When autoeroticism with an infant is sanctioned by a society of deviants

Many are the strictures placed on what can be said and what can’t be said in matters sexual. The anatomy of breastfeeding, naturally, is no longer discussed, for a little digging – a wee-bit of knowledge – would reveal that only biological females can breastfeed successfully, by which I mean, sustain the infant so that it grows and develops on a diet of breast milk. Having breastfed my own daughter successfully until she voluntarily rejected that dependence (at 9 months), I know.

What I remember of the breastfeeding experience is a mother-baby cocoon, with baby occasionally taking a break to smile, play with mom’s hair, burp. While breastfeeding is a much better formula for mother-child bonding than baby formula—gender-appropriators forget that baby nurses to survive, sate hunger and grow.

Thus, a member of the sexually exotic community who claims to no longer be woman cannot sustain an infant through breastfeeding because “he” doesn’t produce breast milk, having had the mammary glands removed. What then is the purpose of such showy displays of “chest-feeding”?

If it is not for the purpose of sustenance, then unsuccessful breastfeeding by a transgendered individual becomes merely an experience, even a production, in furtherance of that individual’s ego-bound gender- and sexual fulfillment.

And worse: I suggest that, in breastfeeding, sexually exotic individuals are often engaged in indecent exposure or some form of sexually charged exhibitionism, if in public.

In my day, we breastfed in private and were modest about it. No one feels comfortable around a woman – much less a “man” – who insists that her mammary glands are not sexual object, foisting them on bashful company.

Is this man-woman, then, engaged in the “natural” act of breastfeeding, or is this something far more sinister like a sexual experience with an infant? Is this not tantamount to titillating oneself, using the baby to get-off?

Since the individual described in the article and discussed in my July 2022 podcast, “Bearded Men Breast Feeding In Public: Paternal Or Kinky?”, is not sustaining the infant – I suggest he is not a successful breast-feeder, as the well is dry.

And given that, by self-admission, the person’s main project is his/her gender identity, I venture that this character is deriving unacknowledged sexual pleasure from fixing a child on to his secondary sexual organs.

The baby here is a prop. The breast feeding is near-sexual. And a society of deviants is sanctioning such autoeroticism, or self-pleasure, with an infant — an infant who has no agency.

WATCH “Hard Truth,” “Bearded Men Breast Feeding In Public: Paternal Or Kinky?”

©2023 ILANA MERCER
WND, July 21

*Image as a screen picture, via Guardian

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The topic was “the end of the all-male, all-white cockpit.”

The context: A June 3, 2022 TV episode, in which Fox News personality Tucker Carlson beseeched viewers to look beyond the race and gender of pilots, to his or her competence. “What’s color to do with competence?” he demanded to know.

Mr. Carlson was appealing to the wrong audience.

In America, where woke is ruthlessly propelled by the private-sector, the commercial aviation industry has been itching to replace humble men like Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, III, with black women (the looks of whom indicate that a good weave, tattooed eyebrows and eyelash extensions are baseline requirements).

Using their employees’ opposition to forced vaccination as a proxy for backbone, moxie and rational thinking—the commercial aviation industry is increasingly shedding very many magnificent, military-trained pilots.

Just so there’s no confusion: Pilots with the right stuff are being selected out of their profession.
Granted, correlation is not causation, but if there is a statistically significant correlation between gender or race and the likelihood one survives a plane flight—well then, one might just want to consider these variables as proxies for safety and survival, however politically impolite it is.

Tucker might want to check the aggregate accident statistics to determine who are the best, safest pilots. By ScienceDirect’s telling, “… females employed by major airlines had significantly higher accident rates than their male counterparts overall.” [Emphasis added.]

To be expected, ScienceDirect then launches a fusillade of excuse-making weasel words to conceal with bafflegab that if you fly with a female, you’re a little less likely to reach your destination. It’s a ghost of a chance, but hey, life matters. Do you want to lose it?

Yes, female pilots have a higher error/accident rate, but never mind that say the Fake Science purveyors; this is only so because they are younger and less experienced. Airlines should make every effort to recruit and retain “experienced” females and manage diversity, they exhort.

Essentially—and while plummeting to his death—the passenger should search his bigoted soul. In addition to letting go of your life; you must release all bigotry. Those thoughts about how race and sex could well correlate with flight safety, and how you wish you had checked the pilot before you took the fatal flight: Let them go. Oh, and by the way, RIP, you sexist, you racist.

The desired outcome is that you fly with a less able pilot, ceteris paribus. This is astonishing, really, for impartial, scientific inquiry is meant to concern itself with facts, yet the authors of “Comparing pilot-error accident rates of male and female airline pilots” conflate and collapse what ought to be two separate categories: The reality of sex-based differences in pilot competence, and the confounding variables (age and experience) on the one hand, and how one might feel about these differences, on the other.

Or, as a rational reader put it:

The article “states in the beginning that females had a higher accident rate, then it states they are about the same as males. So, which is it???”

Pretty much.

I wonder. Does anyone grasp the difference between a veteran of the Air Force versus a “pilot” trained at an affirmative-action, feel-good girlie flight school? It’s life and death.

Remember Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger’s famed “Unable; we’ll be in the Hudson”? His was the very embodiment of “manliness (not a miracle) on the Hudson.” Nothing but cool hands and a mind to match at the controls.

Capt. Sullenberger’s airbus, carrying 155 passengers, had lost the thrust in both engines following a “double bird strike.”

Having been informed of the emergency, Ground Control radioed the captain: “Which runway would you like at Teterboro?”

Capt. Sullenberger to Ground Control: “Unable; we’re going to be in the Hudson.”

Those were the laconic, spare words of the iconic “Sully,” as he calmly prepared to crash land Cactus 1549 in the Hudson River.

With no engine power, flying at a low speed, at low altitude, “over one of the most densely populated areas on the planet,” Captain Sullenberger managed to glide the jet, using its “forward momentum to provide the air flow over the wings,” so as to enable “sufficient lift.”
The river was the only “viable” surface on which to land with a chance of survival. That, Sullenberger had determined after “two and a half minutes into the flight—and just one minute after the birds had hit.”

Who do you want in the cockpit during such an event? Sullenberger, a high- intelligence retired Air Force fighter pilot? Or dreamy Ms. Zakiya Percy and Ms. Cetrena Simmons, to be introduced shortly.

