Category Archives: The West

NEW ESSAY (9/12/026) On Conservative Kvetching About Contemporary Western Civilization’s Superiority

Christianity, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Intelligence, Israel, Literature, Middle East, Morality, Natural Law, Propaganda, Terrorism, The West, War

War is the West’s way in the world; war on civilians ~ilana   

NEW ESSAY is “On Conservative Kvetching About Contemporary Western Civilization’s Superiority.” It appeared on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com, anti-war, anti-state, pro-market.

You can find it on ilanamercer’s FPV Resistance on Substack, where we can also chat.
And, on IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

….Once-upon a time, I’d have said, more serenely, that when an American politician preaches about “the values that make our country great,” to quote Mrs. Clinton, and about “our ally Israel sharing these values,” to be spread far and wide, chances are they mean not ordered liberty, but a libertine order, where the Bill of Rights is subordinate to the Security-cum-Surveillance State apparatus, and any common-law traditions remaining are treated as living, breathing, mutating philosophical malignancies that must be made to second and reinforce the murderous apparatus just mentioned.

Without qualm, I’ll now venture that the contemporary version of civilization known as “western” has been repudiated to a great degree by the Axis of Genocide. “You can’t pull too many bricks out of that wall before it caves in,” to borrow from Louis Auchincloss (one of the great writers America once boasted).

The Axis of Genocide’s modus vivendi is instantiated across the West in every single institution of state and civil society. The “perpetrator block” encompasses nearly all western governments and the most powerful economic actors. Its military and civilian squadrons have not only adopted Israel’s inverted reality and morality, but have made it their own. 

The thing, the West, is in a state of putrefaction.

You’d think, then, that the conservative commentariat—many of whom rose through the military- or media-industrial-complex—would finally quell their yelling about “western civilization,” in the context of metastasizing, protracted western genocidal pursuits.

Not a bit. They continue to rabbit on about The (Christian) West vs. The Rest. They continue to figuratively remind us, with a sniff and a sneer, that The Rest once could not make iron or roll a wheel.

One notable exception to the warped rule, aside Jeffrey Sachs—a prince among intellectual and moral scullions—is Professor Stephan Walt, the intellectual in the famous pair that authored the seminal book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. 

During an August interview, Walt firmly but affably told Tucker Carlson that “people sometimes forget” about the “collapse” of norms against the use of violence, courtesy of the Super Power and its supremacist sidekick, Israel. In his words: …”

READ THE REST: 

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance” on Substack.
https://ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com

ESSAY (4/24/2026): Team Netanyahu/Trump Sinks Iran Talks; Kushner Beefs Up Rap-Sheet

America, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Morality, Natural Law, Paleolibertarianism, Palestinians, Private Property, Propaganda, Terrorism, The West, War

The US is violating Iran’s territorial sovereignty and denying that country’s riparian rights in the waterways that abut its territory. ~ilana

[Israelis] don’t have to explain themselves to the world. Israel [should just] focus on the things that make them incredibletheir ingenuity, their innovation, their compassion, …on being exceptional. ~ Jared Kushner

Jared, You forgot killing. Israeli pleasures and pastimes are killing. ~ilana

NEW ESSAY IS “Team Netanyahu/Trump Sinks Iran Talks; Kushner Beefs Up Rap-Sheet.” Read it now on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com.

It is now available on IlanaMercer.comhttps://www.ilanamercer.com/2026/04/team-netanyahutrump-sinks-iran-talks-kushner-beefs-up-rap-sheet/

Excerpt:

We have a “good negotiating team, the best,” blathered Trump, with respect to the individuals he dispatched to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, April 10, to dictate the terms of surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Team Trump was led by Israel firsters and Israeli assets like Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoaff (sic), and Vice President JD Vance, whose eyeliner only enhances the “degeneracy of manners and morals” he embodies and represents.

I’ll make this very simple. Against the Islamic Republic, victim of the US-Israel’s untrammeled criminality, the president’s men have committed the most egregious crime, the crime of aggression, categorized as such in international customary law—and in all systems of law, codified and uncodified.

By violating Iran’s territorial sovereignty and denying that country’s riparian rights in the waterways that abut its territory—by strafing Iranian cities, targeting life-sustaining infrastructure and industries; hospitals, healers and first responders.; historic sites and schools; wantonly murdering thousands of Iranian people, assassinating esteemed political and scientific leaders—Trump has demonstrated that he has assimilated Israel’s military doctrines. The president of the United States of America has Israelized the US Military and is ‘going Amalek’ on the Jewish State’s designated enemies.

The “accumulated evil,” another legal term invoked in international customary law with respect to the “supreme crimeof unprovoked aggression—this rot is evident in all Trump’s dealings and deeds. It is etched on his decaying Dorian Gray like countenance and is manifest in what is disgorged from the American president’s mouth.

By extension, it was quite clear what tone Trump’s team of choice would set for any and all “negotiation” proceedings with Iran.

Once the talks in Islamabad predictably collapsed, it transpired that Vance had likely been holding all information in reserve for Bibi Netanyahu’s edifications and approval.

