There was no need for the AWOL, Missing-In-Action Piers Morgan Media, which was never in Gaza, never stood up for Gaza, and never broke down barriers to reach and report about Palestinians sequestered in genocide. Thanks not to the MIA Media, but to Palestinian journalists, the living and the martyred, The Truth about genocide in Gaza continues to be conveyed faithfully and meticulously. ~ilana

Wearily I repeat what has been obvious early on to anyone with some cerebral agility: There is no ‘fog of war’; there is no fog (only ash). There is no war. There never was anything but a genocidal impetus and the attendant declared intent to commit genocide, followed, in quick succession, by an enacted genocide in which Palestinian humanity was crushed, dismembered and burned alive; dispossessed of home and history on live tv. By Israel. ~ilana

With the Genocide of Gaza accomplished; a convoluted coverup has begun. The Johnny-Come-Lately culprits, the professional liars in media, politics, in advocacy and in the tech industry—also the custodians of The Narrative—have commenced their dull recital of excuse-making.

A dull mediocrity which was fully behind Israel—or, alternatively, had confined itself to occasional quips about mass murder in Gaza being antithetical to the American “national interest”—is suddenly simulating belated passion for the truth. Or, versions thereof. All to sanitize their sins.

Having carved out “a place of massive impunity” for Netanyahu and his complicit countrymen, these sinecured, “credentialed” Western elites have duly begun to hijack storylines—even chronology—to absolve themselves of the genocide of Gaza. The same “perpetrator block,” wading in the blood of Palestinians, intends, for now, to remain mum about the territorial asphyxiation of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. There, strategic adaptations of the Twenty-First Century Gaza Holocaust are rapidly and energetically underway. Pursuant to popular demand in Israel proper, Jewish-Israeli thieves and murderers are purloining Palestinian land and lives in the West Bank.

I had imagined that the media organ’s formulaic production had reached a nadir in Iraq, when my own passion burned as hot as a Babylonian kiln against that war. The “Truth” about Iraq, I had then observed incredulously, arrived officially only once the Empire’s agents declared it so, and released it in massaged, flattering form. And only as exigencies of power allowed. The sizeable dissident community did not rate a mention.

The current crop of Israel apostles who’ve connived and colluded to suppress truth include, broadly speaking, the Western news, commentary, advocacy and policy-making classes; the overarching tentacular corporate media and its clientele—the military-media-congressional-industrial complex, if you will. In a word, the international Imperial Comitatus: the foot soldiers who share in the loot or aspire to do so (like “Washington’s Arab puppets, whose sound and fury signify nothing”).

The international Imperial Comitatus make themselves known by affinity and affiliation, but mainly by what they do: They “ravage, slaughter, usurp … and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” Originally by Tacitus, the words were popularized by economist Jeffrey Sachs in an epic essay about these influencers, Israel’s co-belligerents.

Israel’s helpers had covered up the Crime of The Century, and now it could out. And although they’ve made excellent time—Palestinian erasure is near complete—these special interests wish, nevertheless, to salvage their standing in the world. They’re doing PR (public relations).

“Gaza panics the pro-Israel media,” said Owen Jones, a dogged British media critic. The genocide-era journalists are “creating a record that’ll allow them to say one day, ‘Here is proof that we denounced and tried to stop the genocide,’” remarked Laith Marouf, a Lebanese geopolitical reporter and commentator. They waited until now, because the genocide comported, broadly, with their worldview. “Media has manufactured consent for the genocide with atrocity propaganda,” seconds Hamza Yusuf, a British-Palestinian writer and journalist. “They did this.” “Western media is Israel’s Iron Dome,” averred Bassem Youssef, commentator, comic and former surgeon.

Although Israel’s abominations have been watched by humanity for the best part of two years; and despite Israel’s industrious, industrial-scale mass murder playing interminably, on a loop—the truth watered-down will only be permitted to come into being, officially, on the say-so of gatekeeping interests and personalities.

Such as Piers Morgan and the Missing-In-Action Morgan Media (shall we call it?).

And so, with pomp and Piers, forever slow on the uptake, those in control of The Storyline prepare to “excavate” a modified version of “the truth” about the Gaza Holocaust.

In attempting to clear his name, Morgan, a spirited evangelist for Israel’s right to practice state terrorism—he calls it “self-defense”—sounded the worst false note: the Iraq Defense: “nobody knew,” nobody could have known. (See “Iraq Liars And Deniers: We Knew Then What We Know Now,” May 22, 2015.)

The reason “nobody knew, or could have known” about a televised genocide, proclaimed the lemon-faced Piers with trademark verbose vacuity, is that there have been no “credible, international journalists” in Gaza!

Did you hear that? Palestinian journalists don’t count! In an instant, the MIA Morgan Media set about canceling the work done by the greatest journalists to have lived and died on the job. As you can see, society’s gate-keepers are also wretched human beings. To further their scheme and vanity, these power-brokers imply that absent their AWOL, MIA Media, we cannot and could not have known what was underway in Gaza.

The Missing-In-Action Media was never in Gaza, never stood up for Gaza, and never broke down barriers to reach and report about Palestinians sequestered in genocide. Now, the same Media asserts that we cannot know—could not have known—what was underway in the tiny Gaza Strip without them. Only Morgan and his ilk could have given us the goods on Gaza.

The Palestinian truth-tellers who’ve been documenting their own demise so as to bring us The Truth, nothing but the manifestly obvious Truth, are being disappeared by their moral and professional inferiors, who had never defended or doffed a hat to the work of these Palestinian journalists—professional or citizen journalists.

Wearily I repeat what has been obvious early on to anyone with some cerebral agility:

There is no neatness and dispatch in the way Israel has destroyed Gaza. It’s not like we’ve got nothing to go on. There are no empirical loose ends to tie up in Gaza; no cobwebs to clear. From the air, from space, from the ground—for all to see—on display in Gaza is, was, has been, the utter annihilation of a civilization.

There is no “fog of war”; there is no fog (only ash). There is no war. There never was anything but a genocidal impetus and the attendant declared intent to commit genocide, followed, in quick succession, by an enacted genocide in which Palestinian humanity was crushed, dismembered and burned alive; dispossessed of home and history on live tv. By Israel.

From terra firma, Palestinian journalists have transmitted unimpeachable evidence of this annihilation. From space, pioneering scientists divined proof of genocide ongoing. Thanks not to the MIA Morgan Media, but to Palestinian journalists, the living and the martyred, The Truth continues to be conveyed faithfully and meticulously.

For the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza is as clear as day—has been since 2023’s end, which is when, for instance, scientists such as Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek (featured in my early Gaza essays) had used Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to monitor the damage to buildings in Gaza. Their aim was to impart a picture of what saturation bombardment had done to Gaza’s habitat and humanity.

Some will experience a Homeric “D’oh!” moment at the next proposition: Beneath this well-documented damage—under the collapsed structures—lie the remains of human beings in their tens-of-thousands, murdered. By Israel.

At this late hour, we do not need the Morgan Media to tell us what is deductively true. “Reality is truth,” as I had put it. Res ipsa loquitur. The thing speaks for itself. Believe your lying eyes was satirist Richard Pryor’s wry phrase for he who has been caught in flagrante delicto. “There is no question any more. There is no need of investigation,” said Martin Griffiths (belatedly, sadly), a former UN diplomat. “We can with confidence and we should with conscience tell it like it is” (08:49 minutes into “Is it a genocide?”).

Whether you speak the language of the law (res ipsa loquitur), the language of facts and apodictic logic (“reality is truth”); gazing upon Gaza, listening to its people and to the humanitarians who rushed to their aid and remained on the crime scene—this was sufficient to know what’s what. By January of 2024, Gaza was ashen and barren. Dresden-level destruction was there for all to see—from the air, from space, and on the ground. Genocide.

The Gaza Holocaust, moreover, has played to a packed house, the world. It has been both a democratic genocide as well as an international genocide, remarked perhaps the only scintillating “genocide scholar,” with a moral compass to match his intellectual heft. 