Avoid flying United Airlines, which has started its own flight school, The Aviate Academy. At “least half of the new pilots will be women or people of color. Of the 121 students enrolled so far, about 78 percent are women or nonwhite.”

Republic Airways, likewise, stacks its flight school with pigmentally pleasing faces, who pay to pilot. “Two years and about $100,000” in tuition fees is what qualifies a pilot, protests Zakiya Percy, who is a pilot for UA, and also a psychology major.

By contrast, consider one of the pilots this writer has had the pleasure of “meeting” through this column:

Retired from the military some years back as a naval officer and pilot, my acquaintance had gone to test pilot school in 2005 and spent 9 of a storied 20-year career in the Navy, flight-testing the FA-18 aircraft. He did 4 total overseas deployments, twice in Iraq and twice in Afghanistan. He flew the EA-6B jet aircraft during 3 of these 4 deployments logging 397 carrier landings. His first deployment was in 2002 and last in 2013. The man has a BS in mechanical engineering and a masters in Systems Engineering and was a test pilot for Boeing.

Stack this pilot’s bewildering accomplishments and intelligence—the aircraft is an extension of his body and mind—against Ms. Percy’s, bless her, who is a graduate of a 2-year course run by a corrupt industry, has a degree in psychology and the perfect complexion. Or, against Ms. Cetrena Simmons, 29, who started her pilot training at Republic Airways’ flight school in 2018, and is now piloting planes for the airline.

As Idiocracy’s iconic Dr. Lexus (IQ around 60) would say, “Kickass.”

He’d add reassuringly: “My first wife was ‘tarded; she’s a pilot now. There are plenty tards out there living really kickass lives.”

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, October 20
Unz Review, October 20
The New American, October 21
American Renaissance, October 21
Townhall.com, October 22

*Screen pic credit

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Nothing completes a man and makes a man as a woman ~ ilana

The male hormonal horror show, as told on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” is almost 2 decades old. It unfolded to very little fanfare in 2006. As this writer first divulged in her column “Manly No More,” the data came courtesy of Dr. Thomas Travison and colleagues at the New England Research Institutes in Watertown, Massachusetts.

American men are indeed losing the stuff that makes them macho.

Wrote Reuters in 2007:

“A new study has found a ‘substantial’ drop in U.S. men’s testosterone levels since the 1980s.” The average levels of the male hormone have been dropping by an astounding 1 percent a year. A 65-year-old in 1987 would have had testosterone levels 15 percent higher than those of a 65-year-old in 2002.

Although the New York Times’ science and medicine reporter now mocks these findings—she likely does so because masculinity has, in the intervening years, been declared toxic and because Tucker refuses to let men be defanged.

The reasons for the reduction in testosterone levels remain unclear. A rise in obesity and a decline in smoking have been suggested, since “testosterone levels are lower among overweight people and smoking increases testosterone levels.”

More reliably, other researchers have implicated estrogen-mimicking chemicals, which leach into the environment from plastics (BPA). I had covered the pioneering work of Dr. Devra Davis on these xenoestrogens in my Canadian column, in 1999. On this front—the pox of plastics—men and women can expect nothing from Republican representatives, who still consider it a conservative creed to fill-the-oceans-with-plastics, kill-everything-that-moves-for-profit, and call on the Third World to be fruitful and multiply, so as to perpetuate this cycle of pillage and pollution.

Conspicuously absent from these reports are the effects on serum testosterone of changes in life experiences over time. These trends are, however, routinely tracked when discussing incidence of this or the other disease or deficiency in distaff America.

Thus, breast cancer is said to be associated with the modern woman’s propensity to delay or forfeit childbearing. Osteoporosis is exacerbated by women’s sedentary routines—they do less weight-bearing work than they used to. And so on.

FEMINIZATION

It is very possible, even likely, that the feminization of society over the past 20 to 30 years is changing males, body and mind. It is very possible that the subliminal stress involved in sublimating one’s essential nature is producing less manly men.

Consider: When they are not twerking tush with transexuals, today’s tykes are required to hack their way through page-turners like One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads. Boyhood today also means BB guns and “bang-bang you’re dead” are banned.

Boys are hardwired for competition; the contemporary school enforces cooperation. Boys like to stand out. But team-work obsessed, mediocre, mostly female school teachers teach them to fade into the background. Boys thrive in more disciplined, structured learning environments; the American school system is synonymous with letting it all hang out.

Sons are more likely to be raised without male mentors, since moms, in the last few decades, are more inclined to divorce (and get custody), never marry, or bear children out of wedlock. The schools have been emptied of manly men and staffed by feminists, mostly lacking in the Y chromosome. Although boys (and girls) require discipline, the rare disciplinarian risks parent-driven litigation.

DEMONIZATION

Boys leave secondary school suffused with a sense of their gender as a repository for society’s ills. As if that’s not bad enough, they soon discover that society privileges girls in tertiary schools and in the workplace. Why, even girls favor girls. Most young women swoon over washed-out, asexual celebrities—cherubic-looking, soft-spoken, “girlie-men,” are replacing deep-voiced, macho men as hot favorites.

Women say they look for partners who are “sweet and sensitive.” If they’re having children with androgynous men who grow bum-fluff for stubble, then perhaps they’re breeding out testosterone.

The smashing success of politically incorrect books such as The Dangerous Book for Boys proves how desperate little boys are to be boys again—the book reintroduced a new generation of youngsters to the joys of catapult-making, knot-tying, stone skimming, astronomy, and such “toxic masculinity”. (Concocting rocket fuel from saltpeter and sugar is not in the book, but is a lot of fun—or so my husband tells me.)

The thought I had offered in 2006 was this:

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is a delicate homeostatic feedback system, intricately involved in regulating hormones and stress in men and women. Has it become the axis of evil in the war on men?

A MAN AND A WOMAN

In 2022, I venture these afterthoughts:

There is a documented “sex recession” among American younger men. The biggest reason for young men shunning intimacy is that they “dread a MeToo-style harassment charge.”

In other words, in an atmosphere of sexual moral panic intimacy is becoming less achievable.

Alas, the imagery Mr. Carlson presents in his highly stylized documentary on testosterone is replete with “oiled, shirtless men performing vaguely masculine tasks, like turning over giant tires and throwing a javelin.”

