Category Archives: Ethics

UPDATED (7/5/021): Citing Sources: Jewish Morality (‘Mussar & Middot’) Demands Acknowledging Those Who Went Before, Intellectually

Argument, Communism, Conservatism, Critical Race Theory, Ethics, Ilana Mercer, Judaism & Jews, Morality, Paleoconservatism, Socialism

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Genesis: It all began with a tweet from a Mercer reader, who was politely ticked off that this writer was not credited for thinking she has developed, and has been hammering home in widely published essays, on large conservative hangouts: WND.COM, American Greatness, The Unz Review, Townhall.com, Quarterly Review out of Britain, and often American Renaissance. The reader’s tweets are pictured above.

In a nutshell: When every other American commentator was kibitzing about Critical Race Theory as Marxism—including the voluble writers on Darren Beattie’s site, Revolver News—this writer, as is her wont, had dug in her heels since 2019, insisting that this was ALL anti-whiteness, not Marxism, and nothing more.

“Not Identity Politics, Anti-white Politics” (02/28/2019)
“Why Conservatives Ignore White-Hating Politics” (September 19, 2019)
“Ethnocidal ‘Critical Race Theory’ Is Upon Us Like White On Rice” (September 10, 2020)
“Earth To Conservatives: The Problem Is ‘Systemic Anti-Whiteness,’ Not Marxism, Not ID Politics” (May 10, 2021)
And MORE, in writing and video.

The reader was honest. So he wrote:

… I saw this evolving the other day when Beattie gave credit to CJ Pearson for calling #CRT anti-white. That’s how it works on Twitter, the big accounts pick up so much from others but never give credit. I knew revolverdotnews was going to run with it but wouldn’t give you credit. It was obvious to me he was aware you were one of the few people on Twitter speaking about this. …
…I know you give credit to others, it’s because you’re an ethical person, something in short supply these days. …

It’s worse than that. Again: throughout, Revolver News has penned elaborate tracts about Critical Race Theory as Marxism, a position this writer has always rejected as bogus; was first to reject, and against which she has developed and targeted analytical thinking.

That tack is summed up by this tract of May 5, 2021:

“Earth To Conservatives: The Problem Is Systemic Anti-Whiteness, Not Marxism, Not ID Politics.” One publisher, American Greatness, excerpted the gist of my lengthy argument:

If quibbling about Communism and identity politics becomes an obstacle to facing the reality of systemic anti-whiteness—then these theoretical crutches are an affront to reality

AND:

Theoretical Escapism Retards Action: … anti-white ideology is not to be conflated, as conservatives habitually do, with Marxist ideology. Very plainly, communism did not revolve around the exclusive blackening of whites. Stripped of bafflegab, this is critical race theory’s central project.

I followed up with a Twitter reference to Jewish sages, sent to me by my “little” brother, Rabbi Y. Isaacson. I copied my reader and Mr.  Darren J. Beattie, editor at Revolver News—where a piece, I am told, was published aping my own thinking, developed and written over months.

Jewish sages were strict about the ethics of crediting those who went before. “Whoever repeats a statement in the name of the one who said it brings redemption to the world. (Avot 6:6)

In response came this contempt-oozing snark of a tweet from Mr. Beattie:

I am all for giving credit for groundbreaking concepts and even coinages where appropriate. But this lady making a proprietary claim over the term “anti-white” or the idea that CRT is anti-white but not marxist is absurd. Marvel comic tier “paleo-lolbertarian” autism on display

Oodles of contempt, I have noticed over the decades, are not unusual among paleoconservative men—not the Republican young men and women, mind you, whom I find delightfully polite and respectful. This venom-spitting cobra is confined to a very specific segment of the Old Right, young and old.

My original reader responded:

…I just read the nasty Beattie tweet, … he’s reduced to calling names. What a jerk. The hilarious thing is Revolver just wrote an entire article about anti-white CRT. [The reader means following the publication of my many tracts.)

Were my original thinking emanating from a LARGE TWITTER account, or any well-known media whore (fat chance)—our own large media whores would have credited me.  This is why they’re so ugly: These Little Men “borrow” sans credit only from smaller, truly marginalized, independent thinkers.

Which is why I mentioned the non-man essence of this conduct. “Valiant strong men are not afraid to give credit.”

Witness the fact that, as my reader pointed out, Beattie had rushed to give credit to one CJ Pearson for calling CRT anti-white in a typical cyber-ejaculate tweet format. I know not who CJ Pearson is. All I know is that, when our media whores give credit—the account must be large. And indeed it is. Puke. My essays, as mentioned, have been detailed and analytical as is my wont—and published on leading conservative outlets (G-d bless them).  

