Popular Culture & Populism

“Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathetique,’ his Symphony No. 6, is a singularly intense and sublime expression of the agonies of the individual, caught between salvation, sin and love of Mother Russia.”—ILANA Mercer, “Bleeding Russia Dry And Then Next Color Revolution,” May 5, 2022
“The masses crave an opiate. Their political overlords know how to exploit the attendant and innate tendency for groupthink. As soon as the usefulness of one faith (Covid) expires; another takes its place (Ukraine), courtesy of the ruling elites, and with the complicity of the crowds. The Covid conformity has been replaced with the requirement that we all find religion on Ukraine.”—ILANA Mercer, “True Story: Russia Finds WMD In Ukraine!”, March 10, 2022.
“George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. wanted to best Gustave Eiffel, so he gave us the American version of the Eiffel Tower … the Ferris wheel.”—ILANA Mercer, Aug 15, 2022
“Rap, very simply, is crap—structurally, technically and tonally. While mistakenly classified as music, it is without musical merit. The rap, hip-hop genre is properly classified as street theater.”—ILANA Mercer, “Exporting Wokeism,” January 13, 2022.
“Wokeism is made in America, is entirely toxic, and, sadly, suffers no supply-chain disruptions in its spread abroad.”—ILANA Mercer, “Exporting Wokeism,” January 13, 2022.
“America’s wokerati have plunged our now institutionally radicalized country into dreary, postmodern deconstructionism.”—ILANA Mercer, CNN’s Sinophobic Zakaria Is Clueless: China Is Reactionary, Returning To Confucianism; Not Communism,” December 16, 2021.
“Properly categorized as street theater, not music, rap and hip-hop are, objectively speaking, gutter culture, certainly without any musical merit, technically and tonally. The hip-hopster or rapper hoots and gestures obscenely like a primate on heat. The movements that accompany the atonal grunts are a simulation of animalistic sex, the call of the wild, if you will.”—ILANA Mercer, CNN’s Sinophobic Zakaria Is Clueless: China Is Reactionary, Returning To Confucianism; Not Communism,” December 16, 2021.
“Taste is subjective, but standards are objective.”—ILANA Mercer, CNN’s Sinophobic Zakaria Is Clueless: China Is Reactionary, Returning To Confucianism; Not Communism,” December 16, 2021.
“The pronoun psychosis amounts to a nihilistic quest to break down the systems of classification bequeathed to us by the ancients. More fundamentally, the world is filled with categories of discrete entities. To make sense of the world, we’ve ordered it in a certain way. Comes the postmodernist progressive and tells us that there are no categories, everything is intersectional and fluid.”—ILANA Mercer, “Is Israel Racist? A Reply To An Anti-Semitic Writer” (Part 2), December 10, 2020.
“Henry Louis Mencken cannot appeal to the bumper crops of humorless, dour ‘dunderheads’ America is now siring. He cannot resonate with those who are afraid to question received opinion, who cannot conjugate a verb correctly, use tenses, prepositions and adjectives grammatically and creatively, or appreciate a clever turn-of-phrase.”—ILANA Mercer, “H.L. Mencken: Misfit In 21st-Century America,” June 29, 2020.
“How can Mencken, author of The American Language (1919), be relevant in an America in which the rules of syntax are passé, pronouns are politicized and neutered, torrential prolixity is in, concision and precision are out, and ‘editors’ excise nothing, preferring to let mangled phrases and lumpen jargon spill onto the page like gravy over a tablecloth.”—ILANA Mercer, “H.L. Mencken: Misfit In 21st-Century America,” June 29, 2020.
“A Mencken essay is certain to furrow the brow of the above-average American reader, writer and editor nowadays. Unlike the tracts disgorged by Conservatism, Inc., the least complicated of Mencken’s editorial writings would place excessive demands on the unsupple minds of young activists, who are busy striking a selfie on social media or running to CPUKE conferences.”—ILANA Mercer, “H.L. Mencken: Misfit In 21st-Century America,” June 29, 2020.
“By virtue of the unsettling, bracing originality of his ideas, Mencken is rendered as inaccessible to the American reader as an alien from deep space.”—ILANA Mercer, “H.L. Mencken: Misfit In 21st-Century America,” June 29, 2020.
“The plague has turned us all into untouchables and the politics have made us a little touched in the head.”—ILANA Mercer, “That Kiss,” June 25, 2020.
George Floyd Events: “The spectacle of mass contagion, where members of the public turn into professional mourners, flocking to funeral happenings for victims they never knew—this is warped. Grief is not a tribal affair. Communities don’t grieve; individuals who incur loss do. These are professional pornographers, not mourners. These phony displays among regular folks are at the root of our festering cultural commons.”—ILANA Mercer, “The Barbarians Are In Charge: Scenes From The Sacking of America,” June 11, 2020
“A tenet of the American democracy is to deify youth and diminish adults.”—ILANA Mercer, “How Democracy Made Us Dumb,” By ilana mercer.
