Some months ago, a gentleman who pens anti-Semitic tracts approached me for an interview. I agreed. Being a naïve methodological individualist, I never generalize about individuals. That my interlocutor writes crude anti-Semitic boilerplate did not mean I would not give him a chance to reveal himself as someone other than a crude anti-Semite.

After I had already answered his written questions in full, however, he bailed.

Here, then, is my reply to one of many loaded and leading questions I was asked and had answered in good faith.

A leading question is one that suggests an answer. Since I am Jewish, I was considered a priori guilty. Of what? Well, you know: “nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more,” as goes the Monty Python skit.

In his case, the fact that I married gentiles twice was not enough to clear me from charges of “Jewish supremacy.” I was pelted with uncouth, inappropriate, bias-confirming questions such as, “Do you think that marrying a non-Jew was a mistake and you should only marry another Jew?

One of the less flighty questions was, “Do you believe Israel is a racist state?”

I’ve been deconstructing the construct of racism in my latest columns, analytically showing that, at worst, racism is a worldview, a state of mind—often spoken or written, and entirely the prerogative of a free people, just so long as no corporeal aggression is committed.

Gleaned from the gentleman’s own enthusiastically affirmative reply to his question—it was clear that he had failed to draw the distinctions made in the column, “Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!”

That distinction is, very plainly, that we have no way of divining what’s in a person’s mind—in this case Officer Chauvin’s, as he pressed down on Floyd’s neck, for eight minutes and 46 seconds. All we know is that it was wrong, and that there are laws that address unprovoked or excessive violence.

To extrapolate to Israel: To the extent Israeli soldiers or law enforcement act with depraved indifference or commit felony crimes against innocent Palestinian civilians—to that extent they should be punished and, I venture, are punished.

When all is said and done, however, there is no credible way of inferring racism from Israeli acts of depraved indifference, or from Chauvin’s.

Nor should we, given that “racism” is mostly a mindset.

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in free societies. In free societies, the role of law enforcement agencies is to police corporeal crime—the kind that injures property and person. Thought crimes, when voiced, hurt only feelings.

Anyone who partakes in weaponizing the nebulous racism construct is a progressive—and certainly a bad person, in my book.

Prejudice—here used as the right to pre-judge—is a concept more fittingly attached to the Jewish ethno-state, not racism. The idea of rejecting some and welcoming others into the fold, as Israel most certainly does, is an extension of an individual’s right as a sovereign, discerning human being.

So long as no real violence and aggression are involved, the right to pre-judge and, consequently, to associate or dissociate in accordance with one’s prejudgments—this is the prerogative of a free person, and, by extension, of a free group of people, living in voluntary association.

Is freedom of association racist? Is exclusion racist? Only if you are of the progressive Left. Both vicious and violent, the progressive Left believes that one is compelled by egalitarian, humanistic dogma to accept everyone into your midst on pain of punishment.

Again, the freedom to exclude is not racist. Rather, it is the inherent right of free individuals, living severally or collectively.

The freedom to exclude is a libertarian tenet of liberty. This, not racism, is the reason many libertarian-minded conservatives were with Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) in opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as it dictated with whom people may associate or dissociate from—who they employ, serve, sell to, bake for, or rent to.

Free people associate and dissociate at will.

To wit, say a retail store selling Nazi insignia and memorabilia opens its doors in my neighborhood. I enter in search of the yellow Star of David Jews were forced to wear during the Third Reich. The proprietor, decked out in Nazi regalia, says, “I’m sorry, we don’t serve Jews.”

“Don’t be like that,” I reply. “Where else can I find a pair of clip-on, yellow, Star-of-David earrings?” (My ears aren’t pierced.) The Nazi sympathizer is polite but persistent: “Ma’am, I mean no disrespect, but back in the Old Country, Jews murdered my great grandfather’s cousin and used his blood in the leavening of the Passover matzah.”

“Yeah,” I reply. “I’m familiar with that blood libel. I assure you my own mother’s matzo balls were free of the blood of brats, gentile or Jewish. No matter. I can see where you’re coming from. Your loss. Good luck.”

There! Did my courtesy to the man’s oddball “sensibility” hurt me? No, it didn’t. It enhanced his freedom and hurt me not at all. (There’s Etsy.com for those earrings.)

It is with the same courtesy and good cheer that I had agreed to reply to my interviewer’s loaded and leading questions.  Alas…

****

In Part 2, Racism, as understood in the US, is more often concerned with discrimination based on distinct physical characteristics. That is addressed vis-a-vis Israel in “Is Israel Racist? A Reply To An Anti-Semitic Writer (Part 2)”.

©2020 ILANA MERCER
WND, December 3
Townhall.com, December 3
American Greatness, December 5
Unz Review, December 3
Quarterly Review, December 7
The New American, January 12, 2023
CNSNews January 13, 2023

The post An Anti-Semite Asks & Is Answered: Is Israel Racist? (Part 1) appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

They’re unwilling to defend true dissidents, but Beltway lite libertarians and Con Inkers are forever genuflecting to privileged legacy journalists, who can afford to voluntarily leave their rich gigs in “protest” of cancel culture.

