Category Archives: Constitution

NEW ESSAY (NEWS 10/6): Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu

America, Anti-Semitism, Argument, Constitution, Donald Trump, Fascism, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, GAZA, Government, Individual Rights, Israel, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Middle East, Natural Law, Palestinians, Racism, The State

Freedom needs no justification. It is an end unto itself. You are deficient in American solidarity if you don’t stand up for non-violent protest and all speech ~ilana 

New essay is “Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu.” It is featured on The Unz Review (as a leading essay), on The New American, and on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

You can now read it on IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/10/free-speech-charlie-kirk-american-lesson-pam-bondi-donlad-trump-netanyahu/

Excerpt:

Let us be clear about what freedom of speech à la America truly means:

The words people speak, chant, write and tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or burn, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia; the goose-stepping, Hitler salutes they muck around with—provided no physical aggression is involved (violence against animals included), all this counts as protected speech, licit in natural law.

So long as oddities and idiosyncrasies, whether performed alone or in groups, thoughts harbored privately or shared in public—so long as no violence accompanies such speech or behavior; so long as your mitts stop at the next man’s face (or at the next mutt’s fury face, Kristi Noem): SPEECH. It’s all speech. It should be free, unfettered and as wild and as wanton as can be.

At their worst, expressions of ostensible antisemitism, Naziism, racisms or other antipathies amount to thought crimes, nothing more, if expressed as a belief system severally or collectively, rather than in palpably violent actions.  Whether your thoughts are spoken, chanted, written or preached; be they impolite or impolitic: they are, at worst, no more than thought crimes.

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. Thought crimes ought to be ferociously protected by a free people. By logical extension, any accusations of antisemitism, Naziism or other antipathies and racisms, are especially suspect when emitted as a meme from American institutionalized power structures.

One such obscenely wealthy and worthless power structure is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), or Defamation League—a more apt moniker once suggested by Elon Musk, before he joined the ADL in severely censoring some speech on the X platform. The ADL is a meddlesome shakedown operation, in the mold of the Southern Poverty Law Center (“Smear Artists for the Total State,” wrote Tom DiLorenzo). It has taken it upon itself to decide who lives and who dies socially and financially on the basis of the unfortunate individual’s ideas, spoken and written.

In the American tradition, thoughts and words spoken or written that are politically impolite—again, racism; Naziism, antisemitism—retain protected status as speech beyond the adjudication of law-makers, bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats and technocrats.

Sniffing out racists or anti-Semites is an absolute no-no for any and all self-respecting, libertarian-minded Americans, or any American, for that matter. Like creedal libertarians, Americans don’t, or should not, prosecute thought crimes or persecute thought “criminals.”

…    Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, RIP, got it. On May 2, 2024, Kirk wrote the following: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t get it. No wonder even Glenn Greenwald, once a practicing constitutional attorney—and a man of manners and decorum—regularly appends “dumb” and “lacking any grasp of constitutional law” to any mention of Bondi, who said this after Kirk’s murder:

The Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech…

…  Left, Right and libertarian; we can and must, then, join in unapologetically rejecting the very idea of policing, purging, persecuting or prosecuting people for holding and expressing politically unpopular ideas in action or in speech.

THE REST:  “Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu” is featured on The Unz Review (as a leading essay), on The New American, and on LewRockwell.com

Read it on IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/10/free-speech-charlie-kirk-american-lesson-pam-bondi-donlad-trump-netanyahu/

NEWS UPDATE (10/6):  Jeremy Scahill
“Hamas’s Strategic Gamble” by the dedicated and able Jeremy Scahill: “While President Trump enthusiastically welcomed Hamas’s response to his Gaza plan, the White House and Israel deal in deception.” (Drop Site News)

UPDATED (4/30) NEW ESSAY And PODCAST: Campus Kids Could Deliver Gaza From The Great & Little Satan

Anti-Semitism, Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Critique, Democrats, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Justice, libertarianism, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, War

NEW ESSAY is “Campus Kids Could Deliver Gaza From The Great & Little Satan.” It was a main featured on The Unz Review, and it featured on The New American, April, 28, and
The Mises Institute’s Power & Market, April 30.

Excerpt:

American foreign policy is a museum of horrors in which Gaza 2023/2024 is the main exhibit.

It is my conviction that Gaza is much more than just one more American foreign-policy failure, an event and topic to swill around like mouth wash, spit out and move on, once the usual “tsk, tsk” bromides have been disgorged.

