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Into the Cannibal’s Pot:
Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa Source
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Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from post-Apartheid South Africa is a polemical work anchored in history, reality, fact, and the political philosophy of classical liberalism. It is a manifesto against mass society, arguing against raw, ripe, democracy, here (in the US), there (in South Africa), and everywhere. Into the Cannibal’s Pot follows Russell Kirk’s contention that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order. It is a reminder that, however imperfect, civilized societies are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes. The tyranny of political correctness, so unique to the West plays a role in their near-collapse. Advanced societies don’t just die; they either wither from within, or, like South Africa, are finished off by other western societies. Ilana Mercer delivers a compelling book; it is required reading for thinking people who care about the destiny of western civilization.
Dedicated to my Afrikaner brothers betrayed, and to my African sisters, Nomasomi Khala and Annie Dlahmini, whose lives touched mine.
To the publisher of this volume to whom added appreciation is due.
To Thomas Szasz, Thomas DiLorenzo and Erik Rush—firm friends all.
To my proof-reader and copy-editor R. J.Stove: The manuscript was polished for publication by the epistolary Wizard of Oz.
To James Ostrowski and Nebojsa Malic for useful comments.
To researcher Rhona Karbusicky, who provided unstinting assistance.
To a nineteen-year-old homeschooled, consummate professional named Aaron Sleadd.
To my dear daughter, who helped me through a punishing publication process.
To my sweet mother, Ann-Wendy Cumes, and my beloved father, Rabbi Abraham Benzion Isaacson, for their backing.
And to my husband, Sean Russell Mercer, who kept me going.
~ Ilana Mercer
This is a book about ideas and ideology. When losing an intellectual argument, there are despicable people who point an accusing finger and shout racism. In our dark times where mob rule and collectivist ideas resonate with so many, this appalling strategy can be very effective.
To those who support colorblind civil discourse, rule of law, equality of opportunity, freedom, the golden rule (do unto others as you wish them to do unto you), liberty, freedom of expression and religion and private property rights…regardless of skin color or ethnic background (black, red, white, yellow, brown, green or violet), we extend the hand of friendship.
To those who support all forms of thuggery—including totalitarianism, collectivism, fascism, extremist fundamentalism, unequal treatment under law, income redistribution, nanny state government programs and the soft bigotry of low expectations—your skin color and ethnicity are irrelevant…and your ideas belong in the dustbin of history.
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When South Africa was governed by a racist white minority, it was scorned by the West and treated as Saddam Hussein was, with boycotts and sanctions. Now that a racist, black-majority government controls the country; that it is as violent as Iraq, Liberia, or the Congo and rapidly becoming another Islamist-friendly, failed African state, it is the toast of the West.
Indeed, world leaders and the liberal lickspittle media seldom speak of the embarrassment that is the democratic South Africa—the crumbling infrastructure of this once First World country, and the out-of-control crime—down to an ongoing mini-genocide. Rocker Bono certainly isn’t moved to tears over the seemingly systematic extermination of the Afrikaner farmers of South Africa. The cultural cognoscenti in the US are equally silent about the New South Africa’s unparalleled, radical, race-based wealth-distribution policies.
As Into The Cannibal’s Pot demonstrates, South Africa’s democratically elected African leaders are as committed as their political predecessors, apartheid-era Afrikaners, to restructuring society around race. With one distinction: more people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.[*] Consequently, the much-maligned Western stronghold established in South Africa under Boer—and before that British—rule is rapidly reverting to type. Gone is the European strongman who suppressed the seething African kraal. What has arisen instead is best captured by Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz: “The horror, the horror.” Dubbed the “Rainbow Nation,” for its multiculturalism, South Africa is now, more than before, a “Rambo Nation.”
Americans, who take for granted their domestic tranquility, can’t afford to finesse the fate of the dying Christian civilization at the tip of Africa. Into The Cannibal’s Pot compels them to stare into “The Heart of Darkness” that is the New South Africa, and by so doing, offers a cautionary tale: in their unqualified paeans to the will of the majority everywhere, Americans must understand that traditionally Western legal institutions, however flawed, are preferable to institutions riven by tribal feuds, fetishes, and factional loyalties.
[*] See Chapter 1, Crime, the Beloved Country
Universal suffrage is not to be conflated with freedom.
As the democratic South Africa (and Iraq) amply demonstrates, political rights don’t secure the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness; ink-stained fingers don’t inoculate against blood stains. Extant societal structures that safeguard life and property can always be improved upon. But once these bulwarks against mob rule and mayhem disintegrate, they are seldom restored. A civilized society, ultimately, is one in which the individual can go about the business of life unmolested. If he can’t do that simple thing, of what value is the vote?
