After describing me and my work as fiercely independent and contrarian, a well-known talk-show host recently quipped: “But you are doing alright, aren’t you?”
I was taken aback. Was it not obvious that this was not the case? Was it not plain to see that other than WorldNetDaily.com—whose willingness to feature their longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, “Return To Reason” came to an abrupt end in April, 2016—most media pack animals, including libertarians, would not brook commentary that didn’t adhere to accepted lines? Was it not apparent that while the praise for the work on this site has come from the best and the brightest, publishers and syndicators were not pounding on IlanaMercer.com’s pixelated doors?
I came out with my first editorial in opposition to the war in Iraq in September 2002. My predictions have all come to pass. Before that, the welcoming invitations from movers and shakers among the conservative media had been trickling in, steady and nice. The syndicator also came calling. After that, everything dried up. And it has remained parched for years. Cultivating those contacts could have been lucrative, but would have come at the price of principle. I was not going to cheer for an unjust war—not against Iraq or Lebanon. At the same time, I did not intend to pacify libertarians (or paleos) by joining in their delegitimization of Israel. Or by confining my suspicion of state power to the American state, while ignoring Islam, a system that strives to establish a state wherever it takes hold, and whose religionists are at the center of practically every conflict in the world today. That would have been irrational and in defiance of reality and history.
Neither was I willing to affirm the libertarian catechism about mass immigration. When government orchestrates an unfettered movement of people into an interventionist state, in which the rights to property, free association, and self defense are heavily circumscribed by the state—it is guilty of unadulterated social engineering, central planning, and worse. State officials who arrest Americans for defending their country against this onslaught are guilty of treason. We said it here. We stayed on topic, offering arguments that so far have remained unchallenged.
The therapeutic state and the trend toward medicalizing misbehavior, a trend conservatives now embrace, remained in our sights. We also pointed out singularly that feminism has entered a new phase: “Feminists once aimed to unseat men, now they are actively engaged in queering them.” The feminization of society is everywhere apparent, as we’ve illustrated, with vivid descriptions of “the many females manning the front desks on cable, Y chromosome carriers included, [who] do their daily bit to entrench a shift from hard to soft-news stories.”
Bush gave implicit consent to his bought buddies, the Turks, to conduct covert operations in Iraqi Kurdistan, home of a people against whom the Turks have “waged systematic ethnocide.” Oblivious to the significance of Bush’s betrayal, the malpracticing media barely covered these developments. IlanaMercer.com did—with a vengeance.
As the dollar continued its precipitous decline, the financial media continued to talk up the stock exchange blithely. But even these cogs in what we’ve dubbed the “Military-Media-Industrial-Congressional-Complex” failed to suppress the facts about the promiscuous money printing underway and the resulting “inflation.” IlanaMercer.com beat them to it by weeks.
Cut to the cloying coverage of the 2008 elections. We’ll discount the mediacrats and their masters in Washington; mainstream media can’t even call a caucus. The liberty community, however, divided broadly into those who panned Ron Paul and those who pandered to his every word. Of these, Beltway libertarians have missed the boat completely. At the slightest upset they dissed and distanced themselves from Paul, and have proven that in their libertarianism lite, they remain utterly divorced from the groundswell Paul has ignited.
Here on IlanaMercer.com we espouse the superlatively reasonable philosophy of classical liberalism, Ludwig von Mises’. With respect to Ron Paul, I’ve adopted the only position I know: unaffiliated and independent. Readers can have confidence in this columnist, as they know that she is “temperamentally unsuited to obedience.” Thus, while I’ve endorsed Ron Paul, aspects of his philosophy and strategy have not escaped my scrutiny. Those who come to this space on cyberspace trust me to scrutinize yet advise. And what has been my qualified advice? Paul’s not perfect (who is?), but his “vision is as close to The Good Life as we could hope to come in the current ideological climate. Only tinny ideologues encased in worthless ideological armor—worthless because it exists in the arid arena of their minds, not on earth—would turn their noses up at the prospect of Paul.” The illustrious John Derbyshire of “National Review” called it “The Pauline Gospel at its Best.” (Updated: February 3, 2008)
As we learned late in April of 2008, “In the land of the free and home of the brave hundreds of children can be rounded up and removed from their families based on a hunch or a hoax. No hue and cry will ensue—not from professional civil libertarians, nor from members of the unwatchful dogs in the media, or from presidential candidates vying to uphold—or is it just to hold—the Constitution.”
As was “the rigor-mortis riddled Right” silent when Texas rangers removed over 417 children from the sect known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”
I duly fingered “the kangaroo court of Judge Barbara L. Walther, for whom a tip from a complainant who never materialized constitutes probable cause.” And I reminded forgetful Americans that the Sixth Amendment applied equally to people of whom they disapproved:
“The rules of evidence have been revised in post-constitutional America. If you thought that wrenching babes from their moms ought to be predicated on the testimony of a competent, credible witness, you were wrong. And you were utterly insane if you imagined the defendants ought to get to confront the witness against them in a trial before being punished.”
