…[Israelis] don’t have to explain themselves to the world. Israel [should just] focus on the things that make them incredible …their ingenuity, their innovation, their compassion, …on being exceptional. ~ Jared Kushner

Jared, You forgot killing. Israeli pleasures and pastimes are killing. ~ilana

The US is violating Iran’s territorial sovereignty and denying that country’s riparian rights in the waterways that abut its territory. ~ilana

We have a “good negotiating team, the best,” blathered Trump, with respect to the individuals he dispatched to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, April 10, to dictate the terms of surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Team Trump was led by Israel firsters and Israeli assets like Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoaff (sic), and Vice President JD Vance, whose eyeliner only enhances the “degeneracy of manners and morals” he embodies and represents.

I’ll make this very simple. Against the Islamic Republic, victim of the US-Israel’s untrammeled criminality, the president’s men have committed the most egregious crime, the crime of aggression, categorized as such in international customary law—and in all systems of law, codified and uncodified.

By violating Iran’s territorial sovereignty and denying that country’s riparian rights in the waterways that abut its territory—by strafing Iranian cities, targeting life-sustaining infrastructure and industries; hospitals, healers and first responders.; historic sites and schools; wantonly murdering thousands of Iranian people, assassinating esteemed political and scientific leaders—Trump has demonstrated that he has assimilated Israel’s military doctrines. The president of the United States of America has Israelized the US Military and is ‘going Amalek’ on the Jewish State’s designated enemies.

The “accumulated evil,” another legal term invoked in international customary law with respect to the “supreme crime” of unprovoked aggression—this rot is evident in all Trump’s dealings and deeds. It is etched on his decaying Dorian Gray like countenance and is manifest in what is disgorged from the American president’s mouth.

By extension, it was quite clear what tone Trump’s team of choice would set for any and all “negotiation” proceedings with Iran.

Once the talks in Islamabad predictably collapsed, it transpired that Vance had likely been holding all information in reserve for Bibi Netanyahu’s edifications and approval.

Confirmed Netanyahu: “I spoke yesterday with Vice President J.D. Vance. He called me from his plane on his way back from Islamabad. He reported to me in detail, as this administration does every day, about the development of the negotiations.”

One wonders why Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, would sit down at the negotiating table with this coterie. After all, “in a phone call with his German counterpart, … Araghchi had proclaimed that Iran entered the failed April 10/12 talks in Islamabad with full distrust because of the US repeated breaches and betrayals of diplomacy.”

Foreign Minister Araghchi is certainly a class act. Team Trump/Netanyahu are class enemies. To wit, during the farcical negotiations, the US sneakily attempted to breach the Strait of Hurmuz, over which Iran has natural, riparian property rights. Simultaneously, the Washington Post ran an article by Marc Thiessen, a mediocre neoconservative, calling for the assassination of the Iranian negotiators if they refuse to submit.

Was it, then, prudent for Iran’s finest to grace with their presence such proven bad-faith actors? More important still, why trust Israel’s proxies—the detritus of humanity, human waste by any other name—with your life, Mr. Araghchi? Had not Mr. Araghchi’s predecessor, former Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazi and his wife, been murdered in “a targeted United States-Israeli strike on their Tehran home”? Indeed. So, too, is the supreme leader’s successor, Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, said to be languishing after wounds inflicted on him by this merged criminal cabal.

Just how duplicitous and vicious a people are we and our Israeli overlords?

A man is only as good as his word. Knowing that America’s word is shit, the Pakistan Air Force is purported to have “deployed an aerial shield” to escort the Iranian delegation, led by Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf,” safely into Pakistani airspace. On departure, their Pakistani hosts scrambled “advanced fighter jets” to protect the Iranians (to whom they had given a rock-star welcome).

True, one negotiates with foes, not with friends. Known, too, is the bravery and self-sacrifice of the Iranians and their leaders. Hours before his murder by Murder Inc., the equally impressive late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had stated that, as long as 90 million Iranians are without bomb-sheltering bunkers, so too will he, their spiritual leader, remain above ground, outside the shelter. He did. He died.

Iranians and their leaders seem to have so much more love and loyalty in them than their oppressors. But this does not mean you sacrifice your finest to Israel’s American idolaters. Trump and team are capable of surprising calculated, calibrated evil. Jared Kushner, in particular.

Behind Kushner’s sylphlike appearance is a boa constrictor anticipating its next meal. Jared Kushner is the “man,” whose “master plan” for stealing Gaza had been in place for the better part of two years.

That’s correct. Because, when Kushner interests himself briefly in the world at the window, it is to covet things not his. Big things. And Trump’s main “man” in the Middle East does not exactly have a pickpocket’s light fingers.

Kushner is the nepotistic scion of a dodgy New York realtor, a former convict, now Trump’s ambassador to France. Kushner senior’s criminal shenanigans had been described by U.S. District Judge Jose L. Linares as “disgraceful and reprehensible.”

The son, Kushner Jr., an androgynous-looking, empty husk of a “man,” had been coveting the waterfront property belonging to Gazans for some time—openly since February of 2024. At the time, Anthony Blinken, secretary of state under Joe Biden, the previous genocidal America president, had been shuttling to-and-fro on missions to smooth over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, so as to make it more sellable.

As sellable as Jared Kushner had assessed “Gaza’s waterfront property” to be.

In 2025, on the Sunday, October 19 edition of 60 Minutes, a CBS current-affairs program, Mr. Steve Witkoff revealed inadvertently what we had already gathered: Jared and sidekick Witkoaff (sic) had “been working for two years,” and “Jared had been pushing ‘it.’”  “It” being the grand theft of Gaza, following the commission of the genocide by the Israelis, enthusiastically aided by two American administrations.

Back in March of 2024, in a repulsive vignette, Ivanka’s spouse had let slip that the Gaza “waterfront property could be very valuable.” Kushner was speaking to an audience at an elite American university, which he had been invited to regale. (That tells you all you need to know about the quality—and elan—of intellectual and moral discourse in the USA.)

“I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now,” mused little Lord Fauntleroy to the audience at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Middle East Initiative, “and I’m looking at the situation [in Gaza] and I’m thinking: What would I do if I was there?

Less enlightened people like you and me would want to flood the zone, Gaza, with good food. Minister to the sick and the injured. Rebuild residences destroyed. Exact reparations for survivors. Serve the culprits in their thousands with subpoenas to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. See that these Israelis and their enablers are punished and their victims made whole.

You know, petty quotidian stuff.