Post-apartheid South Africa serves as a reminder that such societies, however imperfect, are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes; the new South Africa reminds us that, for better or for worse, societies are built slowly from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by people, not by political decree. Sadly, the facts as this writer tells them indicate that, while the Old South Africa could only have improved; the New South Africa can but decline.
So why is this book so very crucial at this juncture? Simply this: Although grisly horror stories have percolated into the popular press, the emetic facts about the New South Africa have never before been told. They must be! Into the Cannibal’s Pot fills this knowledge gap. This book, moreover, is crucial in curbing the naïve enthusiasm among American elites, and those they’ve gulled, for radical, imposed, top-down transformations of relatively stable, if imperfect, societies, including their own. As the example of South Africa demonstrates, a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease. In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure.
In the U.S., a slower, more incremental transformation is under way. It began with a state-orchestrated, historically unparalleled, mass importation of inassimilable ethnic groups into a country whose creed is that it has no creed any longer. American institutions no longer assimilate immigrants.
Rather, they acculturate them to militant identity politics aimed at doing away with merit. Dissolving the American people and electing another, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, will likely erode American institutions further, and may well replicate on American soil the terrifying conflicts that mar the Third World. Ever the source of deafening demagoguery about the virtues of democracy, American leaders might wish to consider that, “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule.”1
Still, American leaders refused to rest until South Africa became a democracy. And before that Zimbabwe. And after that Iraq. (They were not alone. I trace that chain of culpability in Chapter Seven, “The Anglo-American-Australian Axis of Evil.”) The consequences in each case have been catastrophic. While all people want safety and sustenance for themselves, not everyone is prepared to allow those whom they dislike to peacefully pursue the same. This maxim applies both to Mesopotamia and to Azania (the term once used for South Africa by the governing African National Congress). The time is historically ripe to challenge some of the central tenets of liberal democratic ideology through the prism of another democratic disaster: post-Apartheid South Africa.
If the sanctity of life is the highest value in a civilized society, then the New South Africa has little to recommend it. Societies are only as good as the individuals of whom they are comprised; individuals only as good as their actions. Democratic South Africa is now preponderantly overrun by elements, both within and without government, which make a safe and thriving civil society impossible to sustain. The salient feature of mass politics in the New South Africa is a government unable to control itself and unwilling to control a sinecured criminal class. As a consequence, sundered is the individual’s right to live unmolested.
Our unhappy trek through the wreck of the New South Africa begins with the facts, nothing but the facts. The realities of crime-riddled democratic South Africa are relayed in Chapter One: “Crime, the Beloved Country.” The title parodies Alan Paton’s poignant tale titled Cry, the Beloved Country. The story of the life of Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo was to apartheid South Africa what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to antebellum America.
1 Donald L. Horowitz, A Democratic South Africa?: Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (Berkeley: California,1991), p. 99.
Victims of crime in South Africa garner some sympathy, but it is sympathy on a sliding scale. Thus, worldwide, the press extended liberal pieties to liberal Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer. She had survived an attack in her Johannesburg home. The Prince of Wales bewailed the murder of another prominent liberal, Anglo-Zulu War historian David Rattray. He was killed by six armed Zulus. When the nephew of South Africa’s finest novelist (no; it’s not J. M. Coetzee), the liberal André Brink, was shot and killed in front of his wife and daughter, The Economist took note:
‘First he thought it was a mouse, then a rat—and then the rat shot him in the face.’ That is how André Brink, one of South Africa’s most famous novelists, described the recent killing of his nephew Adri, at home at 3am in the morning.2
Former First Lady Marike de Klerk, brutally stabbed in her Cape Town apartment, received a fair amount of international attention too. Not so the Afrikaner farmers who are being culled like springbok in a hunting safari. This brings us to the mini-genocide underway in the democratic South Africa, chronicled in Chapter Two, “The Kulaks of South Africa Vs. The Xhosa Nostra.”
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) is largely composed of the Xhosa Bantu tribe. The Xhosa are also well-represented among the Africans armed with automatic weapons, who roam the countryside killing Afrikaner farmers. These rural folk—who, by law, must battle their ubiquitous assailants with only a shotgun, a handgun and a legally limited number of rounds at their disposal3—are convinced that the assaults are state-sanctioned, the ANC’s idea of an early eviction notice; “land reform,” if you will. The evidence suggests that they may have a point, hence the title pitting the “Kulaks” against the “Xhosa Nostra.”
But before we recount how upward of 3,000 members of this once 40,000-strong community—almost ten percent—have hitherto been exterminated, we explain who the Boers are and provide a brief, action-packed, history of Boer, Briton and Bantu. Americans will want to hear this! Decades of emasculation—legal and cultural—have created a hunger among American men, especially, for heroic, historic narrative. The story of the South African settlers, circa 1652, is every bit as epic as that of the American settlers. Despite their comparable foibles and frailties, the last haven’t been blackened by historians as much as the first.