The Right hasn’t shut up about the New Yorker’s Andrew Sullivan, who is far less banal than the New York Times’ Bari Weiss. Both belong to the “nothing new, more of the same” neoconservative tradition. Her resignation antics are a storm in a C-cup; his “defiant” departure is the fussy equivalent (just for gay men).

For a more meaningful scandal, to the Right at least, consider the farce of a Conservative news and opinion organization (founded by a dragon slayer of a broadcaster), which has published lacerating pieces condemning America’s foremost hate group, yet has proceeded to purge writers, in compliance with the demands of said shakedown hate group.

American conservatism capitulating to America-haters? Negotiating with terrorists? Hypocrisy? Yes, yes, and yes.

Prone is the natural position of the Establishment Republican, Con Inker, neoconservative, whatever his latest opportunistic, political permutation may be.

The news site is the Daily Caller. The hate group is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The ransom demands issue from the illiterati of the SPLC, who regularly publish lists of—and hit pieces against—untouchable dissidents. They then proceed against us with all the vigor of a “a money grabbing slander machine,” to quote John Stossel, a veteran investigative journalist who has exposed this corrupt syndicate that lives off destroying people.

For his part, economist Thomas DiLorenzo has skillfully pried apart the revenue-rich, “racial racketeering” of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showing it to be nothing more than a “hate group hedge fund.”

Wrote the great leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn, in the New York Press, in 2007: “I’ve long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life. The reasons: a relentless fundraising machine devoted to terrifying mostly low-income contributors into unbolting ill-spared dollars year after year to an organization that now has an endowment of more than $100 million.”

An organization that shakes down paupers and pensioners to support its “ritualized forms of defamation.”

One would expect the Daily Caller, which has written against cancel culture and the Southern Poverty law Center, not to capitulate to such rot. But one would be wrong to expect principled positions from any Con Inc. org.

Opportunistic and prone are the only principles known to the D.C. media types. For they have no philosophy to speak of. Whatever political raiment he happens to be cloaked in—defeatism, hypocrisy and betrayal are the default positions of the D.C. “conservative” swamp dweller.

And so, July 7 saw Geoffrey Ingersoll, Daily Caller’s editor in chief, assume the supine position in a Twitter exchange, which ceded the terms of debate to the Democrats and their most diabolical proxies.

The Twitter entity before which Mr. Ingersoll was kneeling metaphorically in contrition was an account called “Sleeping Giants.” “They’re the worst,” attests Steve Bannon. They appear to be attached to a shakedown hub of cancel-culture activism. Illiteracy precludes any manifesto, but the constant nattering on a Twitter account has earned these cyberthugs a Wikipedia page.

To thrive, thugs need enablers. Enter Mr. Ingersoll.

First up on my Twitter feed, July 7, was a tweet from gutsy reporter Patrick Howley, founder of Big League Politics.

Geoff Ingersoll, best known for ranting sexist slurs at @CassandraRules, … wants everyone to know he does NOT know Ilana Mercer

Lol. Ilana is out of your league, pal

Chimed in the clever and combative Cassandra Fairbanks of the “Gateway Pundit”:

I don’t know [ilana], but if Geoff is denying knowing her to save his ass, she must be super interesting.

Cassandra quickly rendered her assessment of Mr. Ingersoll :

I really really like a bunch of people at Daily Caller, but Geoff is probably the most dull and basic neocon bitch in any dc newsroom.

All the while, I’m thinking: How odd. I certainly know Mr. Ingersoll. But since I’m hoping against hope that this is not about the fabulous segment written about me by the aforementioned SPLC, the “hate group hedge fund,” on August 16, 2017, I keep it light.

So, I jest:

Dear Patrick and Cassandra: What is this about? Thanks for spelling my name correctly. No idea why Mr. Ingersoll can’t. He did in his correspondence with me. LOL.

Beneath Patrick’s feisty throwdown is Mr. Ingersoll’s nervous tweet to his tormentors, the “Sleeping Giants”:

… Illana [sic] Mercer? Never stepped foot in our offices. Who else? [Scott] Greer? He left BEFORE we found out.

Titled “The Daily Caller has a White Nationalist Problem,” the SPLC’s hit piece is an asinine collection of non sequiturs, easily refuted in a society that values reason. But that’s no longer America.

And that’s not the Con Inkers—the con artists formerly known as neoconservatives and Establishment Republicans before that, whose aim is to pacify the Left and deceive the Right.

In fact, what the SPLC wrote about me was high praise—all the more reason for the Daily Caller to keep my animated copy on its anemic op-ed page.

You see, since the firing of former opinion editor Robert Mariani, the Caller’s op-ed page has been festooned by Israel First, neocon boilerplate. Retread rot, really. Its line-up of writers consists of unoriginal, Johnny-come-latelies to the America First position, which has been held by the dissident Right for decades. We do it best.