Not Kushner. His calculus is different: 

… I would just bulldoze something in the Negev; I would try to move people in there … I think that’s a better option, so you can go in and finish the job. … I do think right now opening up the Negev, creating a secure area there, moving the civilians out, and then going in and finishing the job would be the right move.

Soon to follow was Trump’s first gaudy production dubbed the Gaza Plan. After that, late in January of 2026, came Kushner’s Davos Master Slave Plan. There, the dull-witted Zionist presented a garish, hideous slide show to some of the world’s wealthiest men, who paraded their greed for the property of the most imperiled people, the Palestinians.

Parenthetically, I’ll say that I’m sick of Gaza being reduced to no more than an “open-air concentration camp.” Legally, this is true. But Gaza before the Holocaust was quite beautiful, certainly unique. It was a quaint community with a character and a history, some of it ancient. All of it well reflected in its public spaces. Gaza had nothing of the vulgar gilt of a Trump tower. To compare Gaza of yore to the Gaza dreamt up in the Kushner consortium’s Master Slave Plan for the Strip is like comparing a centuries-old church with the heavily adorned Trump White House and White House ballroom.

With Jared, you just don’t know when he will strike. You just know it’ll be as fast as a snake’s thrust. Kushner’s contacts, of course, came to him quick, “by marriage rather than merit.” Jared used his first White House stint, during the first Trump administration, to secure certain connections. “Monetized access,” Fortune Magazine calls it.

Kushner’s firm, Kosher Finances (fine, my tongue here is firmly in my cheek), “earns more than $US80 million a year looking after the money of “Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS), United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohammad Bin Zayed (known as MBZ); and Emir of Qatar Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.” So reports the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Trump, like Kushner and Jewish-Israelis (93 percent of whom support a continued assault on Iran), is outside all moral gravitational pull. Put it this way: You don’t have to marry a Trump to get Trump to betray America.

When the hostile bids for TikTok, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery were initiated by Larry Ellison—the multi-billionaire who is the Israel Defense Forces’ largest donor, supporter and promoter—Trump jumped to it.

Ellison, who is heavily invested and vested in the IDF and their necro-industry, successfully led a Trump-approved financial putsch on American media conglomerates that’ll entirely curtail, even criminalize, speech critical of Israel.

Let not Kushner’s cool antiseptic façade conceal that he is a limbic creature whose deadpan delivery helps him to push the boundaries of propriety and exploit gentile slavishness. Until he can’t. For a while, he was all in on some of the Ellison schemes, ostensibly trying to tilt the bid to favor Ellison. Until he was not. Jared suddenly withdrew his involvement on December 8, 2025.

Luckily for him, Pater had matters in hand. Putty in Israeli hands; Trump muscled TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell their company—it had allowed unfettered pro-Palestine content—to Ellison. That was the end of the voices of so many of us. Especially affected were America’s impassioned young, at whose expense Trump was greatly and illegally enriched, claiming at minimum $10 billion as his TikTok deal ‘brokerage fee’.

Kushner and Trump are certainly partners in vice. In-and-out of “the Warner brawl between Paramount and Netflix.” In-league with the House of Saud, and “backed by Saudi billions”—all that remained was to put Kushner in charge of negotiating with Iran.

Memorably, on the same edition of 60 Minutes mentioned above, and with the fey charm of a state-cutter (a coroner) preparing to carve a corpse, Kushner shrugged a slender shoulder, and languidly mused the following about the genocide in Gaza. The full exchange for the reader’s edification:

LESLEY STAHL: Before the hostages actually come out, you decide to go to Gaza.  …And what did you see?
JARED KUSHNER: it looked almost like a nuclear bomb had been set off in that area. And then you see these people moving back. And I asked the IDF, ‘Where are they going?’ Like, I’m looking around. These are all ruins. And they said, ‘Well, they’re going back to the areas where their destroyed home was, onto their plot, and they’re gonna pitch a tent.’ And it’s very sad, because you think to yourself, they really have nowhere else to go.
LESLEY STAHL: Would you say now, having been there, that it was genocide?
JARED KUSHNER: No. No.
STEVE WITKOFF: Absolutely not. No, no, there was a war being fought.

Reflexively, Kushner refers to Palestinians as “these people.” They, the Palestinians, are perceived as many times removed from the waxy perfection that are Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump. Or, from the perfection of their serial-killer hosts, the divinely appointed Israelis.

So, Kushner, who cannot conceive of the Palestinians as being the proper owners of the land on which they now live homeless—and who plans to appropriate land in which Palestinians have inalienable title—the same Kushner is fit to negotiate with the protectors of the Palestinians, the Iranians?

What am I saying?! The Kushners don’t even see Palestinians as beings. They have, however, made a religion of Israel’s uncontested superiority.

To correspondent Lesley Stahl’s contention that “Israel has become increasingly isolated because of this ‘war’—because of the pounding in Gaza”—and to her attendant inquiry about “what [Israelis] need to do … to—reestablish the good reputation they had”; Kushner never for once bared his fangs. In dizzy rapture over Israel, Kushner intoned quietly:

…[Israelis] don’t have to explain themselves to the world. I think this war has taken a big toll. But if Israel focuses on the things that make them incredible, which is their ingenuity, their innovation, their compassion, they focus on creating and—and just being exceptional, I think that in a couple years from now you’ll see Israel going from controversial to very, very popular again on the world stage.” (CBS News)

That’s right. Israel can do no wrong. The Jewish State has effectively asserted, and been granted by its Western lobbies, a birthright to do genocide, extended to southern Lebanon, which Team Trump says falls outside of its faux ceasefires.

Consequently, and with American imprimatur, Israel is on a “genocidal rampage” in Southern Lebanon, where it blew-up 350 human beings in the span of minutes, on April 9, and where its genocidal forces are erasing village after villages—a way of life—as well as entire city blocks in Beirut’s Dahiya neighborhoods.

To which Trump has responded by huddling even closer: The American president continues to play procurer and pimp for Israel. Team Trump’s message to Israel is, “just be the lovelies that you are.”

To the civilization of Iran, however, Israel’s American flunkies are full of sound and fury. Your “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” (1). “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” (2)

As if his violent actions so far have not already placed Trump in succession as the most evil individual in the world, he now threatens to blockade a waterway in which Iran has God-given, natural riparian property rights.

**********

Post your comments here: https://barelyablog.com/new-team-netanyahutrump-sinks-iran-talks-kushner-beefs-up-rap-sheet/#comments

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, April 15
LewRockwell.com, April 17

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.