It is commonly argued, in defiance of emerging facts to the contrary,4 that crime is an equal opportunity offender in South Africa: whites, blacks and browns are all in it together. What is incontrovertible, however, is that, where economic opportunities are concerned, the minority that dare not speak its name is on the wane. White males, strictly speaking, are not supposed to comprise more than ten percent of the payroll in a South African company. As during apartheid, a class of people is being dispossessed because of their pallor.
Chapter Three, “Dispossession is Nine-Tenths of the Law,”explores this legal attack on property known as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). BEE is yet another unique feature of the South African democracy, whereby racist labor laws have made for what Robert Guest, Africa editor of The Economist, has charitably termed “The world’s most extreme affirmative action program.”5 The upshot of such a coercive transfer of private wealth from those who create it to those who consume it is that societal institutions—state and civil—are being hollowed out like husks. South Africa’s gutted institutions serve as a harbinger of things to come in the U.S., where affirmative action is still dismissed as a “minor irritant,”6 but ought not to be.
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2. “Between staying and going,” The Economist, September 25, 2008.
3. Ilana Mercer, “Self-defense: A universal right,” WorldNetDaily.com, June 25, 2004,
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39139 (accessed October 20, 2009).
4. Carvin Goldstone, “Who do criminals target in SA?”, IOL, August 4, 2007.
5. Robert Guest, “The World’s Most Extreme Affirmative Action Program,” Opinion Journal, December 26, 2004.
6. Ibid.
South Africa is a microcosm of what America could become, unless it returns to the principles that made it great. If American institutions continue to subordinate their raison d’être to politically dictated egalitarianism, reclaiming them from the deforming clutches of affirmative action will become harder and harder. Sadly, it is probably already too late for South Africa, where the majority opposes a meritocracy. Americans, however, must once again embrace merit and individualism. Be it in the U.S. or in South Africa, preferential treatment, enforced by legal fiat and rooted in the characteristics of a group (race) rather than the value of the individual, flouts justice in every respect.
The West has grown accustomed to Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s refined former president. Having spent most of his adult life abroad in exile, Mbeki has the mannerisms of an English gent, not a man of the people. But the baton has been passed from the pukka proper Mbeki to the populist polygamist Jacob Zuma, whose favorite jingle is called “Bring Me My Machine Gun.” (It only has two lines; the second beseeches, rather politely, “Please bring me my machine gun.”7) In a country in which crimes are seldom prosecuted, the newly-installed President Zuma has the dubious distinction of having stood trial on 783 charges of corruption, racketeering, tax evasion, and rape.8
Against Mbeki’s reserved style, there is Zuma’s unbuttoned conduct, dancing half naked in tribal dress. In one of his Noble-Savage moments, after forcing sex on an HIV-positive acquaintance, Zuma promised, disarmingly, that he took a shower as a prophylactic against AIDS. It has been suggested that Zuma has done for South Africa’s international image what Borat Sagdiyev has done for Kazakhstan.9 With one distinction: Borat is a fictitious character, the product of Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedic genius; Zuma is “for real.”
Since Zuma’s ascension, wealth transfer in South Africa is expected to accelerate considerably and to resemble ever more closely the unabashed confiscation and dispossession brought about by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. “Mandela, Mbeki, And Mugabe Sitting In A Baobab Tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” or Chapter Four, analyzes the significance of the unqualified support Zuma’s predecessors, Mandela and Mbeki, have lent the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe over the decades. “If you want to see the future of South Africa, it might not be a bad idea to look at the present in Zimbabwe.”10
The Old South Africa had been governed by Puritans. But as Christianity receded in influence after the 1994 transition, the void left has been filled by Islam. The unintended consequences of bringing the Old South Africa to its political knees, to the detriment of American interests, are covered in Chapter Six, “Why Do WASP Societies Wither?”
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7. Peter Hitchens, “He has four wives and he faced 783 counts of corruption,” Daily Mail, March 31, 2009.
8. “Zuma: South Africa’s comeback kid,” BBC News, December 28, 2007.
9. “Wounded Nation,” The Herald [Glasgow], February 9, 2008.
10. Andrew Kenny, “The Future Looks Black,” The Spectator, April 9, 2005.
America, a humane society, ought to take pity on the persecuted descendants of another Protestant patriarchy. However,even if American immigration policy welcomed white South Africans, which it doesn’t, Afrikaners would find it hard to leave. The Boers (and British) built the place. Like Heidi away from the Alps, Afrikaners tend to wilt when separated from their homeland. Not for nothing have the Afrikaners been dubbed “The White Tribe of Africa.”11 They are as African as black South Africans. What is to be done, then, in light of the fact that Afrikaner farmers, in particular, are being killed off at alarmingly high rates? While it remains for the secessionists to “give territorial content”12 to their aspirations, secession is one of the escape routes suggested in the conclusion, “Saving South Africans S.O.S.”