Principles aside, any op-ed editor whose op-ed page is littered with such insipid fare should warm to the rave review given to me by the SPLC.

Alas, only cowards shove principles aside. For the Southern Poverty Law Center is “America’s left-wing hate machine.” Its members advocate “urban Marxism” and “Third World Communism.” Why, “Weather Underground” terrorist William Ayers used to manage a website sponsored by the SPLC. “Tolerance.org” was its name.

In any event, my cordial correspondence with Mr. Ingersoll commenced on December 7 of 2017. The Daily Caller had been featuring my weekly column for some time, under the editorial leadership of young Mariani, who liked to mix it up. Mariani had just been shown the door, and my column, “Flynn’s Sin Was Lying To Liars, Not Colluding With Russians,” had been rejected.

A POLITE MR. INGERSOLL EXPLAINED the new, Daily Caller editorial policy. It would, seemingly, revolve around pacifying the Southern Poverty law Center:

From: Geoffrey Ingersoll <geoffrey@>
Sent: Thursday, December 7, 2017 10:57 AM
To: ilanamercer@
Subject: Re: ILANA MERCER On Michael Flynn Injustice

Hey, Ilana,

Frankly, I love your copy, but we’re going to hold on publishing you for a little while. I’ll ping you when I want to start running again.

Thing is Eric is the new guy fitting into this new role, and we’re right in the middle of coming at SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] about their baseless smear, and I think it’s in everyone’s interest to hold off for the time being.

Please let me know your thoughts,

All the best,

Geoffrey Ingersoll
Editor in Chief
The Daily Caller

MY REPLY:

From: Ilana Mercer <ilanamercer@
Sent: Thursday, December 7, 2017 8:09 PM
To: ‘geoffrey@>
Subject: SPLC

Dear Geoffrey,

Thanks for explaining the shift toward my column at Daily Caller. I appreciate that.

And thanks for asking for my thoughts. Here they are:

I saw that [Southern Poverty Law Center] hit piece on me, Scott and DC. I was going to reply to it at the time. I should have.

I am not a white nationalist. I am a hard-right libertarian individualist.  I’m also an ex-Israeli, Jewish, daughter of a rabbi still residing in South African, etc. And, I’m wedded to reality. That, the SPLC can’t forgive.

The SPLC article is easily refuted. In my case, it frames colorful language as “raaaaacist.” There is no argument in the SPLC article, just ad hominem. I’m more than capable of dealing a devastating blow to the “writers.” The SPLC’s text is impoverished, factually and logically.

I refuted a “Media Matters” attack, in “One More Media Matters Con Man,” here. Picked to pieces, this man’s case against me crumbles.

I don’t think this individual, dealt with above, renewed his attacks.

The entire establishment is attacking the president on the same grounds as the SPLC. The president is lagging in the battle b/c he has not put up a person or persons to eloquently argue his platform, non-stop. Just playing defense and only barely won’t cut it.

If we lie low and allow the SPLC bullying (joined by mainstream pols and media), we lose the agenda of this presidency, as well as a spectrum of speech that won’t easily be recovered.

My column also seemed to be quite liked by DC readers, who, for the most, clearly do not see things through the SPLC prism.

So, would you consider giving me the opportunity to refute the SPLC smear against Daily Caller and myself?

Kind regards,
Ilana

CAME MR. INGERSOLL’S RETORT:

From: Geoffrey Ingersoll <geoffrey@>
Sent: Friday, December 8, 2017 6:33 AM
To: Ilana Mercer <ilanamercer
Subject: Re: SPLC

Sure, but not right now. We’re doing a series called “The New McCarthyism,” perhaps as a part of that. Right now, we have Pollock dealing with the SPLC directly. Then we’re going to post an oped he wrote that I already have as one in the series. After that, I’d be elated to get one from you.

Primarily, I don’t want SPLC to have any ammo when Pollock finally gets through to their board. If he does get through to them, and they check your byline, it would not help if you had recent posts there.

This is just a temporary measure.

Geoffrey Ingersoll
Editor in Chief
The Daily Caller

POSTSCRIPT: I reached out again, once or twice, in an attempt to reinstate a column that has been limited in its reach for 20 years by all spectrum of conservatism and libertarianism. (Again, highest praise, really. In this context, I am reminded of Alexei Sayle, a scrupulously honest British comedian, perceptive about human nature, too. When asked what he does when he watches a really talented satirist performing, Sayle replied: “I go back stage and tell him he’ll never make it.”)

In response, an ever-cordial back-stabbing Mr. Ingersoll lied through his teeth:

From: Geoffrey Ingersoll <geoffrey@>
Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2018 5:43 AM
To: Ilana Mercer <ilanamercer@
Subject: Re: Mercer column

We’re talking to SPLC today about removing Richard Pollock’s name from their smear on us. I will keep you posted.

Geoffrey Ingersoll
Editor in Chief
The Daily Caller

That was on January 9, 2018 at 5:43 AM.

So, there you have it.