Confirmed Netanyahu: “I spoke yesterday with Vice President J.D. Vance. He called me from his plane on his way back from Islamabad. He reported to me in detail, as this administration does every day, about the development of the negotiations.”

One wonders why Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, would sit down at the negotiating table with this coterie. After all, “in a phone call with his German counterpart, … Araghchi had proclaimed that Iran entered the failed April 10/12 talks in Islamabad with full distrust because of the US repeated breaches and betrayals of diplomacy.”

Foreign Minister Araghchi is certainly a class act. Team Trump/Netanyahu are class enemies. To wit, during the farcical negotiations, the US sneakily attempted to breach the Strait of Hurmuz, over which Iran has natural, riparian property rights. Simultaneously, the Washington Post ran an article by Marc Thiessen, a mediocre neoconservative, calling for the assassination of the Iranian negotiators if they refuse to submit.

Was it, then, prudent for Iran’s finest to grace with their presence such proven bad-faith actors? More important still, why trust Israel’s proxies—the detritus of humanity, human waste by any other name—with your life, Mr. Araghchi? Had not Mr. Araghchi’s predecessor, former Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazi and his wife, been murdered in “a targeted United States-Israeli strike on their Tehran home”? Indeed. So, too, is the supreme leader’s successor, Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, said to be languishing after wounds inflicted on him by this merged criminal cabal.

Just how duplicitous and vicious a people are we and our Israeli overlords?

A man is only as good as his word. Knowing that America’s word is shit, the Pakistan Air Force is purported to have “deployed an aerial shield” to escort the Iranian delegation, led by Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf,” safely into Pakistani airspace. On departure, their Pakistani hosts scrambled “advanced fighter jets” to protect the Iranians (to whom they had given a rock-star welcome).

True, one negotiates with foes, not with friends. Known, too, is the bravery and self-sacrifice of the Iranians and their leaders. Hours before his murder by Murder Inc., the equally impressive late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had stated that, as long as 90 million Iranians are without bomb-sheltering bunkers, so too will he, their spiritual leader, remain above ground, outside the shelter. He did. He died.

Iranians and their leaders seem to have so much more love and loyalty in them than their oppressors. But this does not mean you sacrifice your finest to Israel’s American idolaters. Trump and team are capable of surprising calculated, calibrated evil. Jared Kushner, in particular.

Behind Kushner’s sylphlike appearance is a boa constrictor anticipating its next meal. …

… Parenthetically, I’ll say that I’m sick of Gaza being reduced to no more than an ‘open-air concentration camp.’ Legally, this is true. But Gaza before the Holocaust was quite beautiful, certainly unique. It was a quaint community with a character and a history, some of it ancient. All of it well reflected in its public spaces. Gaza had nothing of the vulgar gilt of a Trump tower. To compare Gaza of yore to the Gaza dreamt up in the Kushner consortium’s Master Slave Plan for the Strip is like comparing a centuries-old church with the heavily adorned Trump White House and White House ballroom. …

…READ THE REST. “Team Netanyahu/Trump Sinks Iran Talks; Kushner Beefs Up Rap-Sheet” is on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com. 

And on IlanaMercer.comhttps://www.ilanamercer.com/2026/04/team-netanyahutrump-sinks-iran-talks-kushner-beefs-up-rap-sheet/

UPDATE (4/23):  Genius Resistance Rap (via Dimitri Lascaris’ Reason2Resist).

 AI LEGO Strait Outta Iran

https://x.com/drew_ponder/status/2045183966848934021

UPDATE 4/24:  
Did I call it or not? Resistance Rap by young Iranian geniuses.

Lego Melania Trump: “I was Never on #Epstein’s Island. Full White House Speech.”

IRAN IS THE ‘IT’ COUNTRY. TOTALLY.
@AntiwarNews @dimitrilascaris #Lego #Iran @ExplosiveMediaa

ESSAY (March 2026): Why Iran Should Go Heavy On Israel, And Spare The US & Gulf States + VIDEO

America, Argument, COVID-19, Democrats, Donald Trump, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Iran, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East, Military, Propaganda, The West, War

The US Epstein Elites, our overlords, are too big, too evil, too resolute to be subject to influence or pain. They’re untouchable, impervious. They’re not subject to the ordinary schedules of reinforcement and punishment ~ilana 

NEW ESSAY is “Why Iran Should Go Heavy On Israel, And Spare The US & Gulf States + VIDEO.” It is a leading feature on The Unz Review, home to those who’ve been dissident writers and thinkers from day one.

Now on IlanaMercer.com:

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2026/03/why-iran-should-go-heavy-on-israel-and-spare-the-us-gulf-states-video/

Excerpt:

I’m thinking that Iran should have—could still—go heavy on Israel, but not on their neighbors. And not on the US. The reasons I say this are as follows:

First the US: Iran cant’s significantly hurt the United States of America. It’s obvious.

Our Epstein Elites, running their mouths and running the war, are impervious to morality, decency; to fairness, and to the costs of their unending, insatiable aggression. (The crime of aggression is considered the supreme crime in international law. The natural law and libertarian law are agreed.)

