UPDATED (5/19): NEW COLUMN: RFK, Jr.: Authentic Americanism That Loves Liberty, Loathes Lockdowns, Upbraids Abe

Argument, Constitution, COVID-19, Democrats, Donald Trump, Free Speech, Liberty, Private Property, Republicans

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NEW COLUMN is “RFK, Jr.: Authentic Americanism That loves liberty, Loathes Lockdowns, Upbraids Abe.” It was featured on WND.COM, The Unz Review, where it was one of the main features, and The New American.

READ IT NOW on IlanaMercer.com.

UPDATE (5/20): The number of views for this column’s companion Hard Truth podcast-–recorded 3 weeks back with my honorable, trustworthy podcast partner David Vance—is 32,000! 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. (Chuckle. Hearty). Tucker and Trump were transformational. We hope against hope that RFK, Jr. will be too.

Excerpt:

THE GULF BETWEEN principles and practice, doxa and praxis, is eternal—all the more so when it comes to the politician.

When you think of a GOP candidate, in particular, you think of neither creed nor action, but, rather, of a list of talking points and policy positions to the exclusion of bedrock principles.

“God, groceries and gas” was how one gaseous hack smugly summed up what Americans need, to Sean Hannity of the near-defunct [chuckle] Fox News channel. That, and promises seldom kept.

Aside from a native intelligence, and to distinguish from his rotten party’s political plank—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., conversely, does articulate a creed that respects liberty. Whether he will act on this commendable worldview once in office is unknown.

As it emerged from the RFK, Jr., announcement for president, his worldview departs from that of the progressive Democrat Party’s, which he has decried as “the party of fear, war and censorship… neocons with woke bobble-heads.”

RFK, Jr’s philosophy of liberty, moreover, appears wedded to reality. He doesn’t jabber GOP-style about a return to small government and the passing of a balanced budget amendment.

Such totem Republican “small-government” words are as good as Orwellian News Speak in concealing the truth, as they are dumbly and dangerously unmoored from reality, and thus meaningless, mere reductive talking points.

With an accreting $31.8 trillion in national debt, and some $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities incurred by federal and state governments—the United States of America is beyond such asinine talk. There is no coming back from this kind of government gigantism; from such Federal Reserve and state-driven chicanery, with which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems familiar and to which he speaks knowledgeably.

Your columnist’s task over the decades has been to address reality, not to levitate in the arid arena of pure thought. Kennedy does the same. As does he appear to grasp that the natural law of the Constitution has been buried under piles of statute and administrative-law precedent. He knows this all too well, having spent his working life litigating against the Deep, Regulatory, Administrative, Security, Welfare-Warfare State. …

… THE REST.  “RFK, Jr.: Authentic Americanism That loves liberty, Loathes Lockdowns, Upbraids Abe.” https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/05/rfk-jr-authentic-americanism-loves-liberty-loathes-lockdowns-upbraids-abe/

 

*Image courtesy The Unz Review

Twenty Years Ago: Dissident From Day One

Bush, Democrats, Elections, Iraq, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Republicans, The Establishment, War

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To be branded Dissident from Day one and cancelled is untenable. Destructive. A career killer

LOOKING FOR mention in my own works of the remarkable Dennis Kucinich, I came across “BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE” (July 16, 2003), one of many antiwar columns written at the time.

It still haunts. What passion (as Hillel, Jewish sage and genius, said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”). I believed in the power of pellucid prose and reason to persuade. Instead, I got cancelled from day one.

It’s easy to become a dissident when such a pose is trendy, and is struck once one has enjoyed 20 years of work in the Establishment.  To be branded Dissident from Day One and cancelled is untenable. Destructive. A career killer.

But then I did liken the “bring ’em on” grin on the face of Bush, beloved of most rightists back then, to the grin “on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis.” LOL. Totally worth it. I think.

…Reducing this administration’s single-minded will to war to an erroneous 16 words ignores the big picture. First came the decision to go to war. The misbegotten illegality that was this administration’s case for war followed once the decision to go to war had already been made. The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework; it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.

By all means, dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the “lattice of lies” leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible “meetings” with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized. But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you?

Do what the critical mind must do. The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for ‘the degeneracy of manner and morals’ which James Madison warned war would bring—the same ‘bring ’em on’ grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis. The rational individual saw all this, and understood that when Madison spoke of ‘war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,’ he was speaking of the disposition of this dictator.

AND

…. Members of the media aren’t capable of much more than fragmenting and atomizing information. Integrating facts into a conceptual understanding is certainly not what Howard Fineman, Chris Matthew’s anointed analyst, and the brain trust on MSNBC’s “Hardball” does. To disguise his pedestrian politicking, Fineman discussed who, at what time in the afternoon, as well as when in the estrus cycle of the next-door cow, did an official put the infamous 16 words about nukes and Niger on the president’s desk. That ought to make a nation already bogged down in concrete bits of disconnected data see the forest for the trees, wouldn’t you say? … “BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE” (July 16, 2003)

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

Dennis Kucinich was always there, along for the lost battle ….