“The late Anthony Bourdain: the Jack Kerouac of cooking.”—ILANA Mercer, “Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City,” The Unz Review, October 10, 2019.
“Music instrumentalists these days can mostly only strum their guitars, and produce an amorphous blend—an ill-differentiated, sloppy sonic porridge. Such a structureless cacophony pleases the lazy ear because it’s repetitive, and chock-full of blurry, angst-riddled crescendos.”—ILANA Mercer, “Grammys: Great Porn, Maybe, But Music It Was NOT,” WND.COM, February 14, 2019.
“Unite we Americans do over the state of our sovereign debt—it’s bad! But not over what it means to be a sovereign people.”—ILANA Mercer, “If The Disunited States of America is to Survive,” Townhall.com, November 2, 2018.
“Kneeling is the ultimate selfie, beamed to the country and blasted by the president himself.”—ILANA Mercer, “Taking a Knee is Akin to Taking A Pee,” September 29, 2017.
Kneeling: “Histrionic hulks can’t debate or argue effectively. Lacking words or wisdom, the kneelers resort to inappropriate displays and gestures aimed at the self, at self-aggrandizement.”—ILANA Mercer, “Taking a Knee is Akin to Taking A Pee,” September 29, 2017.
Kneeling: “Partaking in civilization entails knowing there is a time for everything. There is a time for activism and a time to do what you’re paid to do.”—ILANA Mercer, “Taking a Knee is Akin to Taking A Pee,” September 29, 2017.
“A sportsman used to embody a certain set of shared values. He set an example in his steeliness, resiliency, strength and singular focus. The spoilt men of the N.F.L. stand unafraid in the presence of … what? American moms, dads and their kids?.”—ILANA Mercer, “Taking a Knee is Akin to Taking A Pee,” September 29, 2017.
Football fetish: “We all inhabit this busy mart called America, but are united by nothing meaningful at all. The football fetish in America has intensified in the context of a country whose inhabitants agree on little else than the importance of The Game. Consequently, come playoff time, we come together fleetingly and superficially, to make a religion out of our respective professional football teams.”—ILANA Mercer, “Taking a Knee is Akin to Taking A Pee,” The Daily Caller, September 29, 2017.
“Satire in the US has been killed off by the twin tyrannies of political correctness and affirmative action.”—ILANA Mercer, “Thanks, POTUS, For Breaking-Up The Annual Correspondents’ Circle Jerk,” The Daily Caller, May 8, 2017.
“Anyone who’s been made to watch a French film, serious or satirical, knows that the French have no sense of humor or irony. The last truly funny comedian to have made merry in France lived in the 17th century. He was Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Molière. To get a feel for what has since become of French comedy, watch Louis de Funès, whom the French consider a comedic giant. Even your typically humorless Charlie Hebdo cartoon—take the one in which the contours of Muhammad’s turban resemble his bare buns, accompanied by the caption, ‘And my butt, you like my butt?’—is wittier than Louis de Funès’ oeuvre.”—ILANA (May 8, 2015)
“If you don’t quite know whether you are afflicted with political correctness, ask yourself this: “Do I police what people say for political propriety? To the extent that I seek it out, do I scrutinize great literature, music, art, television or comedy for signs of so-called sexism, racism, elitism, homophobia, antisemitism and meanness? Am I incapable of appreciating a superbly written script or book; a sublime painting or symphony; a smart stand-up routine, if only because the material and its creator violate the received laws of political correctness?”—ILANA (July 11, 2014)
“B.B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach.”—ILANA (March 7, 2014)
“Dance, in general, has become more atavistic than artistic. Dance moves most energetically engage the rump and the reproductive region, as though choreographed to the rhythm of mating primates.”—ILANA (March 7, 2014)
“Duck-Dynasty” controvery: “The Ducksters are part of a debased culture—the right-wing answer to Kim Kardashian, whose deformed figure and ass elephantiasis you can ogle online and on late-night Leno.”—ILANA (December 27, 2013)
“Not for nothing was the vow of silence once considered a test of character and spirituality in Christianity and in other faiths. This universal value has been inverted by American pop culture and pop religion. In the US, a deeply private person is considered defective; a blabbermouth who does and says anything on camera is canonized.”—ILANA (March 15, 2013)
“Auto-Tune technology is what makes a cast of vain ventriloquists like Katy Perry and Glee what it is.”—ILANA (January 25, 2013)
“I’d rather listen to the dodecaphony of twelve-tone music than sit through the cacophony that passes for music, emitted by today’s performers.”—ILANA (January 25, 2013)