Over time, the US Epstein Elites have accrued wealth and power so obscene, so ill-gotten that they are able to have a say over the livelihoods and lives of their subjects, stateside and the world over. Wars and catastrophic events serve as ruses through which power is centralized. Of note is the consolidation of power and wealth that COVID afforded these elites. (More about the precedent-setting violations of individual rights in my book about Deep Tech, Deep Pharma and the Aberrant Economy.) Covid and genocide. Genocide was Trump’s gateway crime.

Yes, we are subjects of the Israeli-American Epstein Elites. And nothing will sway the Orange Entity, his formal accomplices stateside, nor his unofficial accomplices, Trump’s Jewish-Israeli billionaire handlers. Nothing. Nonchalantly, Bibi’s bitch told America that he anticipates losing American men in his war of choice on Iran (for Israel). The price is worth it, he suggested.

In the service of Israel, American lives are Trump’s to dispatch. These are Goyim, as Epstein and friends refer to non-Jews. So what does Trump care if the shiksas mourn the Goyim. (Shiksa is a non-Jewish girl or woman. It’s the female for Goy, and it is as offensive.)

The same goes for the Democrats. I don’t have to tell you that Genocide Joe and all his Democrats—from AOC to Pelosi—smoothed the way in normalizing genocide in Gaza, “because Israel.”

As ugly as this reality is; The US Epstein Elites, our overlords, are too big, too evil, too resolute to be subject to influence or pain. They’re untouchable, impervious. They’re not subject to the ordinary schedules of reinforcement and punishment to which even Europe’s and England’s Epstein Elites have reacted. There was residual shame expressed in resignations and attempted suicides that took place across The Pond.

America’s Epstein Class has no shame. It thrives, in power, independent of the influence of ordinary folks like you and me. We appear incapable of dislodging the Class that rules us.

So, Iran is wasting time and scarce resources in trying to punish Little Satan (America). Am I biased? Of course. Naturally, I don’t want Iranians to punish our hapless soldiers, my countrymen, even though the patient Iranians are well within their right to so do.

I come now to the Gulf States, which Iran is pummeling—and not only US installations, but facilities and installations across the region:

I say this with weary contempt: When it comes to the elites of the Persian Gulf countries; it’s literally the case of, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Yes, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait, etc., they host US forces and all the support structure of war. But they are puppet states, vassals. They are in thrall to the Anglo-American-Israeli axis. Intractably so.  … ”

… READ THE REST. “Why Iran Should Go Heavy On Israel, And Spare The US & Gulf States + VIDEO.” It is a leading feature on The Unz Review

VIDEO: “Why Iran Should Go Heavy On Israel, And Spare The US & Gulf States

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDfDVBTy5s0

SEND YOUR COMMENTS HERE AT THIS BLOG POSThttps://barelyablog.com/new-essay-why-iran-should-go-heavy-on-israel-and-spare-the-us-gulf-states-video/#respond

(UPDATES 3/15):

Thank you to the three men whom Elon allows to see my post:

https://x.com/Mo_Resourcez/status/2033234973453340833

Coming out: Melania Trump too is a narcissistic megalomaniac. Who knew? A match made in hell. Watch:

https://x.com/IlanaMercer/status/2033236509508370735

Sodom and Gomorrah. Genocide and genocidal war turns the demons on. GenocideDonald. Watch:

https://x.com/IlanaMercer/status/2031824555300569515

The Middle East’s ancient Christian community is dying by Israel, hand-in-glove with America. Read: 

https://x.com/IlanaMercer/status/2031822930330747004

The white smoke over Tel-Aviv: What does it mean? Watch:

https://x.com/BranPuffin/status/2031441852436807718

US murdering Iranians to make them (allegedly) more like Israelis. Here are Israel’s religiously devout charedi, ultra orthodox, after a Purim Party, presumably … drunk. Check:

https://x.com/IlanaMercer/status/2030726645167108459

US killing Iranians (ostensibly) to make Iran and Iranians look like this:
Purim in Jerusalem, the holy city:

https://x.com/IlanaMercer/status/2030723811713458396

UPDATE: 3/21: Looting, trashing Lebanon. Hmm. Where have we seen this before?

Sadly, IDF, a citizens’ army, have a get-out-of-jail card READY.

The narrative among American conservatives is “Shame, they are brainwashed.”
Wrong! Israel has a robust, and privately owned media. It caters to PUBLIC DEMAND.

Israel is one of the most WiFi-ed societies in the world. It’s a high-tech society; every Israeli has access to corrective feedback, to information.

Beware. Infantilize and disease innate evil—and you’ll get A LOT MORE OF IT. Coming to your shores.

https://www.facebook.com/fatunetwork/videos/a-group-of-israeli-soldiers-recorded-themselves-looting-homes-in-lebanon-as-they/882137588192250/

ESSAY (DEC. 2025): 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

The Anglo-Israeli-American genocide in Palestine is a moral matter, not to be subsumed within the confines of foreign policy, but transcending it. ~ilana 

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.