Dr. Martin Shaw pierces the carapace of lies now under construction:

‘The genocide that is being committed now is being committed not just by the Israeli State and the Israeli army. There is a larger perpetrator block. It isn’t just these most obvious core-actors. This is what we could call a democratic genocide, carried out with the active contributions of the Israeli-Jewish population in arms, Israeli right-wing activists who have stood at the gates of Gaza and have tried to block even the little bit of aid that the Israeli government has been willing to let in. And it’s a genocide supported ideologically and practically by a very large segment of the Israeli society: by the political opposition, by most of the media, and by vast majority of public opinion. In this sense, it is a democratic genocide.  The other thing about it is that it’s an international genocide. It is being carried out by the essential support of the United States, which is now in direct partnership, trump with Netanyahu, to complete the project with the forcible removal of the complete population from the territory.’  (9:02 minutes until 10:40 minutes.)

The obliteration of Gaza had been achieved well before Piers Morgan’s May, 2025 self-serving pivot, which arose out of “moral panic.” And well before an American whistleblower did the rounds on US media, in June of 2025, bearing witness to the death squads of the misnamed US-Israel Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Picture this: A starving, emaciated, wee Palestinian boy kisses the hand that controls his fate, and cradles a face that looks upon him with some kindness. The American mercenary—a hired security subcontractor for the Isra-American GHF Gulag operation—he may wish to believe that the child does so out of abiding “respect” for our American soldiers.

Palestinian mothers know better.

As an insightful American (novelist John O’Hara) had long-ago remarked: “You don’t keep friends by having them obligated to you,” much less when their very existence depends on your cruel whim. The achingly sad image of Amir, who kissed the hand of whistleblower Anthony Agilar, is that of a hungry, helpless, forsaken Palestinian boy, bowing-and-scraping like a beggar before his only “benefactor.” For these overlords might kill him or feed him as the fancy takes them.

Surrounded by the SS IDF, Palestinian boys like Amir kiss a hand, smile beguilingly, and hope for a miracle: That a kind stranger might rescue them, rather than make them run through daily cycles of “hunger games.” One day it’s the groin that the thrill-seeking gamers of the Israel Occupying Forces (IOF) have been reported to target; the next it’s center-mass the demons aim for. As recounted by humanity’s finest (the very many medics volunteering in Gaza), the GHF food-procurement massacres are rounded-off with headshot clusters, courtesy of the same gamers: the delirious marksmen of the IDF.

Nevertheless, a Homeric “D’oh!” was duly disgorged by a recent flyover reporter, who pretended to have just discovered genocide two years hence. Gone is “the soul of the place along with the souls who lived here,” intoned this particular ITV News editor, on August 4, 2025.

Our flyover visitor had popped in over Gaza, early in August, as party to an Israel-controlled, airborne contingent that was throwing “paltry, lethal parcels of food aid” on small sections of the Strip, “instead of forcing Israel to open the crossings to over 22,000 aid trucks that remain blocked from entering.”

Missions of mercy these air drops are not. By design, Israel shells the anthills from above. The imperious, complicit “Western and regional states” and their stooges throw parcels of food at the people whom they’ve bombed into oblivion—and into begging. Israel is loving it. Its vampiric i24 News network entertained one Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, friend of i24’s Laura Cellier show, who waxed fat about “flying ‘missions’ over Gaza.”

Throwing a few nutrient-free parcels of dry goods at starving Palestinians from the air; or herding them, for the ostensible purpose of feeding them, into “agricultural cattle pens, like animals in a human abattoir,” to be, then, sprayed with bullets, or targeted by the marksmen of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation: These slow extermination-liquidation operations are, have been, part of Israel’s Final Solution to its Palestinian problem, for the best part of two years. Openly pursued, openly discussed in the Hebrew (with which I am fluent).

Full famine in Gaza has galvanized the West—not to feed Palestinians, but to feign action by convening forums of inaction.

To meager food drops, the West has added fuss and feathers—white noise—about the two-state diplomacy, and has given speeches about recognizing the State of Palestine. This is just what a people being starved and butchered need: speeches. Besides, upwards of 140 states had long-since recognized Palestinian statehood. Had that stopped Israel’s genocide? The fake, defunct two-state “solution” notwithstanding, rhetoric is not what’s needed in the face of a reality, whereby a many-times dislocated population made homeless is being starved and slaughtered out of existence.

If Israel has been exposed, so has the West, with America in the lead.

Israel’s extermination campaign has been sacralized at the highest of political and journalistic altitudes. It is these genocidal criminals, these cagey characters—vicariously involved or on active duty—who now want to salvage their reputations by sullying the reputation of Palestinian, Gaza-based reporters.

Long months sequestered in genocide, notwithstanding, Palestinian journalists have nevertheless been crisscrossing Gaza, on the scene of every Israeli mass murder; every tent encampment incinerated by the heavy payload-weapons of the Israel Occupation Forces; interviewing and filming by-standers, healthcare workers, assisting the faithful civil-administration functionaries and rescuers (reduced to digging for survivors with homemade trowels); living alongside their families in nylon domes, and standing vigil over dead kin and colleagues in prayer. And now, the chroniclers of Palestine starve with their people.

In truth, it is the Morgan Media, ex officio town criers, that don’t count. Best to express their nullity was the fierce Francesca Albanese, a woman not desperate to feature on Piers Morgan’s low-intelligence, large podcast, alongside his other suck-up guests. Albanese had refused to get drawn into Piers’ broadsheet-sensationalism! The UN’s rapporteur for Palestine (an unpaid, punishing position) told the desk-bound ponce, “What you say, Piers, is worth zero.” Your opinion counts for zero.

The epitome of grace in a life-and-death struggle, Palestinian journalists, on the other hand, have been exceedingly polite to the Julius Streicher Media, given that the latter have colluded with the Israelis in the murder of 266 of their colleagues (and climbing). This is more than “the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan combined, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project.” (Via ForeignPolicy.com)

As is the case with the genocide of Palestinians, the news chyrons on your televisions are out-of-date as they scroll by. The Associated Press counted, but failed to name, Israel’s August 25 prey among Palestinian journalists. Four. It fell to readers to name the fallen. Newly martyred for Truth were:

Reuters’ Hossam al-Masri
Al Jazeera’s Mohammad Salama
Freelancer Maryam Abu Daqqa
NBC’s Muath Abu Taha

Forgive me. I should have known that the news scroll across our screens is also reliably wrong. The AP failed to accurately count the fallen. Five.  The AP omitted Ahmed Abu Aziz, a local journalist murdered. The “betrayal of Palestinian journalists in Gaza” peaked with the presstitutes of the International Women’s Media Foundation. Playing procurer and pimp for Israel; the IWMF withdrew a “Courage in Journalism Award” from Gaza-based Maha Husseini. (The reason? Likely Antisemitism or housing Hamas: You choose. I won’t dignify another Zionist blood libel.)

Martyred for truth before the five aforementioned were Anas Al-Sharif and his team (here is the live footage via real journalists). The veteran young reporter was the kind of human being whom members of the pampered Morgan Media can only dream of equaling. Like so many of these magnificent Palestinians, Anas Al-Sharif wrote his epitaph, final will and testament, before his words were lost forever in death. Why? Because, as night turns to day, the world knows what Israel will do next:

Murder! All the more so if you are a Palestinian reporter chronicling a genocide of your people.

Piers Morgan, who announced in May of 2025 that he “was wrong,” was joined in public expiation by other genocidal British public figures, including politicians such as Tory MP Mark Pritchard. At the eleventh hour, Germany, Israel’s second largest supplier of baby-busting munitions, worried the optics, too. Nineteen months into the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, Chancellor Friedrich Merzagain whimpered that Israel’s operations “no longer appear to [him] as strictly necessary for defending Israel’s right to exist and for combating Hamas terrorism.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stalled until August 27, which was when she condemned Israeli attacks on Gaza as “beyond the principles of proportionality.” Editorialists in leading western publications joined this coalition of evil.

