Category Archives: History

UPDATE III: Beck Revised (Who Eats Nails? Spencer Or Mercer?)

Conservatism, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, History, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Race, Republicans

I’ve followed Glenn Beck closely and have concluded that overall, flaws and all, he is a force for liberty. One such example was when “Beck Broke From The Pack” to denounce perpetual war as the health of the state. Let us not forget how polluted are the waters in which conservatives swim. Glenn has changed that somewhat. Not for nothing does Sean Hannity keep his distance from Beck.

“Beck, Wilders, and His Boosters’ Blind Spot” discusses some mindless Beck missteps, such as mistaking “Geert Wilders, an influential Dutch parliamentarian working against the spread of Islam in his country, as a man of the fascist, far-right.” Unforgivable.

IMMIGRATION IGNORANCE:

Glenn also vastly overestimates the virtues of the “American People,” and underestimates the forces (state-managed mass immigration) that are dissolving what remains of that people and busily electing another. (Glenn: Once the country is 50 percent Third World, you might as well be talking to the hand.)

Nevertheless, I revised the “blithering idiot” verdict I passed some years back.

Richard Spencer has not. Glenn “going-to-school-with-each-new-show” has earned the contempt of the editor of AltRight.com.

The funny thing is that I second Richard’s analysis, as I have made the same points myself about Beck’s ridiculous fetishes (stop waxing fat about “Faith, Hope, and Charity”; build on life, liberty, and property, I wrote).

Beck’s (Harry) Jaffarsonian civil rights preoccupation and racial revisionism—sad to say, there were no black Founding Fathers!—are contemptible. But, what do you know?, I have been more forgiving of Glenn than Richard Spencer. Having been characterized as someone who eats nails for breakfast, I’m pleased when along comes a young man who is more uncompromising than myself, even if this guarantees he will not be playing footsie with this conservative tootsie (“intellectual windsock”) on Sean Hannity’s Great American Panel, a forum of and for the Idiocracy.

Read Richard’s superb analysis, “The Glenn Beck Deception: Inside the PC Lunatic Fringe.”

UPDATED I (June 22): I have been extremely careful to separate Beck from James Huggins’ Republican “freedom fighters” (see comment hereunder). Without much success. If you are convinced by Huggins’ GOP loyalism—and Mr. H has stuck to his guns, insisting these hacks stand for liberty—your learning curve is, well, wobbly.

UPDATE II: Here’s the “‘Mercer Eats Nails For Breakfast’ (Not)” accusation:

I’ve been called THE WORD WARRIOR…but I would run for my life if I saw Ilana Mercer coming my way! Does she eat nails for breakfast?— Anthony St. John

UPDATE III: Who Eat Nails for Breakfast, Spencer Or Mercer? Probably both, but Spencer wins out this time, I’m pleased to say. In case you think (sorry Huggs) that every tough-talking toots on Hannity’s “Great American Panel” can eat nails or swallow flames: tough, here, implies an ability to reason, and an uncompromising fealty to first principles. These must draw on fact and on history. To reason in the arid arena of pure thought is not what Richard (or myself, for that matter) does. Most libertarians, however, do so err.

UPDATED: Saint Mandela & The Gaza Amity Armada

Christian Right, Crime, Glenn Beck, History, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Jihad, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Racism, South-Africa, Terrorism

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column, “Saint Mandela & The Gaza Amity Armada”:

“‘One of the worst human rights violations in the world today’—this is how Nelson Mandela has characterized Israel’s naval blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza, and the defensive actions the Jewish state’s soldiers were forced to take on board a Gaza-bound ship. The Mavi Marmari was one in a flotilla of six ostensible aid ships headed to Gaza in contravention of the naval blockade.

And I know this how? Norman Finkelstein, another of Hamas’ effective spokesmen—left-liberal, Jewish academics often are—has galvanized Mandela for moral suasion in condemning Israel’s actions.

The fact that Mandela made the condemnation in his capacity as a member of the UN’s ‘Committee of Elders’ was supposed to further bolster Finkelstein’s position (made on ‘Russian TV’). According to Finkelstein, this particular coven includes another international holy man, Desmond Tutu (in my upcoming book, “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post Apartheid South Africa,” I tell of the time I took afternoon tea with Tutu himself).

This is important, why? Because, even more than the Dalai Lama, Mandela is considered the moral compass of the world by the philosopher kings of this country— beauty pageant contestants, contemporary conservative and liberal pundits (ranked here from most to least intelligent).

Look, I too condemn the Israeli commandos—for sliding one-by-one into a snake pit seething with poisonous reptiles. …

The complete column is “Saint Mandela & The Gaza Amity Armada.”

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material and reviews. Get your copy (or copies) now!

UPDATE (June 4): A more impassioned defense of Israel as Glenn Beck’s I have not heard since Alan Keyes’ magnificent display of outrage, on MSNBC, at the reality in the human heart a suicide bombing bespeaks (Keyes was fired shortly thereafter).

Glenn’s Israel narrative of June 3 (here) arises deep from within a pure Puritanical heart exquisitely attune to the historical “Hebraic bond,” and to morality.

I’ve said it before, Glenn (overall) is great.

UPDATED: Saint Mandela & The Gaza Amity Armada

Christian Right, Crime, Glenn Beck, History, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Jihad, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Racism, South-Africa, Terrorism

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column, “Saint Mandela & The Gaza Amity Armada”:

“‘One of the worst human rights violations in the world today’—this is how Nelson Mandela has characterized Israel’s naval blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza, and the defensive actions the Jewish state’s soldiers were forced to take on board a Gaza-bound ship. The Mavi Marmari was one in a flotilla of six ostensible aid ships headed to Gaza in contravention of the naval blockade.