And:
“In post-constitutional America the right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures certainly no longer applies uniformly. Ditto due process. Creepy people, for whom the goons in government have been gunning, are as good as convicted criminals. In the case of the FLDS cult’s kids, the burden of proof has been shifted from the state to its victims.”
“They’re Coming For Your Kids!” managed to get a word in about “misplaced compassion” in “sentimental, sensation-driven America”:
“The country cried with Ellen DeGeneres as the comedian slobbered on camera, and begged the ‘Mutts and Moms’ canine adoption agency to return to friends a terrier the agency had removed.” Why was “no member of the American Idiocracy shedding a tear for tots torn from their loving mothers?”
It’s all well and good for large libertarian websites and think tanks to tout their courage as they sally forth from the security of well-established, well-frequented, and reasonably well-funded establishments. Not so when one is running a solo operation, with limited funds and little support. Yet IlanaMercer.com was recently ranked by the “Intellectual Conservative as 61st out of the top 131 conservative-cum-libertarian websites.
THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT (January 31, 2009): The economy is not the only object of cooling; the weather appears to be freezing over too. This is why the gabbling, hot-and-bothered Al Gore has substituted “global warming” with the more versatile “climate change.”
Here at the Weather Underground (and @ilanamercer.com), I’ve encapsulated the Gorian illogic thus:
“Evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate Chicken Littles enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns—warm or cold—is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it.”
As Karl Popper reminded us, “A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is,” of course, “non-scientific.” What eco-idiots have done is to immunize the theory of global warming against the dangers of scientific refutation.
LET THE SUNSHINE IN. Readers of Barely A Blog were, moreover, introduced, before most in the mainstream, to the concept of “sunspot activity.” In March of 2007, I published an article written exclusively for BAB by N. Baldwin, Jr. It was based on our friend’s book, “Global Warming: CO2, SunSpots, or Politics?”
The decrease in sunspot activity—the sun having entered what appears to be a period of solar inactivity, resulting in all likelihood in global cooling—was reported a year and a half later by “Space Daily.” Fully two years after our report, sunspots, solar flares and solar eruptions have entered the overheated debate about the climate.
Having failed their readers time-and-again, the establishment media is struggling to survive. Good. Why support a source of propaganda that blows hot air about global warming and is cool to the market economy, the source of our splendid standard of living? Why contribute to the success of major media that have failed miserably and consistently to predict the outcomes of unjust wars, or warn ahead-of-time of the economic havoc wreaked by profligate administrations and their printing press?
“I.O.U.S.A.” (February 28, 2009): Speaking of the printing presses, which are now running non-stop: Just the other day, MSNBC found the word “debt” in the dictionary. Michael Smerconish—who calls himself conservative, but isn’t—was asked by Obamahead David Schuster whether our foreign debtors might call it quits and stop funding the orgy.
Smerconish looked surprised, and said he had no idea, which was honest enough. Then he quickly padded that enormous ego by adding: Let nobody claim he has an idea, or that he foresaw the current crisis.
When you shut serious libertarians (not libertarians lite like Neal Boortz and Treason Magazine) out of the discourse, you are also able to pretend they don’t exist and have not been warning of a meltdown. (And then steal their insights to present to mainstream when the time is ripe.)
This column was warning in 2003, if not earlier, of the consequences of endless debt, credit expansion, and the dangers of hyperinflation. As did I explain to those who bothered to listen that production, not credit-fueled consumption, was whence came wealth. An example is “Bring ‘Em Home, Mr. Bush”:
“…This means we’re into Keynesian deficit spending—the government is borrowing and inflating the money supply to fund its profligacy, a practice that will accelerate the depreciation of the dollar, and may even lead to the horror of hyperinflation.”
Here I am again, in April of 2003 (Wartime Socialism), sounding the alarm over Dubya’s debauchery:
The finances for the war, of course, will come from the private economy. For every dollar the government spends, a dollar is suctioned from you and me. For every new smiling military recruit sitting pretty with a home, a porch, and a pension, some poor sod will join the army of (nine million) unemployed.
Given its debt, the U.S. government is fast becoming a bad risk as a borrower. To finance the war, then, it’ll have to steal over and above the usual call of duty. Unlike ‘The Shrub’ currently in power, Ronald Reagan understood a thing or two. He said this: ‘The truth is that inflation is caused by government. It’s caused by government spending more than it takes in, and it will go away just as soon as government stops doing that.'”
More precisely, inflation is an increase in the money supply by the government. Having adopted deficit spending as an article of faith, Bush will call on the Federal Reserve and the printing press to print money to pay the costs of the war. The endemic price hikes and economic distortions that’ll follow are but a by-product of this legalized counterfeiting.
Reports of freshly minted dollars making their way from the Federal Reserve Bank to millions of Iraqis, now on the U.S. payroll, suggest that the money market is already being flooded. The first counterfeit down payment on the war will soon be wending its way into the coffers of the selected war contractors and their employees.