You know just what a confidence trick and a fraud the Piers-type Israel pivot represents—when a she-devil like podcaster Megyn Kelly feels called upon to add her shenanigans to the production. For glib viciousness, Kelly—whose métier is feel-good militarism and assorted “girly gutter journalism”—is unbeatable. Fifteen minutes and 22 seconds into a July 28, 2025 “visit” with the perfidious Briton, Kelly said this:

“I am reluctant to put too much stock in the images coming out of Gaza, because they are manipulated and they are masters of propaganda. They are fine having their own children starve, just so long as they can put them on camera and show them off to the world. That’s Hamas, and frankly, that’s a lot of Palestinians. So, I’m very skeptical at [sic] taking those images at face value, and saying that it’s Israel’s fault.”

To the word “complicit,” some, not me, naturally, would add “c-nt and cretin.”

Come August 19, 2025, in an attempt to both stay current and outshine her guest Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kelly was practically climbing over those “phantom” starving Palestinian children, to cast herself as an edgy resister and critic of AIPAC, the Israel Lobby, and its “multiple reachouts” to Me, Myself and I, Megyn Kelly.

Now please lead me to the Vomitorium.

Meloni and Merzagain, whose administrations, like all western nations, have not divested materially or diplomatically from the genocidal entity, share the moral pedigree of a Megyn Kelly and a Piers Morgan. They all resolved to stop framing genocide as self-defense long after the genocide in Gaza was completed.

It was in May-June of 2025 that Morgan morphed Israel’s status from the legitimate exerciser of self-defense to no longer exercising legitimate self-defense. For nearly two years, Morgan had watched Palestinians being “denied the right to life on an industrial scale.” He had tried and succeeded quite well in framing Israel’s mass murder ongoing as self-defense. Until one day when it was not. Piers’ posture is obviously forced, insincere and strategic. Why and where precisely was the pivot-point?

There is no reason in logic. Piers Morgan’s flabby reasoning is reliably circular and self-serving. The point of demarcation—where Israel went from legitimate self-defense to state terrorism—is measured in Piers Morgan Units: in the time it took Morgan to go from avid Israel supporter, to reluctant critic of the genocidal entity (14:41 minutes in).

Circular reasoning, indeed. What reasoning other than circular would one expect from the journalistic circle jerk?

What really motivated “august” members of the Media Circle Jerk, such as Piers Morgan or Megyn Kelly, to rap Israelis on the knuckles, suddenly, for that is all this is?

Joseph Massad, a Palestinian scholar, homes in on what’s afoot among these scullions. While the structure of genocide has been the same throughout, the “suddenly developed moral compunction” is about “the more recent phase of the genocide, where the continued outright bombing and incineration of Gaza in a holocaust is now compounded by the deliberate mass starvation of the Palestinian survivors,” remarks Massad. In essence, the sight of jutting baby bones and distended bellies  is not a good look.

If Piers Morgan and his clones were men of conscience, as they undoubtedly are not, they would come clean; lie low, listen, flagellate, be ashamed, stay ashamed. Piers should be begging Palestinian pardon—perhaps admit to being a mouthpiece of power, and endeavor to listen to his betters.

This staged reckoning comes against the backdrop of Israel’s ongoing, imposed famine-starvation in Gaza. Awash with evil, when Israel is not assassinating negotiators (Qatar) as well as entire governments, heads of civilian portfolios, and journalists across the Middle East (Yemen), the exterminatory Jewish Israel is willy-nilly murdering over 100 Palestinians each day and wounding many hundreds more, consigning the injured to slow death by sepsis and starvation, without hope for recovery.

The Gaza Strip Israel has demolished. Just in case, The Demon State has set about demolishing “around 300 residential units a day in Gaza City, aided by the Israeli army’s explosive-laden robots.” Soldiers the IDF are not. Here’s a “news” story from the crypt of an archaic, old-fashioned keeper of records: By November 15, 2023, ancient Gaza City, “the largest, oldest Palestinian city,” was near complete destruction. Given the state of the collective memory, it behooves me to remind readers:

The SS IDF has already crisscrossed the Gaza Strip in one way or another. When Israel announced its plan  to “conquer” Gaza City, you ought to have asked: As opposed to what? Destroy it? Done. Kill tens-of-thousands of its residents? Done. Concentrate the starving population for the purpose of killing more of it? Finalizing what has been a Final Solution? Done and done. Mere semantics. The place, Gaza—city and strip—is ashen and barren.

I deal in words. Stale, worn words. I have none left.

The “Dispossessed of the Earth” are being starved to death by evil-on-earth: Israel and its willing accomplices.

The people of the world are with the “Dispossessed of the Earth,” the Palestinians. The governments of the world and their mouthpieces, North and South, are either nowhere to be seen or, alternatively, with evil-on-earth, Israel.

And that includes the complicit, MIA, Piers Morgan-Megyn Kelly Media.

One of many selfless healers and humanitarians currently operating with great difficulty in Gaza is Dr. Tarek Loubani. By this point, day 711 of the genocide, what Dr. Loubani said on day 236 of Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Flood is amplified many times over. If you have been silent so far—or, enveloped by the warm smell of the herd, are conveniently piping up two years into the sacking of Gaza—you must not be forgiven.

Follow: https://rumble.com/v6toq73-the-real-israel-vs.-hasbara-history.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp_f

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xedE2MSEgRE

©2025 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, September 16
LewRockwell.com, September 18
The Mises Institute  (genocide as a “Note in the Margins,” https://mises.org/notes-margin/gaza-genocide-coverup-begins-johnny-come-lately-journos-start-covering-keister, no link provided to https://mises.org/profile/ilana-mercer) October 1

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization

*Image via screen picture, The Guardian

The post Gaza Genocide: The Coverup Begins. Johnny-Come-Lately Journos & Politicos Start Covering Keister appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

King Tuck clearly carried the Fox News network and its nits ~ilana

Whether full of spleen or in support of Tucker Carlson, the commentariat, as usual, was dead wrong about the effects of his firing on the Fox News network.

The disposable clowns at The Dispatch echoed the gleeful sentiment, coming from the left and the pseudo-right. Posted on Nick Catoggio’s crudely (and cruelly) titled “Boiling Frogs” blog was a number titled “Tuckered Out: Be careful what you wish for.”

Catoggio, formerly of Allahpundit, belched, May 9, that, “On the day Fox News parted ways with Tucker Carlson,” he “doubted …the network would suffer much, if at all, in the 8 p.m. hour. ‘For all the hype about Carlson’s ratings, the truth is that any dogmatic right-wing figure airing at 8 p.m. on Fox News will attract an enormous audience.’”

This reflexive, Freudian “Wish fulfillment”—“the satisfaction of a desire (for Tucker’s demise) through an involuntary thought process”—encapsulates the cowardly gloating Tucker received following his professional garroting by Fox News.

From her self- referential and reverential perch, Megyn Kelly insisted that, just as in her case, the perch (Fox News) would always outlive the anchor (Tucker Carlson). Well, of course. Ms. Kelly would say so. She has plenty cognitive dissonance to reconcile: She is not Tucker Carlson. No sooner had she fled Fox News for more progressive media climes than Tucker stepped into her stilettos—and nobody remembered Kelly.

Before she abandoned her “Kelly File” Fox News show, Ms. Kelly had firmly aligned with members of the Murdoch Media for a Marco Rubio victory. Side by side with lightweights like Dana Perinno, and other egos in the anchor’s chair, Ms. Kelly had made manifest, in February of 2016, that she was hoping someone like Rubio would slay The Donald dragon.

Kelly is a lot smarter than Kayleigh McEnany (whose hard-to-spell names one has always to cut-‘n-paste) and simpleton Lawrence Jones, both of whom have attempted to fill-in on Fox at 8 p.m. Neither, however, is in Tucker’s league. Kelly was also more politically independent than these two tools and others considered for the peerless Tucker’s slot.