Into the Cannibal’s Pot is topped and tailed with hard evidence that allows conclusions vis-à-vis the aggregate characteristics of South African society. Although not necessarily politically correct, such conclusions are perfectly proper. With this in mind, a word about the titular tease. Cannibalism, attests Leonard Thompson, author of The Oxford History of South Africa, was widespread during the upheaval associated with rise of the Zulu Kingdom in the 1820s.13 These days, in northeastern Congo, two prominent militias, the Lendu and the Hema, delight in demonstrating to UN observers their culinary creativity with human hearts and livers.14 While cannibalism—motivated by aggression, ancestral reverence, or survival—has seldom been an athema in Africa, Into the Cannibal’s Pot is meant as a metaphor, and is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery:
In America, religion is relatively nonmystical. Religious teachers here are predominantly good, healthy materialists. They follow common sense. … The majority of religious people in this country do not accept on faith the idea of jumping into a cannibal’s pot and giving away their last shirt to the backward people of the world. Many religious leaders preach this today, because of their own leftist politics; it’s not inherent in being religious.15 [Emphasis added]
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11. David Harrison, The White Tribe of Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981).
12. Hermann Giliomee, “Liberal and Populist Democracy in South Africa: Challenges, New Threats to Liberalism,” p. 18, Presidential Address, Delivered in Johannesburg on February 15, 1996. p. 30.
13. W. A. de Klerk, The Puritans in Africa (London, 1975), p. 35.
14. Tim Taylor, “Unpalatable but true: cannibalism was routine,” Daily Telegraph [London], October 20, 2003.
15. Robert Mayhew (ed.), Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A (New York, 2005).
Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, a Cameroonian thinker, and a former adviser to the World Bank, contends that “What Africans are doing to one another defies credulity. Genocide, bloody civil wars, and rampant violent crime suggest African societies at all social levels are to some extent cannibalistic.”16 Why? In part, because of the inveterate values held by so many Africans. These, and other causes—and excuses—are examined in Chapter Five, “The Root-Causes Racket.”
Based on the evidence presented in this book, both Ms. Rand and Mr. Etounga-Manguella would have agreed that South Africans had been tossed into the metaphorical cannibal’s pot. Washington and Westminster insisted that the country pass into the hands of a voracious majority. Unwise South African leaders acquiesced. Federalism was discounted. Minority rights for the Afrikaner, Anglo and Zulu were dismissed. Ironically, America’s founding fathers had attempted to forestall raw democracy by devising a republic. Yet under the wing of the American eagle a dispensation was negotiated in this writer’s former homeland, the consequence of which is the raw, ripe rule of the mob and its dominant, anointed party.
Since Into the Cannibal’s Pot stands for peaceful, progressive, and sustainable change, it will resonate with those who saw the folly of imposing majority rule on Iraq. Democratizing Mesopotamia has resulted in horrifying material destruction and lasting moral damage. Democratizing Azania has, similarly, made it abundantly clear that the franchise is not to be equated with freedom and that political rights do not safeguards natural rights. The cause and the consequence of the almost over-night, top-down transformation of South Africa is a society where might makes right.
In the interstices of this polemic, the reader will find my story and the story of those I love and had to leave behind. Above all, this tome is a labor of love to my homelands, old and new.
16 Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York, 2000), p. 74.
