Category Archives: Reason

NEW ESSAY: Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Is ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian

Argument, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, Logic, Middle East, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Palestinians, Political Philosophy, Reason, The West, War

NEW ESSAY IS “Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Feels ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian.” It appeared on The Unz Review, where it was one of two featured articles to lead the page, and on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

Now on ILANAMERCER.COM.

Excerpt: 

Stateside, people speak of genocide as though it were an item of foreign-policy, albeit—small mercies—an unwelcome foreign policy event.

Absurd, of course!

Whether such crass utilitarians like it or not, the Anglo-Israeli-American genocide in Palestine is a moral matter, not to be subsumed within the confines of foreign policy, but transcending it.

“Genocide for Israel” is Trump’s de facto Middle East foreign policy. Enmeshed, the American and Israeli cabal, two self-appointed world powers, are presently and shamelessly still engaged in genocide. Israel acts to “disappear” the Palestinians as individuals, as a people and as a polity. Trump, who respects Israel’s wishes to the letter, appoints people who do the same. He pursues and imposes policies that dovetail with what Israel demands.

Israeli-American devilry has entailed the decimation of Palestinian habitat, the salting of their earth for decades to come; the despoiling and theft of their rightfully owned resources, the elimination of their historical artifacts and records; of thousands of their bloodlines. Gone are Gaza’s institutions of law, of learning of healing; their churches, their mosques, their leadership.

All ongoing. We are 790 days into Israel’s relentless bloodletting.

Trump, corporate media and the political ring leaders sashaying up and down both aisles may call the “new” dispensation under which Palestinians live a “ceasefire.” In point of fact, the so-called ceasefire is just Trump’s “engineered new normal: a slow-paced genocide.” For Israel.

The future of Gaza, Trump has made clear, would “be pretty much up to Israel.” When Israel declared its intention to take over Gaza, Donlad Trump had shrugged and egged them on. “Ramp it up,” he whooped. Having long since slipped between the sheets with soulmate Bibi Netanyahu, Trump gave the Israeli prime minister the go-ahead to “fight and finish the job.”

Under Gaza’s weeping winter skies, massacres continue. Drones, killer quadcopters and other Israeli shelling implements come scudding at Gaza from the north all the time. The “destruction of remaining homes, property and land, and the prevention of the entry of food, humanitarian aid and basic infrastructure materials” had never ceased, only let-up slightly. Genocide hums along now at the rate of more than eight human beings murdered a day, and at more than 20 injured, also each day, attest the Euro-Med’s human-rights monitors, on the ground.

By no unfortunate coincidence, Trump had normalized this mindset during his first administration. I was hardly being a crusty cynic when, in a January 3, 2018 column, “How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism,” I foresaw the vanquishing of Venezuela:

Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump’s foreign policy.

A couple of months back, Bloomberg’s Eli Lake let it be known that he was in neoconservative nirvana: ‘… for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. ‘The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,’ Trump said. ‘We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.’

‘For a moment,” swooned Lake, ‘I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting.’ (“How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism,” Ilana Mercer, January 3, 2018)

“Onward to Venezuela!” I wearily wrote. It was not a mysterious sense of foreboding. I was just following facts.

Then, I watched the lies with fascination. Now, I know all the tricks. Of course I did not vote for the man in 2024. And, of course Trump was bound to normalize genocide for Israel, albeit at a slower pace. 

Another of Trump’s hombres is Florida Representative Randy Fine. No sooner did the “Hebrew Hammer,” as he fondly calls himself, advise the Palestinian collective to “starve away”—than Trump rushed to pose by Fine’s side. The pair of them, two mountains of flesh as soft as sin, giving themselves over with passionate intensity to criminal complicity. That was in July of 2025. Come October of 2025, Trump endorsed Fine’s  candidacy.

Having gotten their hostages back, the inviolable Israelis, for their part, have settled into a different rhythm of genocide. The only thing that has come to an end in Israel are mass hostage protests. Since the Israeli-dictated “ceasefire” took effect on 10 October, upwards of 352 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel and over  900 injured. “Gaza is a living necropolis,” reports the Glia organization, also on the ground in Gaza.

Having kept up its standards, the majority of the casualties inflicted by the “most moral army in the world” are women, children and the elderly. You might look at these two diminutive brothers, small for their ages (for obvious reasons), and think kids. IDF terrorists, with far greater acuity than you, were able to discern “two suspects who crossed the yellow line,” and were conducting “suspicious activities on the ground.” …

… The REST. “Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Feels ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian” is on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com

Now on ILANAMERCER.COM.