Geoffrey Ingersoll, Daily Caller’s editor-in-chief (and a Marine), would sooner purge writers like me and the many who agree with me than stand up to the SPLC urban terrorists.

To his credit, Mr. Ingersoll was always respectful and cordial to me.

Against Mr. Ingersoll it must be said that he was utterly insincere. He told this columnist that her excising was “temporary.”

While reassuring a dissident it had every intention of reinstating her, the Daily Caller, apparently, was, hypocritically, negotiating with the SPLC heisters for a reprieve, striking a Faustian deal with the devil.

Over the authentic, dissident Right, Con Inkers and the Left converge: We must be cancelled.

 **

With appreciation To WND, The Unz Review, American Greatness, Cassandra Fairbanks, Patrick Howley, and others like them who man-up.

©2020 ILANA MERCER
WND, July 16
Unz Review, July 16
American Renaissance, July 20

The post How Con Inc. Sells Out Dissidents To The Southern Poverty Law Center appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Melinda Gates, a silly woman with an enormously wealthy husband, has decided to reinvent herself as a venture capitalist. With a difference.

With her husband’s billions, Mrs. Gates announced her intention to venture into funding start-up companies that are likely to fail.

In an interview with Fortune Magazine, Gates “bashed ‘white guys,’” and vowed to favor women and people of color in her investment choices.

Using pigment and gender as criteria in allocating her abundant resources is hardly a prudent investment strategy.

But Mrs. Gates can afford to lose money. Her husband is Bill Gates, a lily-white billionaire (with lots of liver spots).

From the vertiginous heights of ignorance, Mrs. Bill Gates has scolded the venture-capital industry:

“Enough with your love for ‘the white guy in a hoodie’” (whatever that means).

Thanks to her husband’s vast riches, Melinda’s son, Rory John Gates, will remain insulated from discrimination visited on white men, by vindictive women like Mommy Dearest, in the name of “white privilege” (whatever that means).

“White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it”:  While the article is from 2015, Salon and other influential leftist news sites have furnished sequels to the “salutary” warning, issued by the magazine in time for Christmas.

“White men must be stopped”? What precisely does that mean?

In the postmodern tradition, the pseudo-academics behind the concept of white privilege have invented for themselves an artificial, political construct.

Political constructs confer power on those who dream them up. For politics is the predatory process through which the figment of sick minds is weaponized.

In defense of their world salads, our ideological overlords never argue or prove their case. They simply assert it.

Clever catchphrases such as “white privilege” create political reality, they don’t reflect it.

By banging on about systemic racism and the evils of whiteness, the lunatics running the country’s academic and corporate asylums indoctrinate the dumb and terrorize deviationists.

Here in the US, these sub-intelligent assault on the identity of Europeans, Caucasians, melanin-deficient men—whatever you wish to call the majority that founded America—is being institutionalized.

In South Africa, the writer’s birthplace, this impoverished, linguistic onanism is already institutionalized. We know where that has led.

Ominously, American universities, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is an example, are offering courses framing “whiteness” as a “problem.” “The Problem of Whiteness” in UW–Madison’s vernacular.

Notice how that’s phrased. A problem is something good people get rid of, solve.

“The Problem of Whiteness.” “The Jewish Problem.” See where this might lead?

Note the linguistic similarities between the language of white haters and Jew killers.

The program known as “The Final Solution” was the Nazi’s solution to what they termed “The Jewish Problem.”

Likewise, whites as whites are said to be a problem. Whites qua whites are described as intrinsically bad.

Lightweight conservatives, the kind constantly empaneled on TV, cast the assault on whites as “goofy,” to quote a Fox News guest. That’s all. They make fun of it as no more than white noise, to be ignored.

The fate of the minority in South Africa suggests otherwise.

There is nothing remotely “goofy” about the demonization of whites. Of any group, for that matter.

It so happens that whites are fair game. No other group would tolerate being blackened.

Yes, profound stupidity is involved.

In an affirmative-action generated class of intellectuals who’re not very intelligent, we have a monster of our own creation.

Certainly, by teaching and preaching collective guilt and guilt by association, this Idiocracy is committing both logical and moral errors.

Why so? Because you cannot blame a collective for your misfortunes (real or imagined), unless each individual within that collective has harmed you.

Alas, problems of atavistic anti-intellectualism, institutionalized stupidity, and plain wickedness, culminating in institutionalized anti-whiteness—these are never merely “goofy.”

They are dangerous.

Dehumanization is part of a broader process that leads to, and legitimizes, violence—and worse.

“Dehumanization,” warns genocide expert Gregory Stanton, “overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder.”

To give the reader a sense of how far into Dr. Stanton’s danger zone American society has “advanced”: “Dehumanization is fourth in Stanton’s “Ten Stages of Genocide.”

As for aider, abettor and all-round idiot Melinda Gates: She might want to back the best and the brightest in her venture-capital exploits. This way, Mrs. Bill Gates will have more money with which to prop-up her failing, racially and sexually pure business ventures.