Dedication … ii
Publisher’s Note … iii
Abbreviations Used … iv
Preface … v
Introduction: Rambo Nation … vii
1. Crime, the Beloved Country … 1
“Jackrolling” … 2
Adapt and Die … 3
“Apartheid Nostalgia” … 4
Crime Desegregated … 5
Suffer the Little Children … 6
Your Home: the ANC’s Castle … 7
Who’s Killing Whom … 8
Sexual Subjugation … 9
Only Filling Their Crime Quota … 10
White Hot Hatred … 11
An Existential Crisis … 12
2. The Kulaks of South Africa vs. the Xhosa Nostra … 13
The Lord Saved Her … 14
“Kill the Fucking Whites” On Facebook … 15
The White Tribe of Africa … 16
“I am an Afrikaner!” … 17
“Methods of Barbarism” … 18
Going For Gold … 19
From Muldergate to Mandela … 20
Apartheid in Black and White … 21
A Strategy for Survival … 22
Up Close and Personal … 23
Land, Language and Landmarks Lost … 24
Eminent Domain or Domination? … 25
The Law of the Land ‘Indigenized’ … 26
Killing God’s Creatures … 27
Tot Siens (Farewell) To The Taal (The Language) … 28
Intra-Racial Reparations? … 29
Recompense or Reconquista? … 30
3. Dispossession Is Nine-Tenths of the Law … 31
Black Diamonds … 32
Cops Call Robbers … To Chat … 33
Reverse Apartheid … 34
Affirmative Action À La America … 35
What Would Martin Luther King Jr. Say? … 36
Thou Shalt Not Discern … 37
The UCLA Race Racket … 38
To Hell with Honky … 39
Civil Wrongs … 40
Toward a Merit-Based Society … 41
4. Mandela, Mbeki, and Mugabe Sitting In A Baobab Tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G … 42
One Man, One Vote, One Time … 43
The Che Guevara of Africa … 44
Rebranding Socialism … 45
Saluting the Alpha Male … 46
5. The Root-Causes Racket … 47
The Colonialism Canard … 48
Africa BC/AC (Before and After Colonialism) … 49
From Bauer to Belich … 50
Slavery: The White Man’s Cross … 51
Aiding and Abetting Underdevelopment … 52
Culture Counts … 53
Voodoo for Values … 54
How the Settlers Saved South Africa … 55
Desperately Seeking Bollywood’s Brangelina … 56
Free Will and the Will of the Free … 57
6. Why Do WASP Societies Wither? … 58
A Fighting Faith … 59
Cross and Crescent Collide on the Dark Continent … 60
The Hebraic Bond … 61
A House at Peace with Islam … 62
PAGAD: A Populist Reign of Terror … 63
COSATU: Carrying the Torch for “Durban I” … 64
The “Running of the Jew” at Durban I & II … 65
The Pathos and Paradox of the Puritan … 66
Reconciling Pietism with Power … 67
Protestant Death Wish vs. Jewish Defiance … 68
Africa Cries Out for Christianity … 69
7. The Anglo-American-Australian Axis of Evil … 70
Betrayed … 71
Sidelined … 72
Less-Than-Sexy Statistics … 73
Racial Voting Coming to a Polling Station Near You … 74
“Democracy: The God That Failed” … 75
Property Rights vs. Political Rights … 76
Democracy and Prosperity … 77
The Franchise: A Foolish Fetish on a Good Day … 78
Acorn with Machetes … 79
The Notional Afro-Saxon Nation … 80
8. Conclusion: Saving South Africans S.O.S. … 81
From Fellini-Style Consumption to Puritan-Worthy Production … 82
Emigration … 83
Secession … 84
The Most Precious Thing on Earth … 85
Ilana Mercer has been lauded by iconic author and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz as “dangerous … intelligent, informed, independent, courageous.” Historian, and New York Times bestseller-list author, Thomas Woods has called her “one of the few writers on earth whose talents I truly envy, adding that, in his opinion, “She should be a household name.” Joseph Farah (CEO of WND.com) has described her as “standing out like a beacon in a vast sea of punditry. She’s always hard to pigeonhole. She’s always witty and incisive.” Paul Gottfried (historian and author of such books as Conservatism in America) wrote: “Ilana takes on indelicate cultural, social, and political issues and challenges her opponents to rethink their positions.” The outspoken libertarian broadcaster Ron Smith of Maryland’s WBAL Radio has called her “a refreshingly original writer on the issues of our time.”
As the only writer to have defended NFL quarterback Michael Vick on the basis of libertarian (propertarian) principles—or so said Fox News TV commentator Sean Hannity—she was invited, in 2007, to debate the matter with Mr. Hannity, after which he commented:
Having read your columns throughout the years, I think I know you a little bit—I know you come from a very intellectual point of view, an intellectually honest point of view—you have given the most articulate argument I’ve heard on the other side of this [animal rights issue], one that is consistent with many of the views you have.
Ms. Mercer was born in South Africa—her father, Rabbi Abraham Benzion Isaacson, was a leading anti-apartheid activist eventually forced to leave the country—and spent her formative years in Israel. In the 1980s she returned to South Africa, where she married, had a daughter, and after completing her degrees, including a double major in psychology and Hebrew, worked as an AIDS counselor. In 1995, she and her family immigrated to British Columbia, Canada, before moving with her husband to America’s Pacific Northwest, which she calls home. Ms. Mercer left South Africa with the proceeds from the sale of her apartment stashed in the soles of her shoes. Had she been apprehended smuggling her property out of that country, she’d have been jailed together with her husband; they both stood taller on that trip. Ms. Mercer, who happens to know what living without freedom is like, has seen first hand the same oppression sneak-up on unsuspecting Americans. (For instance, the South-African model of detention-without-trial is slowly becoming a fixture of the American legal landscape.)
