Category Archives: Psychology & Pop-Psychology

UPDATED (1/7): NEW ESSAY: Genocide Was Trump’s Gateway Crime. Why The Surprise Over His Vanquishing Of Venezuela?

America, Argument, Colonialism, Democrats, Donald Trump, Law, Logic, Middle East, Military, Morality, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Palestinians, Populism, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Republicans, War

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“Trump is a second-rate gangster and he hates it. He wants to be Bibi.” ~ilana

“Surely, you don’t need mommy to tell you that murder is more than a secondary personality trait? It defines who a person is. It tends to crowd out all other positive attributes. If that’s not obvious, think of Oscar Wilde’s simple guidelines for cretins: ‘Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.'” ~ilana

NEW essay is “Genocide Was Trump’s Gateway Crime. Why The Surprise Over His Vanquishing Of Venezuela?“. It is now featured on the Unz Review, home of true dissidents from day one.

Some choice excerpts (not contiguous): 

https://www.unz.com/imercer/genocide-was-trumps-gateway-crime-why-the-surprise-over-his-vanquishing-of-venezuela/

“The fuss and feathers over Trump’s foreign policy is silly, childish. It attests to what happens to the minds of men when they view the very public mass murder of The Other—committed by their Leader—as unrelated to their own moral integrity and future welfare: the brain goes to mush. Or perhaps it was the size of a lentil to begin with.

In the mind of the minimally moral, minimally compos mentis American—”America First” and genocide ought to be two mutually exclusive categories. 

Here’s a useful clue: If your politician of choice, going into an election, supports genocide or is silent about genocide; he’s not your friend. You ought to be smart enough, in possession of the very basic moral faculties—having reached a rudimentary development of conscience—to make that minuscule determination.

Has mommy not taught you that murder is wrong and that no mass murderer and congenital thief is your friend? Alas, the decay of the American Mind is such that Trump’s fans are apoplectic—and one or two has texted me in tears: “America First, Ilana; what-oh-what has happened to it?” …

….   That his phlegmatic followers now whinge and whine over Trump’s lackluster America-First focus is really quite puzzling, if not contemptible. It’s like complaining—not that serial killer Ted Bundy killed a lot; but that he was unpatriotic for driving around in a Volkswagen Beetle.

“Ever heard of a Chevy Tahoe, Ted? Boohoo, Bundy, why did you go to work in a Volkswagen, you traitor? Buy America, not German.

Bundy and Trump, Joe Biden and Bibi Netanyahu, and their minions, are murderers all. Murder is what defines them; it’s their defining feature. Except that the last three delegated mass murder to the mercenaries of a military. Bundy did the deeds himself.

Surely, you don’t need mommy to tell you that murder is more than a secondary personality trait? It defines who a person is. It tends to crowd out all other positive attributes. If that’s not obvious, think of Oscar Wilde’s simple guidelines for cretins: “Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.” …

…  “Genocide for Israel” is Trump’s de facto Middle East foreign policy.

Impoverished heroic Houthis of Yemen Trump has murdered beginning in 2018: The House of Trump in partnership with the House of Saud. Iranians Trump has helped murder. Somalis and Nigerians Trump has been murdering. Sailors in vessels, on the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, no due process required: them, too, Trump has murdered. All this with nary a meaningful check on executive power from the dullards serving in the world’s “greatest” deliberative bodies, the US Congress and Senate.

And now Venezuelans, ordinary men and women, scan the skies nervously for the telltale metallic shimmer, wondering whether they are being simply surveilled from above, or targeted by Hellfire missiles. …

… Genocide, the crime of all crimes, was Trump’s gateway crime. Once you’ve crossed over to genocide, the world (and its people) is your oyster. …

… And his fans expected Trump to compartmentalize the killer-within and keep to his America-First promise? Are they dense? …

As to Venezuela: Trump knows nothing about the anti-imperial spirit of the Bolívar Revolution still animating Latin America. …  …  Trump’s handlers, only marginally smarter than he, tell him to say stuff that makes him seem in-the-know. So, Trump stammers about The Monroe Doctrine and the imperative to make errant Latin America submit to America (much like Arabia bows to Bibi).