©2018 ILANA MERCER
Quarterly Review, The Unz Review, WND.com,
Center for Property & Freedom, Constitution.com
June 7

*Image credit

The post The Demonization Of Whites By Mrs. Bill Gates & Other Dangerous Idiots appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

©2018 By ILANA MERCER

Not for nothing did Alexis de Tocqueville conclude “that what made the American political system work was a culture congenial to democracy.” A lesser luminary, Lawrence E. Harrison, has isolated some salient factors that distinguish development-prone from development-resistant cultures.

Although they are rapidly being transformed, Western cultures emphasize the future; view work as a blessing rather than as a burden; promote individuals based on their merit; value education and frugality, are philanthropic, identify with universal causes, and have higher ethics.

In static cultures, individuals tend to be fatalistic rather than future-oriented; live for the present or past; work only because they need to; diminish or dismiss the value of education, frugality, and philanthropy; are often mired in nepotism and corruption; and promote individuals based on clan and connections, rather than capabilities.

“I am because we are” is how one wag encapsulated the cog-like role of the individual in African culture. In advanced cultures, on the other hand, the individual, and not the collective, is paramount.

The paucity of planning and future preparation in African life, Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, a Cameroonian scholar and former adviser to the World Bank, puts down to a suspended sense of time. The reverence for the “strongman of the moment” the same thinker traces to the sincerely held belief that political strongmen harbor magical powers.

In Africa, magic wins out over reason; community over individual; communal ownership over private property; force and coercion over rights and responsibilities; wealth distribution over its accumulation.

Africans inhabit stratified societies in which “strength prevails over law,” and where “the best way to change a social system is to overthrow those who hold power.” African totalitarianism was not born with independence, cautions Etounga-Manguelle. By logical extension, it will not miraculously change following migration. Instead, Etounga-Manguelle has counseled the need for a mind-freeing, “cultural adjustment program” for Africa.

Such a cultural adjustment program, of course, lacks the Compassion Chic that marks the present system of subsidies to dictatorial kleptomaniacs.

Still, be it Africa or Arabia, the Left labors under the romantic delusion that the effects of millennia of development-resistant, self-defeating, fatalistic, atavistic, superstition-infused, unfathomably cruel cultures can be cured by an infusion of foreign aid, by the removal of tyrants such as Robert Mugabe or Jacob Zuma, or by bringing the underdeveloped world to The West. (Left-libertarian Katherine Mangu-Ward actually told Tucker Carlson that, “If we had a billion people in America, America would be unstoppable. That would be amazing.”)

Alas, bad leaders are not what shackle backward peoples. Not exclusively, at least. And Africa’s plight is most certainly not the West’s fault. Rather, Africa is a culmination of the failure of the people to develop the attitudes and institutions favorable to peace and progress.

However, while human behavior is mediated by values, we’d be intellectually remiss to deny that the cultural argument is flawed. It affords a circular, rather than a causal elegance: people are said to do the things they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way.

See what I mean by flawed?

What precisely, then, accounts for the unequal “civilizing potential,” as James Burnham called it, that groups display? Why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwifed Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place?

Such an investigation, however, is verboten—a state-of-affairs Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson blamed on “a prevailing rigid orthodoxy,” which is the preferred academic phrase for political correctness:

Culture is a symbolic system to be interpreted, understood, discussed, delineated, respected, and celebrated as the distinct product of a particular group of people, of equal worth with all other such products. But it should never be used to explain anything about the people who produced it.

This much can be said: The West is what it is due to human capital—people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.

Overall, American society remains superior to assorted African and Caribbean societies because the tipping point has not yet been reached here. A preponderance of a certain kind of individual still makes a civil society possible.

We shall now attempt to answer the question posed in Part 1 of this inquiry, “Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed.” The vexing question prompted by President Trump’s pooh-poohing of immigration into the United States from what he crudely called “s-ithole” countries was this:

What makes a country, the place or the people? Does “the country” create the man or does the man make the country?

And the answer is no chicken-or-egg quandary.

Ultimately, human action is the ultimate adjudicator of a human being’s worth. The aggregate action of many human beings acting in concert is what makes or breaks a society.

In other words, it is the individual who creates the collective, not the other way around. The Man makes the country what it is.

A sufficient number of bad people admitted into the Unites States of America is bound to make America not-so-great a country.

©2017 ILANA MERCER
 Townhall.com, The Unz Review, WND.com,
The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom,
Constitution.com, Storia.me
January 31

Read Part 1: Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)

The post Why Trump Pooh-Poohed “S-ithole” Countries (Part 2) appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Junge Freiheit is Germany’s finest weekly newspaper. It’s easily its only authentically rightist, freedom-loving, classically liberal publication. When Junge Freiheit‘s editors come calling; this writer is always happy to oblige—and not only because my weekly column once appeared in JF. But also because, present company excepted, the young editors at JF are simply the kindest, most professional journalists I’ve encountered. What was it that Oscar Wilde said about kindness? “She thought that because he was stupid he would be kindly, when of course, kindliness requires imagination and intellect.” Having just emerged from a 15-year-long, abusive, professional relationship; kindness and courtesy are indeed new and lovely things to behold.