Most all at Fox New are party operatives, certainly not one is as nimble intellectually, or has the elemental intellectual curiosity of a Tucker Carlson.

Your columnist’s April 25, live, “HARD TRUTH” podcast, recorded a day after Tucker Carlson’s dismissal, got it right. Tucker, like Trump, we contended, is transformational. Fox was finished (we chuckled). This forecast was echoed in a column whose lead said it all, “Fix News is finished, having just fired their only attraction, Tucker Carlson!” Clearly, if not “finished,” Fox News is sorely diminished. Joy!

I mean, who, pray tell, wants to watch Bret Baier’s “Common Ground” sanctimony—where the neoconservative anchor gloms Democrats and Republicans together? What treacle! MAGA men and women—we’re a “minority” said Asa (Who?) Hutchinson to CNN’s Erin Burnett, on May 30—will only ever reach across the aisle if it is to grab a member of the Treason Class by the scruff.

“Sacking Tucker Carlson has put a dent in Fox News’s ratings,” The Economist finally admitted, on May 16, when the truth could no longer be withheld. The consensus is that, “Fox News is currently down by more than a million viewers per show per night.”

King Tuck clearly carried the network and its nits.

Newsweek puts the loss of viewers during Tucker’s time slot at “50 percent, while the network’s audience among 25- to 54-year-olds had shrunk by two thirds.” On May 5, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, sibilant riffs and all, was all in with 145,000, among viewers aged 25-54. While Mr. “Carlson’s former 8:00 p.m. ET slot attracted an audience of 90,000.” Tucker’s “final show on Friday, April 21, had [drawn] more than 2.6 million viewers.” He averaged “just over 3 million viewers across 2022.”

A total of two minutes of a cheerful Tucker Carlson on Twitter, come April 26, orienting The Idiocracy to what matters, netted more views at the time of the broadcast—seven million to start—than the sum of all concurrent programming on Faux News, CNN, MSNBC. That Twitter segment now has 85 million views. Unstoppable.

Tucker Carlson is planning to launch a new show on Twitter in the service of unfettered speech and a search for truth. That announcement on Twitter has been viewed  133.1 million times to date.

Rupert Murdoch will be remembered as the Money Man who fired Tucker Carlson and, by so doing, sank his network.

WATCH THE HARD TRUTH podcast, where UK’s David Vance and your columnist discuss King Tuck, Ron DeSantis and Roger Waters. We appreciate a Follow.

©2023 ILANA MERCER
WND, June 1
Unz Review, June 4
The New American, June 1

* Image via WND, as screen pic

The post King Tuck, Like Trump, Is Transformational appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

‘The proper aim of education [was] to make virtue habitual’— Leonard Roy Frank, my friend & editor of Random House Webster’s Quotationary ~ilana

Ecumenical submission to heavily promoted second-handers is not in me. Picking the brains of longtime, marginalized, prolific, independent dissidents will not become a pattern on my watch ~ilana

In his 2004 foreword to my book Broad Sides, Peter Brimelow, the man who penned everything there is to say about America’s immigration disaster, in 1996, wrote this:

“… somewhat to my surprise, it is actually quite rare for this most emotionally intense of columnists to draw on … personal experiences. What seems to motivate Ilana, ultimately, is ideas.”

In this tradition, on February 6, 2017, I wrote a column titled, “Are Liberals Turned-On By Turning The Other (Gluteus Maximus) Cheek?” In it, I expressed the kind of—dare I say?—outsized idea that has animated my writing for 21 years.

To quote:

“The pale, liberal patriarchy is a pioneer in forever scrutinizing itself for signs of racism and deficits in empathy toward The Other, while readily accusing others like it of the same. It’s as though liberal men derive homo-erotic pleasure from bowing-and-scraping to assailants and ceding to racial claims-making.”

As so often is the case, I was the only one to have been tickled pink by that insight. I found it so utterly cheeky that I ran the column again in April 27, 2018, for WND, under the more prosaic title, “Are liberal pervs sexually obsessed with refugees?”

The case to have elicited my Freudian flourish—and boy, was Freud a fabulous and fabulist writer—had to do with, as I put it, “The repulsive specter of [a Western male] just about turning the other cheek to [an African refugee-rapist] who had spread both his cheeks.”

I promptly shredded Douglas Murray’s banal, humdrum observations (“Stockholm syndrome”), about the case under discussion, and offered up my own.

To repeat:

“It’s as though [egalitarians, of the left and the political right] derive erotic pleasure from prostrating themselves to assailants and ceding to racial claims-making. Could it be that liberal men are driven by a powerful homo-erotic impulsive?”

The theme of WASPs acting out in sexual-submission really jelled in “The Barbarians Are In Charge: Scenes From The Sacking of America,” featured on American Greatness, and published first by WND, June 11, 2020.

The column described the “Kneeling Ninnies”—those who lay down for the Black Lives Matter thugs, during last year’s BLM riots. These were “men, cops too, who knelt down like girls, instead of standing tall like men for law and order”:

“…men in uniform all collapsed to the pavements like yogis to the command of their black tormentors. One after another. … The forces, police and paramilitary, all squatted like sissies.”

With a link to the original idea in the earlier column, I broadened the category of flagellants:

“It’s almost as though WASPs get a homo-erotic sexual charge out of prostrating themselves in front of The Evil Other.”

Tying the pleasures of sexual-submission to the acts of WASPs kneeling and ceding ground en masse to The Evil Other: This is an idiosyncratic idea—my own.

But what do you know? I wasn’t the only one enamored of my generally woefully underappreciated ideas.

On May 17, 2021, on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Pedro Gonzales, a new writer, fingered the submissive response to the BLM rioting and general meekness of police and punditry as a form of “psycho-sexual ethnomasocism.” He said (2:58 minutes into the TV broadcast):

“I’ve characterized it as a kind of psychosexual enthomasocism.”

“Homo-erotic submission” (Mercer); “psycho-sexual enthomasocism” (Gonzales): potato, potahto.

“Mental telepathy”? Yeah, right.

“Ethnomasochism,” of course, came into use via Patrick J. Buchanan. The term is from Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

John Derbyshire does the properly honest linguistic forensics: “The earliest usage in a book that I am aware of is in Pat Buchanan’s 2011 Suicide of a Superpower.” However, ventures Derbyshire, Pat was preceded by Jared Taylor of American Renaissance.

One might convincingly—and charitably—argue that “ethnomasochism” as a term has come into common use.

However, a term (“ethnomasochism”) is not an idea (the “homo-erotic submission of WASPs to The Other”). An idea is “a mental representation that is the product of creative imagination.” In other words, it is a more intricate concept that bears the originator’s intellectual footprint.

Again, tying pleasurable sexual-submission to the acts of WASPs kneeling and ceding ground en masse to The Evil Other is an idiosyncratic idea. Like it or not (a lot of men don’t like it)—it originates in an oeuvre festooned with such audacious insights, made over 21 years.

I cringe as I write this, and other, forced, first-person accounts. Duly, in “The Curious Case Of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian (April, 2016),” I told my readers how the use of the first-person pronoun in opinion writing is a cardinal sin. “To get a sense of how bad someone’s writing is, count the number of times he deploys the Imperial ‘I’ on the page. Abuse ‘I’ only when the passive-form alternative is too clumsy. Or, when the writer has earned the right to, because of her relevance to the story.”

The second is my reason here.

My knowledge of my own works, well over a thousand, excluding books, is near-photographic; the idiom, the expressions, the way of thinking. So, the ears perked-up at another stray, but familiar, quip on twitter:

Pedro Gonzales, April 29, 2021:

“I regret to inform you that the absolute top priority of the conservative movement and the GOP today is assuring Americans that Democrats are the real racists.”

I shot back:

Mr. Gonzales, “That is my verbatim, 2013 description of the GOP ‘silly tit-for-tat’ argumentation“: “…Democrats are the real racists; Republicans are the party of Lincoln, the liberator of [African-Americans]. We’re against abortion and welfare because we love [African-Americans].”