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The post Team Netanyahu/Trump Sinks Iran Talks; Kushner Beefs Up Rap-Sheet appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The hotter the housing market, the higher the homelessness ~ilana

The egalitarians have appropriated the anti-zoning argument. They now malign single-family neighborhoods in favor of promoting density, which is—wouldn’t you know it?—more expensive and thus more lucrative ~ilana

Trust the late, much-missed Anthony Bourdain, the Kerouac of cooking, to blurt out the truth when nobody else would as to the root causes of homelessness. Other than libeling the poor as mental drug addicts, the rest—conservatives and liberals in cahoots—call for denser development (as greedy developers lick their chops), and certainly none of those dreamy picket fences for the poor.

Following his Jack Kerouac wanderlust, Bourdain had arrived in Seattle to spotlight the manner in which high-tech was changing the city, draining it of its character and of the many quirky characters that made Seattle what it was.

“Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Expedia, and Amazon are the big dogs in town,” mused  Bourdain. “A flood of them—tech industry workers, mostly male, derisively referred to as tech boys or tech bros—is rapidly changing the DNA of the city, rewiring it to satisfy their own newly-empowered nerdly appetites.”

That the “tech boys” “are so dull,” as members of a Seattle band say—and sing—in no way assuages their heated effect on the housing market. A street artist called “John Criscitello … told Bourdain how the high-tech influx has driven up housing costs and forced artists [like himself] out of the neighborhood.”

Yes, Big Tech is exacerbating homelessness in Seattle and the surrounds. While correlation is not causation,

The ongoing and never-ending, annual importation of a sizable feudal elite from China and India must be factored into the homelessness equation

“Buoyed by the city’s thriving technology industry, Seattle has consistently been the hottest housing market in the nation.” Commensurate with the explosion in the number of Seattle neighborhoods in which homes cost $1 million has been an explosion in the region’s homeless population.

“Households must earn about $140,000 a year to afford mortgage payments – nearly double the city’s typical income,” but on par with the “average base pay” of a software engineer in the Seattle area.

Some consciousness of guilt was evinced by Microsoft. The company threw money at a problem to which it has greatly contributed. In 2014, Microsoft allocated $500 million toward low-income housing, because, somehow, working-class families who should be inching into middle-class were sliding into poverty, unable to afford homes in Seattle and its surrounding counties.

“There are more families with children than chronically homeless people” in the homeless encampments, revealed the Seattle Times. “Fewer than 50 percent of people without homes are addicts.” Underlying homelessness are factors such as “loss of a job,” “eviction,” “medical bills and foreclosure,” the last of which “destroys credit ratings, making former homeowners no longer eligible for loans or, in many cases, rentals.”

Among her homeless acquaintances, local writer Lola Peters counts “[a] seamstress, her mortgage broker husband and their two children.” “Several couples going through the breakup of long-term relationships. A nurse. The middle-aged couple who owned their home and two nearby rental houses. A woman, with a 4-year-old child, who lost her job shortly after moving to Seattle. A floral delivery worker. A painter.”

“They are not alcoholics or drug addicts,” protests Peters, an activist. “They are people who suffered as a result of political and economic decisions they had no part in.” Indeed, data cobbled together in Aaron Carr’s essay, “Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong,” very clearly expose the mental illness and drug addiction casual factors as so much libel.

And it’s not only Seattle and its suburbs that are filled with suffering, marginalized Americans.

Via CBS News comes the unwelcome news that, “Even with rising wages and falling mortgage rates, Americans can’t afford a home in more than 70 percent of the country. Out of 473 U.S. counties analyzed in a report, 335 listed median home prices more than what average wage earners could afford, according to a report from ATTOM Data Solutions.”

Driven by an unending influx of immigrants, realtor.com certainly revels in the tight housing market created by immigration central-planners:

“[S]waths of America have seen local housing fundamentally altered by an influx of new immigrant groups. There are now about 42 million immigrants from just about every country in the world living in the U.S., making up about 13 percent of the overall population, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.”

“Immigrants are a big driving force for housing markets across the nation,” says Kusum Mundra, an economics professor at Rutgers University, Newark. “Most want the American dream, which is to own a home.”

With The World clamoring for the American Dream, the average home in the U.S. will soon cost half a million dollars. “Rents are rising much faster than income, while the median home price in some 200 cities is $1 million.”

“Homelessness—perhaps the most extreme form of poverty—is a symptom, surging in high-cost cities,” notes The Economist. “The problem,” moreover, “is most acute in America’s most-thriving cities, the ones governed by unabashed liberals. In 2018, New York estimated its homeless population to be over 79,000, or 48 percent more than in 2010. … California now accounts for one in four homeless Americans.”

“Unabashed liberal” outfits like The Economist, The Brooking Institute and the Seattle Times blame inadequate supply for the housing crisis, ignoring the demand side of the supply-and-demand housing equation whereby, “Big Tech is permitted to petition The State for permission to import The World at a price heavily subsidized by the disenfranchised American taxpayer. Through government immigration policies, a ceaseless demand for housing has been generated.”

In particular does the Economist implicate “local control over zoning” for “poor housing supply.”

ZONING REGULATIONS, historically—whereby municipal governments decide “what parts of the city will be industrial, residential or commercial”—are indeed linked to high-cost housing. However, city planners have been determining where people live, work and do business for close on a century. Pure market forces and the price system have been absent in city planning for a very long time.

It is, therefore, more edifying to survey the special interests currently involved in the anti-zoning debate. Tellingly, these are the grubby interests of the developers, the realtors and the municipalities, hunkering after more property taxes. All are, inadvertently, protesting the idea of the “Single-family home that offers people a chance at traditional, white-picket fence home-ownership.”

Development fiends all hunger for the revenues that come from “dense housing,” namely “any housing that’s attached to another unit, often in taller buildings: apartments, condos, town homes, row houses.”

Against this background, it seems clear that the egalitarians have appropriated the anti-zoning argument. They now malign single-family neighborhoods in favor of promoting density, which is—wouldn’t you know it?—more expensive and thus more lucrative. Dense living also jibes with the progressive climate agenda to corral as many people possible into rent-a-bed, pod-living arrangements.

To the working poor, the new cellblock units that replace single-family homes are worse than useless, as they cost so much more than the (often conveniently condemned) homes torn down.

No wonder The Economist clucks in outrage against “local control over zoning.” As ruthless and reckless as it is, local government is more likely than state or federal governments to be responsive to the petitions of single-family homeowners against building “dense housing,” to accommodate Jeff Bezos’ H-1B visa arrivals.

