Category Archives: War

UPDATE V (5/11): TUCKER TODAY. GOOD NEWS BREAKING: Fix News Aka Faux New is FINISHED (Fires Tucker)

Free Speech, Journalism, Media, Propaganda, Republicans, The Establishment, War

UPDATE V (5/11):

Tucker Carlson launches a new show on Twitter in the service of unfettered speech and a search for truth in 2023.

Just imagine what being a dissident from day one means (2002): It means you don’t even get a chance to speak your Truth over time to a large enough crowd, and only then get cancelled. Rather, you show up, begin writing in America and are cancelled almost from Day One.

PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES! (May 29, 2004): “So why are insightful commentators whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while false …. prophets are called back for encores?”

The answer will not please admirers of the late James Burnham, who blame scheming elites for any popularly accepted project they dislike, be it unwarranted wars or welfare. Contrary to Burnham, elites, media included, can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced, as the invasion of Iraq was. Today’s news is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please – not inform – the populace.
Fox News was able to create the perception of a parallel universe in Iraq replete with big (nuclear) bangs and miraculously materializing al-Qaida terrorists because its Hollywood-inspired vision resonated with viewers. The ratings provided proof. By popular demand, MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times (This means you, Judith Miller) adopted a similar faux patriotism devoid of skepticism and serenely accepting of every silly White House claim.

UPDATE IV (5/5): Tucker Carlson was transformational.

Megyn Kelly no sooner left Fox News than she was forgotten once Tucker stepped into her stilettos.

And Ms. Kelly is smarter than Kayleigh McEnany (whose hard-to-spell names one has to cut-‘n-paste), or simpleton Lawrence Jones. As was Kelly more independent politically.

The other two are tools. Most all at FoxNew are tools, not nimble intellectually, which Tucker is.

If the likes of those two succeed in replacing the independent Tucker–then that’s all Boobus Americanus deserves

UPDATE III (4/26): Fix News is indeed finished. Joy! Two minutes of a cheerful Tucker Carlson
on Twitter, orienting The Idiocracy to what matters, nets more views—seven million to begin with—and climbing, than the sum of all concurrent programming on FauxNews, CNN, MSNBC. Unstoppable.

The Tucker segment is now, a few hours later, inching toward thirty million views!!!!

Rupert Murdoch will be remembered as the Money Man who fired Mr. Tucker Carlson.

Truth will out.

GOOD NEWS BREAKING: Fix News aka Faux New is FINISHED.

They just fired their ONLY attraction, Tucker Carlson.

Deep State, aka Fox News, are synonyms.

Prediction: Tucker Carlson might join News Nation. It’s not a bad little outfit, and does decent reporting. This, for lack of better options, as the USA—the embodiment of freedom, we are lectured—has banned most other news sources.

As a writer who put in years of sustained antiwar writing against Genghis Bush and others of the neocon coterie—who burned (and consequently burnt-out) as hot as a Babylonian kiln against invasions backed 100 percent by Fix News and its blond war-porn flank—this mammoth event is a salve. Poetic justice. Fox News is finished, having cemented its bona fides  as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, which it always was, until Tucker.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/war/page/2/
https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/war/

UPDATE: The intuitive and likely reason for the firing by Faux News of Tucker Carlson—their top rating host, and one of the highest-ranked cable news shows in the country—tracks with human nature:

Envy. The regression toward the mean, as we say in statistics. The quest in America for safe mediocrity.

“Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans,” wrote my good friend CLYDE WILSON, professor of history at the University of South Carolina and the foremost scholar of JOHN C. CALHOUN.

In the responses from the mediocre media—and I flatter them—one sees nothing but schadenfreude (“joy derived from the misfortunes of others”).

UPDATE: Megyn Kelly is one of a handful to offer an intelligent analysis of the stupidity of Fix News. All other bobbleheads are pontificating about the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit. Or the sexual harassment libel. That’s not Tucker. Nonsense. Megyn Kelly was once very good. But in courage, intelligence, and anti-establishment instinct–she could not match or come close to Tucker. And she lost her perch to Tucker due to vanity. She opted to take a job with one of the biggest news networks, NBC, only to be dumped. And she came out against Trump for the silly reason of sexism and palled around with the Left, she now maligns.

