Monthly Archives: December 2016

A Christmas Snuff Story

Christianity, Family, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Religion

“A Christmas Snuff Story” is the current column, now on The Daily Caller. An excerpt:

“We’re going to be saying Merry Christmas a lot more. And we’re going to have fewer criminal aliens to contend with,” promised President-elect Donald Trump on separate occasions.

Alas, Christmas and a criminal alien coalesced tragically, when Bob Clark, director of “A Christmas Story,” was killed by a drunk illegal alien in 2007. Clark’s son, age 22, also died on that day in April.

Like the director of that enchanting film, the family depicted in “A Christmas Story” is all but dead and buried, too—killed by Uncle Sam, the patron saint of social disorder.

Described by a critic as “one of those rare movies you can say is perfect in every way,” “A Christmas Story” debuted in 1983. Set in the 1940s, the film depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker, who yearns for that gift of all gifts: the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

This was boyhood before “bang-bang you’re dead” was banned; family life prior to “One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads,” and Christmas before Saint Nicholas was denounced for his whiteness and “Merry Christmas” condemned for its exclusivity.

If children could choose the family into which they were born, most would opt for the kind depicted in “A Christmas Story,” where mom is a happy homemaker, dad a devoted working stiff, and between them, they have no repertoire of psychobabble to rub together.

Although clearly adored, Ralphie is not encouraged to share his feelings at every turn. Nor is he, in the spirit of gender-neutral parenting, circa 2016, urged to act out like a girl if he’s feeling … girlie. Instead, Ralphie is taught restraint and self-control. And horrors: The little boy even has his mouth washed out with soap and water for uttering the “F” expletive. “My personal preference was for Lux,” reveals Ralphie, “but I found Palmolive had a nice piquant after-dinner flavor—heady but with just a touch of mellow smoothness.” Ralphie is, of course, guilt-tripped with stories about starving Biafrans when he refuses to finish his food.

The parenting practiced so successfully by Mr. and Mrs. Parker fails every progressive commandment. By today’s standards, the delightful, un-precocious protagonist of “A Christmas Story” would be doomed to a lifetime on the therapist’s chaise lounge—and certainly to daily doses of Ritalin, as punishment for unbridled boyishness and daydreaming in class …

… Read the rest and share. “A Christmas Snuff Story” is now on The Daily Caller.

Merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah to all.

ilana

UPDATED (1/9): The Unbearable Banality Of Fox News (Tucker Carlson Excepted)

America, Conservatism, Intelligence, Media, Politics, Pop-Culture, Republicans

“Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans.” Thus, the possibility that a lonely voice telling an unwanted, original truth might be heard on Fox News is small.

With this in mind, I couldn’t resist bringing you the “mind-blowing” Fox headlines for December 22, 2016, the kind of insights that are off-the-charts brilliant (cynicism alert):

“Germany’s Refugee Policy Has Been a ‘Complete Disaster.'” [You don’t say!]

“Gutfeld Slams ‘Divisive, Alienating’ YouTuber Who Claimed Racism on Plane.” [Yawn.]

Meghan McCain, one of the dumbest women on TV: “‘I’m So Blown Away’ That Some Dems Want a 3rd Hillary Run.”

“‘Russia Didn’t Elect Trump, America Did'” [OMG!]

Prepare for the clincher: “‘Tolerance Is One-Sided’ on the Left.” [The truly brilliant Christopher Hitchens must be tossing in his grave. His brilliance has finally been bested.]

Mediocrity.

UPDATE (1/9):

What About Donald Trump’s Security Detail? Has IT Been Infiltrated?

Affirmative Action, Donald Trump, Homeland Security, Islam, Middle East, Terrorism

The shooter who assassinated the Russian envoy to Turkey, Andrey G. Karlov, is “described by Turkish officials as a 22-year-old off-duty police officer.”

