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.

THE NEW COLUMN is “Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?” It was featured first on Townhall.com. It is also on WND.COM, the Unz Review and American Renaissance.

On Sunday, you can read it on the great American Greatness.

The column is first in a series of three. Excerpt:

The “systemic racism” refrain is a meaningless abstraction.

Operationalize the nebulous abstraction that is “systemic racism,” or get out of my face!

To concretize a variable, it must be cast in empirical, measurable terms–the opaque “racism” abstraction being one variable (to use statistical nomenclature).

Until you have meticulously applied research methodology to statistically operationalize this inchoate thing called “racism”—systemic or other—it remains nothing but thought crime:

Impolite and impolitic thoughts, spoken, written or preached.

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. (By logical extension, America is not a free society.)

The law already mandates that people of all races be treated equally under its protection. The law, then, is not the problem, logic is. In particular, the logical error of reasoning backward.

“Backward reasoning, expounded by mystery author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes,” writes Dr. Thomas Young, “applies with reasonable certainty when only one plausible explanation for the … evidence exists.”

Systemic racism is most certainly not “the only plausible explanation” for the lag in the fortunes of African-Americans, although, as it stands, systemic racism is inferred solely from one single fact: In aggregate, African-Americans trail behind whites in assorted academic and socio-economic indices and achievements.

This logical error is the central tenet of preferential treatment—affirmative action, and assorted quotas and set-aside edicts and policies.

According to diversity doxology, justice is achieved only when racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population. On indices of economic well-being, the same egalitarian outcomes are expected.

Equalizing individual and inter-group outcomes, however, is an impossibility, considering that it is axiomatically and self-evidently true to say that such differences have existed since the dawn of time. …

… THE REST: “Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?“, on Townhall.com, WND.COM, the Unz Review and American Renaissance.

On Sunday, you can read it on the great American Greatness.

American Greatness, where I do verbal swordplay for civilization, is the best, cutting edge, paleoconservative webzine. Julie Ponzi, its skilled, bold editor, harnesses and enhances the best talent our side has for the battle of ideas ahead.

Busiest Comments Section is on American Renaissance.

UPDATED (8/7/020):

Readers reached are worth everything.

Readers reached are worth everything, @LindysBairn https://t.co/haVbtZSShK

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) August 7, 2020

Pierre Danger • @townhallcom
"Ilana Mercer is a treasure and should be a regular on Tucker." ?

Fat chance and who cares? Dare I say the writers @TuckerCarlson sometimes borrow? But American corporatism means they can rip off the Little Guy or Gal. https://t.co/BL8GCuBJwK

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) August 7, 2020

The other day on “Life, Liberty & Levin,” Ben Shapiro trashed, but absolutely rubbished, John C. Calhoun, one of America’s greatest political theorists, in the estimation of historian Clyde Wilson, editor of the John C. Calhoun papers, and the foremost scholar of Calhoun in our time. From what I’ve read of Calhoun’s works, I concur.

Especially magnificent is “A Disquisition on Government,” published in 1851, wherein Calhoun developed the profound idea of ‘two different modes in which the sense of the community may be taken.’ The one ‘regards numbers only.’ The other invokes an entirely different quality or dimension, over and above the ‘numbers.’”

I was inspired to apply Calhoun’s idea in “Has Trump Awakened John C. Calhoun’s Concurrent Majority?” The column is from the book, The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June, 2016).

The more important point is logical. Ben Shapiro trashes Calhoun using the logic of the left—namely that a towering American intellectual and statesman held views considered improper to the American Idiocracy of the 21 Century.

As Professor Wilson has brilliantly written, “This is not historical debate. It is the propaganda trick of labeling something you do not like in order to control and suppress it. Such are those who want the war to be all about slavery—hateful, disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion.”

Another fundamental flaw in Ben Shapiro’s decidedly Republican view of America, expressed on “Life Liberty & Levin,” is the idea that his party is the Good Party.

Libertarians (check) don’t have a bone in the bi-partisan fight, except to advocate for the truth. And the truth is that lot of pseudo-history rests on the deification of, say, the Radical Republicans.

Here is the truth with a caveat: “The Radical Republicans were far more vicious and barbaric than the Antifa. The Republicans supervised the genocide of some 60,000 Plains Indians from 1865 to 1890, led by General Sherman himself”:

MORE:  “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865,” September 6, 2017

UPDATED (7/22):

Great comment, Daffy Duck, aka Dale @dalerooster
One more thing: As someone who reads biblical Hebrew and gets it, I am Daisy Duck if Ben Shapiro knows any serious Hebrew, as boasted. Maybe Pidgin Hebrew, i.e., the Americanized crap they speak in Israel, these days.

?Great comment, Daffy Duck, aka Dale @dalerooster. One more thing: As someone who reads biblical Hebrew and gets it, I am Daisy Duck if #BenShapiro knows any serious Hebrew, as boasted. Maybe Pidgin Hebrew, i.e., the Americanized crap they speak in Israel, these days. https://t.co/u9licF1Xyn

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) July 22, 2020

In mentioning Milos Forman’s formidable musical in “The Kiss,” my latest column,” an Unz Review reader alleges I was promoting an anti-White film.

“Hair” is a magnificent antiwar movie, featuring Western ideas, music and dance at their most triumphant.  This musical is an achievement (and I don’t much like musicals).

Who do you think That War killed? Poor white boys (and millions of Vietnamese).

What kind of music does it feature? Quality Western music. Western dance at its best, too. (No matter the color of the choreographers, I see the great Martha Graham’s influence in there).

What kind of black-Americans does “Hair” the movie showcase? Blacks singing in the Western tradition, dancing in the same tradition (no twerking) and signing-up to the tradition of anti-state war protest.

What kind of Left was featured in “Hair”? The Old Left, the anti-war Left, before “liberal brains became pickled in the formaldehyde of wicked woke, identity politics.”

As I wrote, “At its most effective and substantive, the left once protested against gratuitous wars.” Now, “’the new liberal brand’ amounts to nothing more than ‘commodified and market-tested ‘diversity.’”

Hair is not anti-white; it instantiates Western culture in every respect.