The Welfare-Warfare State

GAZA: “Inarguably, the case against Israel’s murder spree in Gaza is ethically quite simple. It is NOT within the realm of opinion. It is immutable, eternal truth. Like the laws of logic, right and wrong are universal, not relative. There are no special tribal privilege clauses—Jews, like gentiles, are prohibited from mass murder. ‘Thou shalt not murder’ (you can ‘kill,’ but you cannot murder—read about the Biblical difference in this essay) is neither opinion, nor is it optional. That’s why the Sixth Commandment is called a … commandment. It isn’t optional. Saint Augustine’s Just War Theory, while imperfect, is closer to truth than opinion. Natural law going back to the ancients and derived from deductive reason and the nature of man: not opinion. What Israel has visited on Gazans and their small enclave is irreparable, orgiastic mass murder and ethnic cleansing.”—ILANA MERCER, January 14, 2024
GAZA: “For one thing, he who offends against innocents is responsible for his offenses; not a third party. For another, and as I hope we have established here before, whether it is committed by decree of the one or by the will of the many; by actors within or without The State; by the designated ‘good guys’ or by the ‘bad guys’—murder of innocents is always murder. Murder by ‘democratic’ approval is also still murder, however many approve of it. At the same time, mass murder is never ‘unintentional’ when you know it is inevitable and incidental to your ‘mission.’”—ILANA MERCER, Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban Not The Israel I Grew Up In,” January 4, 2024
GAZA: “Look at Gaza. It’s a moonscape. What are your lying eyes telling you, to use Richard Pryor’s wry phrase for he who has been caught in flagrante delicto? As they were turning Gaza into Dresden on TV, before our very eyes, Israel’s quicksilver state propagandists were also telling us, their American funders, that ‘this is not happening.’ Who are you going to believe? Democratic Israel, or your ‘lying eyes’? I believe my ‘lying eyes,’ thank you very much. Those ‘lying eyes’ speak to the scale of Israel’s depredations against Gazans. ”—ILANA Mercer, “Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban Not The Israel I Grew Up In,” January 4, 2024
GAZA: “The broad and short of it is that, no reparations can fix the irreparable Gaza, although these are owed.”—ILANA Mercer, “Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban Not The Israel I Grew Up In,” January 4, 2024
GAZA: “The Israel of my formative years was no Eden before the Fall, but it was not a terrorist state. Jewish supremacism, like the American exceptionalism driving the United States’ foreign policy, breeds barbarism.”—ILANA Mercer, “Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban Not The Israel I Grew Up In,” January 4, 2024
Gaza: “In their recent military campaigns, America and Israel have waged what to the inexpert, keen observer is largely old-fashioned, Third-Generation Warfare—a blitzkrieg, by any other name, against civilian populations. Yet when military mavens predicted and depicted the next form of warfare; it was the contours Fourth-Generation Warfare that they were tracing. Fourth-Generation Warfare was to be the distinguishing characteristic of the modern military. Fourth-Generation war was meant to be smart; to see Mind dominate and direct materiel. What is underway in Gaza, at 2023’s end, however, is the very opposite. I see madness for what it is.”—ILANA Mercer, “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights U.S. Marines’ Superiority,” December 4, 2023
Gaza: “Hamas’s low-tech invasion into 17 areas in Southern Israel was also a clear demonstration of a complete failure of the State apparatus, the Israel Defense Forces being the face of the State. Hamas operatives motorbiked, paraglided, bulldozed and motorboated their way, by land and by sea, past Israel’s flimsy fences, unmanned, AI-powered machine guns and other clever, high-tech gadgets on the Gazan border. Post-graduate cleverness was simply no match for Hamas’ fiercely savage, hands-on guerrilla warfare.”—ILANA Mercer, “Hamas, Israel And The Anatomy Of State Treason,” October 12, 2023
