Category Archives: Free Speech

UPDATED (11/23): NEW ON YOUTUBE: Dissident Donald’s Parallel Presidency

Argument, Democracy, Donald Trump, Elections, Free Speech, Ilana Mercer, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Populism, Republicans, Secession

NEW ON YOUTUBE: Dissident Donald’s Parallel Presidency:

Here is my positive, anti-politics message about the 2020 elections:

“Trump is just now getting into Beast Mode. Dissident Donald will be rising now for real. The presidency was Donald J. Trump dabbling at Establishment respectability. From now on, he’ll be running a populist movement, perhaps a new party—after all, he owns the Republican Party. ”

Subscribe to the channel here.

UPDATE (11/23): WHAT FREE SPEECH?

An unkind cut leveled against me has been that my YouTube comments are a love fest of rotating, unchanging visitors.

Yes, it’s a great deal of fun when YouTube ALLOWS ME ONLY what the left calls female-objectifying comments. YouTube’s  “sensitive content-blocking,” “shadow-banning and follower-throttling” means I can’t post these comments which I have approved:

French Schoolteacher, Beheaded For Instructing Children In French Secular Values

Europe, Free Speech, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Jihad, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Terrorism

Russians are cursed in the North Caucasus by an Islamic state, Chechnya. When Russia attempts to control Chechen aggression, the West steps in to help shelter the terrorists/ “refugees” fleeing the Islamist Chechnya. Now a Frenchman (“beneficiary” of the French’s willingness to take in Muslims fleeing because of Russian crackdowns) is missing a vital organ: HIS HEAD.

The man who was beheaded by the Chechen Abdullakh Anzorov is Samuel Paty, 47. For what it’s worth, The Economist has a decent Obituary for him. It would appear that poor Paty was doomed to teach a class writhing, seething with Muslim snakes, ready to spit venom—and worse. One female called Zaina, in particular, helped foment hatred against her teacher:

When it came to teaching free speech as part of the national curriculum, he liked to show his quatrième class two caricatures from the magazine Charlie Hebdo which, in January 2015, had been attacked by murdering Islamists. He had done so for several years; this year it had added edge, with the trial of the accomplices going on. The caricatures were, first, Muhammad holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign, blasphemous to Muslims merely for giving him a face. Most pupils might be unimpressed with that, but the second caricature was clearly rude: Muhammad on all fours, naked, with a star emerging from his backside and the caption “A star is born!”.

Once his pupils had seen the drawings he would explain that French law protected them, as part of the liberty enshrined in the Republic. Then they would debate why and whether it should, not angrily—he insisted on that—but reasonably, carefully marshalling their arguments. Being aware, though, that the caricatures were strong stuff for many 13-year-olds, especially the Muslim children, he warned his pupils at the start that they could look away if they thought they might be offended. He had to be careful, as it was against the law to identify anyone by their religion; the warning had to be general. But he had done all this before, and the result had been a mutually respectful conversation.

This time the backlash was furious. A number of Muslim parents objected, and one filed a complaint to the police. He also posted a video on Facebook to mobilise others, identifying who the teacher was and calling him a voyou, a thug: “He should no longer teach our children. He should go and educate himself.” A known Islamist agitator, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, came to the school and made a video decrying “irresponsible and aggressive behaviour”. The mobiliser’s daughter, Zaina, said the prof wanted to attack Islam, and had done so that day by asking Muslims specifically to raise their hands and then, if they liked, to leave.

That was lies, as he told the police. Zaina had not even been in the class. But at the first claim that the teacher of histoire-géo was an Islamophobe the principal called him in, and her superiors requested a visit by an inspector from the local education authority. They, like the police, supported him, and said he had followed correct classroom procedure. He would not face disciplinary action. The moral and legal weight of the French state was on his side, and he felt confident enough, as well as angry enough, to file a defamation complaint against the parent who had abused him.

He also felt threatened, though. The level of hate in the attacks was quite new, and it had spread wide, far beyond Conflans. Now he kept his head down in the corridors, and was noticeably out of sorts. His walk home from school, a short stroll through a wood, no longer felt safe, so he took the more open, still quiet, still leafy streets. As he set off for home on the 16th he had just finished teaching a class of petits sixièmes about prehistory, a relatively calm subject. The All Saints’ break was about to start, a chance to let things cool down a bit. The tennis court beckoned. He wished his pupils, and they wished him, “Bonnes vacances.”

Mercifully, the French police are still permitted to kill killers without causing a riot. So they shot Abdullakh Anzorov and arrested a whole bunch of brutes who worked to eliminate this poor man. READ.

But seven people, including two students and a parent of one of Mr Paty’s pupils, were detained in the days following the killing.

On Wednesday, prosecutors said six of the suspects had been charged with complicity in a terrorist murder and placed under judicial investigation.

One man is accused of having close contact with the killer and faces the lesser charge of associating with a terrorist.

All of the suspects, other than the two students who are minors at just 14 and 15, are in custody.

The self-immolating, liberal West!

UPDATED (8/30): Book ‘In Defense Of Looting’ ‘Argues’ Looting Is ‘Joyous’, Produces ‘Community Cohesion’

China, Crime, Cultural Marxism, Ethics, Free Speech, Intellectualism, Morality, Race, Racism

We inhabit a culture in which high-brow polemics are banned and banished from the public square by grubby, low-brow, social engineers like Facebook functionaries.

In the same culture, a new kind of Kafka confronts any author whose thoughts veer from those of the mono-cultural mainstream.

Books that enlighten never see the light of day; badly written pamphlets that dim debate find publishers and “respectable” reviewers (for now).