The mocking phrase “Democrats are the real racists”—as part of my methodical critique of GOP argumentation—is from “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem, I Smell The Blood Of A Racist,” published on May 16, 2014, but repeated many times in my work.

Ecumenical submission to heavily promoted second-handers is not in me. Picking the brains of longtime, marginalized, prolific, independent dissidents will not become a pattern on my watch.

Speaking of a pattern: The “Conservative Case for a Higher Minimum Wage,” made recently by Gonzales, was first made by Ron Unz, editor of The Unz Review, for which I write. From a conservative stance, Mr. Unz blazed that intellectual trail. Myself, I would have acknowledged those who went before. It is the habit of a scholarly and fair mind.

Jack Kerwick, whose specialty is moral philosophy and ethics, made the following point:

While it is true that I was unfamiliar with Pedro Gonzalez, I was indeed acquainted with the idea for which he argued on Tucker’s program. And this, I was quickly reminded, is because the idea originated with Ilana Mercer, who advanced it for the first time a few years ago! She defended this thesis once more last summer in the midst of the BLM riots that visited billions of dollars worth of damage on legions of American cities.

Of course, it is possible for intelligent, thinking people to independently arrive at the same [insights]. This idea, though, is not one of them, for no one, but Ilana, has so much as floated it, let alone defended it.

While it is good that Pedro was given the opportunity to express Ilana’s brilliant insight on Tucker’s massive platform, he should’ve given credit to the person who first birthed and nurtured it. He could’ve then elaborated upon it, as Ilana herself did in her articles on the subject. … it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to explore, revise, and expand the ideas of others, to explore their nuances, their contours, and utilize them for the purposes of illuminating new circumstances.

But not before crediting The Originator.

*Image credit here

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, May 20
Unz Review, May 20
Quarterly Review, May 24

The post The Moral Writer’s First Commandment: Cite Your Sources! appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The happening featured beefcake Donald Trump Jr. and bimbo Kimberly Guilfoyle.

The couple was on stage at UCLA to promote the president’s son’s “book,” when they were jeered by dissident Deplorables for shutting down the Question-and-Answer segment.

“Book” here is in quotations to denote “so-called,” because the staple, ghost-written political pablum, penned by ambitious political flotsam, relates to literacy as H. L. Mencken relates to conformity—not at all.

Predictably, Guilfoyle opted out of the conversational give-and-take demanded by her man’s hecklers, and went straight for the groin:

“I bet you engage in online dating, because you’re impressing no one here to get a date in person.”

Why “predictably”? Well, a supple mind may not be one of Guilfoyle’s assets.

Kimberley’s cerebral alacrity was seldom showcased when seated in Fox News’ legs chair. During one of her last televised appearances on “The Five,” a Fox News daytime show, Guilfoyle protested that, “the U.S. has already reduced its [toxic] ‘admissions’ enough.”

I give you Guilfoyle, verbatim, in her own words: “So, we can keep doing what we’re doing. We can keep reducing our admissions. …”

To Make English Great Again, you reduce emissions, not “admissions.”

For a while, it even seemed that Trump, looking for curve appeal in a press secretary, was going for Guilfoyle. She certainly thought so and said as much, implying, at the time, that she herself is “a great communicator … with deep knowledge.”

And no; I do not digress. This all goes to the Guilfoyle’s knee-jerk, flirty, aim-for-the-groin reaction to her hombre’s hecklers.

Tellingly, the taunting of Donald Jr. by dissident Deplorables was covered very differently by the American Daily Beast and the British Guardian.

Descriptions of political positions and personalities were prefaced by the Daily Beast with “edifying” editorializing. The hecklers the Beast described as “fringe-right.” Their alleged instigator and inspiration was said to be “a white nationalist.” Perfectly legitimate demands from this disgruntled audience for a “Q&A” and for “America First,” the Daily Beast deemed tantamount to a right-wing insurrection or civil war.

Discrediting dissent is all in a day’s work for the American press.

What do you know? The hecklers at Trump Jr.’s book-flogging were also known, to the Daily Beast at least, as “Holocaust deniers.” As far as this reader can tell, the group taunting the empty suits on stage for refusing to answer questions had said not a word about the Holocaust. Nor had the disrupters been interviewed by the Daily Beast about their views on the Holocaust.

More to the point: Why is participation in our democracy predicated on one’s views on the Holocaust? What the hell does an individual’s opinion about that topic have to do with his right to solicit answers from members of Donald Trump’s politically active dynasty? I say this as a Jew whose family tree was truncated by the industrial-scale mass murder of millions of Jews that was the Holocaust.

Perhaps the Daily Beast is of the Daily Northwestern’s school of journalism. The Daily Northwestern, a campus Newspaper, had recently said “no” to fact-gathering if this, apparently archaic, journalistic practice proved too unsettling to campus snowflakes.

Yes, Deplorables who aren’t dittoheads have dared to question The Donald.

Many a Deplorable, among them Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, has refused the ditto-head designation. Instead, these dissenters perceive President Trump and his unelected emissaries as reneging on doable promises to build a wall, to place a moratorium on legal immigration, and put the United States and its long-suffering people first.

But to the Daily Beast, these positions are reason to libel those who hold them as awful, Israel-averse anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. Trump voters inquiring about campaign promises hitherto unkept were wrapping “racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic messaging” in the raiment of Trumpism, we were told. (My paraphrase. Beast journos can’t write.)

Contrast the Daily Beast’s emotive, ad hominem laced invective with coverage of the same event by The Guardian, a British daily newspaper.

It was not racists who “drowned out” Trump Jr. and his paramour, but “diehard Make America Great Again conservatives,” reported The Guardian.

It was not the adjudication of the Holocaust that these “hostile conservatives” were demanding, but the need for a “Q and A! Q and A!”

The fury of the “fringe group” was not white-hot racism, but that “of America Firsters who believe the Trump administration is captive to a cabal of internationalists, free-traders, and apologists for mass immigration.”

There was a “factional rift on the Trump-supporting conservative right,” reasoned the Guardian,” intelligently, quipping further that hardly any “triggered” left-wingers were present to “clamor for Trump Jr’s silence.”

In other words, by skedaddling, rather than staying to face the music, the president’s son, ventured The Guardian, had sundered his own case that it was he who was “willing to engage in dialogue, but that it was the left that refused to tolerate free speech.”

And, OMG! Contra the new, woke journalistic credo established by the Daily Northwestern; The Guardian interviewed two dissenters and published their pungent criticism, namely that “the pro-Trump movement was being infected with ‘fake conservatism’ and that the president himself was at the mercy of a cabal of deep state operatives who wouldn’t let him do many of the things he campaigned on”:

“We wanted to ask questions about immigration and about Christianity, but they didn’t want to face those questions.” Not a word about the Holocaust.

As for Donald Trump Jr. and his gal pal Guilfoyle: Dumb in isolation—worse in combination.

* Image via The Quarterly Review

©2019 ILANA MERCER
Townhall.com, The Unz Review,
Quarterly Review, WND.COM
November 14 & 21

The post Is Political Participation Predicated On Views About Holocaust? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

It takes a foreign correspondent planted amid our White House Press Corps to highlight the latter’s dysfunction. During a presser with “Trump of the Tropics”—Brazil’s visiting prime minister, Jair Bolsonaro—a Brazilian lass distinguished herself by focusing exclusively on … hefty matters. When this foreign correspondent asked President Trump about the “OECD,” the furrows on the sloping brows who make up the American press scrum deepened.

To these presstitutes, it mattered not whether America was going to put in a good word for Brazil at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, when there was one overriding, life-or-death matter to tackle:

Trump’s irredeemable, unrelenting, absolute awfulness, which not even an exoneration by the sainted Mr. Mueller has ameliorated.

Yes, Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in the 2016 election. This has altered not a bit the hyperventilating done by the harridans on the ubiquitous television panels.

Let me be clear. When I allude to the women of TV, I include those with the Y Chromosome.