Gaza: “To refuse to bear witness to the prosecution of Total Warfare against Gazans—also the defining event of 2023 and the decade, twinned with COVID—is to be inhuman, insane, incoherent. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in such contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.”—ILANA Mercer, December 9, 2023, “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights U.S. Marines’ Superiority“
GAZA: “You can’t gussy up what’s going on in Gaza.”—ILANA Mercer, “Bibi Netanyahu May Find Himself In the Dock, In The Hague,” November 14, 2023
GAZA: “It’s simple: If you know in advance that your actions will cause the death of thousands of civilians; attached to your criminal actions (actus reus) is a guilty mind (mens rea), which means malice aforethought, also known as intent, in Western jurisprudence and judicial philosophy.”—ILANA Mercer, “Bibi Obliterates Memory Of October 7 Martyrs; Creates New Martyrs In Gaza,” November 2, 2023

GAZA: “The razing and ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Benjmain Netanyahu, abetted by Joe Biden and his Uniparty accomplices, in the course of which tens of thousands civilians are dying: This is murder with malice aforethought, a concept that includes ‘deaths resulting from actions that display a depraved indifference to life.‘ Further depraved indifference to life was Israel’s throttling of supplies of water, food and power to the millions of aid-dependent Gazans, as Israel knows full-well this will imperil civilians indirectly.”—ILANA Mercer, “Bibi Obliterates Memory Of October 7 Martyrs; Creates New Martyrs In Gaza,” November 2, 2023

GAZA: “Murder with majority approval is still murder, whomever the perpetrator. Whether it is committed by actors within or without The State; by the designated ‘good guys’ or by the ‘bad guys’; murder of innocents is still murder.”—ILANA Mercer, “Bibi Obliterates Memory Of October 7 Martyrs; Creates New Martyrs In Gaza,” November 2, 2023

GAZA: “The razing of Gaza and the ongoing murder of thousands of civilians by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with western imprimatur, is a war crime. Strafing civilian populations and pulverizing entire neighborhoods to ostensibly ‘soften’ the few embedded targets within—this violates natural law, international law, libertarian law and Just War Theory.”—ILANA Mercer, “Bibi Obliterates Memory Of October 7 Martyrs; Creates New Martyrs In Gaza,” November 2, 2023
Ukraine: “Win Or Die policy imperialism: Ukraine’s America-Engineered ‘Options for Ukraine’: ‘Win or die, dummies’ is what Ukrainians are being instructed by the US UniParty, its NATO marionettes and their leader Zelensky, who is protected by the above forces. America has engineered Ukraine’s current existential reality by purging the pursuit of diplomacy and peace from its duties as the world Super Power. Mention of a negotiated truce between Ukraine and Russia is practically labeled treason by the command-and-control US media.”—ILANA Mercer, “Win Or Die: Ukraine’s America-Engineered ‘Options’”, August 10, 2023
“Putin’s war in Ukraine is a war for which there are plenty reasons, all of them vindicating Russia; Russia is in the right! Reasons for war, however, are not the same as justification for war. A war of aggression is seldom justified.”—ILANA Mercer, “Bleeding Russia Dry And Then Next Color Revolution,” May 5, 2022
Ukraine: “The Hebrew Testament (though ‘Old,’ it’s never out-of-date) is bedecked with examples of leaders pleading, even bargaining, for the lives of the Stiff-Necked People. Abraham haggled ingeniously with The Almighty over Sodom and Gomorrah. Queen Esther petitioned mighty King Xerxes (Ahasuerus) on behalf of the Persian Jews, and Moses did the same for his enslaved people before Pharaoh. Another Hebrew has written that ‘he who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war.’ That’s what real leadership is about—uphold and fight for the people’s natural right to live peacefully. By these reasonable and rational criteria, Zelensky and Biden are failed leaders for doing nothing but bait and goad the Russian Bear.”—ILANA Mercer, “It’s Biblical, Zelensky: A Leader Who Fails To Haggle For The Lives Of His People Has Failed,” March 24, 2022.