“Do yr. research!,” I shot back. “You have not given credit where it’s due. “This lady,” old enough to be your mom, is indeed first to methodically develop the Marxism vs. Antiwhiteness distinction when u were penning treatises on CRT as Marxism, mere weeks back. Ugly. Dishonest @DarrenJBeattie.”

Some young people have related to me that, “We grew up politically reading Mercer on WND.” What a gift—and a responsibility. It was thus important to serve up an example of what intellectual honestly and integrity look like in crediting others. To that end, I posted my report about Beattie’s analysis–and application—of US-instigated color revolutions: “Here is an example of my reporting of Darren J Beattie’s very recent work (mine goes back 21 years). I will never-ever stiff people out of credit for their work. It’s loathsome. Tis about character (also, why borrow what I can best? I’ve never been at a loss for original thinking in 21 years of work):

Truth is non-partisan. However, in line with partisan social media’s celebrity tagging ditto-head proclivities—the warm smell of the herd that inoculates against impartial thinking—reality, in the form of mounds of essays, mine, was not considered the ultimate adjudicator of truth.

A select group of serious readers, my own, however, responded, thus:

David Sullivan: “You were first, for sure, way back with THE book, ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot.'”

“Ilana Mercer has been explaining for years why the problem is anti-white politics, not identity politics. Given that conservatives have failed repeatedly and the problem has gotten worse, perhaps it’s time they start listening. This column is from 2019,” tweeted Matt Ray, a paleolibertarian presence on the Internet and social media:

Matt took the time to excerpt from “It’s Not ‘Identity Politics,’ It’s Anti-White Politics” (February 28, 2019): Whatever is convulsing the country, it’s not identity politics. For, blacks are not being pitted against Hispanics. Hispanics are not being sicced on Asians, and Ameri-Indians aren’t being urged to attack the groups just mentioned. Rather, they’re all piling on honky.”

And I thank Matt Ray. Over the course of 21 years, I have replied to almost every reader who has taken the time to share with me his or her thoughts about my work. It’s called decency, humility. And if I get an idea from a twitter account, no matter how small, I hyperlink it, in credit (an example is the hyperlink on the quip, “That was a scary scene in ‘Deliverance,’” someone quipped  on Twitter, in “The Barbarians Are In Charge: Scenes From The Sacking of America“).

Anti-White HateWatch made excuses for the more powerful not crediting those whose work went before—and not because their work doesn’t speak for itself, but becasue their Twitter accounts aren’t as large as The Idiocracy’s.

In a war, we aren’t required to shout out “Thank you, Lockheed Martin” before we fire our missiles!

Me: If honestly crediting originators of serious argument and strategy in the battle over years is not important–why does @DarrenJBeatie try to “cancel” me and my work in developing this thinking first? You, too, are bereft of ethics, sir. Credit is a moral imperative, as per Jewish sages

And so it went.

Even when I excerpted my surmise, in “A White-Out Of Whites: Ignoring The Albino, Dhimmi Elephant In The Room,” drawn from a Critical Race Theorist who openly departs from Marxism—my own words were attributed to another. One not only loses IQ points on the illiterate social media, but one is faced with studied intellectual depravity.

A tweet, always limited by the number of allowable characters, was then compiled of my many pioneering essays explaining why, contra conservatism’s consensus before me, Critical Race Theory needed to be addressed purely and exclusively as anti-white agitprop and bafflegab combined. I wrote:

Fair minds know you can’t change the reality of creation.

Colin Flaherty, one the few fair, valiant men, retweeted with a comment:

“Everyone wants to deflect from that essential truth.”

Finally, heed we must what the sages of Judaism say about a morally simple matter: Crediting those who went before.

Text
“Whoever repeats a statement in the name of the one who said it brings redemption to the world.” (Avot 6:6)

Commentary
The sages deemed it so imperative that credit should be given for another’s ideas that they identified the act as a cause for redemption, both communal and personal.

I thank my brother, Rabbi Y. Isaacson, for sending me the words of our Avot (fathers).

And I ask that you teach your children to ethically and honestly credit their sources in conversation. This is what scholarly minds do.

As Jack Kerwick has explained :

it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to explore, revise, and expand the ideas of others, to explore their nuances, their contours, and utilize them for the purposes of illuminating new circumstances.

To Do
Make a concerted effort to share what you learn from someone else with the others around your Shabbat table, but be sure to quote your source and do so in the name of the person from whom you learned it.

UPDATE (7/5/021): I had mentioned in the blog post you are reading the imperative, as taught by our Jewish sages, to cite those who went before in one’s work, if one uses ideas developed by others. I’m pleased to report that “Mussar Center” liked the lesson on Twitter. @MussarCenter

 

Video With David Vance: “NY Psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani Is Right: Hatred Of Whites Is Here To Stay

Education, Ethics, Ilana Mercer, Morality, Psychiatry, Race, Racism, South-Africa, The West

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My weekly conversation with David Vance looks in depth at why murderous “NY Psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani Is Right: Hatred Of Whites Is Here To Stay.”