However, other than a few “men”—Don Lemon and his CNN sideshow, Chris Cuomo, come to mind—the housebroken boys on the typical TV panel are tamer than the tarts. Some of the “men” might even be pretending to be temperamentally unhinged in order to hook-up with good-looking girls in the Green Room.

Brooke Baldwin of CNN and Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC continue to spit out Trump news in CAPS, just so you know HOW EACH ONE FEELS DEEP DOWN INSIDE, AND WHO ARE THE ANGELS AND THE DEMONS IN THE STORY. (Donald and his Deplorables are never angels, if you get the drift.)

Not coincidentally, the asphyxiating hysteria matches the vapid vocabulary. TV’s women rob the English language blind, deploying breathy figures of speech to fit a simpleton’s febrile, emotionally overwrought state-of-mind: “Unbelievable, incredibly embarrassing, amazing, OMG!”

This p-ss-poor, teenybopper English comes with sound effects. TV’s tarts all speak in insufferable, grating, staccato, tart tones. At least, that’s how I’ve always described the gravelly voice of the tele-ditz. Believe it or not, such a depiction is no longer politically proper. The voices from hell have been dignified. Explains the Economist,

“Two vocal features are associated with young women: vocal fry and uptalk. Uptalk, as the name suggests, is the rising intonation that makes statements sound like questions? And vocal fry—often said to be typical of Kim Kardashian, an American celebrity—happens at the ends of words and phrases when a speaker’s vocal chords relax, giving the voice a kind of creaky quality.”

Mandatory elocution lessons might ease the viewer’s pain.

Bad English and bad thinking are intertwined. By logical extension, the “ladies” resort reflexively to ad hominen attack. If Trump expresses an opinion, it’s not because he sincerely thinks it or believes it, but because he’s narcissistic, isn’t nice, makes them sad.

As befits the pedestrian minds described, our pig-ignorant panelists (with apologies to pigs) are incapable of grasping the role of government.

TV’s tele-tarts focus not on the role of government, but on the tone of government.

Thus is disagreement cast as diabolical. POTUS dares to dispute the notion that white nationalism is an urgent problem. He has the audacity to dislike John McCain (who is, likewise, despised by many a Vietnam War veteran), and he’s unconvinced a few Russian bots threw the 2016 elections. Trump doesn’t conform. He rejects received opinion. He’s not like all those sinecured, empaneled “normies.” The reality of difference among TV’s distaff sets off the kind of uncontrollable twitching and writhing conjuring medieval mass hysteria. St. John’s dance frenzy, six-hundred odd years ago, for example.

All this is the stuff of tabloids. For the disciplined mind craves data. It craves facts, not folklore. By contrast, devoid of discipline and a sense of propriety, and seeking the warm smell of the Fake-News herd—cable’s cretins escape into gossip, feelings, and fantasy.

The girlie nature of news reportage means a lurch from one scandal to the next. And it’s never about real news. The “Five W’s” journalists are obligated to impart in their coverage no longer count. These were: Who, What, When, Where, Why. Nowadays, the women in control keep it sensational, as opposed to informative and substantive. They pick the most perverse aspect of a story—often entirely imaginary and symbolic—zero in on it and work it, until the next fix presents itself.

And, no, these dames are not nameless phantoms. Here are some of American TV’s more memorable mediocrities:

Yamiche Alcinder (PBS), Ruth Marcus (WaPo), Marie Barf, Jessica Tarlov and Rochelle Ritchie of Fox News, Alexis McGill Johnson, Jackie Speier (politician), Ana Maria Archila, Nomiki Konst and Symone D. Sanders (high-flying Bernie babes both), Asha Rangappa (former FBI, ever Democrat), Michelle Goldberg (atrocious writer at the New York Times), Hallie Jackson (MSNBC), Sarah Westwood (snide at CNN), Emma Brown (WaPo), Shannon Pettypiece (Bloomberg), Catherine Rampell (WaPo), Eliza Collins (USA Today), Maya Wiley (MSNBC), Jessica Valenti (author of “Sex Object”), Liz Plank (cringe factor infinity ∞ at Vox Media), Liz Mair (lite libertarian), Cynthia Alskne (dumps on Donald for MSNBC), Natasha Bertram (The Atlantic), Anne Rumsey Gearan (Washington Post’s White House Reporter); Jennifer Horn (AP News), Neera Tanden (former adviser to BHO and Democratic operative), Adrian de Vogue (CNN Court reporter), Laura Coates (CNN), Xochitl Hinojosa (big wig in the Democratic Party, if you can pronounce her name), Jay-Newton Small (Time magazine), Adrienne Elrod. On and on. These females are interchangeable in opinion and in demeanor.

And here is my modest Swiftian proposal:

It so happens that a hero of the left, mass murderer Mao Zedong, once proposed exporting 10 million Chinese women to the United States. In a long conversation with Henry Kissinger at the Chinese leader’s residence, in February of 1973, Mao moaned about “the dismal trade between the two countries.” China was a “very poor country,” said Mao, with “an excess of women.”

“Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way, you can lessen our burdens,” Mao pleaded in earnest (for he had no sense of humor).

That’s the one and only page America might consider taking out of the Little Red Book—in reverse. Ship the aforementioned to China. Bomb China with American bimbos. Alas, as soon as one prototypical panelist falls away, like sharks’ teeth, another moves in to fill her slot.

**
Previously: The TV Tarts’ Reign Of Terror, Part 1

©2019 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review,
Quarterly Review, Reckonin’
March 28

The post TV Tarts: Cringe Factor Ad Infinitum, Part 2 appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The particular CNN segment I was watching concerned Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. It was meant to help terminate the controversial anchor’s career.

I recognized the sourpuss, dressed in marigold yellow, who was presiding over the seek-and-destroy mission, targeting the ultra-conservative Mr. Carlson.

She was no other than Poppy Harlow.

It transpires that years back, Carlson had routinely called into a Howard-Stern-like shock-jock radio show and made naughty comments, some about women. Women were “extremely primitive,” he had quipped.

To watch the countless, indistinguishable, ruthless, atavistic women empaneled on CNN, MSNBC, even Fox News—one cannot but agree as to the nature and caliber of the women privileged and elevated in our democracy, and by mass society, in general.

They’re certainly not women with the intellect and wit of a Margot Asquith—countess of Oxford, author and socialite (1864-1945). Would that women like Mrs. Asquith were permitted to put lesser “ladies” like CNN’s Ms. Harlow in their proper place.

When asked by American actress Jean Harlow how she pronounces her first name, Margot Asquith shot back, “The ‘t’ is silent, as in Harlow.”

Naturally, you’d have to have a facility with the English language to know what a “harlot” is.

You’d certainly need an education, as opposed to a degree, to recognize the next character referenced.

TV’s empaneled witches and their housebroken, domesticated boys are guided more by the spirit of Madame Defarge than by Lady Justice.

If parents saw to it that kids got an education, not merely a degree, the brats would know who Madam Defarge was.

But our uneducated ignoramuses no longer seek out the greatest literature ever. This is because the best books were penned by the pale, patriarchal penile people. Given this self-inflicted ignorance, few younger readers will know this most loathsome of literary icons, from “A Tale Of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens.

Madame Defarge is the bloodthirsty commoner, who sat knitting, as she watched the en masse public beheadings of innocent aristocrats (17,000 of them) in Paris, during the Reign of Terror, aka the French Revolution, whose symbol ought to be the guillotine. (Another 10,000 perished in prison sans due process.)

America’s modern-day Madam Defarges are the harridans who shrieked in vengeance on TV when a sentencing Judge, T. S. Ellis III, dared to cite Paul Manafort’s “otherwise blameless life.”

Manafort, formerly a Trump campaign adviser, will be jailed for seven-and-a-half years for non-violent “crimes” excavated by Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller, and committed against that most wicked of government departments, the Internal Revenue Service. That a broken, frail, wheelchair-bound man might not die in jail enraged the wicked, pitiless witches of the  networks.