Ukraine: “To normies, a leader who doesn’t plead for the lives of his people is a failed leader. Diplomacy, negotiations, a cease fire: that’s the nomenclature clear-thinking people ought to wish instinctively to hear when they see the immiseration of Ukrainians and their cities. To my knowledge, not before the war and not now has Zelensky initiated, or partaken in, or been urged to pursue serious, high-level talks with Putin.”—ILANA Mercer, “It’s Biblical, Zelensky: A Leader Who Fails To Haggle For The Lives Of His People Has Failed,” March 24, 2022.
Ukraine: “With his fatigues, simplistic jingoism and facility with TV optics and social media—Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky certainly appeals to the war channel females (Fox News) and to distaff worldwide. But he has been worse than useless in the grander scheme of things.”—ILANA Mercer, “True Story: Russia Finds WMD In Ukraine!”, March 10, 2022.
Ukraine: “I abhor what is, on its face, a Russian war of aggression on Ukraine. However, knowing the history of the conflict leaves no room for doubt: The Russian Bear was poked, and poked and then some.”—ILANA Mercer, “True Story: Russia Finds WMD In Ukraine!”, March 10, 2022.
Ukraine: “There is something utterly obscene—as rudely shocking as the front-row viewing of the ‘Shock and Awe’ visited on Iraq—about watching the displacement of people and the destruction of innocent lives in real time, on television, without lending a hand. And I don’t mean a military hand.”—ILANA Mercer, “Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik And The West’s Failure,” March 3, 2022.
Ukraine: “The onus is on the USA, the only so-called responsible superpower, to calmly negotiate with Putin on behalf of his innocent, weak victims. Instead, world leaders watch the suffering on TV and bemoan the fate of the sufferers. Both sides are a disgrace and a failure to have brought us thus far. Ditto NATO and the EU. This is precisely what President Joe Biden should be shamed into doing now: talk to Putin; thrash out a cease-fire, ASAP; haggle for the lives of the population under siege because led by imbeciles.”—ILANA Mercer, “Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik And The West’s Failure,” March 3, 2022.
“The military is a morass of leftism, statism, feminism, reverse-racism, interventionism, propositionalism, and other poisonous creeds. If nothing else, the Trump years have made it clear that the military brass has aligned with the Left.”—ILANA Mercer, “Rising Republican Rotters To Look Out For,” February 11, 2021.
“When Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon were growing up, they wanted to be government. Now they are!”—ILANA Mercer, “Deep Tech: Locked Down And Locked Out, First By The State, Then By Silicon Valley,” January 14, 2021.
“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.”—ILANA Mercer, “A Hardcore Libertarian Take on the Storming of the Capitol Building,” January 21, 2021.
“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.”—ILANA Mercer, “A Hardcore Libertarian Take on the Storming of the Capitol Building,” January 21.
“Ventriloquist dummy Joe Biden represents not the war-weary people, but America’s anti-Trump, never-won-a-war, treacherous general officers and admirals and the military-industrial-complex.”—ILANA Mercer, “We ‘Lizard Brains’ Love Our POTUS—Kvetching COVID Joe Must GO! ,” October 29, 2020.
“Dissecting and decrying communism is an ideological luxury, the province of relatively wealthy, stable, developed democracies.”—ILANA Mercer, “Wake Up. Systemic Anti-Whiteness Is Deadly. Witness South Africa,” October 15, 2020.
“Western democracies are third-way political and economic systems. They are already heavily socialized. Once Western societies go from third way to third world, debate over communism will cease, for communism will have arrived.”—ILANA Mercer, “Wake Up. Systemic Anti-Whiteness Is Deadly. Witness South Africa,” October 15, 2020.
“Communism was an equal-opportunity oppressor. It did not single out whites, like Critical Race Theory, which revolves around the exclusive blackening of whites.”—ILANA Mercer, “Wake Up. Systemic Anti-Whiteness Is Deadly. Witness South Africa,” October 15, 2020.
“Government committees are where accountability goes to die. Governments create committees to conceal their own culpability.”—ILANA Mercer, ‘Who Invited The World To Infect America?” April 30, 2020.