“This will be good for Tucker.” Indeed. And as I point out: this will hasten the death rattle of the War Porn channel. “Tucker is about to dominate in whatever space he goes to.” “Tucker is a unicorn.” Also by Kelly’s telling, “Tucker is an avid reader and writer,” who doesn’t own a TV. He’s not a snowflake who crumbles at criticism, but the toxicity of his post affected him, says she.

In truth, Kelly back then did not get Trump’s America.
https://www.ilanamercer.com/2015/08/motormouth-megyn-kelly-and-the-mad-matriarchy/https://www.ilanamercer.com/2016/01/megyn-kelly-production/

UPDATE III (5/19): WATCH HARD TRUTH LIVE: Tucker Removed By Fox. Robert Kennedy Jr Against The Deep, Warfare, Woke, Industry-Captured State

COVID-19, Nationalism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Populism, Regulation, THE ELITES, The Establishment, The State, War

Tucker, like Trump, is transformational ~ilana

UPDATE (5/19): The number of views for my latest column’s companion Hard Truth podcast-–recorded 3 weeks back with my honorable, trustworthy podcast partner David Vance—is now 29,000! Truth is timeless, especially when it’s predictive. You see, other popular podcasts have only just caught up with our insights. Namely that Fox News is doomed. Tucker and Trump were transformational. We hope against hope that RFK, Jr. will be too.

UPDATE III (4/29): On the broadcast, which now has now close to 6000 views, I disputed Megyn Kelly’s contention that, just as it happened with her; the perch (Fox News) would always outlive the host (Tucker Carlson).
Well, of course. Ms. Kelly would say so. She has a lot of cognitive dissonance to reconcile there: She is not Tucker Carlson. No sooner had she left Fox News than Tucker stepped into her stilettos—and nobody remembered Ms. Kelly. Tucker, like Trump, is transformational.

UPDATE II (4/25): Substantive and lively. I enjoyed my time with David Vance. We always go deep. 

https://rumble.com/v2kbeyc-tucker-removed-by-fox.-robert-kennedy-jr-against-the-deep-warfare-woke-indu.html

THE HARD TRUTH PODCAST with David Vance and myself will be live on Tuesday, April 25, at 12:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.
https://rumble.com/v2kbeyc-tucker-removed-by-fox.-robert-kennedy-jr-against-the-deep-warfare-woke-indu.html

Please join us on Rumble, and send in your comments and/or questions.

https://rumble.com/c/HardTruthPodcast

The remarkable Robert Kennedy Jr. announced his 2024 presidential campaign. One need not agree with every word Kennedy spoke in a pellucid address almost two hours long, delivered extemporaneously, to grasp that, on the defining issues of our times, most of which Kennedy addressed in depth and detail, Robert F. Kennedy is right and righteous.

DAVID AND ILANA discuss Kennedy’s analysis of corporate feudalism, the murder of the American middle-class and the deep, warfare, woke, industry-captured state.

Many thanks for SUBSCRIBING: https://rumble.com/c/HardTruthPodcast

‘The Magus’ By John Fowles: A Sublime Work of Art

Aesthetics, Art, English, History, Literature, The West, War

It is remarkable how many individuals who cannot write, much less conjugate the verb to “spit” (past tense “spat,” in proper English), have attempted to review John Fowles’s The Magus.

Nick Dybek—Dybbuk, the possessed, is a better name for him—for example. No idea who he is but his grubby English alone disqualifies him from even glancing at this work.

I tried to grapple with The Magus (published in 1965, rev. ed. 1977) when barely into my twenties. I had just left Israel having returned to South Africa, so my command of English was not up to the task. I struggled.

The prosaic mind will not possess the necessary imagination and love of beauty for a book that brilliantly plays with your mind, but takes you through exhilarating labyrinths of art, history, the follies of mysticism and psychiatry, other mid-century fads of Europe and England; a lost natural world where the Greek Islands were pristine not yet swamped with smelly tourists; to metaphysics, political philosophy and the phoniness of dying for the state, for a peddled patriotism, not to mention the best description EVER of the killing fields and suicidal battle technique and posture practiced in World War One:

“…the whole butcher’s shop of war”. And, “I saw only Thanatos.” “A desert of the dead.”

Stunning writing (which only writers who craft sentences could appreciate). 

I feel good for I have used “Thanatos” in my book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot, as the most apt concept to describe the drive of the white man who gives up his birthright. But I can understand the trouble an idiot reviewer would have, for most would be unfamiliar with the term and its provenance.