I worry that Tucker Carlson might be encouraging the male equivalent of the solipsistic, me-me narcissism typifying the MeToo movement.

I worry that our host has been hanging out with too many meatheads.

Not so long ago, Tucker anointed one Andrew Tate as a go-too “manly” philosopher king, by bestowing him with the honor of a “Tucker Carlson Today” interview.

The vision of manhood Andrew Tate offers disenfranchised young men he himself encapsulated thus: get rich, workout, have fast cars and fabulous females.

This skin-deep take on the Optimal Man is something every hip-hopster and rapper beat Mr. Tate to.

Men, young and old, could learn more about being admirable men from strong, principled women than from a rubbishy, social-media type “male,” whose goals are fast cars and fast women. I like and drive the poor-man’s fast car (six-speed manual transmission, turbocharged engine, 18-inch alloy wheels); but no quality woman wants a fast or fickle man.

At its most elevated, manliness, as I see it, is about the values of kindness, protectiveness—not gratuitous cruelty—honor, trust, and …, I’ll say it: sexual, monogamous love.

Love is the ultimate man maker.

True—physical and mental endurance certainly go to the core of manliness.

Indubitably, disciplined men and women can keep their bodies toned and faces fine well into old age. But testosterone in all its multifaceted manifestations is best preserved through passionate, monogamous love between a man and a woman.

Nothing completes a man and makes a man as a woman.

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, October 6
Unz Review, October 6
The New American, October 7
Townhall.com, October 8
American Greatness, October 11

*Image from “A Man and a Woman,” 1966 classic by Claude Lelouch

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Bearded trans men chest-feeding: paternal or sexual?

Many are the strictures placed on what can be said and what can’t be said in matters sexual. The anatomy of breastfeeding, naturally, is no longer discussed, for a little digging – a wee-bit of knowledge – would reveal that only biological females can breastfeed successfully, by which I mean, sustain the infant so that it grows and develops on a diet of breast milk. Having breastfed my own daughter successfully until she rejected me (at 9 months), I know.

In any event, a member of the sexually exotic community who claims no longer to be woman cannot sustain an infant through breastfeeding because “he” doesn’t produce breast milk, having had the mammary glands removed. What then is the purpose of such showy displays of “chest-feeding”?

If it is not for the purpose of sustenance, then unsuccessful breastfeeding by a transgendered individual becomes merely an experience, even a production, in furtherance of that individual’s ego-bound gender- and sexual fulfillment.

And worse: I suggest that, in breastfeeding, sexually exotic individuals are often engaged in indecent exposure or some form of sexually charged exhibitionism, if in public. In my day, we breastfed in private and were modest about it. No one feels comfortable around a woman – much less a “man” – who insists that his or her mammary glands are not sexual object too, foisting them on bashful company.

Is this man-woman, then, engaged in the “natural” act of breastfeeding, or is this something far more sinister like a sexual experience? Is this not tantamount to titillating oneself, using the baby to get-off?

Since the deviant described in the article and discussed in the podcast “Bearded Men Breast Feeding In Public: Paternal Or Kinky?” is not sustaining the infant – is not a successful breast-feeder, as the well is dry – and since, by self-admission, the person’s main project is his/her gender identity, I suggest this character is deriving unacknowledged sexual pleasure from fixing a child on to his secondary sexual organs.

The baby here is a prop. The breast feeding is near-sexual. And a society of deviants is sanctioning onanism with an infant: A grown man here is likely using an infant to pleasure himself. An infant has no agency, hence onanism.

A reader at the Unz Review asserted that women, too, get aroused during legitimate breastfeeding. Ridiculous. And, if so, disgusting distaff! Put a lid on it. Curb yourself, will you?

What I remember of the breastfeeding experience is a mother-baby cocoon, with baby occasionally taking a break (these gender-appropriators forget that a baby nurses to survive, sate hunger, grow) to smile, play with my hair, burp. This is a much better formula for mother-child bonding than baby formula.

Wrote another: “That is one of the sweetest descriptions of the mother and child bonding experience I’ve ever read. Nothing prurient at all. Just love. The hair part got me.”

WATCH “Hard Truth,” “Bearded Men Breast Feeding In Public: Paternal Or Kinky?”

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©2022 ILANA MERCER
Unz Review, July 7
The New American, July 10

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That the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) finally delivered a decision returning and restoring power to the states on this one issue, abortion, is as it should be. If her state outlaws abortion; a woman can still board a Greyhound bus to get the procedure elsewhere.

The ethical elegance of the libertarian argument was voiced before in this space:

However much one disdains abortion, one can’t get away from the matter of self-ownership. You simply have no right to take custody of an adult’s body. An adult woman, however loathsome, either owns herself and everything inside her or doesn’t. You can’t “own” yourself with the exception of your uterus or in conjunction with other busybodies.

Thus, theoretically, “Women have the right to screw and scrape out their insides to their heart’s content.” With a proviso: Americans who oppose abortion must be similarly respected in their rights of self-ownership. Taxpayers who oppose the procedure ought to have an equal right to dispense of what is theirs—their property—in accordance with the dictates of their conscience.

Trojans, Trivora or termination: An American woman has the right to purchase contraception, abortifacients and abortions, provided … she pays for them. For like herself, America is packed with many other sovereign individuals, some of whom do not approve of these products and procedures.

So, while adult women ought to be able to terminate their pregnancies—always to the exclusion of late-term infanticide—what America’s manifestly silly sex does not have the right to do is to rope conscientious objectors into supplying them with or paying for their reproductive choices. The rights of self-ownership and freedom of conscience ought to apply on both sides of the abortion debate.

Late-term abortion, generally, must always be outlawed. (I realize, dear reader, that I owe you argument, not assertion, which, alas, is what I’ve provided.) One could argue that, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the deciding case brought before the SCOTUS, did concern late-term abortion, with the state of Mississippi banning abortion after 15 weeks, pursuant to which, “The Jackson clinic and one of its doctors sued Mississippi officials in federal court, saying the state’s law was unconstitutional. A federal district court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the clinic, blocking Mississippi’s law. But the state appealed to the Supreme Court, which put the case on its docket.”

The result has been real federalism—on this one vexing matter—although, individual taxpayers who conscientiously object to abortion will still be on the hook for these services should their state authorize them. Federalism does not respect individual choice. And, federalism has hardly been revived. Powers have never been more concentrated in the Federal Frankenstein, which has never been more intractable and tyrannical.