Cheered on by our contemporary Madame Defarges, Manafort’s next sentencing Judge, an angry female, failed to limit her ambit to the application of the law, namely to sentencing. Instead, she lectured the defendant for a demeanor that displeased her, and for an inadequate display of contrition. Judge Amy Berman Jackson subjected a visibly broken Mr. Manafort to a vicious tongue-lashing.

For that the TV harpies rejoiced as one.

Not one bit did the ugly landscape that is the collective mind of TV’s liberal women care that Manafort had also been subjected to double jeopardy. In contravention of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prosecutors simply tweak or reword an indictment just enough to twice or thrice put a defendant “in jeopardy of life or limb” “for the same offense.”

The cable coven was having none of this compassion stuff (that’s for immigrants who murder Americans, not for elderly white men who had worked for Mr. Trump). Mercy? What’s that! Manafort had stolen from the government, shrieked one NBC harridan (the IRS itself being a thieving, corrupt and oppressive entity).

Undeniably, this reign of terror on TV is dominated by women. And they’re as flippant about a new arms race with Russia as they are about jailing individuals for crimes created in the process of conducting a Mueller-like inquisition, with its “storm-trooper tactic” and overweening, extra-constitutional powers. (Is Maria Butina still in solitary, by the way?)

Likewise, the attitude of TV’s females to alleged sex crimes is to drop the word “alleged” and dispatch the accused: guilty! In the lexicon of these feral creatures, whom we watch day-in and day-out gesticulate and fulminate, to be accused of a sex offense is to be guilty of it (unless you’re a ruthless illegal alien who’s raped a helpless cow). Due process? That’s too much of a high-minded abstraction for the average tele-tart.

Then there are the phrases these women deploy and the direction their impoverished discourse invariably leads on the ubiquitous panels:

“It’s not normal!”

“Look at what President Trump just said. Look, he shows more affection toward dictators than democrats.”

“Look at the ‘untraditional nations’ he is befriending, look at the war he is not prosecuting. It’s not normal. Help. Restrain him. Make him ‘normal.’”

The “not normal” refrain issues from the uterine bowels of the tele-tart. It is a visceral cry for conformity, uniformity of thought at all costs.

Never mind that the path to some kind of unity in this fractured, broken country of ours is through peaceful disunity. That, these radical females consider dystopic. They’re unprepared to accept respectful disunity, or accord an opponent respect. It’s a fight to the death—though not theirs.

**

Next: “TV Tarts: Cringe Factor Ad Infinitum, Part 2.”

©2019 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review,
Quarterly Review, Reckonin‘
March 21

The post The TV Tarts’ Reign Of Terror, Part 1 appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

In 2018, Lara Logan left her perch as foreign correspondent for CBS’s “highest-rated, most profitable and best-known program, ‘60 Minutes.’”

She is currently doing the rounds, assuaging “conservative” media’s appetite for celebrity. The latter have a Uriah-Heep like propensity to fawn over swamp-based, defecting, big-name media celebs.

It’s as though Logan is job hunting, on a blond-ambition tour—for she certainly has no news to impart other than a few banal catchphrases. Logan has “revealed,” first to Breitbart podcaster Mike Ritland, that—OMG! —the media are “mostly liberal.”

Yes, Logan has been pontificating about the tritest of truths: the media are liberal.

Ever in search of defecting celebrities around whom to create buzz, the pack dogs of “conservative” media picked up Logan’s scent and gave chase. Mission accomplished.

In a lovey-dovey, public tête-à-tête, Fox News’ Sean Hannity hinted to his higherups at Fox that they should hire Logan. One wishes they’d do this self-congratulatory cable-news porn behind closed doors. Like we don’t already suffer an abundance of Fake News, No-News and salacious news.

Most remarkable was how quick cons were to decorate Logan with a journalistic purple heart for stating-the-obvious-while-filthy-rich—“a hero, she’s committing professional suicide” went their hyperbole.

Again: Logan left CBS in 2018. She always ran with the intellectual herd. It’s now time to reinvent herself after, likely, blowing up one too many roads.

Is it not obvious that Logan is hoping to fill Megyn Kelly’s stilettoes at Fox News? For there is no way in which she could aspire to emulate old-school journalists like Sharyl Attkisson and Sarah Carter for whom Logan offered plaudits on “Hannity.”

Indeed, it would appear that Logan’s blond-ambition tour is to make herself over in the image of women reporters who’ve always embodied a conservative ethos by doing their work with great refinement. For Attkisson and Carter, it’s about the story; not the cleavage.

Not so with Logan, whose career has been marred by a showy exhibitionism as good as Kelly’s—except that Logan is far and away the less brainy of the two celebrity journalists and the more scandal prone (not that scandal would deter “conservatives,” who’ve practically capitulated to the elastic moral standards of the liberals).

In 2008, the former swimwear model made headlines for her role as … “home-wrecker.” Logan had become embroiled in an affair with a married man, while carrying on simultaneously with talented war correspondent Michael Ware (“just a one-night stand”). Her CBS  employers knew the drill: They relocated their wayward correspondent from Baghdad to Washington.

As implied, “the drill” had been rehearsed. To her newly adoring conservative headhunters, Logan has been professing fidelity to the two-source rule of journalism. You verify a story with two independent, primary sources. Little did Logan’s new lapdogs know that CBS had once suspended her for violating the rule on which she harped with Hannity: verifying the hell out of a story. The acid irony is that, while voicing belated outrage over Fake News media, Ms. Logan was relying on her conservative hosts’ lackadaisical research into her own journalistic failings.

Early 2011 saw the uncritical Logan rush to Egypt to slobber mightily over the revolution in that country. At the time, this writer was castigating media over its sickening sentimentality over Egypt, and the impossibility of a happy ending to their celebrated Lotus Revolution, “in a country that had become progressively more Islamic since the 1950s.”

“Mubarak’s dictatorial powers were directed, unjustly indubitably, against the Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim brotherhood,” I had averred. “Unjustly, but probably quite usefully—for now, much to the surprise of the American Idiocracy [Lara included], Islamic fundamentalists had won 61 percent of the vote in Egypt’s first democratic election.” Given these facts, any journalist worth her salt would have known how the Lotus Revolution, which is how the West had dubbed the mess in Egypt, would unfold.

Not America’s female reporters. With Lara in the lead, they rushed headlong to Tahrir Square to celebrate Egypt’s democratic spring. It was a macho Muslim affair, in the main. But distaff America insisted on showing solidarity—and way too much skin—to the generic freedom fighters, who, it turned out, doubled up as common-or-garden variety gropers and rapists.

“This is about freedom,” chirped the deeply silly Lara Logan, before the freedom fighters piled up on top of her. The sick, predictable, sexual assault of this poor Pollyanna occurred on “the day Mubarak stepped down.”

Such are the reality flouting fantasies of the prototypical, progressive female! She believes in humanity’s civilizational sameness and acts accordingly. Duly, Logan had to be rescued. Her rescuers were a few clever—presumably local—sisters, who were, no doubt, clad in the traditional nosebags.

Local sisters are not so dumb as to dress like Lara had been dressed in a country in which the majority (82 percent) supports executing adulterers. Left-liberal women of the West imagine they can flit around the Middle-East or Africa as free as birds, burdened only by overwhelming affection for the exotic beings they encounter.

More reckless than heroic.

Her uber-liberal former employers have praised Logan as a “determined and courageous” correspondent, who “never fails to see and report the human side of conflict, including some of the most horrific stories of our time.”

Platitudes are what media, liberal and con, offer about their own drab homogeneity. A fellow South African expat, the well-to-do Lara Logan has not used her influence to expose the horrors unfolding in our homeland of South Africa. Had Logan done so in 2011, she’d have been authentically heroic.

It’s certainly too late for Logan, who’s been mum about the systematic murder of whites in the country of our birth, to be a hero to South Africans.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
WND.COM, The Unz Review,
Quarterly Review, Praag.org
February 21

* Image courtesy the wrap.

