print“Beware The Values Cudgel” is the current column, now on The Daily Caller (founded by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson). An Excerpt:
… When you hear an appeal to “permanent values”—”the values that make our country great,” to quote Hillary Clinton—know you are dealing with world-class crooks. These crooks want to swindle you out of the freedom to think and believe as you wish. For in the classical conservative and libertarian traditions, values are private things, to be left to civil society—the individual, family and church—to practice and police.
The American government is charged purely with upholding the law, no more. Why so? Because government has police and military powers with which to enforce its “values.” A free people dare not entrust such an omnipotent entity with policing values, at home or abroad, because values enforced are dogma.
When incontestable majorities call on government to curb Islamic and other in-migration because this imperils American lives, President Trump’s unswerving opponents—the Obama, Clinton, Ryan, McCain, Graham, Schumer and media mafia—will invariably intone, “That’s not who we are.”
When you hear that manipulative mantra, tell them to shut up, mind their own business, and stick to their constitutional mandate to protect the people, not police their minds.
Remember that through an appeal to values, the State aggrandizes itself.
A limited government, serving an ostensibly free people, must thus never enforce values. …
… Read the rest. “Beware The Values Cudgel” is now on The Daily Caller.
If you’d like to feature the Mercer Column (criminally underexposed in paleolibertarian and paleoconservative quarters), in your magazine, paper or pixels, contact me at ilana@ilanamercer.com. My gratitude to the wonderful, intellectually honest publishers who’ve taken the leap.