Her book Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash with a Corrupt Culture (2003) was hailed by the late Aaron Russo (former libertarian presidential candidate) as the work of “a true warrior—a modern-day Joan of Arc—in the fight for freedom.” A Fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, and the Jeffersonian think-tank Free New York, Inc., she has appeared as a guest on scores of broadcast talk programs: including those of Sirius Satellite Radio’s Mike Church; of the late, legendary talk-show host George Putnam; and of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In addition to appearing on RT, the global Russian television news network, she was among the participants in the 2003 Public Network television series America At War, debating the media’s dereliction of duty during the invasion of Iraq.
Ms. Mercer is—and has been for the last decade—a featured columnist for WND.com (which, according to Web monitoring site Quantcast, had one million daily visitors as of September 2009). Other publications where her articles, essays, columns, editorials, book and film reviews have appeared are The American Spectator, The American Conservative, The Orange County Register, Insight On the News (an affiliate of The Washington Times), London’s Jewish Chronicle and Quarterly Review, The Ottawa Citizen, The Calgary Herald (for which she penned a regular weekly column),the two Canadian national newspapers, the Financial Post and the Globe and Mail, The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Free Life: a Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought, and the Foundation for Economic Education’s Ideas on Liberty.
Ms. Mercer’s work has been cited by The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Time’s European edition, among other prominent publications. She maintains a popular blog, where she comments on the issues of the day. In her role as proprietor of the libertarian Barely A Blog (BAB), she has attracted such contributors as Tibor Machan (Cato Institute adjunct scholar), George Reisman (emeritus economics professor at California’s Pepperdine University), and the aforementioned Thomas Szasz.
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ILANA Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer and theorist based in the US. Her acclaimed, weekly column, begun in Canada, has been going strong since 1999. (Articles Archive.) Ilana is the author of The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June 29, 2016), the first libertarian book of Trump, and of the seminal Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011).
Ilana’s weekly column appears in The Unz Review, WND.COM, for which she has penned WND’s exclusive “Return to Reason” feature (now called “The Paleolibertarian”) since 2001, Townhall.com, American Greatness, Britain’s Ludwig von Mises Centre For Property and Freedom, London’s Quarterly Review, founded in 1809, and CNSNews.com.
She has also contributed to the Mises Institute’s Wire, as well as to its Power & Market Blog; to the Ron Paul Institute, the Abbeville Institute, The American Thinker, The Daily Caller, The Liberty Conservative, The Heartland Institute, The Hudson Institute, to Intellectual Takeout and to Chronicles, a magazine of American culture.
Under the handle “The Paleolibertarian Column” or “Paläolibertären Kolumne,” in the German, Ilana’s weekly column was featured respectively on Russia Today and in Junge Freiheit, a German weekly of excellence, for some years. Likewise did the column run on Taki’s Magazine. Formerly syndicated by Creators Syndicate, Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank).
Since the late 1990s, Ilana has written for The Financial Post, The Globe and Mail (Canada’s National Newspapers), The Vancouver Sun, The Report Newsmagazine, London’s Jewish Chronicle and Quarterly Review, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, The New Individualist and the Foundation for Economic Education. Her work has appeared in The Ottawa Citizen, The Orange County Register, The Colorado Gazette, and in other Freedom Communications, Inc. newspapers across the United States, including The Valley Morning Star, The East Valley Tribune, Jacksonville Daily News, Washington County News, Holmes County Register.
Ilana’s work has also been published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Free Life: a Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought, the Foundation for Economic Education’s Ideas on Liberty and in Insight On the News (a former affiliate of The Washington Times), for which she has penned essays in symposia debating intellectual property.
Ilana has written weekly columns for the conservative Calgary Herald, Vancouver’s North Shore News. As was she an analyst and commentator for Free-Market News Network, founded by the late Harry Browne, one-time libertarian presidential candidate.
Ilana’s commentary has been mentioned in the European edition of Time (see “Trading Places” by Peter Gumbel, appeared in the print edition of March 28, 2005), cited in the Boston Globe (“The Downside of Diversity” by Michael Jonas, August 5, 2007); the New York Times’ Economix blog (“Are Federal Workers Overpaid?” by Prof. Nancy Folbre, October 13, 2009), and featured on web sites such as the Ludwig von Mises Institute, LewRockwell.com, The Hudson Institute, The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Laissez Faire City Times, Rational Review, Antiwar.com, Frontpage Magazine, and Jewcy.com, an acclaimed “online ideas-and-culture magazine.”
Ilana, who supported Ron Paul for president in 2008 and 2012, was asked by the Paul campaign for a written endorsement. Here it is:
“Ron Paul stands alone among the presidential contenders for a solvent, sovereign America—he has the will to stop the squandering of men and matériel in Iraq and the intellectual wherewithal to salvage an ailing currency, fortify forsaken borders, and restore individual liberties.”