However, my Teutonic editor lit a fire under me. I was asked to make haste in answering Junge Freiheit‘s personalities-from-abroad questionnaire, for the November 11 issue. You’re in good company was his matter-of-fact message. But get to it.

The company: Nigel Farage (architect of Brexit), Eric Burdon (rock-and-roll legend), Douglas Murray (famous neoconservative), Lord Christopher Monckton (politician and inventor), Thomas Drake (Whistleblower), Colin Crouch (author of Postdemocracy), Frederick Forsyth (bestselling author), Charlie Duke (Apollo 11 and Apollo 16 astronaut), Tony Sheridan (early Beatles), etc.

The record time for answering the JF questionnaire: six minutes. Needless to say, I failed miserably to best it.

JUNGE FREIHEIT: Where would you like to be at this very moment?

ILANA MERCER: I’m strictly reality oriented. I don’t indulge in make-believe. I don’t wish to be where I’m not. …
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

JF: What would you give anything for?

MERCER: I’d give “anything” for freedom from The State, provided “anything” is a figure of speech (no limbs, eyes, etc.)
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

JF: What does home mean to you?

MERCER: My residence; my house—but also a revival of the thing Edmund Burke called “the little platoon we belong to”; namely an end to the centrally planned transformation of Western communities through forced integration and mass immigration.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

JF: What do you consider important in life?

MERCER: Meaningful work, intellectual honesty (rare), close relationships, good health, my guns, my companion parrot (Oscar-Wood), related advocacy and charities.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

JF: What did you learn from your parents?

MERCER: To think critically about everything, to read voraciously, to be charitable; the love of music and art.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

JF: What book has left a lasting impression on you?

MERCER: The concept of a Favorite Book is childish, if you’re a lifelong reader. Lots of books of political theory, philosophy and economics have indelibly influenced my thinking. Lately, it’s been Clyde N. Wilson’s “The Yankee Problem: An American Dilemma.”

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

JF: What music do you like?

MERCER: Chamber music and Bach—any Bach—and the hard core, intricate, masterful brilliance of progressive rock outfits like Symphony X, Dream Theater, to say nothing of neoclassical guitar wizards like Sean Mercer, Tony MacAlpine, Yngwie Malmsteen.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

JF: Which event in history has been the most incisive and far-reaching for the world?

MERCER: The advent of Communism. Its agents killed the most people and poisoned the most minds, for posterity. Communism/socialism continues to pollute every nook-and-cranny of state and civil society.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

JF: What would you want to change?

MERCER: In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” instead of “life, liberty and property.” With that vagueness, Jefferson undermined the foundation of civilization: private property rights.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

JF: What do you believe in?

MERCER: Individual sovereignty, secession down to the individual.

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JF: Which values should we pass down to our children?

MERCER: Traditionalists value hierarchy. An infantile, immoral society deifies The Child. Kids should follow Florence King’s injunction that “children have no business expressing opinions on anything except, ‘Do you have enough room in the toes?'”

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JF: What does death mean to you?

MERCER: The end.

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JUNGE FREIHEIT, z.Hd. Christian Dorn, Hohenzollerndamm 27 A, 10713 Berlin, GERMANY, November 11, 2016 issue, page 27.

The post The Third Degree à la Germany: Answering To Junge Freiheit appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

©2015 By ILANA MERCER 

The specter, on the nation’s campuses, of frightened, middle-aged white educators, mostly men, resigning in fear of a mob rising in rage against hurtful words and gestures—all constitutionally protected speech—is an organic extension of the American educational project, down to your child’s school.

If your kids are in the country’s educational gulag—primary, secondary or tertiary—however well they’re faring; they’re still being brainwashed and de-civilized. Most private schools are now bastions of progressivism, too.

“Progressivism,” of course, does not imply progress.

The “justice” for which privileged youngsters on America’s coveted campuses are rioting—the right to silence and purge dissent and dissidents—they’ve imbibed in schools public and private, prior to arriving at the university. On the University of Missouri campus, atavistic youth have joined against hurtful words, symbols and unsettling, unorthodox ideas, and for “safe spaces,” where these brave hearts can hideout from “racial microaggression.” Examples of “microaggression” are asking a black student for lessons in twerking, complimenting her weave, or simply being white.

But mostly, these minorities and their propagandized white patsies are campaigning for the unanimous acceptance of the following destructive, dangerous, often deadly, dictum:

“White racism is everywhere. White racism is permanent. White racism explains everything.”

The “systemic racism” meme you hear repeated by media, across the American campus, and preached from the White House is a function of “Critical Race Theory,” the sub-intelligent, purely theoretical, and logically fallacious construct, now creeping into American schools at every level.

As detailed in WND colleague Colin Flaherty’s “Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry,” America’s children, black, white and brown, are being taught, starting at a tender age, about “racial hostility and resentment.” This racial hostility is said to be endemic and always and everywhere a white on black or brown affair. 