“If Deep State durability has proven anything, it is that not even a fire-breathing political dragon like President Donald Trump can fumigate the snake pit that is the Permanent State.”—ILANA Mercer, “Incompetent, Imperial Neocons And The Permanent State (Part 1),” February 13, 2020, WND & Unz Review.
“Government committees are where accountability goes to die. Governments create committees to conceal their own culpability.”—ILANA Mercer, “Who Invited The World To Infect America? Or, A ‘Walmart With Missiles’,” April 30, 2020
Unintelligent Intelligence: “The Steel Dossier, which launched the Mueller inquisition, was as fantastical a fabrication as were the documents that fed the Bush administration’s will to war. As it is, intelligence report-writing is more art than science; more flare than fact. It’s executed by many of the same, tinny, dogmatic, ex-CIA feminists whom we see plonked in CNN studios, ponderously pontificating about Our Russian Enemy.”—ILANA Mercer, “Mueller & Atta: Fake Intel Runs Through … Prague, Part 1,” WND.COM. April 11, 2019.
“From the CIA to CNN, the youthful talking heads (and their shapely keisters) have only ever gone from a swivel chair at the Langley headquarters to a seat in a CNN studio, in New York City. It’s not at all unfair to conclude that the ‘intelligence’ these cartoon characters produced as CIA or FBI agents is as intelligent as their commentary in the TV studio.—ILANA Mercer, “Mueller & Atta: Fake Intel Runs Through … Prague, Part 1,” WND.COM. April 11, 2019.
“When a politician preaches about “the values that make our country great,” to quote Mrs. Clinton, chances are they mean multiculturalism, pluralism, wide-swung borders, Islam as peace, communities divided by diversity as a net positive, and the Constitution (it mandates all the above, just ask Ruth Bader Ginsburg) as a living, breathing, mutating philosophical malignancy.”—ILANA Mercer, “Kamala’s Values Cudgel,” Quarterly Review, March 15, 2019.
“When politicians pule about the importance of preserving ‘our values,’ they mean their values: Barack Obama’s values, Hillary Clinton’s values, Angela Merkel’s values, Chucky Schumer’s values, Jeff Bezos’ values, the late John McMussolini’s values, Lindsey Graham’s values, and Jared and Ivanka’s values (but not Trump’s).”—ILANA Mercer, “Kamala’s Collectivist Values Village,” Townhall.com, March 15, 2019.
“There are other, highly plausible explanations as to why a president does not wish to war with Russia, not least that diplomacy is a good thing.”—ILANA Mercer, “John Quincy Adams is Turning in His Grave, Dwight Eisenhower Too,” March 22, 2018.
“Hidden or in plain sight, The State is geared toward increasing or maintaining its sphere of influence, never reducing it. Voters are paid lip service, provided their wishes coincide with the aims of this unelected, entrenched apparatus. But when the popular will defies Deep State, that monster breathes fire.”—ILANA Mercer, “Elon Musk, Et al.: The Corporate Arm Of The Deep State,” Townhall.com, June 3, 2017
“The anatomy and workings of the Deep State are reflexive, rather than a matter of collusion and conspiracy. Simple psychology—human nature at its worst—sees government jobs and programs, war and welfare alike, protected in perpetuity and at all costs by the administrators of government jobs and programs.”—ILANA Mercer, “Elon Musk, Et al.: The Corporate Arm Of The Deep State,” Townhall.com, June 3, 2017
“‘Deep State’ is no conspiracy theory. There’s nothing mythical about the Republican and Democratic career government workers, embedded like parasites in the bowels of the bureaucracy, the intelligence community, the military, and a like-minded media, who’ve risen on their hind legs to protect their turf and protest an agenda that leaves them out in the cold.”—ILANA Mercer, “Elon Musk, Et al.: The Corporate Arm Of The Deep State,” Townhall.com, June 3, 2017
“Wars are generally a rich man’s affair and a poor man’s fight.”—ILANA Mercer, “Sanctuary City Mayor Trashes An AMERICAN Hero, Robert E. Lee,” The Abbeville Institute, May 25, 2017
“A professional politician is opportunistic and parasitic. For his survival, he must feed off his hosts. To convince the host to let him hook on and drain his lifeblood, the political hookworm must persuade enough of them to believe his deception. The energies of this political confidence trickster are thus focused on gaining voter confidence by promising what will never be delivered and what is impossible to deliver.”—ILANA (August 7, 2015)