The World is the American multinational’s labor marker. The housing market in the U.S. reflects that reality. Unburdened by brains, pundits and politicos remain incurious as to why supply and demand in housing can never be brought into a semblance of a balance in such a perversely globalized labor market.

READ PART I: “Slandering The Homeless: Mass Immigration, Not Mental Disease & Addiction”

* Image credit: The Unz Review

©2023 ILANA MERCER
WND, March 30
Unz Review, March 30
The New American, March 30
Townhall.com, March 31

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It matters not that the few “Republican governors crusading against vaccine mandates are [allegedly] facing significantly lower approval ratings on their handling of the coronavirus pandemic than their counterparts,” as Politico purports. (Don’t believe Politico!)

What matters are governors like Texas’ Greg Abbott, who “flat-out banned vaccine requirements, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, followed up by vowing to sue the Biden administration.”

These two governors are unique in upholding natural, inalienable, individual rights—the right of self-ownership, bodily dominion; the stuff mocked by President Joe Biden, wearing a ghoulish grin.

Biden’s remark came at a recent, highly contrived CNN townhall, during which “moderator Anderson Cooper noted that as many as one in three emergency responders in some major cities are refusing to comply with city vaccine mandates.”

“I’m wondering where you stand on that,” inquired Cooper. “Should police officers, first responders be mandated to get vaccines? And if not, should they be mandated to stay at home, let go?”

“Yes, and yes,” replied the president.

Disinterred for the day, Biden went on to mock the quaint notion of bodily autonomy with a demented quip, “I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID. I mean, come on, freedom.”

Were our representatives to frame the vexatious question of vaccine mandates in the correct language of natural rights—self-ownership and individual privacy—we’d get the right answers, more likely to be followed by rights-upholding legislation.

But are Republican representatives doing so? Are our representatives who art in D.C. doing anything but wait in Tucker Carlson’s green room?

When it comes to Covid-19, only the following arguments are permissible as an objection to the Covid vaccine mandate. “Exemptions from employer-mandated coronavirus vaccines [are] in [these] three general areas: natural immunity, religious objection, [and] medical objection.”

One hears also a perfectly calm case being made on the Left for outcome-based coercion: rights-violations work well to bring about vaccine-compliance, so let’s violate us some rights.

Dr. Leana Wen’s positions reveal the scandal of coercion:

Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, said she approves of the administration’s push for employer-based mandates because “frankly nothing else was working.”

Nowhere is a rights-based argument being made, or an argument based on the right to question the safety of the vaccine. Nowhere are individual sovereignty and self-ownership mentioned.

Indeed, Republicans prattle about religious exemptions (state granted!) and natural-immunity based exemptions (state granted!)—but they have not the faintest urge to defend the natural, God-given right of self-ownership.

Enough then of the cheering for the ineffectual GOP and its front men and women, who arrive in the Idiocracy’s version of Rome, only to do nothing, decade after decade. Oh, yes, they turn in appearances on TV and before congressional committees; get lucrative book deals, and consolidate political and corporate power for a lifetime.

But as the West careens toward the Covid-centered anthill society, nobody identifies and defends the individual’s dominion over his body and his right to reject the Pharma-State’s Hemlock prescription for that body. As emphasized, Republicans’ case against Covid mandates indirectly capitulates to coercion.

Historically, this has certainly been the case. During an October 19 appearance on the “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” civil-rights attorney Harmeet Dhillon explained the genesis of the current COVID corporate tyranny. Business is allowed to screen out and reject employees based purely and solely on their Covid vaccine status. The GOP (RIP) has, over decades, authored and facilitated laws the outcome of which is the current corporate tyranny. This fact needs the widest publicity possible.

Meantime, we have the ruling class, an example being New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, boasting about having created an additional two classes of people in her diabolical democracy, where might makes right: the unvaccinated underclass (villains all) and the vaccinated upperclass (virtuous).

In similar vein, an Austrian chancellor revealed his plans to place Austria’s unvaccinated under house arrest. Stateside, Noam Chomsky, a progressive “intellectual,” wants to see the unvaccinated underclass reduced by the state to a “Hunger Games” type fight to survive: sequestered, waiting until dark to scrounge for scraps.

Explore these and other Hard Truths with David Vance and ilana mercer:

“Toward The Covid-Centered Anthill Society: Nobody Identifies & Defends The Individual Right Of Self-Ownership”:

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, October 28
Townhall.com, October 28
American Greatness, October 30
Unz Review, October 28
The New American, October 29
CNSNews.com, November 1

The post Self-Ownership And The Right To Reject The Pharma-State’s Hemlock appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our country is not to be equated with the Capitol.

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

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I’m not even sure one can still speak freely about theoretical matters. Nevertheless, against the background din of “insurrection” charges against MAGA America, I’ve tried to distill the hardcore libertarian take regarding the storming of the Capitol Building, on January 6, in a brief YouTube clip

It is very plainly this: Principled libertarians will distinguish pro-Trump patriots from the armed wing of the Democratic Party: Black Lives Matter, Antifa and other criminal riffraff.

BLM rioters trashed, looted and leveled their countrymen’s private property, their livelihoods and businesses, doing billions in damages.

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

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

Wrong!

Principled libertarians, very plainly, think the opposite.

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

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

The State is, after all, an entity that, by definition, forsakes the legitimate defense of the lives, liberty and property of its citizens.

The State’s standard operating procedure is to fleece us without so much as flinching, shake us down, so as to fatten its members and increase their sphere of influence.

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

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

There, I’ve said it!

It’s no secret that rock-ribbed libertarians—as opposed to the lite, fluffy establishment libertarian—view the State, certainly in its current iteration, as a criminal enterprise. For it operates with force and without the consent of the governed.

If you are tempted to argue this theoretical point, think only of the meaning of the 2020 election:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our country is not to be equated with our Capitol.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, February 4
Unz Review, February 4
Quarterly Review, February 6

The post Trumpeting The Hardcore Libertarian Take On Jan. 6 Capitol Incident appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

When Uncle Sam threatens some blighted and benighted region of the world—ostensibly on behalf of the American People and for the region’s own good—our representatives call it peace through strength.

It is then that ordinary Americans are encouraged to pipe up in praise of the State’s invariably Orwellian peace-through-strength strategies.

Peace through strength on our front porches, while being menaced by lowbrow looters and assorted louts? For that you can be incarcerated in the land where the criminal roams free.

And when practiced by pale faces, our Second Amendment rights, exercised on the perimeter of our properties, as we stand vigil against the vilest of human beings—that’s tantamount to white supremacy and privilege.