The timeless insights are drawn from “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons From America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011), and from columns based on the book, such as “Why Hatred Of Whites Is Here To Stay” (2017).

UPDATED (5/22/021): NEW COLUMN: The Moral Writer’s Commandment: Cite Your Sources! (And A Bit Of A Salve: The Beatles)

Argument, Canada, Conservatism, Ethics, Etiquette, Free Speech, Ilana Mercer, Journalism, Morality, Music, Paleoconservatism

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My first submission ever to an American news magazine was as a Canadian, in the early 2000s. What was visited upon me, on that occasion, shook me to the core.

I had been published by the Canadian Financial Post, a national newspaper, on the topic of intellectual property rights. Oh, the luxury of intellectual pursuit for the sake of it; these days, survival as free individuals is the pressing topic of the day.

Naturally, I credited scholarship galvanized in the making of my argument. And so, mentioned were Sir Arnold Plant, Tom G. Palmer and Stephan Kinsella, with whom I later collaborated in an IP symposium for the now-defunct Insight magazine.

The IP column submitted to the American Magazine was fielded by a well-known editor, a gate-keeper, who, in the unethical American model was both editor, writer and syndicated columnist. Still is.

Unethical, why? Because division of labor in our profession prevents corrupting conflict of interest. The latter always and everywhere gives rise to unethical conduct, all the more so given the grubby, ego-driven nature of journalism and journalists in America. With a few admirable exceptions (Townhall, American Greatness, CNSNews), almost all conservative editors also colonize their own editorial pages with their own copy.

Such opportunistic misconduct is zero-sum. The bad pushes out the good. In direct conflict with their mission, editors have the greatest incentive to keep talent off the pages, in-case it usurps theirs—and worse.

This particular editor-cum-writer-cum-syndicated columnist replied to my submission in the negative: My  piece (similar in “shoddiness” to “How Things Would Work In A Copyright Free Universe“) was just too shallow for his magazine. In other words, “Be gone with you lesser Canadian woman.”

My piece, however, was not too shallow for—wait for this—the American Editor’s syndicated column, where my column’s ideas cameoed in the United States under the dishonest man’s byline. Oh, yes. American Editor had excised smarty pants woman, seized upon her argument and her scrupulous citations of American scholars—and got himself a neat little column for his dry-as-dust syndicated slot.

Perhaps one day I shall name him, although to what avail, I don’t know. While it repulses me and I will not countenance it or be victim of it—unethical conduct doesn’t repulse many conservatives in the least.

I continue to be appalled afresh along this long and winding road (to conjure the pathos of the Beatles), and as the unfortunate topic of this week’s column attests.

Here’s the take-away lesson (as the kids like to say): Ecumenical submission to heavily promoted second-handers is not in me. When these second-handers pick the brains of longtime, marginalized, prolific, independent dissidents sans acknowledgement—they will be called out.

The new column is on WND.COM and The Unz Review, the staunchest defenders of my speech.

A bit of purity and inspiration amid a lot of moral ugliness:

The Beatles – The Long And Winding Road from Lennon-McCartney on Vimeo.

UPDATE (5/22/021):

This from a new and devoted reader I “met” through Michelle Malkin’s “Sovereign Nation”. His language is so vivid and filled with passion about ethics and justice.

Friday, May 21, 2021 11:30 PM
Subject: Fwd: RESPECT IDEAS!:> “HOMO EROTIC SUBMISSION > A MERCER ORIGINAL IDEA

Dear Friends,

The following LINKS are for an excellent essay by Misses Ilana Mercer on ideas and their, not only origin, but the acknowledgement of credit where credit is due. And this is not a case of shallow egocentricity, of a blowing of one’s own horn, and at that, out of tune. It is something I imagine a number of you have come across; that which concerns one of the most vile forms of censorship. The DISPLACEMENT of a human being, by the dishonest pseudo-intellectual weakling, who subsequently RANSACKS his victim’s artistic-intellectual-scientific creation rendering it his own. The vomitory irony is that this dishonest action of cerebral faggotry is carried out by either one who has the power to bludgeon many a time the true creator into a living oblivion or is aided and abetted by those who’ve not any concern for the truth. Have no sympathy, their hearts are as cold as ice, and know not a beat of life. I am not preaching: they’re one degree of an evil hierarchy. Be forever courageous and take the ax of a woodman to this disease ridden tree.