John Derbyshire, formerly of National Review Online, called Ilana’s case for the Texas Republican “Pauline Gospel at its best”:
“The most persuasive Paul booster remains the ravishing, brilliant, and eloquent Ilana Mercer. I don’t say you’ll agree with her, only that this is the Pauline Gospel at its best. If you won’t buy it from Ilana, you won’t buy it from anyone.”
Ilana is the founder, editor, and creative force behind IlanaMercer.com. This aesthetically pleasing thematic website, on which ilana’s essays are archived conveniently, reflects her vision, transformed into pixels. She is also the proprietor of the weblog Barely a Blog (BAB), to which prominent thinkers such as Tibor Machan (RIP), George Reisman, and the late Thomas Szasz have contributed. (Mercer contributed a dust-jacket blurb to Professor Szasz’s book, Coercion As Cure.)
Ilana has been a guest recently (May 1, 2021) on Michelle Malkin’s “Sovereign Nation,” on Newsmax TV (“it’s systemic anti-whiteness”), ABC Radio (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), and on radio stations across America. These include “Talk Back,” the nationally syndicated show of the late, legendary George Putnam, The Mike Church Show (aka the “King Dude”) on the Sirius Patriot Channel, and Sean Hannity’s nationally syndicated radio show, on which she appeared, regrettably, to defend NFL quarterback Michael Vick (honest thinkers admit to mistakes). About Ilana’s work, Mr. Hannity said this:
Having read your columns throughout the years, I think I know you a little bit—I know you come from a very intellectual point of view, an intellectually honest point of view—you have given the most articulate argument I’ve heard [‘In Defense of Michael Vick’‘] on the other side of this, one that is consistent with many of the views you have. (August 17, 2007)
As has Ilana appeared on Russia Today (RT), most recently to mine the legacy of Mandela, and on the Public Network’s television series, “America at War” (#434), where, in 2003, she debated the media’s dereliction of duty during the invasion of Iraq. Her analysis of Martha Stewart’s legal travails, “Convicted for Fearing Conviction,” was voted among the best Mises.org articles of 2004. In the same year, she received the “Ron Paul Liberty in Media Awards (LIMA)” for the essay “Wartime Socialism.”
Ilana was born in South Africa, which her father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, decided to leave pursuant to harassment by the South African security police on account of his anti-apartheid preaching and activism. (Ilana herself, on return, decades later, fought petty apartheid tirelessly.) The family departed in the 1960s for Israel, where Ilana spent her formative years. She returned to South-Africa in the 1980s, married and had a daughter. The family emigrated to Canada in 1995, and then went on to settle in the US.
Described as an engaging, iconoclastic polemicist by National Post editorial writer Lorne Gunter, Ilana typically marshals powerful analytical argumentation in support of her case. “All I can tell you is that you can’t win an argument with this woman. I’ve tried and failed,” said Victor Niederhoffer, Ph.D., in May of 2012. Dr. Niederhoffer is a noted stock-market investor, a former business partner to George Soros, and founder of the New York City Junto liberty forum.
In a review titled “The Passion of Principles,” the Objectivist magazine The Free Radical called Ilana’s first book, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With a Corrupt Culture, “a perfect mix of reason and rhetoric.” (Here are part 2 & part 3 of the review.) The late great Ron Smith of WBAL Radio, Maryland, had described her as “a refreshingly original writer on the issues of our time.” Others have praised Ilana as a particularly strong stylist, with “no less powerful an intellectual punch as Ayn Rand, only wickedly funny.” (Citations are here and here).
Ilana’s latest book is The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June 29, 2016). It was the first serious analysis of the Trump phenom, and certainly the first libertarian book of Trump. Released in June of 2011, her second book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from post-Apartheid South Africa. Into the Cannibal’s Pot is a polemical work anchored in history, reality, fact, and the political philosophy of classical liberalism. It is a manifesto against mass society, arguing against raw, ripe democracy, here (in the US), there (in South Africa), and everywhere. “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” follows Russell Kirk’s contention that “true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order.” It is intended as a reminder that, however imperfect, civilized societies are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes. The tyranny of political correctness, so unique to the West—plays a role in their near-collapse. Advanced societies don’t just die; they either wither from within, or, like South Africa, are finished off by other western societies.
All is not grim. Ilana does pause to turn the arrows in her epistolary quiver away from the state—the Thing the inimical Sir Humphrey Applebee of the British satire “Yes, Prime Minister” called a disorganized criminal organization. She covers popular culture, mainstream media, Hollywood, and pseudo-science. From sex to music, it’s all here, minus the unpalatable pabulum served by the mummified media.