“America’s governing elites habitually betray their constitutional and fiduciary obligations to their constituents.”—ILANA Mercer, “Dying For Obama’s Deadly Dogma,” October 17, 2014
“Conservatives question government programs. War is a government program. If they hope to retain a modicum of philosophical integrity, conservatives will have to include a critique of the state’s warfare machine in their case against its welfare apparatus.”—ILANA (June 6, 2014)
“The best and brightest do not work for the state. Increasingly, government workers are carefully selected for the color of their complexion, for their sex and sexual or political orientation, not for their competence.”—ILANA Mercer, “Waiting To Die On The Government’s Watch,” May 23, 2014
“Failure to keep health care services out of the hands of socialist central planners will see all Americans pinned down like butterflies by ‘service providers,’ whose sadistic displays of power are honed in a state monopoly.”—ILANA (October 25, 2013)
“On Rome’s marching army and its mating habits (or the David Petraeus scanadal): “Military top brass and the brassy broads who attach themselves to Rome’s Army do not stand aloof from the state and its supermarket culture. Its evil imperial reach notwithstanding, the military is manacled by doctrinaire mediocrity, multiculturalism, feminism, affirmative action (fem and other), and every postmodern pox imaginable. And this is only the froth on the top. I wonder what next big shoe is fixing to drop.”—ILANA (November 17, 2012)
“As proof that the matter in Big Government V. Small Government has been decided, I offer exhibit No. 1: 16 trillion gigabucks worth of debt. While it might have dipped at some distant point in the past, the national debt has been rising steadily for decades, under both Democratic and Republican faction.”—ILANA (September 21, 2012)
“If regular visits with prostitutes kept the political class from launching trillion-dollar war- and welfare programs, and financing Fanny, Freddy and the Fed—I would personally contribute to a prostitution fund for Washington whores. The prostitutes would be the patriots.”—ILANA (May 11, 2012)
“When has waging economic warfare on a country done anything other than entrench internal monopolies, political and economic?”—ILANA (March 16, 2012)
“Government is doomed to fail because it is bereft of the constraints private property imposes. The more funds funneled into an insolvent system, in which property is communally ‘owned’—the greater the squandering of these scarce, precious, appropriated resources.”—ILANA (April 15, 2011)
“The FLOTUS of the fat-based initiatives ‘cares’ enough to decide what America’s bloated babes will ingest, but not enough to weigh-in when their bodies are invaded by state workers at the nation’s federally controlled airports.”—ILANA (December 31, 2010)
“Proper metaphors for the relationship between The Great Unwashed and their Overlords Who Art in D.C. is that of ruled and ruler, Rome and its provinces, Imperial China and its peasants.”—ILANA (December 24, 2010)
“As proof that the matter in Big Government V. Small Government has been decided, I offer exhibit No. 1: 16 trillion gigabucks worth of debt. While it might have dipped at some distant point in the past, the national debt has been rising steadily for decades, under both Democratic and Republican faction.”—ILANA (September 21, 2012)
“The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government, chief of which is its liberalism. Like the government, the military is freighted with pathological political correctness.”—ILANA (December 10, 2010)
“Government commissions are where accountability goes to die.”—ILANA Mercer, “Make Me Thankful: Don’t Enlist!“, November 27, 2009
“On the anti-Obamacare town hall protestors: “Americans with a bias for small government and big society! What next?”—ILANA (August 14, 2009)
The idea of charity is to improve society, not the State; and to do so through personal, not political, acts.”—ILANA (August 29, 2008)
“The-state-as-parent is a leftist legal doctrine that has been eagerly embraced by the rigor-mortis riddled Right.”—ILANA (April 25, 2008)
