Interview: Ilana Mercer, Part 1: Roots, Writing, & Resistance

Canada, Conservatism, Critique, Ethics, Etiquette, Family, Ilana Mercer, Journalism, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism

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Interview: Ilana Mercer, part 1: Roots, writing, & resistance, By Dissident Mama on Friday, September 25, 2020.

I gave an interview to an up-and-coming young star, Dissident Mama, aka Rebecca Dillingham. She writes:

“It’s been a long time in the making, but here it is: the first installment of my two-part interview with the always provocative and poignant Ilana Mercer. Part 2 should be published on Monday. Keep your eyes wide open for that – it promises to be explosive!”

The tagline at Ilana Mercer’s website is “Verbal swordplay for civilization.” Ain’t that the truth. The self-described paleolibertarian has been wielding words and fighting the good fight since well before I even thought about fleeing the clutches of feminism-atheism-socialism. She’s both provocative and poignant – a difficult thing to pull off anytime, much less in our postmodern dystopia.

I remember first stumbling upon Mercer at World Net Daily back in my neocon “daze” in the early 2000s. I recall being moved by not only her tenacity, but her cerebral style. Being such a prolific essayist, I then found her articles during my libertarian/ancap phase. And again, her writing spoke to me. Now, I’m what you’d call a paleoconservative/Southern traditionalist, and yet, there she is again: writing articles that say things we all want to say but don’t know how, or planting seeds for new thinking.

Now, I don’t always agree with Mercer. I’d say she speaks my language on most matters, but that’s really not what draws me to her work. When you read Mercer, you know that she’s coming to her conclusions through principled inquiry, deep research, a passion for justice, and an impatience with the insanity. In other words, she’s rational but on fire!

And Mercer can see through so many of the charades. Perhaps this is due to her years of experience or because, as Jack Kerwick says, “Ilana is in much greater supply of that ‘manly virtue’ than are most male writers today.”

As Southern stalwart Dr. Clyde Wilson explains of Mercer, “This is one libertarian who knows that the market is wonderful, but it is not everything.” Intellectual honesty like that is hard to come by these days, and that’s why Mercer’s writing is so damn good: it’s fearless and succinct. Bold and challenging. Accessible and engrossing.

Moreover, anyone who’s forever banned from Facebook, pegged as a hater by the SPLC, and given accolades by everyone from Peter Brimelow and Vox Day, to Tom Woods and Paul Gottfried, well, they’re pretty cool in my book. Plus, Mercer has become what I would call a mentor and a friend. So, for those of you who don’t already know her, please meet the never-to-be-duplicated Ilana Mercer. And folks who are already familiar with her and her independent streak, get ready to have your socks knocked off.

MORE… Ilana Mercer, part 1: Roots, writing, & resistance, By Dissident Mama on Friday, September 25, 2020.

 

 

UPDATE (9/29): Amy Coney Barrett And Life On Earth

Abortion, Conservatism, Constitution, Justice, Law, The Courts

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“The restoration of law and order and the reverence for private property rights are the most powerful principles with which to unite main-street America, left and right, in the ramp-up to the November election.” (“Law and Order Unites Main Street America.“)

“This is what Republicans must remember, before they scamper down the judicial rabbit hole of abortion.” The kind of “reasoning” that could unseat Trump is if the credentialed conservative elites press the abortion issue. That would be political suicide.

And it may be upon us with the nomination of “Amy Coney Barrett, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals of the 7th Circuit, as President Trump’s nomination to the seat vacated by the death of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” (Fox News)

Via Revolver News (which has replaced Drudge):

According to this think piece in Revolver:

Amy Coney Barrett may appear to promise the shock we all know the system deserves, but her nomination risks reframing the precarious Trump reelection effort from a winning battle over law and order, immigration, and left-wing political violence to a messy and poorly timed slog through well-worn battles that would be better and more effectively fought after Trump wins re-election.

It’s too late, but READ “The Case for Judge Bridget Bade.”

UPDATED (9/29):

UPDATED (9/23): Americans Importing Black Babies

Celebrity, Critique, Culture, Ethics, Family, Race, Relatives

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Mitt Romney’s son did it. So did Madonna. Angelina Jolie pioneered the social art of color-coding her family, even disclosing her intention to acquire a designer, United Colors of Benetton family. About her quest for color-coordinated couture kids she said this to Anderson Cooper:

We don’t know which—which country. But we’re looking at different countries. And we’re—I’m just—it’s gonna be the balance of what would be the best for Mad[dox] and for Z. right now. It’s, you know, another boy, another girl, which country, which race would fit best with the kids.

Clearly, some of the most sanctimonious, white, virtue-preeners around us go abroad in search of black kids to adopt. It’s almost as though these people seek an amulet with which to elevate and immunize themselves against any fault-finding. Look at me: I’m perfect.

There is so much poverty in the US, in general. There is so much child poverty in the US, in particular. There is so much poverty among white American children. On the facts, adopting across racial lines often proves to be fraught for both adopted and adopting parties. A minefield of sorts.

Amy Coney Barrett, a much-touted candidate for the Supreme Court, has a child or two from Haiti. Is one ever permitted to question public figures who sidestep their country’s poor, and go in search of kids with more exotic identities? Can we even ask?

UPDATE (9/23): Our reader below instructs that we dare not pose questions about a cohort that is distinguished by its phoniness. No can’t do.

I doubt very much that Madonna is able to love anyone but herself. Check out the demeaning way in which she displays the poor kid. The black child looks like a gangster, not like a girl, tongue hanging out, gesturing, while Madonna decks herself up to look feminine. Unkind. Horrid.