Ask your state representative and your school board about Glenn Singleton and his Pacific Educational Group’s curriculum, deceptively titled “Courageous Conversations.” The PEG poisonous program has been adopted by “hundreds of school districts across the US,” and foisted on millions of pupils, very possibly your child.

Beware; propaganda is process oriented, and an insidious one at that.

ITEM: Your cherub’s project receives an A. His work the teacher praises before the classroom. Yet, oddly, the child’s identity she will studiously conceal. This is in furtherance of the egalitarian idea, implemented, whereby no individual student is to be identified as having produced superior work to that of the collective.

“[U]nder the Singleton influence,” explains Flaherty, “the Seattle schools [have] defined individualism as a form of cultural racism and said that only whites can be racist.” Moreover, “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology is a form of racism,” too.

The progressive educational project carries its anti-white bias into teaching about the Orient (East) versus the Occident (West).

ITEM: A Christian boy, placed in an academically advanced study program, is tasked with submitting a project about one of three ancient civilizations: Egypt, India and Rome. Ancient Egypt, a big hit apparently, is spoken for. The teacher, generally “white, female, liberal,” advises the boy: “Choose India. Rome is … BORING.”

What is it that this colossal ignoramus has conveyed to her student with the words “Rome is boring”? Let us unpack the meta-message (with reference to History.org):

• Christianity, first adopted and spread by the giant empire of Rome, is BORING.
• Engineering, which the Romans perfected and excelled at like no other civilization, is BORING.
• Related in tedium and utterly BORING: The ingenious construction of roads and aqueducts.
• The Greeks, an inspiration for Rome—what little boy doesn’t love Leonidas of “300”?—BORING.
• The form of government known as “republicanism,” an inspiration for the American Founding Fathers: BORING.
• The notion of equality under the law, invented by Rome and instantiated in Rome’s Twelve Tables, 449 Before Christ: BORING.
• The intrigues of Julius Caesar’s court: BORING.
• The oh-so relevant lessons of Empire and government overreach: BORING.
• Spartacus, gladiator and rebel leader against Rome: BORING.
• “Gladiators, Chariots, and the Roman Games,” the riveting stuff of kiddie video games: BORING.
• The fine art of argument and oratory: BORING.
• Masters of literature and poetry: Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Livy: BORING!
• The greatest romance in history, Antony and Cleopatra’s: not quite on the level of a Bollywood tryst.

Rome is the foundation of our Western civilization. The boorishness of telling a Christian young boy that Rome is boring conjures a skit from the “Life of Brian,” a parody by comedic genius John Cleese about Judea under Rome:

So, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” asks Reg, a Jewish rebel against Rome. “The aqueduct,” one rebel ventures. Says a second, “Sanitation, remember what the city used to be like?” A third Jewish rebel praises the roads. A fourth, the public baths. Exacerbated by the growing list of Roman improvements, rebel-in-chief Reg responds: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Except that what is par for the course in your children’s’ schools is no laughing matter.

Certainly, parents ought to familiarize themselves with the politicized process of textbook and course-material selection. In Washington State, the selection of textbooks is a highly centralized affair, arrogated to a “textbook commission,” which consists of five individuals, whose liberal, labor-union credentials are guaranteed to be unimpeachable.

Put it this way, textbook selection effected by the politburo of books will ensure that your child never ever comes away believing in the immutable truth, say, of the philosophy that animated the republic’s Founding Fathers. Or in the originalist intention of the US Constitution. Yes, your kids will learn about the Constitution and about theories of constitutional interpretation. But so will they be inculcated in the unshaken view of originalism as a quaint notion reserved for oddballs (Auntie ilana’s preference for the Anti-Federalists is tantamount to a thought crime), and that “progress” demands that the Constitution be “updated.”

Your child will be taught that eternal verities—the rights of private property and self-defense—shift with the times, when in fact truth is not relative, but both knowable and immutable (also the theme of a magnificent encyclical penned by the late Pope John Paul II).

Fact: Yale and Mizzou students are oblivious to the cherished American tenets of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion; diversity of thought, and most important: the magnificent life all people irrespective of skin color can labor to achieve in America.

These students didn’t arrive on campus with such illiberal biases. The rot didn’t start there and didn’t unfold overnight. The closing of the Millennial Minds at the University of Missouri and beyond, to yield such philosophically and ethically bereft boorishness, has happened over time. The seeds of the bizarre contagion spreading across American campuses were sown in your kids’ primary and secondary schools, public and private.

And as we speak.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Quarterly Review, Praag.org,
The Unz Review, The Libertarian Alliance
& LewRockwell.com
November 20, 2015

The post Continuum Of Propaganda: Yale, Mizzou & Your Child’s School appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

©2015 By ILANA MERCER 

The top one-tenth of one percent in this country own almost 90 percent … as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent,” roared the independent senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, at the first Democratic primary debate of 2015, in Las Vegas.

Standing for president, Sanders implies, somehow, that there exists in nature a delimited income pie from which a disproportionate amount of wealth is handed over to, or seized, by a class of evil doers: “the rich.”