“Whether they are ‘plural’ or single, Wicca or just weird, bohemian or bourgeoisie—parents should take the kids and skedaddle when they hear that phrase ‘in the best interests of the child.'”—ILANA (April 25, 2008)
The nation’s foster parents: “Fagin on welfare.”—ILANA (April 25, 2008)
“The danger exists that by subsidizing ‘freedom’ for others, we’ll disempower them and encourage dependency.”—ILANA (February 3, 2006)
“‘Philanthropic’ wars are transfer programs—the quintessential big-government projects. The perpetually profligate Bush should quit pretending he’s an apostle of smaller government.”—ILANA MERCER (January 6, 2006)
“Most of what the Federal Frankenstein does is either unconstitutional, immoral, illegal, or all of the above.”—ILANA (October 15, 2005)
“A Katrina Question: Hey, what do Americans have to do to get their army reservists to bat, not for Baghdad, but for the homies and the homeland? Climb on their rooftops and yelp for help?”—ILANA (August 30, 2005)
“The Key to Katrina: “The inverted and perverse incentive structure that characterizes [government] endeavors guarantees failure. … Wrongdoing and incompetence in government are seldom punished, but are, rather, rewarded with budgetary increases. A government department accretes through inefficiency. Failure translates into ever-growing budgets and powers and a further collectivization of accountability.”—ILANA (September 2, 2005)
“Statists say that if not for the state, man would be unable to produce. That’s like saying that the tick created the dog! Production predates government predation. Government doesn’t produce wealth—it only consumes it.”—ILANA (Sixteen, the Number of the Beast, in Broad Sides, 2004)
“The Abu Ghraib photographs tell a tale, not of fleeting youthful indiscretion, but of abiding degeneracy in the military.”—ILANA MERCER, “GI JOE MEETS GI HO,” May 15, 2004
“Two things that are definitely not isolated occurrences in today’s Army are feral levels of fornication and illegitimacy.”—ILANA MERCER, “GI JOE MEETS GI HO,” May 15, 2004
“However you slice it, there’s no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an ‘organized society’ that does the same. In a just society, the moral rules that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective.”—ILANA MERCER, “Sixteen, the Number of the Beast,” November 20, 2002
“Real wealth is created only by the production and consumption not of paper money, but of products. An abundance of goods, not money income, is what makes for an increase in wealth.”—ILANA MERCER, “WARTIME SOCIALISM,” April 30, 2003
“A brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can.”—ILANA MERCER, “BETRAYING BRAVE BOYS,” March 26, 2003
“President Bush’s overheated rhetoric about the Middle East becoming a place of ‘progress and peace’; his prophetic visions of ‘tyrants falling and resentment giving way to hope, as men and women in every culture reject the ideologies of terror, and turn to the pursuits of peace’ — this is the political equivalent of speaking in tongues. At best, it’s ahistoric. Yet the American people are lapping it up.”—ILANA MERCER, “Bush’s Warfare State,” Toronto Globe & Mail, September 11, 2003
“The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for ‘the degeneracy of manner and morals,’ which James Madison warned war would bring.”—ILANA MERCER, “BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE,” July 16, 2003
“We continue to cling unhealthily to the Walt Disney worldview whereby the grateful infantile Iraqis will soon rejoice at the sight of the noble, wise American liberators, and all will live happily ever after.”—ILANA MERCER, “IN BED WITH THE MILITARY,” Ilana Mercer, April 2, 2003
“The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution was also executed by popular demand. Assembly-line guillotining was voted on by the leadership, which, much like Bush and his grisly henchmen, claimed to represent the Common Will.”—ILANA MERCER, “Murder By Majority,” April 23, 2003
“Murder with majority approval is still murder.”—ILANA MERCER, “Murder By Majority,” April 23, 2003
“For journalistic jingoism, it’s hard to find a better example than the coverage of the high-tech media extravaganza known as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom.'”—ILANA MERCER, “In Bed With The Military,” April 2, 2003
“Boobus Americanus wants to conquer, colonize and stay comatose.'”—ILANA MERCER, “In Bed With The Military,” April 2, 2003

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