Witness the fate of some courageous home owners (the McCloskeys of St. Louis, Missouri) exercising age-old rights—also American constitutional rights—when they ventured out onto their verandas with firearms, intending to stand their ground and deter mobs from overrunning hearth and home.

Good people standing their ground were libeled and charged as criminals. Since these home owners did nothing illicit in the natural law, state authorities had to cunningly conjure charges against their naturally licit stance of deterrence.

Law-abiding Americans who practiced deterrence, or peace through strength, have all-too-often been prosecuted by a justice system characterized by institutional rot.

The Law of Rule

We live under the law of rule, not the rule of law. And the law of rule favors the criminal class. Be they illegal voters, criminal aliens, or just good old vandals, rapists and murderers—the criminal class is now the armed wing of the Democratic Party.

Duly, the Black Lives Matter and Antifa militia continue to riot in cities across the country. Their “best” work is currently being carried out in the Pacific Northwest, where the degenerate, libertine political climate is seemingly most conducive to legalized crime.

For Americans, reality is refracted through the Fake News cartel and the Deep-Tech manipulated search engine and social media. Try using the search engines to ferret out current news about “riots”—and what these’ll yield is only news about the January 6, storming of the U.S. Capitol building. Not a thing about the Democratic Party’s proxy riots ongoing elsewhere.

Entire city blocks in downtown Seattle and Portland have been commandeered with impunity by these criminals. They face no censure. From licentious city and state leaders, the rioters get not much more than mild rebuke and permissive gestures of good will (although Ted Wheeler, mayor of Portland, outrageously pepper-sprayed a BLM nasty when his own bodily integrity was threatened).

Riots have been a nightly happening in Oregon for eight straight months, including on the inauguration of Joe Biden, when more than 150 insurrectionists besieged “the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement building in Portland’s south waterfront.”

You know by now that when Black Lives Matter dreck roam the country intimidating, bullying, killing cops and ordinary countrymen, targeting and knocking out whites; defiling and destroying public monuments, sacking state capitols and courthouses; burning and looting the property of their fellow Americans—that this insurrection against MAGA America amounts to no more than an exercise of free speech and “peaceful protest.”

Parallel events have become a feature in the City of Seattle, where the same insurrectionists, who turn on their neighbors, continue to target businesses and courthouses and assault the police. Tacoma has also been engulfed by America-hating Antifa militia, targeting police for daring to protect people and their property.

Ad nauseum have we heard TV’s ugly mugs channel MLK to rationalize and normalize violent insurrection against MAGA America (a term used here to signify decent, non-deviant, likely non-Democratic America).

“A riot is the language of the unheard,” they chanted from their walled-off, rarified zip codes. The “billions being paid out in insurance claims,” they tell us, are mostly for peaceful protests, amounting to mere “isolated instances of property destruction.” Or, so goes the farrago of misinformation spread by the lying, malpracticing media about the terrifying carnage unleashed in hundreds of cities across the U.S.A., courtesy of Black Lives Matter and their Democratic shock troops.

Peace-Through-Strength For The People

During months of mayhem, in 2020, the message to law-abiding Americans, from city, town, county council members and other legislators, Republican and Democrat, came loud and clear: You’re on your own. Neither police nor politicians are coming to protect what’s left of your businesses or your banal, little bourgeoisie life. You’re just not that important. You have no causes, no clout, and, consequently, no constitutional rights.

More often imperiled in law-of-rule America are home and business owners and their valiant protectors. Tired of waiting on a neutered, coopted, infiltrated and compromised police and politicians to come to the rescue, law-abiding taxpayers practiced peace through strength on their properties.
Young Kyle Rittenhouse, for example, came to the rescue in Kenosha. A folk hero was born in September of 2020, and it was not George Floyd. For that, the feds jailed young Kyle.

From Fishtown, Philadelphia, to Snohomish, Washington, as columnist Jack Kerwick has chronicled, civilians resisted the rabble, in stories of organized self-defense that’ll warm the cockles of your heart.

What better way is there to keep the peace than for the righteous to deter the rabble! Meant for “The People,” alas, peace through strength increasingly is the province of the state, and not the sovereign individual.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, January 28
Townhall.com, January 28
American Greatness, January 31
Unz Review, January 28
Quarterly Review, January 29

The post The Ongoing Insurrection Against MAGA America appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Hardcore libertarians differentiate between pro-Trump patriots and Black Lives Matter detritus.

BLM rioters trashed, looted and leveled their countrymen’s private property, their businesses.

Democratic stormtroopers harassed their fellow Americans—meek men and women in eateries, in shopping malls, in the inner sanctum of their homes—often forcing innocents to kneel or recite repulsive, self-incriminating racial catechisms.

These Mao-like cultural revolutionaries descended like locusts on places where their fellow Americans shop and socialize, sadistically threatening, and often visiting, physical harm upon their countrymen, unless they knelt before them like slaves.

In contrast, the ragtag men and women of the MAGA movement stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State.

Yet, in reply to the fact that “entire cities were burned to the ground” by the Left’s militarized BLM troops, some of the staunchest of conservatives, staffers at Breitbart, are purported to have concluded, in error, that “storming the Capitol building” is much worse than “than burning down strip malls.”

Wrong!

Hardcore libertarians, very plainly, think the opposite. Like us or not, the radical, libertarian propertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway—will strongly disagree with the contention of the Trump-blaming Breitbarters.

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

For the State is an entity that, by definition, forsakes the legitimate defense of the lives, liberty and property of its citizens. The State’s standard operating procedure is to fleece us without flinching, all the better to fatten its members and, reflexively, to increase their sphere of influence.

Libertarians who live by the axiom of nonaggression will always prefer the man who proceeds against the State, governed as it is by force, to the man who destroys private property, rooted as that institution is in peaceful, just, voluntary transactions.

There, I’ve said it!

It’s no secret that rock-ribbed libertarians—as opposed to the lite, establishment libertarian—view the State, certainly in its current iteration, as a criminal enterprise. For it operates with force and without the consent of the governed.

If tempted, foolishly, to argue this theoretical point, think only of the meaning of the 2020 election, whereby 81,283,098 million people, or 51.3 percent of those who voted, not of the people, get to impose their will on 74,222,958, or 46.8 percent of the voters, as well as on the millions who didn’t vote.

Moreover, and since we are no longer a republic in which central authorities have only limited and delimited powers—all the people in the commonwealth are compelled to do as the Permanent State and the newly minted state dictate.

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

Which is why, incidentally, Tucker Carlson’s question to a guest on his eponymous Fox News show, the other day, was so misguided.