UPDATED (11/23): Israelis NOT Sweating Sde Teiman Rape! Prosecutor’s ONLY Concern: Leaked Rape Tape Undermines Israel’s International Legal Impunity

Crime, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Logic, Palestinians, Reason, Science, Sex, The Therapuetic State

About the Sde Teima leaked rape tape, suffice it to say that, like the Hostage Square demonstrators in Tel Aviv, whose concern was exclusively for their hostages; there are no nettles of conscience in the genocidal society. The on-camera rape has just become a PR (public relations) problem. Unless the world’s yelling can be quelled, Israel’s legal representatives fear for the country’s legal impunity, which is meant to last in perpetuity. Like all shouting scraps in Israel, this one is entirely without an ethical or moral dimension. ~ilana

NEW ESSAY IS “Israelis NOT Sweating Sde Teiman Rape! Prosecutor’s ONLY Concern: Leaked Rape Tape Undermines Israel’s International Legal Impunity.” It is currently on The Unz Review, where it led the page as one of two feature essays. And on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market. 

READ IT NOW on IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

There’s a reason I purposefully avoided mention of the fracas in Israel over the leaked Sde Teiman video, in the companion column to this one: “Rape of Palestinian Men By IDF & Israeli Security Forces: Habitual.”

You see, the Hasbara herd seems to have one gift, in Israel and stateside. They live in a self-reverential and self-referential world: They talk from under wet cement about … themselves. And, they are training you to do the same: talk about them.

As hard as it is for this lot to compute; the genocide, however, is about their victims, Israel’s victims, the Palestinians.

About the Sde Teima leaked rape tape, suffice it to say the following: Like the Hostage Square demonstrators in Tel Aviv, whose concern was exclusively for only their hostages; the same Israeli society is not unhappy about crimes against Palestinians; but that one such crime had been made public to the detriment of their criminally complicit countrymen.

More so than mere publicity—after all, Israel is conducting genocide to a packed house, the world—Israel’s military advocate general worries that the leaked Sde Teiman footage will undermine Israel’s international legal impunity.

The case of the rectal-rape-with-objects of a Palestinian hostage, one among thousands held in the legal limbo of detention-without-trial, was leaked by the Military Advocate General’s office (MAG), whose apparatchiks had heretofore never expressed—nor acted to convey—regret, remorse, contrition, or penitence over the genocide ongoing. (So you know, Israel has merely shifted to “genocide lite” and to the “ghettoization” of the Strip.)

There are no nettles of conscience in the genocidal society. The on-camera rape has just become a PR (public relations) problem. Unless the world’s yelling can be quelled, Israel’s legal representatives fear for the country’s legal impunity, which is meant to last in perpetuity.

Like all shouting scraps in Israel, this one is entirely without an ethical or moral dimension. The leak of the filmed rape is but a procedural, administrative annoyance, the “Minister of Defense and many others in the political sphere and public discourse,” even claiming that any criminal proceedings constitute a “blood libel.

At about this time, Israeli think-tank residents are fretting. As the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) put it (in all sincerity), it is imperative to preserve “Israel’s legal and diplomatic ‘resilience’ internationally, and thus … our ability to protect IDF (Israel Defense Forces) service members from legal risks around the world.” …

… READ THE REST. “Israelis NOT Sweating Sde Teiman Rape! Prosecutor’s ONLY Concern: Leaked Rape Tape Undermines Israel’s International Legal Impunity” is currently on The Unz Review. And on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market. 

READ IT NOW on IlanaMercer.com.

UPDATE 11/23:  As I told you, grumbling across the world, move the Serial Killer State to make token arrests. There will be no serious prosecutions of the hundreds of settler culprits:

“Israeli Teenage Settler Charged With Terrorism-related Offenses Against West Bank Palestinians”:

“According to the charges, the teenager arrived as part of a group of rioters at a logistics center near the Palestinian village of Beit Lid, where they smashed windows and set fire to buildings, trucks, and vehicles belonging to Palestinian workers.”