Off duty or on duty, does the security detail of President-elect Donald Trump include Muslims who may be similarly “awakened”? These budding Jihadis are being flooded with images of Syrians dying in a civil war between the American-backed ISIS rebels, as against Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin. Eric Margolis:

[T]he US has long aided ISIS and still sees it as a potent weapon against the Assad government. Why else would it take the US and its Arab and Kurdish foot soldiers so long to move against ISIS strongholds at Raqqa and Mosul– which are, as this writer knows, only a taxi-ride away? ISIS is a rag-tag bunch of 20-something amateur Rambos, not the Wehrmacht.
One likely answer is that imperial Washington is totally confused over whom to support and how to do it. The bewildering fracas between Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, Arabs, Yazidis, assorted Christians, ISIS wildmen, egged on the US, Israel, Turkey, Russia, France, Britain, Lebanon, Jordan, the oil Arabs is just too much for Washington’s ill-educated, or often downright dim policy makers. …

Backing ISIS.


Be careful.


No place for Prince of Peace.


BHO goes a golfing:


Merkel must go.


Be a good dhimmi:


Fake News?


RELATED: Islamic Infiltration: How Deep, How Wide?

A Timely Christmas Gift

Christianity, Donald Trump, Ilana Mercer, Literature

The other day, a reader asked if  “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” published June 29, had been “updated since the election.” The candid reply is “no. No need.” The first libertarian book of Trump is as valid and predictive as it was when it came out. And the price of both formats has been slashed. For a last minute Christmas gift, the Kindle edition is a mere $3.99; the paperback $10.99.

Historians Dr. Clyde Wilson, whose books I highly recommend, reviewed “The Trump Revolution” in Chronicles magazine, the flagship publication of principled paleoconservationism. “Sounding The Trump” is in the October 2016 issue of Chronicles (subscribe). A short excerpt:

In important ways, a revolutionary process has begun. So argues Ilana Mercer in the best extended analysis yet published of the Trump phenomenon: “Trump is getting an atrophied political system to oscillate” in “an oddly marvelous uprising.” For us revolutionaries there is still a long way to go, but we are entitled to a “modest hope” that “an utterly different political animal, Donald Trump, might actually do some good for the countrymen he genuinely seems to love.”  … It is not Trump who is transforming American politics, the author asserts; “it’s the people of America doing the transforming.” Trump is the first politician in a long, long time who has regarded America as a country rather than a “proposition” and has actually spoken to and for “the people.” Far from being “divisive,” his plain speaking has enthusiastically united large numbers of Americans. …

… “White Lives Matter Less” has been, in Mercer’s words, “the creedal pillar” of our public life. Without ungraciousness to any, Trump has shown that it is OK for white Americans to declare that they have had enough of “the pigment burden” that has been piled on their backs. This paleolibertarian author does not disguise her disgust at the fashionable statism, indistinguishable from the collectivist left and without a clue to what “free trade” really means, that passes for libertarianism today. …

… as Mercer points out with tough realism, … In this post-constitutional time, it may be that “the best liberty lovers can look to is action and counter-action, force and counterforce in the service of liberty.” A president hoping for reform will face 160,000 pages of federal laws and regulations and relentless sabotage by the Banksters, Bombers, Bureaucrats, and Busybodies who now govern us. He cannot be a moderate if he hopes to accomplish anything.

On “Mercer’s Menckenesque ability to coin memorable phrases describing the empowered fools of our time,” Professor Wilson’s asks: “Does any contemporary writer do it better?”

Finally, a reviewer with a sense of fun; someone with the good sense to have a hearty chuckle at this verbal swordplay:

Mercer on the media: “news nitworks,” the “War Street Journal,” “idiot’s lantern,” “unsharpened pencil,” “tele-tarts,” a “circle jerk of power brokers,” “one-trick donkeys,” “celebrated mediocrities,” “another banal bloviation,” the “cable commentariat as a cog in the corpulent D.C. fleshpot.”

Mercer on our rulers and would-be rulers: “parasites in waiting”; “nation-building at the point of the bayonet makes [Hillary] barking happy”; “Banana Republicans”; “dwarf-tossing” (William Kristol’s promotion of nonentities as Trump alternatives); the “quaint expectation that voters, not party operatives, would choose the nominee”; the “silent majority that dare not speak its name”; “what our crypto-leftist conservatives are ramming down our proverbial gullets are dogmas, not values”; the “master-servant relationship between Republicans and the Religious Right”; the “think tanks’ industry for the god of war”; “neoconservatives speaking like Tocqueville but acting like Robespierre”; “neoconservatives standing athwart every valid form of American conservatism yelling stop.”

What a review and what an honor!

And to all my readers: I’m honored to have had your support for all these years. Thank you!

Merry Christmas and a happy Hanukkah and New Year.

ilana