The young lady’s two small businesses had been bankrupted by her state’s brutal lockdown regimen, which targeted her tiny enterprises, but not the big-box retailers around them. Why was she still paying her taxes, Tucker inquired?

Really?

Taxes are not voluntary. The State is not based on the principle of voluntary association. Tucker ought to try to withhold his taxes. Fail to fork over the shakedown funds extracted by the syndicate that is the State—and you’ll find yourself in a cell.

Incontestably, your money, as a private individual working in the private economy, comes from the avails of your labor and is 100 percent yours in natural law. As such, you should be able to withdraw it from an agency that doesn’t serve you—and even harms you—to give to one that does. But you can’t.

For that peaceful act of financial secession, the State will deprive you of your liberty.

Expose the Welfare-Warfare Surveillance State in all its depredations—and you’ll find yourself entombed forever, like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden (who, at least, lives free in Russia).

“What I saw in the Capitol on January 6,” lamented Never Trumpkin Matt Labash, at the Spectator, “made me physically sick… I couldn’t tell the difference [between the] Red Hats [and Antifa]. They [the Red Hats] were desecrating something they pretend to love.”

Truth be told, to the non-statist libertarian, those “citadels of democracy” mean very little that is good. Loss of life we lament—but the song-and-dance about the storming of those citadels of statism we consider overheated.

Our country is not to be equated with our Capitol.

Certainly, sickening is the cowardice of the garrison city-state that is Washington, D.C. In particular, the way the political parasites who comprise it are shielding themselves from us, as they deny us the right to protect private property from them and from their moral emissaries, Black Lives Matter.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND.COM, January 21
Unz Review, January 21
American Greatness, January 24
Quarterly Review, January 24

Short, YouTube version, also on Rumble:

*Image courtesy The Mirror

The post A Hardcore Libertarian Take On The Storming Of The Capitol Building appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

AS A COINAGE, DEEP TECH is superior to Big Tech. It better captures the deforming power and tentacular reach into state and civil society of the high-tech monopolists.

That reach notwithstanding, many libertarian-minded and “small-government conservatives” (a contradiction in terms, considering the national debt is $28 trillion) have been stalwart defenders of the rights of Deep Tech to deploy unprovoked financial force to kneecap those users who don’t conform to the tech oligarchy’s monolithic notion of the new Ideal Citizen.

David French, writer at the Dispatch—and one of the many political dwarfs tossed periodically at Donald Trump, by Never Trumpsters (hey, dwarf tossing is a cruel sport)—emphasized the immutable right of private platforms to de-platform (limit and throttle) “millions of Americans who engage in wrongthink,” the president included.

LET DISSIDENTS EAT CAKE

Let the disenfranchised—those of us who’re routinely blocked from being able to grow our appeal and peddle our intellectual products, now fearful that our books will be digitally burned—create platforms of their own, exhorts French, from the comfort of his conformingly banal, pixelated perches.

“Find other off-ramps,” advised podcaster David Rubin affectatiously.

Coming from the conformist mediocracy that runs Conservatism Inc., this cynical suggestion is the equivalent of, “Let them eat cake,” which, in practice, means let political dissidents go dark or resort to a barter economy.

You might not know it, but financial de-platforming has been a staple of many a long-suffering American dissident’s working life. Financial de-platforming is when you are barred from banking or transacting via PayPal. It is an “existential threat to free speech in America,” inveighed Revolver News.

This observation both trivializes what’s afoot and misses the point, for financial de-platforming teeters on violating another’s natural right to make a living.

How do you make a living if you can’t bank? Do you revert to a barter economy? A book for some bread? Go underground? Hunker in home-based industries? Keep afloat by word of mouth? Go door-to-door? Oh, I know: Beat the tom-tom drum, if your email service is severed, given that our email accounts and other server-supported facilities are currently under threat, too, with nary a remedy from fat-cat representatives (screw Josh Hawley’s book).

FLOUTING THE SPIRIT OF CIVIL RIGHTS

As a social-media platform, Parler has been found lacking by the Deep Tech overlords, simply because it sports a different business model.

Deep Tech restricts speech to comport with its censorious, progressive and politically correct, do-or-die guiding lodestars. Parler’s business model, however, is based on more free speech, not less of it.

Quislings such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter quickly colluded in flagrant violation of the American pro-competition sensibility, and flouting the spirit, if not the letter, of civil rights law, to financially segregate, banish and cripple irksome people and enterprises, Parler, in our example. Quick to ape them were other fearful vendors, lawyers, for example.

“Whatever Trump did, there is no excuse for what happened to Parler,” protested David Sacks, a liberal.

“Barring businesses from using online payment systems,” seconded Never Trumper Bari Weiss, “removing companies from the App Store; banning people from social media—these are the equivalent of telling people they can’t open a bank account or start a business or drive down a street.”

Nice, but Weiss failed to analytically distill the meaning of that prohibition:

“[T]elling people they can’t open a bank account or start a business or drive down a street” is the equivalent of informing them they might not be able to make a living, despite the fact that they are innocent; their only offense is to type or waft words into the ether.

“This is the fate of Parler, courtesy of the Amazon webserver. No such thing as monopoly power? No such thing as deformed, economic gigantism? My a-s!”

I had tweeted out the above in disgust, appended to a screen picture of the following ubiquitous nullity: “We’re having trouble finding Parler; check your network connection.”

“Stop with the monopoly talk,” admonished a diehard ideologue, in reply. “You sound like the government interventionists of the Progressive Era.”

Yes, let the unfettered market-place, peaceful and slow, remedy the speedy and deadly aggression of our tech enemies, who come at us in war, not peace.

This, as the conformists persist in puling, “build your own platforms.” Right. Parler was ever so confident The Competition would be happy for its business. As was I.

For its confidence, Parler was subjected to a coordinated financial attack; dealt an unwarrantedly aggressive, financial death knell. The social-media platform was forthwith robbed of its value, even though it was not the aggressor in a dispute it did not pick—Parler had not defaulted on its financial obligations, and it didn’t defraud its users or vendors.

So, how do conservatives create an “alternative” to Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter, when these are conglomerates whose revenues are greater than “the GDP of four of the G20 nations”; and when “they are, collectively, more powerful than most, if not all, nation states”?

And when, more importantly, the men and women of Deep Tech no longer have products on their megalomaniacal, petty minds, but politics.

STRUCTURED LIKE A PETROSTATE

When Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon were growing up, they wanted to be government. Now they are!