And I know this how? Norman Finkelstein, another of Hamas’ effective spokesmen—left-liberal, Jewish academics often are—has galvanized Mandela for moral suasion in condemning Israel’s actions.

The fact that Mandela made the condemnation in his capacity as a member of the UN’s ‘Committee of Elders’ was supposed to further bolster Finkelstein’s position (made on ‘Russian TV’). According to Finkelstein, this particular coven includes another international holy man, Desmond Tutu (in my upcoming book, “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post Apartheid South Africa,” I tell of the time I took afternoon tea with Tutu himself).

This is important, why? Because, even more than the Dalai Lama, Mandela is considered the moral compass of the world by the philosopher kings of this country— beauty pageant contestants, contemporary conservative and liberal pundits (ranked here from most to least intelligent).

Look, I too condemn the Israeli commandos—for sliding one-by-one into a snake pit seething with poisonous reptiles. …

The complete column is “Saint Mandela & The Gaza Amity Armada.”

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material and reviews. Get your copy (or copies) now!

UPDATE (June 4): A more impassioned defense of Israel as Glenn Beck’s I have not heard since Alan Keyes’ magnificent display of outrage, on MSNBC, at the reality in the human heart a suicide bombing bespeaks (Keyes was fired shortly thereafter).

Glenn’s Israel narrative of June 3 (here) arises deep from within a pure Puritanical heart exquisitely attune to the historical “Hebraic bond,” and to morality.

I’ve said it before, Glenn (overall) is great.

Voices Of Collectivism & Exceptionalism

America, Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Fascism, Foreign Policy, History, Neoconservatism, The State, War

The concept of American exceptionalism has been hotly debated in connection with what kind of history “The Children” will be force fed in state schools.

My position : “the United States, by virtue of its origins and ideals,” was unique. But most Americans know nothing of the ideas that animated their country’s founding. In fact, they are more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical liberal philosophy of the founders, and hence wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive state and the fulfillment of their own needs and desires through war and welfare.

Thus, I find myself in agreement with this one statement from Princeton’s Joyce Carol Oates:

“[T]ravel to any foreign country,” Oates wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in November 2007, “and the consensus is: The American idea has become a cruel joke, a blustery and bellicose bodybuilder luridly bulked up on steroids…deranged and myopic, dangerous.”

Andrew Roberts, on the other hand, is the Anglosphere’s “advertising agent,” whom some call a historian (most learned sources like the Times Literary Supplement question the value and veracity of his “scholarship”).

Roberts “has endorsed American exceptionalism in his own writings,” and thinks that to question it is to evince “psychiatric disorder,” or belong to liberal America (Rob Stove and I are rightists).

Yes, another learned source is our friend Australian historian Rob Stove, who detests Andrew Roberts (author of the best-selling Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945). Rob has called him a “Court Historian,” the Anglosphere’s greatest modern mythologist perfectly suited to sanitize the Bush presidency.”

In the eponymous essay Rob Stove writes that to Roberts,

“Not only must every good deed of British or American rule be lauded till the skies resound with it, but so must every deed that is morally ambiguous or downright repellent.”

“The Amritsar carnage of 1919, where British forces under Gen. Reginald Dyer slew 379 unarmed Indians? Absolutely justified, according to Roberts, who curiously deduces that but for Dyer, ‘many more than 379 people would have lost their lives.’ Hitting prostrate Germany with the Treaty of Versailles? Totally warranted: the only good Kraut is a dead Kraut. Herding Boer women and children into concentration camps, where 35,000 of them perished? Way to go: the only good Boer is a dead Boer. Interning Belfast Catholics, without anything so vulgar as a trial, for no other reason than that they were Belfast Catholics? Yep, the only good bog-trotter … well, finish the sentence yourself. FDR’s obeisance to Stalin? All the better to defeat America First ‘fascists.'”

[SNIP]

Last week’s column, “In Defense Of Obama’s Apologizing,” coaxed out of the woodwork some “exceptionals.”

Wrote Mom [don’t you hate it when women call themselves “mom”? I see these self-identifiers everywhere, when out on my running excursions. They occasionally swing a kid while talking incessantly on the cell, and are always sedentary and overweight. Sorry for that detour]:

“I do not agree with you at all.…I give this administration a D in foreign policy and public relations…Listen, yes we have made some mistakes in our 300 years, but on the whole, this is the best country on the planet and we are an exceptional nation….This administration’s aim is to diminish our greatness and our status on the world stage…for a One World socialist government…When Obama said we have no borders, I nearly fell out of my chair…if we diminish our borders, we will not have a country….How did he allow Calderone to bash our country? You know why, because he doesn’t think of our country is special…So, I don’t give any points to him, I want my country back…I do not recognize my country anymore….so for you to give this admin. points … that is a no no. Sorry…”

[SNIP]

In other words, even though she and I agree on immigration, I must never be fair to BHO when he is not wrong. Indeed, fairness and non-partisanship have gotten me nowhere.

Tangentially related is another letter received last week in irate response to “In Defense Of Obama’s Apologizing.” This time the “exceptional reader” informed me imperially that he was writing me off and would no longer be reading The Mercer Column because I FAILED TO ENDORSE HIS FAVORITE MASSACRE.

This particular reader was a relic from my years of writing against the Bush war of aggression in Iraq—you know, when all those “red-state fascists” kept trying to get me fired from WND.

Memories…