News (10/4) & New Gaza Genocide Essay: The Coverup Begins. Johnny-Come-Lately Journos & Politicos Start Covering Keister

Foreign Policy, GAZA, Iraq, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Logic, Media, Middle East, Propaganda, Reason, Terrorism, War

There was no need for the AWOL, Missing-In-Action Piers Morgan Media, which was never in Gaza, never stood up for Gaza, and never broke down barriers to reach and report about Palestinians sequestered in genocide. Thanks not to the MIA Media, but to Palestinian journalists, the living and the martyred, The Truth about genocide in Gaza continues to be conveyed faithfully and meticulously. ~ilana

New Essay is “Gaza Genocide: The Coverup Begins. Johnny-Come-Lately Journos & Politicos Start Covering Keister.” It is featured on The Unz Review, and LewRockwell.com,  anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

And now on IlanaMercer.com

With the Genocide of Gaza accomplished; a convoluted coverup has begun. The Johnny-Come-Lately culprits, the professional liars in media, politics, in advocacy and in the tech industryalso the custodians of The Narrativehave commenced their dull recital of excuse-making.

A dull mediocrity which was fully behind Israel—or, alternatively, had confined itself to occasional quips about mass murder in Gaza being antithetical to the American “national interest”—is suddenly simulating belated passion for the truth. Or, versions thereof. All to sanitize their sins.

Having carved out “a place of massive impunity” for Netanyahu and his complicit countrymen, these sinecured, “credentialed” Western elites have duly begun to hijack storylines—even chronology—to absolve themselves of the genocide of Gaza. The same “perpetrator block,” wading in the blood of Palestinians, intends, for now, to remain mum about the territorial asphyxiation of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. There, strategic adaptations of the Twenty-First Century Gaza Holocaust are rapidly and energetically underway. Pursuant to popular demand in Israel proper, Jewish-Israeli thieves and murderers are purloining Palestinian land and lives in the West Bank.

I had imagined that the media organ’s formulaic production had reached a nadir in Iraq, when my own passion burned as hot as a Babylonian kiln against that war. The “Truth” about Iraq, I had then observed incredulously, arrived officially only once the Empire’s agents declared it so, and released it in massaged, flattering form. And only as exigencies of power allowed. The sizeable dissident community did not rate a mention.

The current crop of Israel apostles who’ve connived and colluded to suppress truth include, broadly speaking, the Western news, commentary, advocacy and policy-making classes; the overarching tentacular corporate media and its clientele—the military-media-congressional-industrial complex, if you will. In a word, the international Imperial Comitatus: the foot soldiers who share in the loot or aspire to do so (like “Washington’s Arab puppets, whose sound and fury signify nothing”).

The international Imperial Comitatus make themselves known by affinity and affiliation, but mainly by what they do: They “ravage, slaughter, usurp … and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” Originally by Tacitus, the words were popularized by economist Jeffrey Sachs in an epic essay about these influencers, Israel’s co-belligerents.

Israel’s helpers had covered up the Crime of The Century, and now it could out. And although they’ve made excellent time—Palestinian erasure is near complete—these special interests wish, nevertheless, to salvage their standing in the world. They’re doing PR (public relations).

“Gaza panics the pro-Israel media,” said Owen Jones, a dogged British media critic. The genocide-era journalists are “creating a record that’ll allow them to say one day, ‘Here is proof that we denounced and tried to stop the genocide,’” remarked Laith Marouf, a Lebanese geopolitical reporter and commentator. They waited until now, because the genocide comported, broadly, with their worldview. “Media has manufactured consent for the genocide with atrocity propaganda,” seconds Hamza Yusuf, a British-Palestinian writer and journalist. “They did this.” “Western media is Israel’s Iron Dome,” averred Bassem Youssef, commentator, comic and former surgeon.

Although Israel’s abominations have been watched by humanity for the best part of two years; and despite Israel’s industrious, industrial-scale mass murder playing interminably, on a loop—the truth watered-down will only be permitted to come into being, officially, on the say-so of gatekeeping interests and personalities.

Such as Piers Morgan and the Missing-In-Action Morgan Media (shall we call it?).

And so, with pomp and Piers, forever slow on the uptake, those in control of The Storyline prepare to “excavate” a modified version of “the truth” about the Gaza Holocaust.

In attempting to clear his name, Morgan, a spirited evangelist for Israel’s right to practice state terrorism—he calls it “self-defense”—sounded the worst false note: the Iraq Defense: “nobody knew,” nobody could have known. (See “Iraq Liars And Deniers: We Knew Then What We Know Now,” May 22, 2015.)

The reason “nobody knew, or could have known” about a televised genocide, proclaimed the lemon-faced Piers with trademark verbose vacuity, is that there have been no “credible, international journalists” in Gaza!