“The pornography of public grief in our country is almost as warped as the evil (not ill), mother-slaying, mass murderer responsible for the Sandy Hook carnage. There is very little dignity in the freaky spectacle of mass contagion—where members of the public turn professional mourners, flock to memorial happenings for victims they never knew, and mill about for hours in the hope of being discovered by the master of ceremonies, the journalist. These ritualistic displays are symptomatic of our festering cultural commons.”—ILANA (December 21, 2012)
“Dr. William Sears is the mad-hatter behind the onansim known as ‘attachment parenting. Time magazine and NBC’s Today Show staged uniquely American vaudeville in support of Dr. Sears’ Method Parenting …”—ILANA (May 18, 2012)
“A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vise versa.”—ILANA (December 17, 2011)
“Graft is within each person’s reach; genius is not.”—ILANA MERCER, “Pleasure Me Now!“, April 22, 2011
“Anyone who has studied seriously, or worked to master a craft, knows that nothing worth learning or mastering is easy or enjoyable, at first — unless you’re a genius, a natural, or both.”—ILANA MERCER, “Pleasure Me Now!“, April 22, 2011
“Our society revolves around the pleasure principle. Unless something is pleasurable, it excites suspicion and is deemed unworthy of pursuit. This is one reason so many American youngsters entering the job market are dumb, difficult and will be, ultimately, dispensable.”—ILANA (April 22, 2011)
“The God-awful Lady Gaga, a facilely recycled idiot.”—ILANA (September 24, 2010)
“To justify distaff disenfranchisement look no further than Meghan McCain.”—ILANA (February 19, 2010)
“Meghan McCain and her peers are everywhere, loudly dispensing mind-numbing clichés as though they were Socratic sayings.”—ILANA (February 19, 2010)
“Homegrown retardation is far more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism in modern-day America.”—ILANA (October 23, 2009)
“This is the age of the idiot. The triumph of Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber in American culture and politics can no longer be disputed.”—ILANA (October 17, 2008)
“In contemporaray America, crying automatically vests the blubberer with moral virtue.”—ILANA (July 18, 2008)
“Meghan McCain is not working with much – and is eminently qualified to dim debate in the Age of the Idiot.”—ILANA (May 8, 2009)
“Imagine what a locust-like cloud of Girls Gone Wild, or bumping and grinding semi-nude spring breakers, would do to Saudi Arabia. Before long, pious Muslim men, the potential Jihadi pool, would succumb to a bacchanalia of debauchery—sex, sloth, and stupidity.”—ILANA (May 9, 2008)
“‘Reality’ TV regularly lifts from well-deserved obscurity a procession of shameless degenerates.”—ILANA (May 9, 2008)
“Idiots have come into their own in a big way, courtesy of depraved consumers, and complicit TV producers and publishers, of pixel and paper alike. The duller you are and the louder you crow in contemporary America, the better you do.”—ILANA (May 8, 2009)
“Misplaced compassion is common in sentimental, sensation-driven America.”—ILANA (April 25, 2008)
“More often than not, the marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art or pop culture. The market does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences enacted by consumers. Aguilera (Christina) probably sells more than Ashkenazy (Vladimir) ever did. Britney outdoes Borodin. For some, this will be faith inspiring, for others deeply distressing.”—ILANA MERCER, Hudson Institute, February 7, 2003, or “MUCH ADO ABOUT CONSERVATIVES AND POP CULTURE“
“America’s idea of beauty nowadays is of a piece with its idea of good food: cheap and nasty.”—ILANA (February 25, 2008)
“The late Robert Mapplethorpe of the bullwhip-bedecked behind…”—ILANA (February 17, 2006)
“Postmodern literary analysis is an error—an artificial, political construct that doesn’t render reality but rapes it.”—ILANA (December 2007)
“Dogmatic plebeians are always poised, pitchforks hoisted, to enforce the lowest common denominator.”—ILANA (February4, 2007)
“In music nowadays, the visual, not the auditory, is the medium.”—ILANA (December 10, 2006)
“The Queen of England has only ever done what is right by her country, whether it knows it or not. Yet the British almost had the elderly lady up for treason because she didn’t tear her frock and roll in ashes when that dodo, Diana, died.”—ILANA (May 8, 2006)
“Most pop ‘musicians’ today are a product of the visual medium: If you were unable to see these ‘artists,’ you’d not want to hear them. I suspect that their image alone has, over the years, supported sales. And of course, the masses habituate to the thump-thump studio-engineered racket that substitutes for a voice, instrumental arrangements, and chord progression in a Madonna or Britney ditty.”—ILANA mercer, December 10, 2006

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