Have we not just lived through three years during which the Pharma State has consolidated power as never before? On pain of taking the Covid jab, the state has de facto established license to shutter a subject’s business, deny him freedom of movement, quarantine, fire, and separate him from loved ones. Arrests of political opponents without due process have become more common in police state America than in Apartheid-era South Africa (which, as chronicled in Into The Cannibal’s Pot, was surprisingly legalistic and by-the-book). On a serious country’s scale of priorities, abortion would not rate a mention.

Law, moreover, is force. Criminalizing abortion (in the midst of a true crime wave and a systemic breakdown of ordered liberty) implies the creation of a new category of criminal, to be punished for the commission of an abortion: the abortion-seeking woman and her D&C performing (dilation-and-curettage) health-care workers.

The piss-poor quality of the now-overturned Roe V. Wade jurisprudence has never been in question. Wrote a reader: “There were 50 state laws on abortion until the Republican-appointed Harry Blackmun decided to merge the musings of his Mayo Clinic physician buddies and the vaguely written 14th Amendment into a stream-of-consciousness halachic SCOTUS decision known as Roe v. Wade. Since then, 55% of black pregnancies get aborted compared to a third of Hispanics and 11% of white.”

These statistics are significant in the context of crime. John J. Donohue and Steven D. Levitt (2001) had established that “the legalization of abortion, in the early 1970s, played an important role in the crime drop of the 1990s. Ceteris paribus, “legalized abortion will account for persistent declines of 1% a year in crime over the next two decades.”

Reversal of the trend is inevitable.

Myself, I don’t have sticky fingers and have no desire to control women’s wombs. Let progressive women—especially the fulminating fiends twerking and tantruming across the country—suction their uteruses for all I care. As evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton has suggested, “Some people voluntarily resigning from the gene pool is a good thing.”

The consequences of a similar impetus against family planning in the undeveloped world have been described less daintily by Kevin Myers, former Irish Times columnist, banished from ossifying circles for telling the truth:

The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a low IQ, AK 47-bearing moron, siring children whenever the whim takes him, and blaming the world because he is uneducated, poor and left behind. … Somalia another fine land of violent, AK 47-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts, and housing pirates of the ocean. Indeed [in Africa], we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive, illiterate indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world …

Also conducting themselves like primates in estrus are American women in protest of Dobbs v. Jackson . They are showing themselves to be in-and-out ugly—gorgons howling at the gods for being undesirable. And conservatives want deranged distaff to be mamas?

Beware: Babies born to “spiteful mutants” will likely be a lot like their mothers, who are not in God’s image. A medal to the man who gets on top of such putrid flesh for his jollies.

WATCH “HARD TRUTH”: “Roe V. Wade Overturned: Should We Care If US Medusas Abort?”
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©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, June 30
The Unz Review, June 30

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What are our conservative “kids” thinking? I went in search of one such elusive creature and found Rob Shimshock, a DC-based editor. In May, he published his first book, “Nightmare Crescendo: Breaking the Chokehold of Woke Capital.” In the dialogue below, Rob patiently explains the idiom in which he expresses his ideas, political and social. Amazon understood enough Millennial Speak to censor his ad campaigns.

ILANA MERCER: “Blistering diatribe” is the correct way to describe your first book, Rob. For me, it is a much-needed glimpse into the mind of a young, thoughtful conservative, ruminating about the state of our country. Explain what is this cabal that “ensnares” us all?

ROB SHIMSHOCK: If I were a magician and you asked me this, my response would be the expected “pick a card, any card.” Academia, Hollywood, the media, Silicon Valley, the banks … no matter which modern institution you choose, the house wins. Except this house doesn’t accommodate a family; in fact, it is explicitly anti-family, anti-Western ideals, and anti-natural law. It is what I term the “Nightmare Crescendo,” or an amalgam of woke corporations and social decadence that’s as loud and merry as any rock concert. But the volume keeps rising, slowly but surely deafening us to a whole host of horrors.

MERCER: In an atomized, alienated America, you find yourself directing existential questions to a higher-order computer program, to the AI (Artificial Intelligence) called Alexa. What, to you, is the significance of that? You ask, “Alexa, how long before groceries are denied to right-wingers attempting to purchase them at stores using Amazon palm-scanning checkout? How long before such individuals are labeled terror threats?” Indeed. It’s fair to say that CNN and the newly imagined ACLU will be cheering Bezos. But what exactly is the GOP doing, and why vote GOP if it is not looking out for the rights of dissidents?

SHIMSHOCK: Ah, yes, my chapter “Just Asking Questions,” where the narrator begins by asking Alexa when his “My Little Pony” hoodie is arriving, but gradually arrives at more intriguing questions such as whether Jeff Bezos supports diversity because a “heat map” Amazon uses to track Whole Foods stores pinpoints lower racial diversity as a factor making a given store’s employees more likely to unionize. I’d say it’s a cynical swipe at the opportunism and malice fueling “men” like Bezos to replace human accountability with machines pushing narcissism and hedonism for profit.

As for the voting question: American electoral politics is a two-party game for the foreseeable future. But it’s important to remember that neither side is an unshifting monolith defined by a couple hundred Beltway suits. As we’ve seen with the hottest issue of the last couple months–critical race theory–the decisions that matter are being made on the level of state government, school boards, and local interest groups. D.C. can proclaim that all citizens must observe “Meatless Monday” starting next week, but if the states reply “get stuffed,” I really doubt a national military whose collective nose is buried in “How to Be an Antiracist” and social justice cartoons is going to do jack about it.

MERCER: As a longtime paleolibertarian, I’ve managed to straddle the divide between conservatism and traditional libertarian economics, but not without ostracization and derision from one side. I don’t love trade deficits (2010), outsourcing (2003), humdrum work visas (2008), and I loathe what I’ve dubbed corporate “economic elephantiasis and gigantism,” untethered to corporeal communities. You go further. You call all us libertarians “Trojan whores.” Take it away, Rob!