So why is this so bad? Doesn’t more paper money make us all richer?
No, it doesn’t. 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.
(March 26, 2009): Since the crowning of Obama, Republicans have begun to cultivate a convenient awareness of the weight of the federal debt on the American economy.
Penned in 2007, my “Inflation 101 For Women Pundits And Other Tyrants” put the burden Dubya’s “national debt of $9 trillion” had placed on “America’s $12.98-trillion economy” in perspective:
As the American national debt stands, we would not be admitted into the company of socialists: The European Union. The EU expects member nations to hold debt below 60 percent of GDP.
Two years later, in March 26, 2009, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) claims the same, and makes headlines in The Hill.
A little late, don’t you think?!
December 15, 2009: What are you supporting? A marginalized voice that beats most well-funded group thinkers out there in coverage and commentary.
On the topic of those fattened collectivists: Neil Cavuto has begun, lately (on December 11, 2009, to be precise), to cover the discrepancy between the respective incomes of workers employed in the private vs. the parasitical sector. Cavuto got his column “idea” from USA-Today data.
I beat both entities to it.
Let’s see, when was “Life in the Oink Sector” written? September 25, 2009. That column was cited by the New York Times’ “Economix” blog. Needless to say, the Times would never ever have bothered to apprise its readers of the cost “of these pampered pigs”:
“There are upward of 20 million of these pampered pigs, hogging 87,000 different institutions in government and public education, where the payrolls are always lard-laden in comparison to private-economy paysheets.”
Ultimately, what neither the Times nor Cavuto will ever do for you is speak to the economic-cum-moral principles that differentiate the voluntary sector from the work force that uses FORCE to keep itself larded up.
April 16, 2010: With few exceptions, no journalistic outlet in the free world has been prepared to seriously and consistently report on the ongoing slaughter of South Africa’s white farmers—and, increasingly, of white ethnics in general-–in ways that would do Shaka Zulu proud.
America’s airheads and idiots find publishers for their mindless meandering. This is not the case with the groundbreaking release, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.”
A culmination of years of writing and thinking about my South African homeland, RIP, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” is topped and tailed with hard evidence that allows conclusions vis-à-vis the aggregate characteristics of the blood-soaked society for which the sainted Mandela is praised in the West. It the definitive account, factual and philosophical, about what has befallen South Africa since democracy.
April 17, 2013: BEATING JON STEWART TO CALLING THE MEDIA’S BLUFF. Over the course of a few hours today (April 17), the hysterical and histrionic US media—front men and women for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the rest—had gone from asserting the arrest of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, to screening amateur images of their fantasy felon, to decamping to the courthouse in expectation of an arraignment, to confessing without a smidgen of shame that nothing of the sort had transpired.
We lied. OK, we fibbed. Let’s move on. Quick. There is to be no meta reporting about the misreporting.
“No arrests in Boston bombing.”
How ironic, then, that readers have demanded that I justify, even atone, for my assessment of the sum-total of one coequal (female) branch of the media-military-congressional complex:
“Big hair, an overbite, botox and mind-numbing banalities.”
You’d have saved time—and spared yourself the confusion generated on the Colosseum of cretins that is American mainstream media—had you, my reader, come straight to Barely A Blog for news and commentary served up straight. Think about it: Jon Stewart, a comedian who cleaves to fact (if not to liberty’s principles), only aired the truth later that evening.
Barely a Blog beat Jon Stewart to it. BAB called the media’s bluff @ 11:20 am on that day (April 17).
So who’s looking out for you?
The role of the contrarian who cleaves to the natural laws of economics and justice is even more crucial in times of crisis. Centuries ago, artists—among other creative folks—relied on discerning patrons to keep their work alive. Nothing has changed.
Mainstream intelligentsia is dishing out dirt, as usual. It is not only festooned with arrogant liars, but, worse: intellectual sloths, bereft of the slightest affinity for reality, much less natural law. Our side can begin to gain a rightful market share in the miasma that is the market place of ideas. But we need to work overtime at supporting and disseminating the truth, while dissociating from the dreck. Out of chaos, some new, not-necessarily bad, order may just emerge.
So, if you have not yet signed up for the Mercer weekly e-newsletter, you can do so HERE. If you value my work and wish me to continue producing it despite ever-diminishing returns, please support the sites and their proprietor, and, of course, purchase a copy of Into the Cannibal’s Pot, and review the book on Amazon.
(In reply to the frequent requests for feature updates: ILANAMERCER.COM AND BARELY A BLOG are low- or close-to-no-budget operations, written and “programed” by me, with the help of donations from a few, generous readers. Unless our fortunes change here—not least that this scribe is no longer the sole “programer”—we’ll have to make do with the BAB format and features are they stands, I’m afraid.)
You, the reader, are my mainstay. I know you value the ability to come to a place in cyberspace where you’re heard, challenged, entertained—even regaled—and (gently) guided. But understand: This is hard work. It cannot be done without your assistance.
As always, I appreciate your generous support during these hard times.
ILANA
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