Did you hear that? Palestinian journalists don’t count! In an instant, the MIA Morgan Media set about canceling the work done by the greatest journalists to have lived and died on the job. As you can see, society’s gate-keepers are also wretched human beings. To further their scheme and vanity, these power-brokers imply that absent their AWOL, MIA Media, we cannot and could not have known what was underway in Gaza.

The Missing-In-Action Media was never in Gaza, never stood up for Gaza, and never broke down barriers to reach and report about Palestinians sequestered in genocide. Now, the same Media asserts that we cannot know—could not have known—what was underway in the tiny Gaza Strip without them. Only Morgan and his ilk could have given us the goods on Gaza. …

…THE REST. New Essay is “Gaza Genocide: The Coverup Begins. Johnny-Come-Lately Journos & Politicos Start Covering Keister.” It is featured on The Unz Review and LewRockwell.com,  anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

And now on IlanaMercer.com

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Dare I say that there is a duty to support anti-genocide activists and intellectuals? There is! To the extent they say important things (and are not powerful celebs); those who do this work are often fired from positions held, shadow-banned and throttled on social media. Tech algorithms also ensure that we are hard to find on Google searches. As one wag (Bassem Youssef) put it, we have free speech, but no reach.

Above all, the duty stems from the fact that this is an American and western genocide.

Like it or not, Gaza is America’s genocide.

PLEASE DO YOUR PART.

October 4: A beautiful—beatific—-soul, Greta Thunberg, who has the courage few men and women possess. Detained and abused in detention by agents of The Demon State.

A good update is at Drop Site Daily.

 

NEW BOOK: UPDATE II (3/13): The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy

Argument, Business, Capitalism, Classical Liberalism, Economy, Ethics, Free Markets, Free Speech, Government, Healthcare, libertarianism, Liberty, Logic, Morality, Natural Law, Outsourcing, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Pseudoscience, Reason, Regulation, Republicans, Science, Technology, The State

State ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another ~ilana

Between the State and the Corporation, Homo sapiens has been reduced to a Hobbesian, hedonistic version of homo economicus and a sad iteration of homo solitarius ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of “The Paleolibertarian Guide” (TPG) compendium.

“DEEP TECH,” my preferred term for the high-tech sector, denotes how deeply the head honchos of high-tech have penetrated and poisoned the American public and private sectors. As a coinage, Deep Tech is superior to Big Tech. Drawn from the term “Deep State,” the term “Deep Tech” better captures Big Tech’s overarching, enervating and tentacular reach into state and civil society.

“Deep State,” of course, is no conspiracy. Before the Left turned the term against the Right; it had long since been deployed on the Left and by libertarians to denote the state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally. To all intents and purposes, Deep Tech has become almost as powerful as the State in molding the Little Guy into a right-thinking Global Citizen.

In The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, I make the case that state ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another. The State no longer merely silhouettes civil and commercial society; but is absorbing it. What’s more, corporate culture, my purview in this volume, has been thoroughly co-opted by the State. Willingly so.

It has become the reflexive habit of corporations, not necessarily malevolently, to work together as well as to collude with government, to snuff out all lineaments of subversion in labor. After all, the progressive ideology is a gospel which these industry leaders never cease to proclaim and act upon. And if you fail to conform to it; they’ll fire you, isolate you, expose you, silence you, cancel you for good. These observations apply across party-lines.

“THE ABERRANT ECONOMY” in this work denotes the attitude of the multinationals toward economic growth. This attitude is today rooted not in healthy, community-based practices stateside and abroad, but in some aberrant economic gigantism. The derogatory diagnosis of economic elephantiasis undergirded by hubris, greed, and devout woke religiosity is warranted, I believe. Acromegaly is a physical deformity. In the human body it is caused by overproduction of certain compounds and is characterized by aberrant enlargement of the structure under discussion.

A diagnosis of economic acromegalia in Deep Tech is warranted ~ilana

The economic acromegalia or giantism diagnosed here in Deep Tech is one that manages to trample individual rights and other elementary decencies. Let us thus not confuse the metastatic multinational, motivated mostly by stratospheric wealth and a woke worldview—itself a gutter-like philosophy—with a business propelled by the good old-fashioned profit motive, whose growth is sustained by individuals and families tethered to corporeal communities, as opposed to colonies of imported laborers. Individuals, families, living in authentic, organic communities: These misty attachments are anathema to, and enemy of, the multinational’s clubby elites.