SHIMSHOCK: I think the “paleo” part absolves you of any of my puny pejoratives, Ilana. As for the others, flip the number “12,” change “BC” to “AD” and you’ll get two centuries during which flashy gargantuans have rolled into a city and conquered it from within. But while the Trojan horse ushered in Greek military and scholastic supremacy–a noble subversion, if you will–the prostitute and Koch-inflated “LOLbertarian” lobby are vehicles for disease. I mean this literally, as they each embrace the sexual liberation that results in chlamydia, along with lower birth and marriage rates and general destruction of the nuclear family, but also figuratively as, with the libertarian’s soft spot for sickness, it’s a buy one, get fifty free sale. Trojan whores come stuffed with a free-market idolatry spawning tyrannical Big Tech monopolies, open-border mayhem spurring crime and cultural dissonance, the displacement of the American blue-collar worker, etc.

Conservatives must act now if they wish to avoid a fate far worse than that of the Trojans.

MERCER: Moving to a more, shall we say, delicate part of your book, The data show that compared to young men, for whom it’s a “sex recession,” young women are hoing it up. From your experience with the dating app, I gather the problem is not only #MeToo, but “me, me, me” all the time. Is that right? What is it like for conservative young men out there?

SHIMSHOCK: On the Day of the Disconnect, when the Internet goes bye-bye and Big Tech CEOs are the subject of a tribunal that makes Nuremberg and the Salem witch trials seem small fry, online dating execs will have their feet held to the fire–perhaps literally!–for perpetrating one of the most heinous crimes against humanity: the commodification of romance.

Tinder, Bumble, and their co-conspirators have taken the pure and noble pursuit of finding a life partner and strangled its visage with edited and airbrushed “duckface” selfies, stabbed its vocal cords with vapid and robotic pick-up lines, and then rifled through the corpse to pluck out its heart — the thing capable of forging a long-term relationship — and replace it with a more monetizable libido that keeps users coming back for dopamine hits and one-night stands, at the small cost of their time, money, pair bonding ability, divorce rate, and immortal soul.

MERCER: What’s wrong with you, Rob? Why don’t you understand that you must “serenade her in front of her work colleagues,” cook for her, help pick her tattoo, and adopt her out-of-wedlock rug rats? For other maladjusted men like you, is it “swipe left” or “swipe right” on the mobile?

SHIMSHOCK: From what I’ve seen, it’s a hybrid approach: attend social functions but perhaps scroll through your options virtually while on the metro or in line. Ultimately, right-leaning men would do best to keep the first couple of dates apolitical and win women over with comedy, charisma, and compassion; then show them that someone possessing these traits can also hold certain views. Bear in mind that people are malleable and it is often just a matter of swapping out some of the John Oliver clips in their propaganda diet with cute and subversive memes.

MERCER: Hitting on another chapter in the lifestyle section of your book, what are the benefits to a guy of describing himself as a “high-capacity schizophrenic” in the woke workplace?

SHIMSHOCK: It’s all about earning respect, Ilana, by any means necessary. Purchasers of Nightmare Crescendo receive a syllabus for my course Structural Training and Foundational Understanding (STFU) 690, which describes how to get ahead in the workplace through use of body language, like jokingly threatening to throw medium-heavy objects, visual cues like punctured photos of loved ones, and, yes, confiding in colleagues about disorders they can’t be sure you don’t have because of patient privacy laws.

MERCER: LOL. Laughter is not a long-term strategy to the disillusion and societal dissolution you emote about, although it helps. What are you proposing?

SHIMSHOCK: I agree that it’s not enough to point and laugh at our problems. While conservatives often see Big Government as an impediment to freedom, Nightmare Crescendo envisions how this already-bloated bureaucracy may be redirected from exacerbating to easing social ills.

Like I said, state governments are useful on this front. But to get more creative, on the federal level, instead of sinking millions of dollars into left-wing university programs, the National Endowment for the Arts could pay artists who produce music with socially conservative messages. Establishing a Ministry of Culture is also an intriguing idea. There can be no doubt that China, which makes use of such a body, has a much more culturally homogeneous society than America. While the Chinese cannot bask in the glory of LGBT films like “Brokeback Mountain,” they also don’t have a media-academia-Hollywood-Big Tech apparatus that’s permitted to foment discord and incite riots. Is this a worthwhile tradeoff?

MERCER: Heaven’s Rob, you understand that if progressives get control of your Ministry of Culture, it becomes a ministry of twerking, with a transgender tush in the face of every three-year-old? That’s why conservatives and libertarians generally do not want the state in control. Address that criticism from statism, please.

SHIMSHOCK: Ideally, the Left would be blocked from gaining control of such a body. If this sounds anti-democratic, my question to you would be: To what extent has a public–whose perspective is so viciously warped by a one-sided media, academia, Hollywood, and Big Tech zeitgeist–been capable of functioning as a democracy? Is democracy vulnerable teens being bombarded nonstop with progressive platitudes by Lady Gaga et al.? Is democracy the ground of the new digital public square, opening up and swallowing conservatives with millions of followers whenever it feels like it? I don’t think so.

In closing, I’d say that if America still stands a chance, we need to strive for cultural cohesion. I hear a lot of “Diversity is our strength” these days, but it’s hush-hush when it comes to another maxim, “United we stand, divided we fall.” Dissidents, not the establishment, need to be the ones to determine that culture and, to that end, humor is an invaluable weapon in our arsenal.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, July 22
Unz Review, July 22
Quarterly Review, July 25

The post Conservative ‘Kids’: Not Dazed Or Confused, But Combative appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

“The matriarchy is merciless, and it has thoroughly feminized and twisted US law,” this writer wrote, in April of 2018, upon the sentencing and jailing of comedian Bill Cosby.

Cosby had been found “guilty” “of three counts of aggravated indecent assault, for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home in a Philadelphia suburb in 2004.”

CNN gloated at the prospects of the legendary 83-year-old comedian facing up to 10 years in prison. The network, under whose auspices are gathered some of the most malevolent and moronic activist broadcasters, in an already crooked media-industrial-complex—did not feature one dissenting legal opinion.

Actually, with few exceptions, talking heads, right and left, converged on Cosby. So, while decent logic and law came from Townhall.com’s Marina Medvin, the unthinking Kimberly Guilfoyle on Fox News joined the #MeToo mob in raising her pom-poms for this travesty of a verdict.

Those of us who did dissent at the time are thrilled that Pennsylvania’s highest court has vacated Mr. Cosby’s 2018 conviction, after Cosby had served two years of a three-to-ten-year sentence.