What Misses Ilana Mercer has written is of a most profound importance, and always has been, with broad-spread consequences not just culturally, as in artistic production, but in all the dimensions of our lives, including the financial. I ask you all to think about this; truly contemplate it. Exactness and precision is called for to-day!

https://www.unz.com/imercer/the-moral-writers-commandment-cite-your-sources/ or: https://www.wnd.com/2021/05/moral-writers-commandment-cite-sources/ Read and pass on.

UPDATED (5/18): Mercer’s Idea Of ‘WASP Homoerotism’ And Buchanan’s ‘Ethnomasochism’

Education, Ethics, Etiquette, Ilana Mercer, Morality, Sex

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On February 6, 2017, I wrote a column titled, “Are Liberals Turned-On By Turning The Other (Gluteus Maximus) Cheek?”

To quote:

“It’s as though liberal men derive homo-erotic pleasure from bowing-and-scraping to assailants and ceding to racial claims-making.”

The insight rang powerful, true and utterly naughty. So I ran the column again in April 27, 2018, for WND. To quote:

The pale, liberal patriarchy is a pioneer in forever scrutinizing itself for signs of racism and deficits in empathy toward “The Other,” while readily accusing others of the same.
It’s as though liberal men derive erotic pleasure from prostrating themselves to assailants and ceding to racial claims-making. Could it be that liberal men are driven by a powerful homo-erotic impulsive?

The theme of sexual-submission really jelled in “The Barbarians Are In Charge: Scenes From The Sacking of America,” published first on June 11, 2020.

The column described the “Kneeling Ninnies”—those who lay down for the Black Lives Matter thugs during last year’s BLM riots; men, cops too, “who knelt down like girls, instead of standing tall like men for law and order”:

…men in uniform all collapsed to the pavements like yogis to the command of their black tormentors. One after another. … The forces, police and paramilitary, all squatted like sissies

I concluded:

It’s almost as though WASPs get a homo-erotic sexual charge out of prostrating themselves in front of The Evil Other.

Tying sexual-submission to the acts of WASPs kneeling and ceding ground en masse to The Evil Other: This is an idiosyncratic idea: my own.

But what do you know? On May 17, 2021, Pedro Gonzales fingers the response to the BLM rioting and general punditry meekness as psycho-sexual ethnomasocism. He says:

“I’ve characterized it as a kind of psychosexual enthomasocism.”

Homo-erotic; psycho-sexual, potato, potahto.

Ethnomasochism, of course, came into use via Patrick J. Buchanan. The term is from Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

John Derbyshire does the honest linguistic forensics: “The earliest usage in a book that I am aware of is in Pat Buchanan’s 2011 Suicide of a Superpower.” However, Pat, says Derbyshire, was preceded by Jared Taylor.

One might convincingly—and charitably—argue that “ethnomasochism” as a term has come into common use.

However a term is not a concept.  And tying sexual-submission to the acts of WASPs kneeling or ceding ground en masse to The Evil Other is an idiosyncratic Mercer concept. Like it or not, it comes from an oeuvre typical with such insight over 21 years.

Ethnomasocism is Buchanan via Taylor.

“Mental telepathy”?

Conservatives, teach the kids to cite their sources, as part of a personal ethic. Teachers are clearly not imparting that ethic.

*Image credit
*Image link

UPDATE (5/18): My knowledge of my own work is photographic; the idiom, the expressions, the way of thinking. So, the ears definitely perk-up at this stray, familiar quip:

Pedro Gonzales, April 29, 2021:

“I regret to inform you that the absolute top priority of the conservative movement and the GOP today is assuring Americans that Democrats are the real racists.”

“…Democrats are the real racists” is the Mercer verbatim description, in 2014, of GOP “silly tit-for-tat argumentation”:

: “…DEMOCRATS ARE THE REAL RACISTS; Republicans are the party of Lincoln, the liberator of blacks. We’re against abortion and welfare because we love blacks.” (From “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem, I Smell The Blood Of A Racist,” ilana mercer, May 16, 2014.)

As for the “Conservative Case for a Higher Minimum Wage“: The inimitable Ron Unz had made the case in 2014.

Myself, I would have acknowledged those who went before. Ron sure did:

Over the last few weeks prominent conservatives such as Phyllis Schlafly and Bill O’Reilly have endorsed a much higher minimum wage and a leading economic writer at National Review did the same several months ago. The Daily Caller, one of the most widely read conservative publications, recently ran a 2,500 word article highlighting all the important conservative reasons for supporting a minimum wage hike, and numerous rightwing pundits have been saying the same things on their websites for the last couple of years. I’m very glad that more and more conservatives are now coming around to supporting the conservative side of this issue, joining liberals who are supporting a wage hike for all sorts of liberal reasons.