Category Archives: Ilana Mercer

NEW COLUMN: Christine Blah-Blah Ford & Her Hippocampus

Ethics, Gender, Ilana Mercer, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Science

Christine Blah-Blah Ford & Her Hippocampus” is the current column, now on Townhall.com (slightly abridged).  

An excerpt:

One of many cringe-making moments in Christine Blasey Ford’s protracted complaint before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and the country—was an affectation-dripping reference to her hippocampus.

“Indelible in the hippocampus” was the memory of supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulting her, some 36 years back, asserted Ford in that scratchy, valley-girl voice of hers.

With that, the good “doctor” was making a false appeal to scientific authority. Ford had just planted a falsity in the nation’s collective consciousness. The accuser was demanding that the country believe her and her hippocampus.

All nonsense on stilts.

We want to believe that our minds record the events of our lives meticulously, and that buried in the permafrost of our brain, perfectly preserved, is the key to our woes.

Unfortunately, scientific research negates the notion that forgotten memories exist somewhere in the brain and can be accessed in pristine form.

Granted, we don’t know whether She Who Must Never Be Questioned recovered the Judge-Kavanaugh memory in therapy. That’s because, well, she must never be questioned.

Questioning the left’s latest sacred cow is forbidden. Bovine Republicans blindly obey.

I happened to have covered and thoroughly researched the “recovered memory ruse,” in 1999. Contrary to the trend, one of my own heroes is not Christine Blah-Blah Ford, but a leading world authority on memory, Elizabeth Loftus.

Professor Loftus, who straddles two professorships—one in law, the other in psychology—had come to Vancouver, British Columbia, to testify on behalf of a dedicated Richmond educator, a good man, who had endured three trials, the loss of a career and financial ruin because of the Crown’s attempts to convict him of sexual assault based on memories recovered in therapy. …

… READ THE REST.  Christine Blah-Blah Ford & Her Hippocampus” is now on Townhall.com.

Unabridged, the column appears on other favorite sites: WND.com, The Unz Review, Constitution.com, and American Greatness.

UPDATED III (8/30): NEW COLUMN: Land Reform In Ramaphosa’s South Africa

Ann Coulter, Crime, Ilana Mercer, Judaism & Jews, Private Property, Race, Racism, South-Africa

Land Reform In Ramaphosa’s South Africa” is the latest column, now on WND.com and the Unz Review. You can also read it on Townhall.com. Yes, President Trump has done the greatest Mitzvah (good deed) of all (read on), this as the accursed ADL (The Anti-Defamation League) is tarring as white supremacists those of us who want to save South Africa’s white Christians minority.

An excerpt from the column:

He who believes he has a right to another man’s property ought to produce proof that he is its rightful owner. “As the old legal adage goes, ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law,’ as it is the best evidence in our uncertain world of legitimate title. The burden of proof rests squarely with the person attempting to alter and abolish present property titles.” (From “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South-Africa”.)

It is to this potent principle that democratic rule in South Africa has taken an axe—or, rather, an assegai.

Here is how taking land legally currently works, in South Africa, a place the US State Department has only just lauded as “a strong democracy with resilient institutions…,” a country merely  “grappling with the difficult issue of land reform.” “Land reform,” of course, is a euphemism for land distribution in the Robert Mugabe mold.

The process currently in place typically begins with a “tribe” or group of individuals who band together to claim vast tracts of private property.

If these loosely and conveniently conjoined groups know anything, it’s this: South Africa’s adapted, indigenized law allows coveted land, owned and occupied by another, to be obtained with relative ease.

See, the country no longer enjoys the impressive Western system of Roman-Dutch law it once enjoyed. Lax law and poorly protected property rights signal a free-for-all on the lives of white owners and their livestock

No sooner does this newly constituted “tribe” (or band of bandits, really) launch a claim with the South African Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, than related squatters—sometimes in the thousands—move to colonize the land.

They defile its grounds and groundwater by using these as one vast toilet, and terrorize, sometimes kill, its occupants and their animals in the hope of “nudging” them off the land.

Dr. Philip du Toit, a farmer (with a doctorate in labor law) and author of “The Great South African Land Scandal,” speaks of recurrent attacks on farm animals that “hark back to the Mau Mau terror campaign which drove whites off Kenyan farms.”

Farmer’s Weekly used to be packed with pitiful accounts of cows poisoned with exotic substances, battered with heavy metal bars, writhing in agony for hours before being found by a distraught farmer.

“Encroachment is the right word,” a farmer told du Toit. “They put their cattle in, then they cut the fences, then they start stealing your crops, forcing you to leave your land. And then they say: ‘Oh well, there’s vacant land, let’s move on to it.’

It’s a very subtle way of stealing land.” “When there is a farm claim I say ‘Look out!’ because attacks may follow to scare the farmers,” confirmed the regional director of the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU).”

Agri SA, an organization representing small and large-scale commercial farmers, reports the annual theft of hundreds of thousands of priceless livestock.