The same myopic, malfunctioning media are currently choosing to focus on how the Cosby verdict has been overturned on a procedural or technical matter. A prosecutor, Pennsylvania Republican Bruce Castor, had struck a “non-prosecution agreement” with Mr. Cosby in 2005. Lack of admissible evidence notwithstanding, this prior agreement with Castor barred the case from going to trial.

Now, as the Guardian explains, Philadelphia justices ruled that Cosby relied on the promise that he would not be prosecuted, when he agreed to testify in a civil case brought against him by [accuser] Andrea Constand, without invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Enter District Attorney Kevin Steele. He must have been watching too many episodes of the new, #MeToo “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” where a team helmed by vengeful protagonist Olivia Benson traps men by means fair and foul. Too often, plea bargains and other agreements are struck only to be gleefully and maliciously torn up once the suspect is deceived into compliance, having trusted the integrity of “the system.”

Matters were certainly rendered unclean when, by deception, officers of the law got Cosby to forfeit his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Once Cosby had done that, in good faith, DA Steele charged Cosby in 2015, using precisely the compromising deposition Cosby was enticed to give in the civil law suit.

But don’t allow the due-process oversight, indubitably important, to distract you from the nub of the matter.

The Cosby prosecution, as I pointed out at the time, rested on he-said, she-said hearsay evidence, on facts that can’t possibly meet the rules of evidence (the ones the United States once abided), or be corroborated for the purposes of a just prosecution, in accordance with the legal standards of Western law (of blessed memory).

The tainted evidence was solicited decades too late, with utter disregard for the statute of limitations. It came from unverified “prior bad act” women (“witnesses”)–unhinged #MeToo hysterics loosed in a court of law–who acted and sounded as though they were demented. Why, even the date of “the crime” could not be established.

The Law must engage in a search for truth. Ultimately, however, courts of law do not deal with what happened. Their judgments must rely on what can be proven to have happened.

Prosecutorial power to bring charges against a person is an awesome power, stress Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton in The Tyranny of Good Intentions. Backing him, the prosecutor has the might of the state, and, consequently, he must never “override the rights of the defendant in order to gain a conviction.”

Prosecutorial duties are dual. While acting as the plaintiff, the prosecutor must also take pains to protect the defendant’s rights.

This is why the #MeToo judicial “philosophy” undergirding the prosecution of Bill Cosby and many other men is so terrifying.

“Always Believe the Victim” is a ditzy, made-in-Hollywood dogma that goes against the stellar Anglo-American common law legal tradition.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, July 1
Townhall.com, July 1
American Greatness, July 5
Unz Review, July 1
Quarterly Review, July 3

* Image: Bill Cosby’s accuser, courtesy BBC News. Note that Mr. Cosby is legally blind NOW, but I don’t believe he was blind when he allegedly went for this apparition.

The post Mad, #MeToo Matriarchy Ensnared Bill Cosby appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The media scrum framed the Trump impeachment circus, round two, as an “emotional” affair.

Headlines homed in on the “emotion” surrounding the trial. “It Tears at Your Heart. Democrats Make an Emotional Case to Senators — and America — Against Trump,” blared one of many hackneyed screamers, this one from Time.

The case made by the managers “was both meticulous and emotional,” came the repetitive refrain.

Democrat Jamie Raskin, a representative from Maryland and a lead impeachment manager, sniffed “emotionally” as he related what to him was a heartbreaking tidbit: His (privileged) daughter expressed fear of visiting the Capitol again, presumably because of the January 6 fracas. That made Jamie cry.

And when Jamie Raskin cries, normies outside Rome-on-the-Potomac laugh. Uproariously.

Impeachment managers had warned all present in the Senate chamber that evidentiary footage would be upsetting. Their presentations were “intentionally emotional,” intoned CNN’s Dana Bash, who had paired up with one Abby Phillips for the “solemn” affair. Phillips’ “coverage” of all things Trump, in scratchy vocal fry, was a reminder that the Left’s “empaneled witches and their housebroken boys are guided more by the spirit of Madame Defarge than by lady justice.”

A lady in an armadillo outfit emoted a lot. She was impeachment manager Stacey Plaskett (D-V.I.). Although not particularly fashionable or feminine, there was a ton of “emotional” praise on the internet for Plaskett’s attire. Armani’s armadillo apparel was certainly a preferred distraction to the decibels of weepy rage emitted over the Trump protest.

The “intentionally emotional” affair, the last impeachment trial conducted by the Senate, had been preceded by an even more “emotionally” bizarre “healing” coven in Congress, led by none other than Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Ocasio-Cortez set up an hour-long primitive, ritualistic session conducted, putatively, to purge the pain over the January 6 protest on the Capitol.

Early in February, a coven of “prominent Democratic lawmakers, including Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan),” joined Ocasio-Cortez in forcing such a session, with the aim of “creating space for members to talk about their ‘lived experience’” during the Capitol Hill riot.

Big League Politics, a news website, was incredulous, reporting that “congress [had] devolved into an AOC-led therapy session,” during which “House members cried while detailing their ‘lived experiences.’”

This American “thought” leader, Ocasio-Cortez, and her “harrowing” ordeal dominated the corporate press as well.

Here are some of the histrionic headlines about what Congress’s queen of #MeFirst solipsism claimed had traumatized her.

See if you can spot the operative word that animated the writers’ impoverished text:

• “AOC reveals more personal details in new harrowing video …”

• “AOC shares harrowing Capitol riot experience, reveals she’s a victim of …”.

• “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recalls her harrowing … – CBS News”

• “’I Thought I Was Going To Die”: AOC Details Harrowing Day …”

It turns out that the “lived experience” of these abreacting women might have “lived” strictly in AOC’s head, since the House Office Buildings, where AOC cowered, had never been infiltrated by the protesters.

Formulaically, Ocasio-Cortez smuggled into her “living experience” an unverified mention of a sexual assault. Well, of course she did.

It transpires that Rashida Tlaib, who provided an incontinently unhinged account of her “lived experienced” on that fateful day—the Democrat’s 9/11—was most certainly “not even in the Capitol during the breach.”

Still, Tlaib framed her trauma of January 6, as emanating from simply “existing as a Muslim” in America.

