Category Archives: Paleolibertarianism

The Curious Case Of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Ethics, libertarianism, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism

“The Curious Case Of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

The reader should know that I cringe as I write this first-person account.

Why the disclaimer?

Opinion differs about how often to use the first person pronoun in various genres of writing. Certainly its overuse in opinion writing is a cardinal sin. To get a sense of how bad someone’s writing is count the number of times he deploys the Imperial “I” on the page.

Abuse “I” when the passive-form alternative is too clumsy. Or, when the writer has earned the right to, because of her relevance to the story. The second is my excuse here.

Righting two wrongs I must.

Clichés about victors writing history aside—it has become apparent to me how easy it is to write individuals out of their place in history, however meager that place and past are.

Since history is another term for reality chronicled, it is ineluctably tied to truth. It’s crucial to tell history like it is.

The stage has been set. Onto it steps a young academic, George Hawley, who’s taken on the first assiduous investigation of an exceedingly small set of individuals: “Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism.”

There is, however, lacuna in Dr. Hawley’s work. By his own admission, Hawley has failed to mention one veteran writer who falls squarely in the even-rarer paleolibertarian subset.

She has been writing voluminously in that tradition, week-in, week-out, for close on two decades (since 1999), and is the author of two unmistakably paleolibertarian books, one of which is “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” (Oh Buddha! The Imperial “I” has now given way to third-person writing. Mea culpa, gentle reader.)

Undergirding these, and the forthcoming “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” is paleolibertarianism.

Plainly put, I (ouch) believe that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure. That’s me. That’s my work.

Another academic, author and Townhall columnist Jack Kerwick, contends the omission of one ILANA Mercer from the first academic’s book covering the dissident Right is a glaring one.

” … There are three reasons why it is imperative that Mercer be included in any discussion of paleolibertarianism,” avers Kerwick: …

… Read the rest. “The Curious Case Of WND’s Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian” is now on WND.

Kerwick: Where’s One Of Paleolibertarianism’s Most Prolific Writers In Book About Dissident Right?

Conservatism, Ilana Mercer, Intellectualism, libertarianism, Old Right, Paleolibertarianism

What is he thinking? Author, columnist and academic Jack Kerwick is incorrigibly honest, intellectually honest. Doesn’t he know it’ll get him nowhere?

In a column at Beliefnet.com, “Missing ‘Right-Wing Critic of American Conservatism,'” Dr. Kerwick suggests that the omission of one ilana mercer from a new book entitled Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism is a grave one.

A “discussion of ‘paleolibertarianism’—an oft-neglected variant of the classical liberal perspective from the genuine right,” ventures Kerwick, “could’ve been vastly enriched had only [its author, George Hawley], said a thing or two about a specific paleolibertarian writer whose omission from his exposition struck this author [Kerwick] as glaring.”

“That writer is Ilana Mercer.”

” … There are three reasons why it is imperative that Mercer be included in any discussion of paleolibertarianism”:

First, and most obviously, she is a paleolibertarian—and a tireless one at that. For decades, this defender of the paleolibertarian vision has published a couple of books and thousands of articles and blog posts in which she’s shattered not only leftist pieties but neocon and “libertarian-lite”(left-wing libertarian) sureties as well. Much blood, sweat, and tears, to say nothing of opportunities for professional advancement, has Mercer foregone in her campaign against the idols of our Politically Correct age.

Second, not only is Mercer a veteran paleolibertarian writer. She is unquestionably the most visible, the most widely read, of such contemporary writers. At one point, she was nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate, and for nearly the last 20 years, WorldNetDaily (WND), a site that boasts roughly 1 million visitors a month, has featured Mercer’s weekly column, “Return to Reason”—its “longest standing, exclusive, paleo-libertarian weekly column.”

In addition to WND, Mercer’s work has been showcased in a plethora of outlets, both internationally and stateside, and she’s currently a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

No paleolibertarian—to repeat, a rightist proponent of a tradition-grounded classical liberal ideal—has nearly as much exposure when it comes to scholarly and popular audiences alike as does Mercer.

Third, Ilana Mercer is a woman. Moreover, she is a Jewish woman, the daughter of a Rabbi who was raised in both South Africa and Israel. This is no insignificant detail: Mercer is a standing repudiation of the stereotype, all too easily reinforced by her exclusion from any study of “right-wing critics of American conservatism,” that such critics are exclusively elderly white men. …

OUCH.

Read the rest. “Missing ‘Right-Wing Critic of American Conservatism” is on Beliefnet.com

UPDATED: ‘ET Analyzes Paris Attacks & Weeps For The West’ Affects The Heartland

America, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Terrorism, The West

Ann Coulter Offers A Corrective To Judge Andrew Napolitano

Ann Coulter, Constitution, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Liberty, Neoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism

I’ve been following Judge Andrew Napolitano long enough to know he is a Reason-type, left-libertarian, who supports Civil Wrongs legislation, even coming down occasionally against the most basic of liberties: absolute freedom of association and the rights of private property.

Therefore, I like not only that Ann Coulter is finally naming names, but that she has offered a serious corrective to the Judge’s ideologically skewed facts, in “Fox News anchored in stupidity on 14th Amendment”

… Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox’s senior judicial analyst … at least got the century right. He mentioned the Civil War – and then went on to inform Bream that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to – I quote – “make certain that the former slaves and the native Americans would be recognized as American citizens no matter what kind of prejudice there might be against them.”

Huh. In 1884, 16 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, John Elk, who – as you may have surmised by his name – was an Indian, had to go to the Supreme Court to argue that he was an American citizen because he was born in the United States.

He lost. In Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not grant Indians citizenship.

The “main object of the opening sentence of the 14th Amendment,” the court explained – and not for the first or last time – “was to settle the question, upon which there had been a difference of opinion throughout the country and in this court, as to the citizenship of free negroes and to put it beyond doubt that all persons, white or black … should be citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.”

American Indians were not made citizens until 1924. Lo those 56 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, Indians were not American citizens, despite the considered opinion of Judge Napolitano.

Of course it’s easy for legal experts to miss the welter of rulings on Indian citizenship inasmuch as they obtained citizenship in a law perplexingly titled: “THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924.”

Yeah, Trump’s the idiot. Or as Bream said to Napolitano after his completely insane analysis, “I feel smarter just having been in your presence.”

MORE.

Incidentally, it is true that since “Adios!” Ann Coulter can do no wrong. That she has recovered recently and magnificently does not mean that you should forget the years of neoconism, lauding the lovely Bush wars (calling them magnificent), ignoring immigration, and being wrong on too many things. I didn’t read her column for years (except on court cases and feminism) until now. I bought only “Treason,” which is a great book. The rest of her books were witty riffs on the theme, “Liberals this; liberals that,” seldom considering that Repubs are liberals too. To forget what neoconism’s most bright and beautiful representatives had wrought is unforgivable.

However, the always-adorable Ann is fast making up for past sins.