One such immoral enterprise is Vicky Osterweil’s In Defence of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action.

To its disgrace, the Economist has gone along and dignified the author’s hedonistic “argument” from criminality:

Some civil-rights activists fret that the latest events in Chicago will weaken national support for police reform that has grown in the months since Floyd was killed. The Rev Jesse Jackson called the events in Chicago “humiliating, embarrassing” and “morally wrong” on August 10th. Not everyone agreed.

A few radical activists, including some associated with Black Lives Matter in Chicago, argued that looting can be legitimate. One woman, protesting at a police station that held arrested looters, called it a form of “reparations” for white oppression.

This really is a live debate. Vicky Osterweil, author of “In Defence of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action”, published this month, sets out the same argument at book length. Looting by the poor, black or otherwise repressed is a radical tactic that brings welcome change, in her view. Peaceful civil-rights demonstrations are too easily ignored, whereas “riots and looting are more effective at attracting attention to a cause”. The shared experience of looting can also be “joyous”, produce “community cohesion”, count as a small act of “direct redistribution of wealth” and, she reckons, does little harm to those who have insurance. She thinks it also leads people to question high levels of inequality.

Her claims are unconvincing. Those who snatched swag from Gucci or Louis Vuitton in order to sell them on hardly share her anti-capitalist views. Nor is it clear that looting spreads solidarity in poor neighbourhoods. The grandmother of the man shot by police condemned the looting. Ms Osterweil might be right, however, that residents of poor areas, who rarely even set foot in the wealthy central parts of their city, are fed up. Looting is not a helpful way to respond, but the resentment at this disparity is real enough …

Osterweil’s political porn has two rotten reader reviews on Amazon:

1. “Poorly written, poorly reasoned.” One star.
2. “Garbage: terrible ideas and a terrible book.” One star.

Yet, is has a rather good Amazon rank. How you ask? The rank is not market-generated, but is due to the corrupt enterprise of university book-buying. State subsidized university libraries have enormous budgets to purchase  drek with which to indoctrinate your kids. They will pay hundreds of dollars a copy.

Down to its libraries, the American universities are corrupt.

China might control thinking in its universities, but do their apparatchiks promote material  meant to make the people thieving, dumb and decadent? Unlikely, considering that the Chinese have a wicked work ethic, low-crime rates and that criminality is severely punished.

UPDATE (8/30):

Here’s the disgrace of In Defense Of Looting, a “book”: someone read the book, endorsed its publication, someone edited it, someone else set it in type, designed a cover, compiled an index, read the proofs. Now people are reviewing it.

UPDATED (8/22/): NEW COLUMN: Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!

Conservatism, Free Speech, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, Reason

NEW COLUMN IS “Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!” It featured on Townhall.com, WND.COM, the Unz Review, and Newsroom For American and European-Based Citizens.

It is currently a feature on American Greatness:

“Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!” It is the second in a series deconstructing the racism construct. For the first, there is also a quick YouTube primer.

Excerpt:

Racism consists of a mindset or a worldview that boils down to impolite and impolitic thoughts and words written, spoken, preached, or tweeted.

If that’s all racism is, you ask, then what was the knee on George Floyd’s neck? Was that not racism?

No, it was not.

Judging from the known facts, the knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck was a knee on a man’s neck. That’s all that can be inferred from the chilling video recording in which Floyd expired slowly as he pleaded for air.

Floyd begged to breathe. But the knee on his neck—“subdual restraint and neck compression,” in medical terms—was sustained for fully eight minutes and 46 seconds, causing “cardiopulmonary arrest.”

There are laws against what transpired between former Officer Derek Chauvin and Mr. Floyd.

And the law’s ambit is not to decide whether the offending officer is a correct-thinking individual, but whether Mr. Chauvin had committed a crime.

About Officer Chauvin’s mindset, the most the law is supposed to divine is mens rea—criminal intention: Was the officer whose knee pressed on Floyd’s neck acting with a guilty mind or not?

For fact-finding is the essence of the law. The law is not an abstract ideal of imagined social justice, that exists to salve sensitive souls.

If “racism” looks like a felony crime, then it ought to be prosecuted as nothing but a crime and debated as such. In the case of Mr. Chauvin, a mindset of depraved indifference seems to jibe with the video.

This is not to refute the reality of racially motivated crimes. These most certainly occur. It is only to refute the legal and ethical validity of a racist mindset in the prosecution of a crime.

Surely, a life taken because of racial or antisemitic animus is not worth more than life lost to spousal battery or to a home invasion.

The law, then, must mete justice, in accordance with the rules of evidence, proportionality and due process. Other than intent, references to the attendant thoughts that accompanied the commission of a crime should be irrelevant—be they racist, sexist, ageist or anti-Semitic.

Ultimately, those thoughts are known only to the perp.

To make matters worse, legions of libertarians and conservatives have joined the progressive establishment in the habit of sniffing out and purging racists, as though they were criminals.

Sniffing out thought or speech criminals is a no-no for any and all self-respecting classical conservative and libertarian. We should never persecute or prosecute thought “criminals” for utterances not to our liking (unless these threaten or portend violence). …

READ THE REST. LATEST COLUMN IS currently a feature on American Greatness:

UPDATE (8/22/20):

Loup-Bouc:

Fine article, Ms. Mercer. Unlike all other Unz Review authors who have addressed the Floyd case, you apprehend accurately/correctly much of the pertinent law. ..I observe that you have written a fine article. Brava.

This essay is the clearest and most effective explanation as to why racism and other bad ideas are not criminal. Of the numerous Mercer essays I have read, this is the best. Thank you.