Trump’s Other Handlers have yet to hand Trump his marching orders. But they’re happy. On Israel’s ILTV …”

…READ IT ALL NOW. “Genocide Was Trump’s Gateway Crime. Why The Surprise Over His Vanquishing Of Venezuela?“. It is now featured on the Unz Review

https://www.unz.com/imercer/genocide-was-trumps-gateway-crime-why-the-surprise-over-his-vanquishing-of-venezuela/

I will update this post with a note on how you can–and really should—help a besieged dissident scribe (who is getting older and more tired).

*Screen picture courtesy of antiwar.com

UPDATE 1/7: 

Do the right thing in support of much-besieged work which adheres to Christian duties flouted by your leaders.  And, do so publicly. Anon is fine. Here is an example of the kind of weasel letters I get (after each piece)—have got for decades—which, as nice as it is, does no good. Preaching to the choir is worse than useless:

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Why the National Interest Standard is Fake & Gayhttps://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/12/why-the-national-interest-standard-feels-fake-gay-solidarity-with-palestine-is-libertarian/
Date: 2025-12-17 08:21
From: kathleen lips
To: ilana@ilanamercer.com

Ilana — This column is brilliant. Thank you for your courage and for saying so many things that many of us think but are afraid to utter in public.

You are a hero to millions of us.

— David

Here is how men and women WITH a backbone can stand up:

Comment (anon if you like) on the blog (not to me), whose readership was destroyed by a former website “expert” developer. (She cut off and spammed our once-vibrant comments section.) Each blog post corresponds to an essay. For example:

https://barelyablog.com/why-the-national-interest-standard-is-fake-gay-solidarity-with-palestine-is-libertarian/#comments

At Ron Unz anon is fine:

https://www.unz.com/imercer/genocide-was-trumps-gateway-crime-why-the-surprise-over-his-vanquishing-of-venezuela/#respond

Do a book Review of last book (another is due please God in April):

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0974103926

Rod Dreher: How to Primal Scream Your Way To The Pinnacle Of ‘Conservative’ Punditry

Conservatism, Critique, Ethics, Etiquette, Family, Juvenal Early's Archive, Morality, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, Racism

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By Juvenal Early

The American Conservative: From Pitchfork Pat to The Crunchy Con Castrate

The Rob Stove article, recently posted here on BAB, reminded me that I hadn’t thought of Rod Dreher (Old Dreary) in many months.  I thought I’d check up on him. I know he’s living in Hungary now. He’s divorced, or about to be. Upon investigation, it turns out he’s on his own now, no longer under the auspices of The American Conservative (TAC), a lone blogger.  Perhaps Dreher’s February exit from TAC was hastened by a piece he wrote last December, after he’d recently discovered (courtesy of a lefty doxxer) that his father (deceased for several years now) had once been in the KKK.

The normal semi-public figure, on learning such a thing, might put out a short statement: “This was a shock to me. I certainly never knew of it. I’m not now, nor have I ever been a Klansman or a fellow traveler, etc.” Something like that.

My G-d, this creep posted a 9400 word screed, an anxiety attack directly from the heart to the blog. I scrolled through it, reading fair-sized chunks, more than enough to get the point.  The thing just went on and on, and often strayed from the (putative) central topic. All this hand-wringing self-pity. All Virtue signaling,  with the obligatory reminders about how wise the great Christian (he wasn’t) MLK was. How he, Dreary, had moved back to Louisiana to be with his family 12 years earlier to help them out and to be helped. But they were mean to him, they rejected him, and he went on at length about how their meanness eventually destroyed his marriage. Like he couldn’t screw it up on his own. Oh, the horror. An endless hissy fit, replete with spluttering lines like, “I thought he was a horrible reactionary whose judgment could not be trusted on anything.” You say that word “reactionary,” Mr Dreher, like it’s a bad thing.