Think about this: These are “businesses” whose political plank dwarfs their economic and technological raison dêtre: Work for them and you’ll quickly learn that it’s about minorities before merit, foreign over native born, women above everybody and everything, and white men who’re made to go to the back of the org—although, given their legendary facility with engineering, honky is made to do double duty for all the deadwood hired.

And, everything in deeply ignorant Deep Tech is done by the book—the White Fragility book, a favorite “teaching” tool of the barely-literate tools in the Human Resources department.

The profit-structure, moreover, within many a Deep Tech company is reminiscent of that of an Arab Petrostate. Billions flow top down, from these sheik-dominated organization—Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos—to their pet political fiefdoms, within each of their respective companies. There, navigating politics is more valuable than making products.

Dissident Americans take comfort in the fact that our leper-like ouster—de-platforming, financial and other—is executed by private companies. Discrimination, aver the libertarian-minded among us, is the prerogative of private property. Or, so we console ourselves. We’re safe, for aggression for the sake of aggression, as we libertarians have long maintained, is the modus operandi of the state, not of free enterprise.

Yet, here we are! In more effectively banishing people and their products from market, private multinationals are posing a serious competition to the State.

And therein lies the rub. Fresh theoretical thinking about the meaning of Deep Tech begins with an understanding that we live and labor under tyrannical corporate statism, or tech-dominated statism. Free-market capitalism remains the “unknown ideal.”

Parler’s sudden (temporary, we hope), financial demise was no natural death; it came not by dint of economic failure, but due to untoward, unwarranted financial force—economic aggression of the most cowardly kind, wielded by economic enemies, and rooted in political enmity.

In defending Deep Tech’s prerogative to visit economic and social violence on innocent individuals and businesses by tossing them off their enormous, irreplaceable platforms, for speech not to their liking—not to mention throttling our speech, and confining us to a leper-like, tenuous status while on the platform—you are not defending the rights of private property to merely conduct itself as it wishes.

Rather, you are marching down the pirate’s plank, on a pirated ship of state in competition with the state.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, January 14
Townhall.com, January 14
American Greatness, January 16
Unz Review, January 14
Quarterly Review, January 15
American Renaissance January 20

The post Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The book In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action has become emblematic of the times we’re living through. Its “thesis” for theft “argues” that looting is “joyous” and can produce “community cohesion.”

Shortly before the mad-hatter media became hip to the socially redeeming aspects of looting, I briefly blogged, on August 28, about In Defense of Looting not imagining it would become such a hit.

The reason for this early mention was the Economist. The news magazine—read religiously—had dignified author Vicky Osterweil’s argument from criminality, calling it “a live debate,” which is good English for, “We need to have a conversation.”

These usually smart people wrote:

A few radical activists, including some associated with Black Lives Matter in Chicago, argued that looting can be legitimate. One woman, protesting at a police station that held arrested looters, called it a form of ‘reparations’ for white oppression.
… Vicky Osterweil, author of ‘In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action,’ published this month, sets out the same argument at book length. Looting by the poor, black or otherwise repressed is a radical tactic that brings welcome change, in her view. Peaceful civil-rights demonstrations are too easily ignored, whereas ‘riots and looting are more effective at attracting attention to a cause.’ The shared experience of looting can also be ‘joyous,’ produce ‘community cohesion,’ count as a small act of ‘direct redistribution of wealth’ and, she reckons, does little harm to those who have insurance. She thinks it also leads people to question high levels of inequality.

To go by Vicky Osterweil’s argument: If looting a man’s property is morally legitimate—it ‘does little harm to those who have insurance’—why not taking his life? Doesn’t he have life insurance?

When will murder be likewise mitigated with the same degenerate logic? For the specimen we’ve witnessed foaming at the mouth and in the faces of the police the act of murder fits on the same continuum of affirmation.

Not to appear as though they were prejudice about the perks of pelf and pillage, the Economist countered with judgment-free utilitarian economics:

[Osterweil’s] claims are unconvincing. Those who snatched swag from Gucci or Louis Vuitton in order to sell them on hardly share her anti-capitalist views. Nor is it clear that looting spreads solidarity in poor neighborhoods. The grandmother of the man shot by police condemned the looting. Ms. Osterweil might be right, however, that residents of poor areas, who rarely even set foot in the wealthy central parts of their city, are fed up. Looting is not a helpful way to respond, but the resentment at this disparity is real enough …

Here, the Economist joins the menagerie of morons that is the American media in considering and dignifying Osterweil’s political pornography.

Her considered readers were, however, on to her.

Late in August, In Defense of Looting still had all but two rotten reader-reviews on Amazon:

1. “Poorly written, poorly reasoned.” One star.
2. “Garbage: terrible ideas and a terrible book.” One star.

Yet it had a rather good Amazon rank. How, you wonder? The rank was likely not market-generated, but due to the corrupt enterprise of university book-buying. State subsidized university libraries have enormous budgets for indoctrination. Just as the colleges have abandoned their duty to educate, so too have publishing giants long since betrayed their mandate to publish quality books. These conglomerate quislings collude to ensure that a lot of dough is forked out for a lot of drek.

Down to its libraries, the American university is a corrupt enterprise. You’ll find “The joys of looting” safely ensconced at the Harvard Book Store, and likely other “elite” schools across the country.

China might control thinking on its campuses, but can you imagine the Chinese Communist Party instructing its apparatchiks to promote material meant to make the next generation thieving, dumb and decadent? Unlikely, considering that the Chinese have a wicked work ethic, low-crime rates and that criminality is severely punished.

Since that blog post, the book has become the toast of the towns not yet burned down by the putrefying left. Its author, Ms. Osterweil, a welcomed guest on many “probing” programs, presumably to explain her “provocative” “thesis” of theft.

Indeed, we inhabit a culture in which high-brow polemics are banned and banished from the public square by grubby, low-brow, social engineers, from Facebook functionaries to the once-august “Publishers Weekly”: It dubbed Osterweil’s debut a “bracing rethink” of something or another.

A new kind of Kafka confronts any author whose thoughts veer from those of the mono-cultural mainstream. Books that enlighten never see the light of day or are digitally burned by the Amazon monopoly; pamphleteers that dim debate find publishers and “respectable” reviewers.

Happily, however, Amazon reviewers were having none of the looter lady, who, mind you, merely “identifies as a woman,” which is not the same as being a woman (in my non-expert opinion). They have not reconsidered their “bracing” views about Osterweil’s immoral enterprise. These book reviews are a riot of hashtags like #violence, #steal, #stupid, #vicky, #waste:

I gave it 2 stars instead of 1 because, while it is empty headed garbage, it was a bargain since I shoplifted it.
Since Amazon doesn’t have a physical bookstore from which I can steal this book, will they please implement a virtual looting option? One star.
Sam says 1.0 out of 5 stars: “Garbage: terrible ideas and a terrible book.”