THUS, it’s a bad idea for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to tout Mr. Kucinich, his newly nominated campaign manager, as progressive.

Kucinich, like the great Southern senator and gentleman Robert Byrd, RIP (who also greatly opposed Obama’s constitutional usurpations), is noted for voting AGAINST the detestable Democrats and the GOP in opposing the US war machine and the executive dictatorship.

 

UPDATED (5/3): NEW COLUMN: First, They Came For Tucker Carlson; Next Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

COVID-19, Democrats, IMMIGRATION, Military, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda, Republicans, The State, War

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Democrat Party is the part of ‘fear, war and censorship… neocons with woke bobble-heads’  ~Robert F. Kennedy

NEW COLUMN is “First, They Came For Tucker Carlson; Next Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” It is currently featured on The New American, WND.COM, The Unz Review, and Townhall.com

The column can now be read on IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

Fix News is finished, having just fired their only attraction, Tucker Carlson. As a writer who put in years of sustained antiwar writing against Genghis Bush and the neocon coterie—who burned (and consequently burnt-out) as hot as a Babylonian kiln against invasions backed 100 percent by Faux New and its blond war-porn flank—something just short of total extinction seems a fitting fate for Fox. The foolish firing of their top rated host, and one of the highest-ranking cable news shows in the country, is sure to hasten the death rattle of the War Porn channel.

Evil And Envy

Fox News has thus cemented its unimpeachable credentials as lickspittle of the Republican Party, which it always was until Tucker. Just so there’s no confusion: the Party is exulting in Tucker’s ousting.

The intuitive and likely most base reason for the ouster of Tucker tracks with human nature: evil and envy strive for mediocrity.

The instinct of man is evil from his youth ~Genesis 8:21

Or, in the language of statistics, it’s the regression toward the mean; the quest in America for mediocrity:

“Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans,” observed my friend Clyde Wilson, professor of history at the University of South Carolina and the foremost scholar of John C. Calhoun.

So, too, do the responses from the mediocre media—and I flatter them—where one sees nothing but schadenfreude (“joy derived from the misfortunes of others”), track with the theory of evil and envy.

Fox News is an echo of the Republican Party, which serves the deep, warfare, industry-captured state.

Robert F. Kennedy, on the other hand, is “a choice, not an echo.”

One need not agree with every word Kennedy spoke in a pellucid address announcing for president, almost two hours long, delivered extemporaneously, to grasp that, on the defining issues of our time, almost all of which Kennedy addressed in depth and in detail, Robert F. Kennedy is right and righteous.

Of the welter of words spoken so very beautifully—for a man with a disorder of the vocal cords—Kennedy, Jr underplayed perhaps two issues and failed to mention but one crucial matter, while delivering a riveting information-dense address, at once deep and philosophical, yet wise and pragmatic, undergirded by historic and constitutional truth. Tactical to boot.

Against The Deep, Warfare, Woke, Industry-Captured State

The overarching impetus of  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s announcement is this:

Americans live and labor under an illiberal, unconstitutional, oppressive administrative state. Our representatives are meant to make law. How, then, has this vast bureaucracy, captured by globe-straddling industries, acquired tyrannical law-making powers! Most certainly not constitutionally.

Candidate Kennedy astutely connects the corrupt merger of state and corporate power with the events, stateside and abroad; past and present, unfolding around us—from the collapse of the dollar, the murder of the middle-class via Covid crackdowns and lockdowns (courtesy of the pharma-state), to inflation (Federal Reserve Bank), to the sundering of individual and constitutional rights, to war forevermore (in service of the military-industrial-complex against which Dwight Eisenhower and John Quincy forewarned). …

…THE REST. “First, They Came For Tucker Carlson; Next Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” It is currently featured on The New American, WND.COM, The Unz Review and Townhall.com

* Image as screen picture courtesy Kenny Powers @MattRyan0070

UPDATED (5/3):  From my April 27, 2023 column, “First, They Came For Tucker Carlson; Next Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.“:

“Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will need to address the border, as that by-now meaningless phrase goes. He has not. If he cares about the poor of his country, he must convince them that he is not part of the Ted Kennedy Fifth Column, which, in 1965, wrote the multicultural legislation that altered America forever. Kennedy Jr. will need to plug the border down South and, ideally, expel Biden’s legions of foreign invaders. If you are championing the middle-class and the working poor you cannot swamp their country with an unending supply of labor”

RFK, Jr., did so today, May 3:

While this isn’t nearly enough—RFK, Jr’s promise on immigration is no less than the Republicans have ever offered, and failed to deliver while in control of the presidency, both chambers and the gubernatorial landscape.

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

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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/