Uncle Sam’s usual deathly mixture of ignorance, cruelty and superiority has been exceeded with respect to Gaza. It is my belief that the United States’ open, even-energetic support for genocide is a defining event in the annals of American foreign-policy aberrations—repeatedly and vigorously vetoing UN Security Council resolutions against Israel’s atrocities, justifying Israel’s violations of the law, as well as, alternatively, pretending these violations had never occurred and making like the laws of man and the laws of God don’t apply to Israel.

This American failure is probably qualitatively different from blunders that went before. What the United States has approved in Gaza is the crime of all crimes, appallingly carried out in broad daylight.

Duly, the annihilation of a community and the landmass that supports it has been achieved. The arteries of supplies that sustain this Palestinian society are all but closed. The mass murder of members of the targeted group proceeds apace. Daily. Shamelessly. Before our very eyes. And as I write.

It is the case of the senile (Joe Biden) supporting the criminally insane (Israel).

To press my point: Mass graves are uncovered near the ruins of the Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals. Therein hundreds of Palestinians have been interred, bodies stacked, some handcuffed, others still tethered to medical tubes. The White House’s response amounts to, “Where, what, who, and how can this possibly be? Who could have done this horrible thing? Yes, we, too, want answers right away. Let’s do the forensics. Let’s ask the Israelis to look into it, shall we? See you tomorrow.”

This is not a Whodunit, you feckless, malevolent morons.

The serial killers are known to us. We know who murdered over 34,183 Palestinians and maimed an estimated 77,143. The serial killers loosed on millions of Gazans—their guns at the ready, pointed at the civilians huddled in the southern tip of the Strip—these are friends of ours. …

….THE REST: “Campus Kids Could Deliver Gaza From The Great & Little Satan” is on The Unz Review, The New American, and  The Mises Institute’s Power & Market.

RELATED PODCAST: “What Next After Genocide-By-Proxy & The Murder Of Diplomacy? The Quest For Peace“:

 

UPDATED (12/17): NEW COLUMN: Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Just How Vampiric Are The ‘Vaunted’ Israel Defense Forces?

America, Constitution, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Middle East, Military, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

Dead in the ruins of Gaza is the Israeli collective conscience—together with thousands-upon-thousands of Gaza’s civilians; dead or displaced for decades to come ~ilana

To refuse to bear witness to the war on Gazansalso 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

NEW COLUMN IS “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights US Marine’s Superiority“. Or, “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Just How Vampiric Are The ‘Vaunted’ Israel Defense Forces?It was featured on The New American, at The Ron Paul Institute For Peace and Prosperity,” and the Mises Institute’s Power & Market.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/12/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/

I thank all my publishers.

I did some simple math—whose core truth obtains, although the numbers are already out of date, given the scale of the carnage. My editor provided another ratio, at the end, here  https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/12/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/ , which speaks to the proportionality imperative of Just War Theory, sundered by Israel.

Please consider that my last four tracts on Gaza, and that scroll of a blog, “Constantly UPDATED (12/13): ‘Total Warfare’ On GAZA: War Against Civilians Is War On Civilization“—all anatomizing the war on Gazans: These are tremendously painful to write, as a Jew and a former fierce defender of Israel.

But to refuse to bear witness to the war on 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.

Excerpt:

“… Force-fed the fiction of the IDF as the most ethical fighting force in the universe; I set about to conduct a proportional, if limited, comparison. I compare like with like, albeit in limited but significant theatres of war: Israel’s offensive in Gaza against “Hamas,” in late 2023, to America’s onslaught in Fallujah against the Iraqi resistance, in 2004.

The battle in Fallujah is considered “the deadliest battle involving U.S. Marines since Vietnam.” “Eighty-two U.S. servicemembers died during the street-by-street, house-by-house effort to clear Al Qaeda from the city.” Officially, it is described as a “battle to retake the key city of Fallujah from a violent insurgency that was taking root across Iraq after the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein.”

Before the American invasion of Iraq, Fallujah was a compact city of about 400,000 people. “Around 700 Iraqi civilians were killed over the course of the 2004 fight for Fallujah.”

Gaza’s population is about 2.4 million strong. The administrative chaos in war-time Gaza would hamper accurate records-keeping. That considered—and not counting individuals buried beneath the rubble—approximately 15,000 Gazans have been killed by Israel. (Haaretz, Israel News, Friday, December 2, 2023)

Let’s extrapolate:

Were Fallujah as populated as Gaza (2.4 million), the United States Marines would have killed approximately 4,200 Iraqi souls. This is a far cry from the Israel Defense Forces’ butcher’s bill of 15,000 civilians dead in Gaza—and climbing.

Were Gaza as small as Fallujah (400,000); the Israelis, befitting their butcher’s bill so far, would still have killed at least 2,500 souls to our Marines’ 700. Ceteris paribus, naturally.

Let that sink in.