The post Lara Logan: ‘Conservative’ Media’s Latest Blond Ambition appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

When Slate magazine went after President Trump’s former speech writer, Darren Beattie, it chose to libel this writer, as well.

That’s a bully’s calculus: If you can, why not ruin the reputation of another individual, just for good measure?

Ruining reputations by labeling and libeling unpopular others is all in a day’s work for the bully, who has nothing in his authorial quiver but ad hominem attack.

The individual who penned an unsourced hit piece on me is Slate magazine’s designated “chief news blogger.”

A hit piece is “a published article or post aiming to sway public opinion by presenting false or biased information in a way that appears objective and truthful.”

Our intrepid journalist does not even feign objectivity.

Indeed, nothing screams Fake News like a “newsman” engaging in sloppy slander.

Incidentally, double-barreled surnames are largely a feminist affection. “Mathis-Lilley” happens to be male. Or, rather, an excuse for a man. Real men don’t bully, berate and bitch baselessly.

That’s what my many dogged, anti-Semitic, unmanly readers do. (Yes, I’m a Jewish, independent writer, the daughter of a scholarly, penniless rabbi. Bullies invariably target the weakest.)

The Mathis-Lilley article was published on August 20, this year, in the section called “The Slatest.” (Slate does cutesy and corny quite well.)

Mathis-Lilley lies throughout the piece, starting with the title:

“White House Speechwriter Appeared on Panel With Author Who Compared Black South Africans to Cannibals.”

It didn’t happen. No such comparisons were made. Cannibalism serves merely as metaphor in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

The origin of the title is expressly and unambiguously explained in the Introduction. “It is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery.” (p. 8)

The exact Rand quote is citation No. 15 in “Into the cannibal’s Pot.” It comes courtesy of “Robert Mayhew (ed.), Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A (New York, 2005).”

Unlike Mathis-Lilley’s unsourced material in Slate, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” is topped and tailed with hard evidence, and sports over 800 endnotes.

Based on the evidence presented, readers come to see “that South Africans had been tossed into the metaphorical cannibal’s pot.” (p. 9)

These are facts, not slander. Slander is Slate’s purview.

Duly, ignored was my polite request, addressed to Slate’s editors, to let me counter Mathis-Lilley’s lies over their pixelated pages.

After all, did not their chief counsel, Ava Lubell, Esq., promise me in email (Sept. 10, 2018, 4:22 p.m.) that Slate takes “the accuracy of [its] work seriously and would appreciate your identifying what factual inaccuracies you believe the piece contains”?

Yes, she did. Chief counsel for Slate clearly didn’t think Slate’s fidelity to facts was brought into disrepute by an unsound, unfounded cry, straight from the reptilian brain of their news correspondent:

“Ilana mercer is a real piece of work, racism-wise!”

Such puritanical zeal would have landed Mathis-Lilley a spot on Cotton Mather’s “special court to try the witchcraft cases,” in Salem, Massachusetts, circa 1692.

“Goody Mercer, burn her, burn her.” “‘Goody’ was a form of address for women,” in the days when women were offed for so-called sorcery.

In what is “Goody Mercer nee Isaacson” implicated, next?

Why, for the “insanely unsubtle” “cover art of ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.’” “[I]nsanely unsubtle”: Mathis is no wordsmith. His choice of adjectives is positively Kardashian.

The cover art, of course, is the publisher’s purview, not that of the author.

In anticipation of the Mathis-Lilleys of the world, the publisher chose to preface my text with a “Publisher’s Note.”

He wrote:

“[‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot’] is about ideas and ideology. When losing an intellectual argument, there are despicable people who point an accusing finger and shout racism.”

Schooled in epithets, not argument, Mathis-Lilley goes on to claim that Steve Bannon uttered the “N-word,” and that, by extension, I was a sympathizer of such ugly utterances.

Oh, Mathis-Lilley hedges his words all right. Legalistic phrases like “Mercer seems to” bedeck his sub-par prose. But that’s just dirty, dishonest, underhanded writing. Never have I used the language attributed to Bannon.

Never. I could not. I would not.

The daughter of Rabbi Ben Isaacson would never use language so foul about another human being.

Daddy was a noted anti-apartheid activist before it became a fashionable and safe virtue-signaling pastime. The book maligned by Slate’s Mathis-Lilley as “racist” pays homage to dad (who refuses to leave his South Africa), for being “…a leader in the Promethean struggle to end apartheid. Rabbi Abraham Benzion Isaacson’s fight for justice for South Africa’s blacks was inspired by the advanced concept of Jewish social justice showcased in Deuteronomy and in The Prophets. …” (“Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” 2011, pp. 185-186.)

Mathis-Lilley is a pig of a man (with apologies to pigs which I love and do not eat). The woman he dubs “a real piece of work, racism-wise” worked tirelessly against petty apartheid.

A couple of pathos-filled pages in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” detail how, in one single day, with nothing but determination, this “racist” broke a bit of the apartheid bureaucracy, to benefit a beloved domestic worker, Ethel, tribal name Nomasomi Khala. (pp. 70-72)

Accompanied by me, Ethel entered the Department of Home Affairs in Cape Town as a woman whose tribal marriage was unrecognized by the authorities, whose kids (in tow) were without birth certificates, and whose decades of toil left her bereft of state benefits.

Ethel was not in The System. She was stateless. But not for long.

When we departed the Department, that same day, Ethel and Jim, her husband of 25 years, had had their union solemnized by a grumpy magistrate, summoned at my insistence. And the children—bless them, they had dressed to the nines for the occasion—had birth certificates.

Good people, Mathis-Lilley, act. Bad people badmouth.

Next, Slate’s pseudo-newsman contends that “Mercer thinks getting rid of apartheid has been bad for South Africa.”

Lilley lies, again.

“Into the Cannibal’s Pot” condemns apartheid, calling it “one of the world’s most retrogressive colonial systems.” (p. 65) “Apartheid showed a gross disrespect for human rights and international law,” I wrote (p. 222).

What I do condemn in the book is “unrestrained majoritarianism” or “simple majority rule,” as applied in South Africa (and America).

Need I remind the crushingly stupid Lilley that “America’s founding fathers had attempted to forestall raw democracy by devising a republic” (p. 9)?

Lilley likely doesn’t even know that, in mediating the political dispensation in the New South Africa, “Anglo-American elites,” condemned in my book, sidelined South Africa’s indigenous, leading intellectuals, one black (Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi), the other white (Fredrick van Zyl Slabbert).

Both these classical liberals are cited as opposing “unrestrained majoritarianism,” and in support of a “power-sharing constitutional dispensation.” (p. 222)

Both favored “a multi-racial, decentralized federation, in which elites of the various groups agree to share executive power and abide by a system of mutual vetoes and spheres of communal autonomy.”

I write in strong support of the thing instantiated in the U.S. Bill of Rights, “the preservation of the rights of cultural groups and the protection of minorities.” (p. 222)

One last ugly, baseless idea imputed to me by the lying Lilley is that I think “white people shouldn’t support democracy in countries in which they’re a minority population because they will be exterminated by nonwhite savages.”

And I’m the pseudo-intellectual?

Every democratic theorist worth his salt knows that South Africa doesn’t even qualify as a democracy.

The scholarly data cited in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” stipulate that a prerequisite for a classical liberal democracy is that majority and minority status should be interchangeable and fluid; that a ruling majority party should be as likely to become a minority party as the obverse.

By contrast, in South Africa, the majority and the minorities are permanent, not temporary. And voting is strictly along racial lines.

If majority and minority are perpetual or fixed, then government ceases to have a mediating or remedial function. It becomes an instrument of perpetual oppression of the minority by the majority.

That’s untrammeled tyranny.

In the U.S., we still have a rotating duopoly, for what it’s worth. But not for long.

To that I object. Of that I warn.

As regards Ben Mathis-Lilley. Look, this is the Age of the Idiot. Idiots have come into their own in a big way. The Lilliputian Mathis-Lilley is not working with much.

But what’s Slate’s excuse?

©2018 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review,
Quarterly Review,
November 9

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