Category Archives: Ilana Mercer

Mercer At The 2010 HL Mencken Club

Barely A Blog, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Political Correctness, South-Africa

I will speaking at the 3rd annual meeting of the HL Mencken Club, which will take place on Friday, October 22, through Sunday, October 24, 2010, at the Holiday Inn BWI, in Linthicum, Maryland, just outside Baltimore.”

I’ll be discussing my new book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For the West From Post-Apartheid South Africa. The book, unfortunately, is still in the publishing works.

But please purchase your copy of my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, and join me for a preview of an important work of which I am very proud.

UPDATE II: Images From The WorldNetDaily 2010 Conference (& Snapshots From The Journey)

Capitalism, Etiquette, Family, Homeland Security, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Multiculturalism, Pop-Culture, The State

After nine years with WND, it was time to meet the people who have been brave enough to showcase my column for that duration; the people who patiently field my (weekly) pedant’s requests for this or the other editorial correction.

Unfortunately, I was unable to stay for the duration of the WorldNetDaily 2010 Conference, which was held at the Doral Golf Resort & Spa, in Miami. This was the case because my mother is visiting with us from The Netherlands, and was home birdie-sitting all alone on Yom Kippur.

“WND And Me” sums up the role of WND in my career, such as it is.

Never, “in all my years with WND.com, the Internets leading, largest independent website,” have I so much as been censored—not even when, in July of 2003, I likened Bush’s ‘Bring ’em on grin’ to the grimace ‘on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis.'”

WND’s intrepid editors have fielded many a missive demanding I be dropped. ‘Guys,’ complained one devotee, “I am about to boycott your splendid website…Ilana’s views are just too … out of sync with other contributors on your site [when it comes to the invasion of Iraq].” What the reader failed to comprehend was that WND was not looking for conformity—at least not from me. And for that I am grateful. I am temperamentally not suited to obedience, not when truth is at stake.

Here I am with the gifted Albert Thompson (already a dear friend), who practically ran the event, and WND’s lovely young book editor, Megan Byrd:

With Joseph Farah at the WND cocktail party.

With the one-and-only Erik Rush, who, I discovered, is also a gifted musician

Jerome Corsi and former Assistant Secretary of State, Alan Keyes.

Dining out with Sean.

UPDATE I (Sept. 19): Snapshots From The Journey.

I am giving in to hyperbole, but when the large African-American woman—employed by the American taxpayer to torment the same subjects at the airport—summoned me with a crooked finger for a pat down, I thought of the film “Midnight Express.” And in particular, the scene where Billy Hayes’ far-from-delightful Turkish jailer schemes to enjoy some time alone with the young American.

America’s airports are ugly places, where statism interfaces with the squalor of mass society. The workforce at the nation’s airports is, mostly, a malicious, affirmatively appointed contingent of minorities, mainly imported. All speaking Pidgin English, and each one singularly focused on exacting revenge on thinner, richer, paler, perceived oppressors.

The poor are first to complain about capitalism, but it has given them cheap travel (and cheap everything else). Once-upon-a-time a trip was a special occasion. You dressed in your finest for it. Now, every tom, dick and harry can afford to fly. Thus the airport’s often-inhospitable waiting lounges are filled with the detritus of humanity; slack-jawed youths talking at the top of their voices, or texting feverishly, mouths agape. Or shamelessly scenting the ether with the orificial end product of nasty food. (Yes, I kid you not.)

Everywhere apparent are “women lost to shame,” to use Edmund Burke’s description of the new breed of woman loosed upon humanity by the Jacobin forces of the Revolution in France. I refer to the kind that spills out of her hot pants and blouses and carries on like a harlot.

A tea shirt popular at the Miami International Airport was one that read, “Miami Bitch.” Many women had voluntarily donned this thing, and it was the cause of much guffawing among them. In “Idiocracy” mode, a semantic trick achieved with vowels elicited a lot of laughter.

Of course, one does see the odd lady among the feral females.

Miami: From the little I saw of it, Miami is a hellishly hot, flat, hellhole. I can see why Tom Tancredo called Miami a Third World place. English is not a first language there. The word that encapsulates that spot’s work ethic is “mañana”: tomorrow.

What can one add about those unpleasant, ugly, old flight attendants? That profession too was once the preserve of females young, pretty and single, who got the opportunity to see the world. By the looks of it, youth and pulchritude are exclusionary criteria; banished, except, I am told, on airplanes flown by China, Singapore and Dubai.

When we emigrated from South Africa to Israel I was a little girl. I remember being awed by the beauty and gentility of the El Al airhostesses. These days, a look from the Delta flight attendants, all in their dotage, is enough to unsettle the most seasoned traveler.

UPDATE II (Sept. 21): These images have now been added to the gallery.

It Takes A Man …

Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Iraq, Just War, Military, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Ron Paul, War

My colleague Vox Day penned an important column about foreign policy, last week. Sadly, his “Better Late Than Never” WND piece will be ignored by the self-satisfied conservative Idiocracy, which has an allergy to truth and reason.

“The so-called ‘isolationist’ Right had it right all along. Neither Saddam Hussein nor the Taliban ever presented one-tenth the danger to Americans that criminal immigrants, legal and illegal, pose to them. And yet the conservative media has been willing to spend more than $1 trillion on replacing a secular socialist government with a radical Shiite one and expelling a Taliban government in favor of one that is merely Taliban-influenced while nonsensically continuing to call for more immigration.

“But the fact is that there is absolutely no past or present justification for the invasions of either Afghanistan or Iraq when considered from the perspective of the American national interest. One could make a much more rational national-security case for declaring war against Mexico, Canada or even Honduras. And there is absolutely no justification for the continued military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq nine and seven years on.”

Vox expresses regret for his initial support for the war and points out the signal significance of Joseph Farah’s recent renunciation of the current errant foreign policy.

The following words I especially appreciated:

Only a very few commentators, such as Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo and WorldNetDaily’s own Pat Buchanan and Ilana Mercer, can truly say that they were opposed from the start to the expensive, unconstitutional and ultimately useless abuses of the American military that have been inflicted upon it by Republican and Democratic commanders in chief over the last nine years.

It takes a man …

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.