The Magus achieves the purpose of great literature:

If you can’t put down a work of over 600 pages—a novel has achieved its purpose. Of course, the English is exquisite and the author ever-so old Oxbridge educated. Not pretentious; just truly educated as once provided by a traditional, classical liberal arts education in the English Ivy League.

I think people who are pedantic and reductive in their oppositional inability to assimilate art and beauty will see all kinds of “isms” in this book: ” “leftism,” “postmodernism”. I disagree with such a miserable and immiserating approach to art.

Literature is either good or bad. It either takes you on a scintillating trip or mires you in dour tedium. The postmodernism tag, moreover, seems to be used as a cudgel by those who inhabit the American English department, or are of its mindset, where postmodernism was perfected—the kind of reader who has never read gorgeous English prose, and wishes to appear sophisticated by raping the literature with artificial constructs.

National Review pegged this old work correctly, as thoroughly traditional in its sweeping style.

For heaven’s sake: John Fowles was an English gentleman born in 1926. He described the mid-twentieth-century as “androgynous”! If our author toyed with the idea that the sexes had merged then; imagine his thinking had he lived today.  Nuance, folks, not labels.

I’m only on page 247 and may well regret my enthusiasm. But, for now, I second the august dust-jacket reviewers on my copy, from National Review to the Charlotte Observer, to that of New York Review of Books, whose verdict was:

* “One of the most ambitious novels of the decade….”
* “Brilliant and colossal….Impossible to stop reading.”
* “A marvel. John Fowles is a master of literary magic…”
* “The book is genius throughout and often beautifully written….”
* Mr. Fowles has accomplished an imaginative tour de force, comparable to the more exciting work of Nabokov, brilliant, elegant, inventive, profound without solemnity… It is an extraordinary novel…”
* “…Fowles writes his way beautifully through the demands of text which calls for every kind of descriptive passage.”

These are observations that could not be made today. The last is particularly smart, for the storyline and the breadth of the thing–The Magus–are formidable. The text—this grand superstructure—demands the bone and blood of the author, which it gets.

NEW COLUMN: FBI SUDDENLY Vested In The Intentional Lab Leak Theory Of COVID’s Origins

China, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Russia, The West, War

NEW COLUMN is “Oh, What Wonderful Wars: The West’s Lying Warlords.” It was featured on WND.COM, The Unz Review, and The New American

Read it now on IlanaMercer.com
https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/03/oh-what-wonderful-wars-the-wests-lying-warlords/

Excerpt:

… Skepticism is duly in order—“Laughing Out Loud” emojis, rather—when the FBI, apparatus of an “Empire of Lies,” embraces the intentional-leak theory with respect to COVID’s origins.

As it happens, “FBI Director Christopher Wray,” reports the BBC News, “has said that the bureau believes Covid-19 most likely originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab.” You don’t say. That settles it, now, doesn’t it? Well, no, it doesn’t. Not with the FBI’s lousy track record for veracity, neutrality and reliability.

Coming from the FBI, the intentional-leak theory seems rich—certainly as “intuitive” as Russia blowing up “the Nord Stream pipelines, also some of Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure.” By no coincidence, the FBI is currently running interference in a kinetic war with Russia and in a ramp-up to confrontation with China. (Leaks in biosafety level-4 laboratories have occurred both in the USA and in China.)

So, who gave COVID to the world? The bat-eating, Chinese people thus gifted the world. The plague-delivery pedigree of the Chinese is solid. Courtesy of the Chinese, the West got the H2N2 virus in 1957 and the H3N2 virus in 1968. Granted, the Chinese viral supply chain was broken with H1N1 flu; it came from Mexico. But, with the bird flu, SARS and SARS-Cov-2, the Chinese had fully reestablished their conventional disease-delivery credentials.

As conservatives tell it, the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for COVID, rather than the many millions of Chinese, who capture, torture—boil alive—and consume wild animals in ways that beggar belief. …

… The clincher: If we know anything about the Chinese it is that, unlike the Americans, they do tend to act in the national interest. Covid was, very plainly, not in the national interest. …

… READ THE REST. Oh, What Wonderful Wars: The West’s Lying Warlords” was a feature on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American

Read it here: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/03/oh-what-wonderful-wars-the-wests-lying-warlords/