Ayanna Pressley rose along with the Tlaib Cobra to spit this venom:

… as a Black woman to be barricaded in my office using office furniture and water bottles on the ground in the dark, that terror — those moments of terror — is familiar in a deep and ancestral way for me …

… I want us to do everything to ensure that a breach like this never occurs at the Capitol (again) … But I (also) want us to address the evil and scourge that is white supremacy in this nation …

…One of the images that I’m haunted by is the Black custodial staff cleaning up the mess left by that violent white supremacist mob … That is a metaphor for America. We have been cleaning up after violent white supremacist mobs for generations — and it must end.

Note the thrust of Pressley’s words. Hers are not just injuries to an individual who happens to be a black woman: Pressley implies she was subjected to them because she is a black woman.

A man, some legislator, was then dragged in, Roman Colosseum style, to expiate before  AOC “for not initially recognizing his ‘privilege.”

It goes without saying that AOC’s castles-in-the-sky “lived experience” mocks out of meaning genuine human suffering.

More to the point: AOC and her squad of progressive Democrats are not advocating “neutral principlism”—neutrality, objectivity, and equality before the law; the noble idea of “rules grounded in law, as opposed to rules based on personal interests or beliefs.”

Differently put, AOC’s theory of justice is not metaphysical but mercenarily political. Every event to her is an opportunity—AOC’s idea being to lower the burden of proof so that events that occur only in a woman’s head can be acted upon in law.

What makes Cortez so cunningly effective is that she fights just like a girl, underhandedly. Her weapon of choice here is the guilt trip; her objective being to squeeze legislation out of her “harrowing,” “lived experience.”

Almost charming in her childish, exclusively lower-order thinking—what makes AOC’s beguiling, baby-like behavior dangerous is that she uses the idiom of emotional anguish to extract legislative leverage.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, March 4
Townhall.com, March 4
American Greatness, March 7
Unz Review, March 4
CNSNews.com  March 5
Quarterly Review, March 7

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Our country is suffering a blackout of intelligence. It is collapsing under the blackhole of affirmative action ~ilana

The American Idiocracy is moving at breakneck speed to equate merit-based institutions with ‘institutionalized racism’ ~ilana

When merit-based hiring is deemed racist, bridges fall down. Literally ~ilana

Some blame a quasi-free electricity market for the collapse of the electrical grid in Texas, during a winter snow storm, mid-February, with temperatures averaging zero. The same people finger deregulation and isolation from the national and neighboring grids.

The other side has it that an excessive reliance on renewable energy sources, like wind turbines, was the culprit in a grid collapse that saw 40 percent of the power supply fail within hours of the storm, indirectly causing the death of about 60 Texans.

All agree that the oil-and-gas state enjoys both cheap natural gas and abundant wind power, and that its natural resources could have stood Texas in good stead.

The Lone Star State’s human resources are another matter entirely.

Be they wind turbines or gas pipelines; the electrical grid has to be properly maintained. Texas, however, lacked “leadership.” It transpires that the grid had not been weatherized nor winterized in anticipation of a harsh winter—pipelines had not been insulated and wind turbines never deiced.

Leadership is a euphemism for intelligence. Texas in the winter of 2021 will likely be looked upon as a case of systemic stupidity; systemic rot.

Things start to fall apart when the best-person-for-the-job ethos gives way to racial and gender window-dressing and to the enforcement of politically pleasing perspectives.

Likewise has the emergency personnel managing the blackouts for the nation’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, joined California’s political leadership to deliver Third-World quality service to Californians.

When it is reported that, “Among the hundreds of people who handled the blackouts from Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s emergency operations center, only a handful had any training in the disaster response playbook that California has used for a generation”—that is a fancy way of saying “affirmative action.”

It doesn’t help that the American Idiocracy is moving at breakneck speed to equate merit-based institutions with “institutionalized racism.”

Or, think about it like this: When merit-based hiring is deemed racist, bridges fall down. Literally.

Recall the deadly collapse of a pedestrian bridge in 2018, at Florida International University in Sweetwater, Florida. Engineers from the FIGG Bridge Group got the mathematics wrong and, oddly, they seemed to have no feel for the properties of cement. As a result, their bridge collapsed, killing six people and injuring 10 others. Something was terribly wrong with those engineers. Rumors were rife. Was it a designer, female-only outfit? Nobody would come clean.

In any event, when spanking new bridges collapse, trains on maiden trips derail (as Amtrak trains did in Washington-State, in 2018 and 2015), Navy ships keep colliding (the USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald in 2017) and law enforcement failure and bad faith become endemic—a picture emerges of a sprawling place, in which indeed the best-person-for-the-job ethos has given way to racial and gender window-dressing.

The latest exhibit in America’s set-aside and quota fiasco is the Capitol Police. The force received the memo about the unruly protest planned for January 6, but was deaf, dumb and blind as to how to process the information, plan and then proceed against a ragtag band of rambunctious MAGA men and women.

I’ve lost count of the security breaches in the White House’s formidably protected perimeter. Memorable is an event from 2014. Secret Service Director Julia Pierson oversaw an incident in which one female Secret Service agent was easily overpowered; another lass didn’t bother to lock the White House front door.

The reality into which America’s deformed social reformers have thrust us is better understood by reading the cautionary tale of South Africa, through the prism of Into the Cannibal’s Post: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, where American reformers were, incidentally, destructively instrumental, too:

“If American institutions continue to subordinate their raison d’être to politically dictated egalitarianism, reclaiming them from the deforming clutches of affirmative action will become harder and harder,” I warned.

South Africa’s gutted institutions were meant to serve as a harbinger of things to come in the United States. In the 10 years since the book’s publication, evidence abounds that societal institutions—state and civil—have been similarly hollowed out like husks.

Like Texas, the South African grid groans under the weight of affirmative action.

[South Africa’s] electrical grid has been degraded at every level: generation, transmission, and distribution. Since distribution is now entrusted to the local, increasingly inept, authorities, candles and paraffin lamps have made a come-back in my home town of Cape Town as well as in other cities. Daily power outages affect industries and services across the country. Rolling blackouts—’load shedding’ is the local euphemism—are now as typical of Cape Town’s landscape as the tablecloth of clouds that cascades over the majestic Table Mountain.