I underscore, as if in red ink, and deconstruct in detail how the awfulness of the COVID years, in particular, was underwritten by giant government, Big Pharma, and its latest malignant offshoot, the COVID Cartel—Disease X ad infinitum, if you will—in informal cahoots with social media. Again, a state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally.

Just how control is achieved—more reflexively than conspiratorially—I demonstrate by taking the reader through the COVID years, when “Agency And State Capture” were consolidated. I show how and why the Grand Old Party, Republicans, will always be missing in action on matters of individual and constitutional rights. On all matters, actually:

The overtone window alludes to a range of ideas once considered unthinkable, but now normalized. With their flaccid, crushingly stupid responses to most situations—Republicans have helped to normalize tyranny ~ilana

And I touch on the deformed foundations of the American Third-Party run healthcare system, down to how Deep Pharma’s patent privileges subvert market-based profits and free market medicine. Fault Deep Pharma, I counsel, not China.

In fact, not mere jobs, but “the very stuff of life is outsourced” by High-Tech, which loathes a labor market. (Chapter 7.) After reading “Homeless In The Homeland” (Chapter 6), the most heartbreaking of the book’s chapters, the reader will understand not only how “High-Tech Compounds Homelessness,” but that “homelessness in the United States is both physical and metaphysical”:

When your home belongs to The World; it’s everybody’s home, and nobody’s home, not even yours, which means you could find yourself homeless ~ilana

Ultimately, the sundering of cherished natural and constitutional rights by entities whose market penetration and capitalization equal those of many countries combined is why a solution is urgent.

Free-traders such as myself contend that it is worse than corrosive for big, powerful business to usher in a mind-controlling creed which they enforce against the Little Guy—on pain of social and financial demise—so that his speech is confined to politically correct, do-or-die guiding lodestars, the kind that sap and leach away the individual’s native power. Such an immoral drive ought to have miscarried a long time ago. A solution is provided in Chapter 9, “Dispatching Deep Tech; Enforcing Natural Rights.”

In the “Epilogue: On Globalism & Giving,” I round up by juxtaposing global integration with regionalism and localism, and spotlighting the last inspirational capitalist heroes of international standing. I hope to leave the readers with thoughts about charity, grace and what distinguishes The Good Giver from the Showy Giver.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK

Analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, as mentioned, is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of The Paleolibertarian Guide (TPG) compendium. The TPG’s polemical impetus is analytical in nature. The framework of this and future works in the series will systematically demonstrate that analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science—and liberty itself.

To wit, certain propositions in life need no “empirical evidence” for their validation. If anything, the constant insistence on scientism is in itself evidence of a deep corruption of reason. While solid empirical data are never to be dismissed, these are supplemental to a solid philosophy of science.

Derived from the Aristotelian method, the method I follow, Austrian-School thinking, is based in the laws of reason. To the extent that research contradicts reason, to that extent research is rubbish. The idea that science without the philosophy of science is nonsense comes alive for readers in Chapter 2: “COVID’s Cartel Of Cretins,” where, vivid and fun examples of a priori truths are provided.

THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON of this volume and those to follow is how to repatriate thinking outsourced to the expert class. For, these days, the simplest of logical deductions often appear to evade the ordinary man or woman.

The cognitive class, a managerial malignancy now glommed onto the Managerial State, will often cloak itself in the raiment of “science” and is instrumental in generating consensus. The insidious Expert Class that shapes and manages perceptions about public affairs I see as an extension of James Burnham’s Managerial State.

New Yorker James Burnham (1905-1987) began his intellectual odyssey as a Trotskyist before abjuring Marxism altogether and becoming a passionate anticommunist. He coined the phrase “managerial revolution,” which was extremely influential in the 1940s, and which served as the title of his bestselling book, one that had a marked impact on Orwell’s philosophy.

Lilliputian Man now finds himself pinned down like a butterfly, incapable or unwilling to derive and arrive at the truth without outsourcing his thinking to some authority or another. Restore we must the ancient philosophical notion whereby some things are simply axiomatically true (or false, for that matter), for it has profound ramifications for liberty.

A free-thinking people does not outsource thinking—the very business of life—to anyone.

 

 

UPDATE (2/25/024): Who knows what this means? Still, a nice category in which to be No. 1, in New Releases however fleetingly: Ethics & Morality.

UPDATE II (3/13/024): I’m buoyed to report that today, March 3, The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is No. 31 in the category of “Best Sellers in Philosophy Criticism.”