On the numbers, I have been exceedingly charitable to the Israelis, given that their victims, buried beneath the rubble, are still mostly unaccounted for, and considering that the IDF resumed hostilities against civilians on December 1.

Both the Israeli and the U.S. militaries come in here for rough treatment. The fulminations of the Israel Firsters stateside aside, however, some American patriotism is owed amid the sorrow over Israel’s barbaric blitzkrieg.

Damning with faint praise though this may be, Americans, in the persons of our U.S. Marines in Fallujah—in the dubious theater of another unjust war—were righteous, compared to the monstrous Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. …

… THE REST is here: “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights US Marine’s Superiority.” Or, “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Just How Vampiric Are The ‘Vaunted’ Israel Defense Forces?

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/12/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/

The complete column is always posted eventually at IlanaMercer’s Weekly Column Archive.

UPDATE (December 17, 023):

These people at ZeroHedge, December 17, 2023, are, well, dishonest. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/4th-generation-devastation-west-has-been-targeted-cowardly-globalist-mind-war

Over the pages of The New American, first, this column mocked the Fourth Generation Warfare categorization—and ostensible benevolence. On December 4, 2023, I applied this the 4th Generation Warfare vs. 3rd Generation Warfare analysis to the current global woke military.

In an intellectually honest America, my iteration of the idea would have been credited on Zero Hedge:

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.
The ostensible use of “tanks, mechanized infantry, and close air support” to “collapse an enemy’s defenses” are really unthinking, disproportionate shows of brute military force, reliant on massive amounts of materiel.
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. Boosted by technology, “advanced” armies would be relying on “small, highly mobile elements, composed of very intelligent soldiers, armed with high technology weapons.” These precision units and attendant weapons were expected “to range over wide areas seeking critical targets.”
In addition to technology; predicted and depicted was a military whose central impetus was augmented by ideas. In America, the controversial changing of hearts and minds, historically, has included fomenting coups around the world with the connivance afforded by psychological operations.
Near as I can tell, 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. Dead in the ruins of Gaza is the Israeli collective conscience—together with thousands-upon-thousands of Gaza’s civilians; dead or displaced for decades to come. The razing and ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Benjmain Netanyahu, abetted by Joe Biden, his Uniparty accomplices and a complicit West: This appears to capture the kind of Third-Gen “capability” delivered by the modern, standing, Woke military.

https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/  (December 4, 2023)

* Screen pic of Gazans reduced to pre-industrial life, scrounging.

NEW COLUMN: Trump: Heroic Martyr—However…

Argument, Conservatism, Constitution, COVID-19, Critique, Donald Trump, Family, Foreign Policy, IMMIGRATION, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Populism, Republicans, Russia, The Establishment, The State

For shooting his mouth off, Trump has been designated a felon. Relays of prosecution launched against him have culminated in the Georgia arrest: That is persecution. Trump is being subjected to the Law of Rule, not the rule of law ~ilana

NEW COLUMN is “Trump: Heroic Martyr—However…” You can read it in its entirety on WND.COM, The New American, and The Unz Review.

It’ll be available on IlanaMercer.com later this weekend.

Excerpt:

That Donald Trump is a political martyr is indisputable. It was already bedrock truth in January, 2021, when I first uttered the M-word. The occasion was the president’s second impeachment, passed impromptu in the House, with no due process of law afforded him whatsoever.

That the persecution of Trump is his badge of honor, a decoration of sorts, has been seconded in some unlikely quarters. Individuals calling themselves Blacks For Trump say the same. Trump is a Brother now: They designate you a felon for shooting your mouth off, and book you into the infamous Fulton County Jail in Atlanta; that means the system is messing with you, they say. You are one of us.

Brothers who speak like this are sensing a deep injustice that comes with institutional rot.

Relays of prosecution launched against Trump have culminated in the Georgia arrest: That is persecution. Trump is being subjected to the Law of Rule, not the rule of law.

Now that Trump has been martyred—we pray for the former president and salute him for his resolve and resilience in the face of unadulterated evil. For the Permanent State, Democrat and Republican, want Trump gone for good—and worse. There! I said it. It’s the truth.

The D.C. hydra head has denied Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a security detail; and they’d assassinate Donald Trump if they could. They’d do the same to you, if you mattered.

In their mild, flaccid responses to the martyrdom of Donald Trump; the Republicans remain execrable.

Admiration for Trump the Man notwithstanding—his failures as a president are irremediable. …

… I count the ways in, “Trump: Heroic Martyr—However…” Read it in its entirety on WND.COM, The New American, and The Unz Review.

Check back here, at IlanaMercer.com, to read “Trump: Heroic Martyr—However...” later this weekend.