Moreover:

I’ve lived through Highveld thunder storms and Cape, South-Easter, gale-force winds. Few and far between were the blackouts. … No, Eskom, the utility that supplied most of the electricity consumed on the African continent, did not run out of juice. It just ran out of experienced, skilled engineers, expunged pursuant to BEE [Black Economic Empowerment, aka affirmative action]. ‘No white male appointments for the rest of the financial year,’ reads an Eskom Human Resources memo, circulated in January of 2008 …

The same supple thinking went into destroying the steady supply of coal to the electricity companies. Bound by BEE policies, whereby supplies must be purchased from black firms first, Eskom began buying coal from the spot market. Buyers were to descend down the BEE procurement pyramid as follows: buy spot coal first from black women-owned suppliers, then from small black suppliers, next were large black suppliers, and only after all these options had been exhausted (or darkness descended; whatever came first), from ‘other’ suppliers. The result was an expensive and unreliable coal supply, which contributed to the pervasive power failures.

The American government is marred, at every level, with similar set-asides, preferential hiring practices and affirmative action, which compromise an already compromised institution (the State, where incentives are inverted, as in the less efficient they are, the more funds government departments get).

The U.S. government hasn’t had an entrance test since 1982. It abandoned both the Federal Civil Service Entrance Examination and the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) because blacks and Latinos were much less likely to pass either of them. In academia, law schools have lowered the bar in admissions and on the bar exam. Universities run a ‘dual admissions system’; ‘one admissions pool for white applicants [and Asians] and another, far less competitive, pool for minorities.’

Institutional or systemic rot certainly explains some of the failures on the COVID-19 front.

By way of comparison, the South Koreans entrusted contact tracing to teams of highly intelligent, Sherlock-Holmes type characters. Contact tracing is indeed an endeavor requiring highly skilled detective types. The South Koreans have done it to perfection from the start.

The U.S. was never in control of COVID. Serious contact-tracing was never deployed to help prevent spread. Rest assured, though, that had COVID been caught in its infancy, and contact tracing implemented to that end—it would have been used as a job-creation opportunity for the government. Instead of merit-based appointments, state and federal authorities would have turned it into a job-creation project for minorities.

No doubt, our country is suffering a blackout of intelligence. It is collapsing under the blackhole of affirmative action.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, February  25
Townhall.com, February 26
American Greatness, February 28
Unz Review, February 25
Quarterly Review, March 1

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Described by a critic as “one of those rare movies you can say is perfect in every way,” “A Christmas Story,” directed by Bob Clark, debuted in 1983. Set in the 1940s, the film depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker, who yearns for that gift of all gifts: The Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

This was boyhood before the Nerf gun and “bang-bang you’re dead” were banned; family life prior to “One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads,” and Christmas before Saint Nicholas was denounced for his whiteness, and “Merry Christmas” condemned for its exclusiveness.

If children could choose the family into which they were born, most would opt for the kind depicted in “A Christmas Story,” where mom is a happy homemaker, dad a devoted working stiff, and between them, they have zero repertoire of progressive psychobabble to rub together.

Although clearly adored, Ralphie is not encouraged to share his feelings at every turn. Nor is he, in the spirit of gender-neutral parenting, circa 2020, urged to act out like a girl if he’s feeling … girlie.

Instead, Ralphie is taught restraint and self-control. And horrors: The little boy even has his mouth washed out with soap and water for uttering the “F” expletive. “My personal preference was for Lux,” reveals Ralphie, “but I found Palmolive had a nice piquant, after-dinner flavor—heady but with just a touch of mellow smoothness.” Ralphie is, of course, guilt-tripped with stories about starving Biafrans when he refuses to finish his food.

The parenting practiced so successfully by Mr. and Mrs. Parker fails every progressive commandment. By today’s standards, the delightful, un-precocious protagonist of “A Christmas Story” would be doomed to a lifetime on the therapist’s chaise lounge—and certainly to daily doses of Ritalin, as punishment for unbridled boyishness and daydreaming in class. Yet despite his therapeutically challenged upbringing, Ralphie is a happy little boy. For progressives—for whom it has long been axiomatic that the traditional family is the source of oppression for women and children—this is inexplicable.

Perhaps the first to have conflated the values of the bourgeois family with pathological authoritarianism was philosopher Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s formulations on authoritarianism have informed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In general, the consensus among these rights’ advocates has been that the traditional family’s hierarchical structure disempowers children. The solution: Let the State destabilize the parent-child relationship via policies that would define and limit the power of the parent, while increasing the power of child and political proxies.

While America’s founders intended for the family to be left untouched as “the major source of an orderly and free society”—Hillsdale College historian Allan Carlson’s words—politicians and jurists have decided to the contrary. What was once the economic and social backbone of American society has been inestimably weakened by both the welfare state and the Supreme Court—what with the latter’s redefinition of family and marriage, and the former’s incremental steps to trounce parents as the child’s primary socialization agent.

Culturally, the family has been demoted to what Charles Sykes once termed a “Therapeutic Family.” Having “adjusted itself to the new demands of the social contract with the Self,” wrote Sykes in A Nation of Victims, “the modern family has ceased to inculcate values.” Instead, it exists exclusively for the ostensible unleashing of “self-expression and creativity” in its members.

Progressives have triumphed. Very little remains of the unit that was once a vector for the transmission of values in American society. Women and children are less likely than ever to have to endure the confines of this bête noire of a family, with its typically “oppressed” mother, old-fashioned father and contained kids. Nowadays, women are more likely to be divorced, never married, or to bear children out of wedlock.

Unencumbered by marriage, women are also more prone to poverty, addictions and sexually transmitted diseases. Their children, a third of whom are being raised in households headed by a mother only, are paying the price in a greater propensity for poverty, and higher dropout, addiction and crime rates. Witness the black family. Having survived the perils of slavery, it was still intact until the 1930s, when the dead hand of the welfare state finished it off. As a social unit, the black American family is near extinct.

Contemporary America’s familial fragmentation—sky-high divorce rates and illegitimacy—has translated into juvenile crime, drug abuse and illiteracy. Yet despite all the State has done to “liberate” children from the strictures of the traditional family, ask any “emancipated” child and he’ll tell you: More than anything, he yearns for a mom and dad like Ralphie’s.

Indeed, lucky is the little boy who has such a family. Luckier still is the lad who has both such a family and … a BB gun.

©2020 ILANA MERCER
American Greatness
Dissident Mama
Quarterly Review
December 24

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