophobes, wont to turn on their Muslim neighbors at the drop of a hat. In one vignette two such mouth breathers break down the front door of a Muslim family’s home and beat the son up.

Reading from a script Jimmy Carter would have approved, Jack becomes attached to Hamri Al-Assad, a reformed terrorist wanting to “enter the political process.” Jack wrangles immunity and a pardon from the president for his pet terrorist. Curtis Manning, director of Fields Operations and a former Green Beret, opposes the pardon for good reasons. During Operation Desert Storm, Assad had captured and personally beheaded two of Curtis’ men. Curtis decides that son of sixty dogs needs killing. Jack goes into Zombie mode, and kills his pal Curtis Manning to save Assad.

Many of the villains in “24” are American businessmen—terrorist plots invariably lead to American business. Jack comes close to killing his businessman brother, who apparently richly deserved it: Graem “Gray” Bauer sold nerve gas to terrorists and was instrumental in the murder of President David Palmer. When Jack fails to finish him off, Father Bauer steps in to do the deed, for reasons less “noble.”

Fraternizing with terrorists, fratricide, and filicide—these are all in a day’s work for your average, dysfunctional, American family, at least as Hollywood sees it.

  ©2007 By Ilana Mercer

  WorldNetDaily.com

  May 11

* Image credit

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