I mean, you don’t say the things he said about his family and put it out there for public consumption. It should be a private matter. Share it with a confidant, if you must. Talk to the family directly—and privately. Don’t squeal on and on about how awful your family is and put it out there for the whole world to see.

Apparently, the family mostly hates him—down to the aunts and uncles and cousins. Even the dead don’t have much use for the guy (although Dreher makes use of them; posting a hazy image of his late father, as he lay dying). Gee, I wonder why.

After reading large portions of Dreher’s apologia, a line from an old war movie, “The Bridges of Toko-Ri,” came back to me, viz., “Where do we get such men?” Irony very much intended. What does it say about TAC, that they would publish such melodramatic tripe? They’ve come a long way from Pitchfork Pat to the Crunchy Con.  You’d think conservatism’s flagship publication might stand up for traditional values, e.g., honor, personal responsibility, family loyalty, toxic masculinity, etc. You’d at least think that the material they publish was—and it’s a low bar these days—conservative. But, then, TAC didn’t even stand up for their founder, Mr. Buchanan.

***************

“Juvenal Early” is a contributor to Barely A Blog and an all-round bon vivant for literature and high-culture. His 2020 piece, “The Dissident Right Has An Idiocracy Problem,” created quite the buzz.

*Articles About Rod Dreary on BAB

UPDATED (6/24): He’d Never Hire ’50-Year-Old White Guys,’ Said Stockton Rush, RIP, Titan’s Submersible’s CEO. Oops.

Critique, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, Racism, Technology

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TITAN’S SUBMERSIBLE’S CEO STOCKTON RUSH, RIP, once declared that he,

“[D]idn’t hire ’50-year-old white guys’ with military experience to captain his vessels because they weren’t ‘inspirational.’ Stockton Rush, 61, added that … ‘anybody can drive the sub’ with a $30 video game controller.

OOPS. A bum’s rush.

“Speaking to CBS News in November,” Reports RT, “Rush explained that the vessel was entirely controlled with a generic bluetooth video game controller, which online sleuths discovered had a dismal reputation for reliability.”

From Matt Walsh—who else?—comes turgid psychoanalysis in the service of mindless WORSHIP. WORSHIP without distinction.

In a burst of Randian emotionalism, Mr. Walsh, an unsupple mind, rushed to praise adventure tourism in general, and the OceanGate submersible’s Titanic-bound endeavor, in particular.

Walsh scolded any who dared to be cynical—as I am of the masses who flock to, say, Mount Everest, turning Base Camp into a vast latrine, and making waste removal a major source of employment for local Nepalese and neighboring Chinese. Yes, how ennobling an industry is that for The Other.

Noble spirit? “Bold and daring” on the Everest? No. Crass, despoiling tourism.

First to summit were a white guy (not yet 50) named Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay. They embodied “different, bold, and daring.”

Nevertheless, scold Matt Walsh pules on tediously about critics:

These are people whose envy and dissatisfaction with their own mediocre, unimpressive lives have driven them to despise anyone who does anything different, bold, or daring. They take pleasure in failure because they will never have any successes of their own to celebrate.

The lives of Lilliputians like you and me dwarf compared to the grand life of CEO and pilot Stockton Rush, RIP, says Walsh.

The latest, via AP News

A submersible carrying five people to the Titanic imploded near the site of the shipwreck and killed everyone on board, authorities said Thursday, bringing a tragic end to a saga that included an urgent around-the-clock search and a worldwide vigil for the missing vessel.

Coast Guard officials said during a news conference that they’ve notified the families of the crew of the Titan, which had been missing since Sunday.