Understated, yet “Astounded” gives In Defense of Looting 1.0 out of 5 stars, writing, charitably, that it “seems rather shallow and malevolent.”

If you think these Amazon reviews are the work of Russian trolls acting for Trump, “Century Rider” provides a corrective cue: “Want another 4 years of Trump?”, writes the reviewer on August 29. “This is the kind of ‘reasoning’ that will get Trump re-elected.”

Clearly, the restoration of law and order and the reverence for private property rights are the most powerful principles with which to unite main-street America, left and right, in the ramp-up to the November election. This is what Republicans must remember, before they scamper down the judicial rabbit hole of abortion.

As to the book: Here’s the true disgrace of In Defense Of Looting: someone read the book, endorsed its publication, someone edited it, someone else set it in type, designed a cover, compiled an index, read the proofs. Now people are reviewing it.

©2020 ILANA MERCER
WND, September 25
Unz Review, September 25
Quarterly Review, September 28
Newsroom For American And European Based Citizens, September 26

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The managerial elites find themselves in a pickle. The coronavirus pandemic is a serious event. Members of a serious society treat it as such; they look out for one another—and they don’t flee into conspiracy and denial in order to cope with the incongruity of it all.

Alas, courtesy of its globalist elites, America is no longer a society; much less a serious one. In the absence of solidarity between citizens, social capital—”goodwill, fellowship, sympathy”—is scarce. Hence the struggle to mount a coherent response to the pandemic.

Centrally Planned Diversity Begets Disunity

Coherence is certainly not a thing immigration policy has supplied. If anything, policy makers have cheapened citizenship.

The populations from which chosen, future citizens are drawn come to America not in search of constitution and community. Rather, the corporate state’s preferred immigrants bring their own community with them and hyphenate its members.

On arrival, immigrants are encouraged to cling to a militant distinctiveness. The only tacit agreement shared by a majority of Americans, native and newcomer, is that America’s exceptionalism obligates it to both control the world through military and moral crusades and welcome it to America.

The extent to which Americans have, nevertheless, managed to galvanize logistically against COVID-19 is a testament to just how energetic a people we are.

Still, the credentialed, cognitive elites who’ve turned the country into this multicultural, money-focused, built-on-sand Tower of Babel, now find that many Americans—united by commerce, not creed—don’t want to go the extra mile for the strangers who make up their country.

Contrast the U.S., vis-à-vis COVID, with a more homogeneous nation like Japan (or Singapore, or Taiwan or South Korea).

Thirteen minutes and 35 seconds into this interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Fox News’ Martha MacCallum quizzes him about Japan.

The country, 127-million strong, has had only 846 COVID deaths, and has, according to Ms. MacCallum, not implemented the social mitigation strategies seen in the U.S. and Europe.

Adjusted for population size, this is as though the U.S had suffered only 2,198 COVID deaths! For Japan to “live up” to America’s COVID cull-rate, 38,484 Japanese would have to have perished from the coronavirus.

Other than that its people sport a culture of fastidious cleanliness and have long-since adopted the etiquette of masking—you and I sense what else is afoot in Japan.

So does Dr. Fauci. Certain counties, conceded the good doctor, have “different sizes and different borders, and different infusions from outside.”

Differently put, Japan is almost completely homogeneous, with little immigration, and, consequently, a strong sense of unity. Citizens are more inclined to pull together in common purpose when there is a fellow feeling to bind them.

“The measures that most successfully contain the virus … all depend on how engaged and invested the population is,” explains Ed Young, a science reporter. All the testing, tracing and isolating are for naught if there is an “antagonistic relationship” with and between the people involved in the effort.

And America, it’s fair to say, is no longer a people in any meaningful way; it is a “Walmart with missiles,” where the fusillades we direct at one another.

Private Property In A Pandemic

In our irreparably fractious and fragmented country, polite requests by private property proprietors for customers to cover their mugs and conduct themselves considerately on private places of commerce have caused Antifa-like anger and deadly violence to erupt. Some of our countrymen have even killed or injured innocent others for such daring.

The violent urges to violate the personal space of others aren’t surprising; they’re a symptom of a society that has lost all social bonds.

“You are in violation of my f—ing constitutional rights and my civil rights,” hollered a man when he was stopped from shopping at a Miami Beach Publix for not wearing a mask.

Such people are barking mad—and clueless (and certainly not Barry Goldwater conservatives). Whatever laws have arisen to govern how private property must behave—civil rights law, in particular—these have constituted an assault on that sacred sphere, launched with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and valiantly opposed by the aforementioned Republican).

If you support the right of the baker to choose the clients for whom he bakes cakes—you will similarly uphold the right of private property to protect customers and employees from a deadly contagious disease by dictating the terms of commerce on said property.

Given that there’s more spite than sense in the displays against responsible private-property enforcement of social distancing and masking—the idea that protest comes from a place of individualism doesn’t quite wash.

Private property is boss: it decides who comes and goes. It’s the way a free people should want it.

Private Property Is Choice, Not Force

It is the absolute prerogative of private property to compel social distancing and masking on its premises, or, to refuse it.

The operative verbs that informed the column “Real Societies Uses Prophylactics, Part 1” were: “asked to,” “requested,” “make an effort to.” In the context of social distancing and masking, these words imply good will, not force.

Good will, in the context of COVID, is a commodity that issues not from government, whose edicts are backed by police powers, but from private property.

In an ideal libertarian world, social distancing and mitigation would be voluntary, not mandatory.

Some—hopefully most—commercial establishments will choose to protect their clients, colleagues and associates by sanitizing, suiting-up and spacing consumers and employees; others, sadly, will opt not to.

Choice, or voluntarism, is the libertarian way.

It is also true that private property is delimited by its boundaries; by its borders. It is supposed to be clearly bounded and demarcated. I can do what I like on my property and you on yours. More crucially, my actions do not affect you and yours do not affect me, because each respects the boundaries and rules of private property.

Here’s the rub: A highly contagious virus that jumps from host to host and from house to house makes a mockery of the choice and voluntarism associated with private property.

Nevertheless, in a free society, the protective borders of private property are better than the State’s boot on our necks. That is if we want to breathe.

READ Part 1: “Real Societies Uses Prophylactics”

©2020 ILANA MERCER
WND, May 28
Unz Review,  May 28
Quarterly Review, June 1

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