Clueless Sanders omits the process by which that wealth magically materializes.

Wealth doesn’t exist pristine in nature, until individuals—deserving as much, if not more, of the pope’s love as the poor—apply their smarts, labor and savings to transform raw materials into marketable things that satisfy human desire and need.

But not if one listens to the socialist from Vermont as, sadly, too many Americans did.

You ask, why was it not just as discouraging when even more Americans tuned in to watch the first and second Republican Primary Debates, 24 and 23 million respectively?

For this reason: While Republicans are never to be equated with freedom, smaller government, or anything remotely libertarian; the voting public equates a vote for a Republican with a vote for less government and more freedom from the state. Therefore, an interest in and a support for a Democrat is often a reliable proxy for the measure of statism in the land.

Over fifteen million viewers tuned in to watch two washed-out, walking clichés of the hard left (Hillary Clinton and Mr. Sanders) join two other political phantoms no one had heard of before (Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee), to malign and bring down their betters: the “highly productive and provident one percent that provides the standard of living of a largely ignorant and ungrateful ninety-nine percent,” in the words of professor George Reisman, author of the seminal “Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.”

Countering Sanders’ pie-in-the-sky economics, Reisman notes that, “The wealth of the 1 percent is the overwhelming source of the supply of goods that people buy and of the demand for labor that people sell.” The wealth of the rich is not to be found in a huge pile of goods from which only capitalists benefit, but in the means of production that benefit us all.

When Hillary Clinton “cogitates” about capitalism, she “thinks,” by her own admission at the same forum, “about small businesses.”

How does this cunning—never clever—woman imagine big, “bad” business began? In a free market, small and “medium-sized businesses” grow to become bigger and bigger through the only pure, fair democracy in existence: the consumer’s vote of confidence; his hard-earned dollar.

By logical extension, self-made rich people were once less rich, even poor. Why make them the object of derision once they get wealthier, create more enterprises, employ more people, and provide a good life for their own families and workers—a standard of living these parties were without until Evil Rich Man In-The-Making arrived on the scene?

Here’s why: Since left-liberals struggle to think logically, they treat “The Rich” as a reified, rigid state-of-being.

Liberals, the true evildoers, are unable to understand that “rich” is a process, a work in progress. Wealth creation is a righteous process, at that, provided it is achieved in voluntary cooperation: by offering people consumer goods they want, buildings to live in, resorts to visit, all sanssubsidies or special grants of government privilege.

Jews like Sanders have forgotten that riches are a reward for work well done. In the Jewish faith’s infinite wisdom, wealth justly acquired is a sign of God’s blessing.

Democratic socialism, under which we already labor today in the USA, turns on Karl Marx’s maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Sanders’ idea, shared by others on stage, is the unnatural notion that the government is entitled to seize a portion of your income; that it has a lien on your life and on what you acquire in the course of sustaining that life.

Be it Hillary or burn-the-wealth Bernie—both agree that it is up to them, the all-knowing central planners, to determine how much of your life ought to be theirs to squander.

Capitalism, conversely, is not a system! It is the uniquely human actions that flow from a moral right to make a living freely and peacefully, absent coercion; by relying on the sanctity of private property upheld by the rule of law.

The voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. Its logic is based on the sanctity of private property rights, beginning with the individual’s title in his or her own body. Capitalism’s starting point is with the most important liberty of all:

Individual self-ownership.

The free market—it has not been unfettered for a very long time, courtesy of the political class—is really a spontaneously synchronized order, comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts performed by individuals to sustain life.

So which is the philosophy of a free people? Capitalism, “the unknown ideal” (for nowhere is it practiced), or democratic socialism, that partial enslavement of a “system” espoused by Sanders and Clinton?

Tell me, too, how is it that Bernie Sanders is not laughed off the podium in 21st century America? Why are he and the harridan Hillary able to porcelainize and romanticize an ideology, democratic socialism, that’ll lead to further nationalization of a good deal of the means of production? How is it that, as a Gallup poll revealed, only “half the country would not put a socialist in the White House”?

This puzzle was explained succinctly and profoundly by another great economist. In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Milton Friedman put his finger on the backdrop to the growth of collectivism:

“The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”

Marxism, socialism and its offshoot democratic socialism engage the gut, or the uterus, in the case of Hillary Clinton.

Free-market capitalism engages the rational mind.

To his brilliantly stated aphorism, Dr. Friedman forgot to add this:

Individualism and the economy of freedom is also the philosophy of justice.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Quarterly Review, Praag.org,
The Libertarian Alliance, The Unz Review
October 16, 2015

The post Burn-The-Wealth Bernie Sanders And His Partial Enslavement System appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

©2013 By ILANA MERCER 

©2013 By ILANA MERCER
WND, Economic Policy Journal,  American Daily Herald & Praag.org. 
November 29

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©2013 By ILANA MERCER
WND, Economic Policy Journal & American Daily Herald.
November 8

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©2013 By ILANA MERCER
WND & American Daily Herald 
July 12

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