The ANC’s old Soviet-inspired Freedom Charter promised this: “All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose.” And so they do today.

Because of legal claims they are powerless to fight, squatters whom they cannot fend off, and cattle, crops and families which they can no longer protect, farmers have already been pushed to abandon hundreds of thousands of hectares of prime commercial farmland.

“Since the end of apartheid in 1994, when multi-racial elections were held,” wrote Dan McDougal of the London Times, millions of “acres of productive farmland have been transferred to black ownership. Much of it is now lying fallow, creating no economic benefit for the nation or its new owners.”

South Africa has become a net importer of food for the first time in its history. …

Into the Cannibal's Pot
Order columnist Ilana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”


… READ THE REST.  Land Reform In Ramaphosa’s South Africa” is now on WND.com, the Unz Review, and on Townhall.com.

I’m pleased to relay that the great Ann Coulter retweeted this column, which means it was read far and wide, as did Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft on Gab, the place for subversives.

Lastly, here is an interview I did with with Bill Meyer, a most thoughtful broadcaster and a long-time friend. Not everything out of Oregon is subpar.

Listen.

UPDATES I (8/24):

Immutable truth? What’s that?

UPDATE II: Crime statistics in this article:

“Trump Tweet on South African Land Overhaul Draws Government’s Ire.”

UPDATE III: Taking something someone doesn’t want to give and hasn’t stolen is … theft. Ten Commandments, anyone?

“‘I have the right to defend my property by force. And I will’: EXCLUSIVE – White farmer who is set to become the first to have his £10m game reserve seized says South Africa’s land grab policy is THEFT”

UPDATE III (8/30):

Boer meisies speaking up:

Ram-pho needs to shut-up:

Perfidious Albion:

Someone knows right from wrong, Mr. Lekota!!! :

UPDATED (8/13/018): NEW COLUMN: Separated From My Child—And Nobody Cares

Family, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Law, South-Africa

“Separated From My Child—And Nobody Cares” is the current column. It’s now on Townhall.com (slightly abridged), but on WND.com and The Unz Review, au naturel.

An excerpt:

The late Charles Krauthammer was right about the rules of good writing. The use of the first-person pronoun in opinion writing is a cardinal sin.

To get a sense of how bad someone’s writing is count the number of times he or she deploys the Imperial “I” on the page. Krauthammer considered a single “I” in a piece to be a failure.

Use “I” when the passive-form alternative is too clumsy. Or, when the writer herself has earned the right to, because of her relevance to the story. (The story itself, naturally, should have relevance.) The second is my excuse here.

As a legal immigrant to the U.S., now an American citizen, I have a right to insert myself into the noisy narrative.

As a legal immigrant who was separated from her daughter, herself a legal immigrant, the onus is on me to share a scurrilous story that is part of a pattern:

America’s immigration policy—driven as it is by policy makers and enforces—exalts and privileges those of low moral character. It rewards law-breakers, giving them the courtesy and consideration not given to high-value, legal immigrants.

The same U.S. immigration law enforcers who cater so kindly to each illegal immigrant—the kind that is a drain on the country and has no right to be in the country—stripped my daughter of her American permanent residency privileges.

A young person travels alone and gets bamboozled at the border-crossing in Blaine, Washington State. So, they strip her of her green card.

That’s our immigration story.

My girl was studying in Canada. She got intimidated at the border and gave the wrong answer to her petty American inquisitor. So, she was quick-marched into a small booth and peppered with more questions meant to terrify.

With an intimidating display of machismo, the burly men of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) bullied a young girl into relinquishing her right of permanent residency (also the road to citizenship).

La Bandida was at bay. America was finally safe.

More fundamentally, hers was not an ill-gotten green card.

The principal sponsor, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, had entered the US on an O-1 visa. Unlike the H-1B visa, the 0-1 visa doesn’t replace Americans; it adds to them. For it is granted to those with “extraordinary ability in the fields of science, education, business or athletics.” The O-1 necessitates “a level of expertise indicating that the person is one of the small percentage who has risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.”

Not by deceit did my child gain her green card. But by deceit is how the swarms on the border will get theirs. The squeaky wheels squatting on the southern border, funneled daily into the interior to create facts on the ground, are not refugees or legitimate asylum seekers. Rather, they are merely from what President Trump has termed “s–thhole countries.” By that criteria, Americans could be forced to welcome the world.

A refugee, conversely, is an individual who is …

… READ THE REST. “Separated From My Child—And Nobody Cares” is the current column. It’s on Townhall.com slightly abridged, and on WND.com and The Unz Review, as is.

UPDATE (8/13/018):

UPDATE IV (5/22): ‘Haters Gonna Hate, Hate, Hate, Hate …’

Anti-Semitism, Family, Gender, Ilana Mercer, Law, Logic, Political Correctness, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

As my dearest first cousin says, “You need to duck, cuz, and let the sh-t hit the wall.”