The sliver of hope that remained for finding the five men alive was wiped away early Thursday, when the submersible’s 96-hour supply of oxygen was expected to run out and the Coast Guard announced that debris had been found roughly 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the Titanic in North Atlantic waters.

“This was a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” said Rear Adm. John Mauger, of the First Coast Guard District.

* Image as screen pic courtesy Fox News

UPDATE II: For their abysmal endeavor, the anti-white ageist brainiacs of the OceanGate submersible used Carbon Fiber, rather than a metal that withstands compression. NASA engineers helped them. Systemic, institutional rot. Ridding the system of the best engineers is a bummer.

RELATED:

“Systemic, Institutional Rot: From Big Freeze In Texas To Fires In Cali,” Ilana Mercer, February 25, 2021

“When Merit-Based Hiring Is Deemed Racist, Bridges Fall Down,” Ilana Mercer, March 29, 2018

“Manliness (Not A Miracle) On The Hudson,” Ilana Mercer, February 13, 2009

As our reader points out in Comments, you would not see a brother, rich or poor, board such a “Hold My Beer” piece of engineered crap, assembled with parts as good as you get from Home Depot, in a basement—OceanGate workshop pics indeed do depict steps descending into what looks like a garage.

However, absent those old, musty, white men, the atmosphere was of giddy exuberance. So, there’s that.

Mental Maladies: Tucker And Mainstream Discover What Thomas Szasz Explained In 1960

Argument, Logic, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Science, The Therapuetic State

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About the lack of empirical evidence for so-called organic nature of “mental disease,” Tucker Carlson said TODAY, , (well, almost) what this column wrote first in 2002 and countless times since, in titles archived under Psychiatry and The Therapeutic State category:

“Cruise And The Psychiatric Shamans,” (2005) “EVIL, NOT ILL” (4/2007), “Conservatives For Abolishing The Fact Of Evil (2015),” “School Shootings: A Moral-Health, Not Mental-Health, Problem” (2018).

Tucker discovers what we wrote in “Broken Brains?” (January 16, 2002):

“… Consider also that there is no credible, scientific, peer-reviewed evidence for the organic basis of aberrant behavior, and you grasp the chicanery that surrounds the claim that strange or bad conduct is caused by ‘chemical imbalances’ in the brain. …”

The more rigorous and honest clinicians will concede that drawing causal relationships between “mental illness” and “chemical imbalances” is impossible. That prescription medication often helps misbehaved or unhappy individuals is no proof that strange behavior is an organic disease. One can chemically castrate a pedophile. But does this demonstrate that molesting kids is an organic disease? Never. It proves only that chemical castration can at times reduce recidivism in people who have chosen to victimize children.

Clear analytical thinking is at the root of solid science, it precedes empiricism.

Roughly 75 percent of the value of “antidepressant” drugs is due to the placebo effect. And talk therapies—cognitive-behavioral therapy in particular—can have equal or better results. Veracity permits only that we limit our causal conclusions to saying that assorted treatment modalities sometimes help people with behavioral problems, nothing more.

MORE.

My mentor, the great Dr. Thomas Szasz, wrote and proved all this analytically in the Myth of Mental illness, 1961. His books I studied at university, back when thought was taught. Both Tom Szasz and I lauded Tom Cruise when the actor attacked psychiatry so very cogently.

See “Cruise And The Psychiatric Shamans” (2005):

The psychiatric peanut gallery has blasted actor Tom Cruise for insisting correctly that there’s more voodoo to the profession than veracity. Cruise’s instincts are good: “Psychiatrists don’t have a test that can prove that a so-called mental illness is actually organic in origin, I wrote. Rigorous clinician —members of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology come to mind —concede that drawing causal connections between “mental illness” and “chemical imbalances” is impossible. That prescription medication often helps misbehaved or unhappy individuals is no proof that strange behavior is an organic disease —placebos or cognitive-behavioral therapy, for example, are as effective.

Tucker Carlson had summoned some limey, a quick-fix popularizer, to speak to these issues.