 

Justice Ginsburg Preferred South Africa’s Constitution To The US Constitution

Constitution, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Justice, Law, Political Philosophy, South-Africa

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Justice Ginsburg Preferred South Africa’s Constitution To The US Constitution
By Ilana Mercer, February 17, 2012:

I would not look to the US constitution,” said US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an interview with Al-Hayat TV. “If I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012, I might look at the constitution of South Africa, Canada … and the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Al-Hayat’s correspondent had solicited Ginsburg’s advice on drafting the Egyptian constitution.

Go easy on Ginsburg. She shares a disdain for America’s founding document with millions, maybe even a majority, of her countrymen. The US Constitution is flouted daily by the people’s representatives, and has been amended and reinterpreted to the point of no return.

The governing documents that excite Bader Ginsburg’s admiration are documents of positive rights. The American Constitution is by-and-large a charter of negative liberties, as President Obama once described it derisively.

A positive right is state-manufactured, usually at the behest of political majorities. Rights to a job, water, clothes, food, education and medical care are examples. Some of the European covenants canvassed by Bader consider “freely chosen” desirable work as a human right. Ditto adequate “rest and leisure.” Once these needs are recognized as rights, they become state-enforceable, legal claims against other, less-valued members of society (“the rich”). Someone who hasn’t had a vacation, or has not reached his career apogee, gets to collect on such claims.

In the case of natural rights—the only founding truths the nation’s fathers could have conceived of, given their classical liberal philosophical framework—the duty is merely a mitts-off duty. My right to life means you must not murder me. My right to liberty means you dare not enslave me. My right to property means you can’t take what’s mine—not 35 percent of it, or 15 percent. Nada. And you have no right to stop me from taking the necessary acquisitive action for my survival, so long as I, in turn, respect the same restrictions.

As an instantiation of a constitutional democracy governed in accordance with state-minted rights, take the new South Africa, where almost everyone knows someone who has been raped, robbed, hijacked, murdered, or all of the above, in violation of natural law.

Not that you’d know it, but the poor South Africans enjoy a constitutional right to live free of all forms of violence, “public” or “private” in origin. Section 12 of their progressive constitution guarantees the “Freedom and Security of the Person.” Clearly “progressive” doesn’t necessarily spell progress, as nowhere does this wordy but worthless document state whether South Africans may actually defend this most precious of rights. If anything, self-defense can be an offense in progressive South Africa. The law dictates that in the course of adjudicating cases of “private defense,” the right to life (the aggressor’s) and the right to property (the non-aggressor’s—whose life, by this “logic,” is not at stake) be properly balanced.

“Before you can act in self-defense,” remonstrates a representative of the indispensable South African Institute for Security Studies, “the attack against you should have commenced, or at least be imminent. For example, if the thief pulls out a firearm and aims in your direction, [only] then you would be justified in using lethal force to protect your life.”

Implicit in the right to life is the right to self-defense. A right that can’t be defended is a right in name only. Alas, in constitutional South Africa, natural rights are merely nominal.

The same document allows a good deal of mischief for the ostensible greater good. It even has a clause devoted to “Limitation of Rights.” Since some citizens are more equal than others under the law of this tormented land, redistributive “justice” in South Africa is a constitutional article of faith. It sanctions the expropriation of land from one citizen in order to give to another, in the name of “social justice.”

Knowing what you now know about the South African Constitution—what is it do you suppose Bader-Ginsburg dislikes about one of the greatest documents of political philosophy?

From all accounts, it is that the US Constitution is principally a charter of negative liberties. Arrived at through reason (or revelation), natural (or negative) liberties are the only authentic rights to which man can lay claim. LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY: These are the sole rights of man. Congress doesn’t grant them; they exist irrespective of it.

One’s life, liberty and the products of one’s labor were not meant to be up for grabs by greedy majorities. Rights always give rise to binding obligations. There are no free contraceptives, Mr. Obama. If a woman has the right to contraceptives, someone has to work to supply her with this “right.” If one is constitutionally entitled to an education, somewhere, some poor sod will be roped into funding this manufactured entitlement.

More fundamentally, if in exercising a “right” one transgresses against another’s life, liberty and property—then the exercised right is no right, but a violation thereof. Because my right to acquire property doesn’t diminish your right to do the same, the right of private property constitutes a negative right. Negative rights are real (or natural) liberties, as they don’t conscript or enslave me in the fulfillment of your needs and desires, and vice versa.

Unless undertaken voluntarily, state-manufactured rights violate the individual’s real rights. Positive liberties—as trumpeted by Bader, Obama, and practically the whole DC Sodom and Gomorrah—are rejected outright in the natural law, followed by the Founders.

Now, the occupants of the Bench who compiled the South African, Canadian and European documents would argue that making some—”the rich” in the West, whites in a black-dominated democracy—supply others with work, water, clothes, contraceptives, food, education and medical care will increase overall liberty in society.

THAT WON’T WASH. Liberty is not an aggregate social project. Every individual has rights. And rights give rise to obligations between all decent men, including those in power. That men band in a collective called “government” doesn’t give them license to violate individual rights.

Rights, as our Founding Fathers conceived of them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms to act in the procurement of these goods. From the fact that most Americans, Egyptians or Russians want others to fund or subsidize their lives, it does not follow that they have such a right.

The Constitution Ginsburg, Obama and the DC Sodom and Gomorrah trash each and every day was designed to minimize political overreach, not mandate heaven on earth.

Justice Ginsburg Preferred South Africa’s Constitution To The US Constitution
©2012 ILANA MERCER
WND & RT
February 17