Quit trying to convince pathological haters you’re a good gal or guy, because, well … “haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”

And they’ll hate you, even when you transform yourself in their image.

If people harbor hate for you—speak it and act it—there’s nothing you can do to transform that hate. Surround yourself with those who don’t think you’re drek. Surround yourself with people who know your heart and with whom you have reciprocal relationships.

In a related context, an articulate reader, a lawyer, reacted strongly to the habitual hatred this writer receives on the Unz Review:

imbroglio says:

Until recently, I’ve been an avid reader of the UNZ review one of whose leading contributors is Ilana Mercer. Ilana has great insight informed by natural gifts and the benefit of having lived in various cultures. Because of her (((background))), Ilana draws the mocking ire of trolls who hope to discount the value of what she says by means of their ad hominem attacks on her ethnicity. As we say in the legal world, argue the facts. If you haven’t got the facts, argue the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law, call your opponent unflattering names and argue to the jury that though the defendant didn’t commit the crime, he could have or at least he would have which makes him as guilty as if he had committed the crime.

Free speech enables people to say what they want. But there are consequences. When the UNZ Review lends itself to Jew-bashing, which is better done by those who write for Takimag and whose skill, in that regard, has been refined to a finer art than UNZ readers seem capable of; Ron Unz and his contributors lose credibility and start to become cliché and uninteresting. In addition, the men who engage in this business – I’ve yet to see a woman do so – come off as weasels and wimps. Let the P.C. crowd do as it pleases, its denizens are hardly avatars of healthy gender relations, but though a guy may take sharp issue with a woman, no self-respecting man would demean a lady with the kind of snide and baseless insults Ilana seems to attract.

There are two kinds of Jew-bashers: the ruthless, intelligent sociopaths who’d inflict violence on Jews if they thought they could get away with it. Their presence on this site is rare. More numerous are the clever but vacuous Jew-bashers who tend to end up as cannon fodder in their personal lives, conflicts and contests that have little to do with Jews. UNZ may find their comments useful, but why that would be so escapes me.

*****

Why, thank you sir—especially for fingering the unmanly men who suffer small-man syndrome.

Fact: There are other Jewish writers on the Unz Review. But they are men. They receive mostly obsequious, boot-licking adoration from the “weasels and the wimps.”

At play here is more than Jew-bashing. It is that the miserable, mediocre men in the Comments Section (for the most) hate it when a woman out-thinks men.

As a defender of men, this saddens—it’s been a huge disappointment—but it is, nevertheless, true.

Like the reader, I prefer the American Renaissance’s practice of a modicum of comments moderation. The Comments on said site are edifying even when negative.

An example of edifying criticism is the reader on Townhall.com. His comments yielded the 5/17 column, “Whodunit? Who “Meddled” with Our American Democracy?” (Part 2).

But hey, The Unz Review is private property. And weasels and wusses don’t scare me. I write my weekly piece, generally to positive reviews. (UPDATE III (5/21): Have done so since 1999, for almost 20 years.)

And I avoid reading the words of the weasels and the wusses as a real man would avoid email spam advertising penile enhancements.

BRING IT, BITCHES!

UPDATE I via Facebook:

Myron Robert Pauli Ilana Mercer: (1) There are, tragically, very few really good columnists of any sex M,F,LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ – and you are one of them. (2) Even among good writers, there are not too many women – not sure why {politically correct answer is the Intergalactic Sexist Conspiracy} – but there are just a few. (3) Can one find anti-Jewish/Zionist whatever stuff on the Unz sight – yes, and more than I would like to see but I try not to get into a pi$$ing contest with every skunky inference on the planet – one never “wins” these contests (4) Ironically, I am finding precious little to read in the Washington Post op-eds – I almost think it is the identically same op-ed “Trump Is Hitler” with a computer randomly toggling sentences and then putting a random name of Dana Milbank, Fareed Zakharia, Eugene Robinson, Jennifer Rubin, Greg Sargent, Kathleen Parker, Richard Cohen, Fred Hiatt, R2D2, … whomever’s turn it is for the by-line of the “Trump Is Hitler” op-ed-du-jour (5) On the latter point, I am not claiming this because I think Trump is perfect but to quote Johannes Brahms when someone pointed out that the last movement of his first symphony resembled a theme in Beethoven‘s Ode to Joy, “Any ass can see that!”. (6) Thus, it is the people who point out that the Iraq war was an impending disaster – the people who have the foresight to not follow the “prevailing” stupidity that I admire the most (such as Ilana).

UPDATE II via Twitter:

UPDATE IV (5/22): Wanda’s generosity of spirit means more than she knows.

Wanda De Lange Zanzi With dictionary by my side, I adore reading the workings of your mind. As a female you inspire me as a female… You have already and continue to teach me to think logically and laterally without gender (class, culture and or race) emotion, on many issues. As a female South African that says a lot, which, perhaps, would be greatly misinterpreted by a gazillion other people. Thank you for inspiring me to think.