When she is not expatiating upon the issues of the day, Ilana enjoys running outdoors. She has been a long-distance, recreational runner since the mid 1990s. Parrots are another passion—in particular, the plight of psittacines in captivity and in the wild. Ilana supports parrot rescues in the community. So too is the cause of the near-extinct Cape Parrot (Poicephalus robustus) close to her heart. Ilana is owned by an adorable hookbill called Oscar-Wood (Poicephalus fuscicollis).
Then there is Music. Chamber music and Bach—any Bach—are her first loves, but she finds the hard core, intricate and masterful brilliance of progressive rock outfits like Symphony X, Dream Theater, Magnitude Nine, and Kamelot (sic) as alluring, to say nothing of neoclassical wizards such as Sean Mercer and Tony MacAlpine.
For a fun quiz conducted with Ilana read “The Third Degree à la Germany: Answering To Junge Freiheit” (November 11, 2016).
ILANA ON THE ISSUES
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Environmentalism
Via Wikipedia's "The environment and climate change" segment: "Mercer is not what is known pejoratively as a 'climate denier,' and considers herself a conservative environmentalist. Or, as she put it in a May 22, 2017 post, a "reincarnated Southern agrarian.' [69] Nevertheless, she had observed, in 2006, that the problem with 'the theory of global warming is that it’s unfalsifiable. The theory cannot be falsified or tested and is, therefore, irrefutable. Evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate Chicken Littles enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns—warm or cold—is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it.'[70] Referencing Karl Popper, Mercer further noted that, 'A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific.'[71] However, Mercer qualified her 2008 observations in 2014, by saying that, 'This is not to say that man is not destructive to the environment, or that we should not cherish and take care of nature. We certainly should by understanding that government is not a panacea for the problem.'[72] 'The root of environmental despoliation is the tragedy of the commons,' claims Mercer. In 'the absence of private ownership in the means of production, government-controlled resources go to seed. There is simply no one with strong enough a stake in the landmass or waterway to police it before disaster strikes.' Mercer advocates 'private property rights in waterways, or riparian rights in water that abuts private property—these are the best protectors of the ocean and of other state-controlled expanses of water [and land]."[73] |
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Feminism
Affirmative action, the equal representation of women everywhere (including in sports), progressive teaching paradigms emphasizing group think; the banishing of competition (for which boys are hardwired) and moral instruction (which they generally crave); the demonization of the greatest writers, scientists, and explorers because they were men, the chemical castration of boys via Ritalin, the banning of BB guns and ‘bang-bang you’re dead,’ and the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ of North America”—Ilana credits the woman’s movement for all of these. She has also pondered whether the discovery of late that testosterone levels in men are falling might be linked to “the feminization of society over the past 20 to 30 years.” As she puts it, “Feminists once aimed to unseat men, now they are actively engaged in queering them.” Ilana observes that “the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is a delicate homeostatic feedback system, intricately involved in regulating hormones and stress.” She then wonders out loud whether “it [has] become the axis of evil in the war on men.” Indeed, the feminization of society, brought about just as well by “Y chromosome carriers,” is a theme Ilana frequently returns to: “CNN’s Anderson Cooper is a major culprit in changing the face of news. Forehead furrowed into a perpetual I-feel-your-pain frown, Cooper’s broadcasts are an interminable kvetch that elevates feelings above facts.” “The Silly Sex?” is how Ilana, controversially, titled an essay explaining “women’s relatively scant accomplishments in the second half of the 20th century, as quantified objectively by Charles Murray.” |
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Immigration
Ilana opposes mass immigration. “Immigration policy by definition,” she notes, “amounts to top-down, statist, central planning. But the least invasive policy is one that respects a nation’s historical and cultural complexion and the property rights of its taxpayers.” To Ilana, unfettered immigration and the interventionist state cannot coexist. "The reality is that the American welfare state is accreting, not shrinking," she writes. The reality is that the more libertarians support the importation of impoverished minorities, with a tradition of aggressively manipulating the political apparatus to obtain property not theirs—the more intractable the welfare state will become. How better to diminish property rights and accelerate wealth distribution and, with it, the death of the republic, than to add to the 'union' each year the equivalent of a New Jersey, powered by identity-politics, and peopled predominantly by tax consumers seeking to indenture taxpayers? She further observes that, “It’s especially absurd for libertarians to assert that the multitudes streaming across the Southwestern border at a rate of one immigrant every 30 or so seconds are here with the consent of American private property owners, simply because many find employment once in the US.” As Ilana sees it, “the sole emphasis of late on border security has helped open-border advocates immeasurably”—leading to a consensus whereby “the security risk newcomers pose is the only permissible topic for conversation. Americans will thus never be allowed to assert their right to determine the nature of the country they live in and, by extension, the kind of immigrants they welcome,” she avers. Indeed, to Ilana, the debate over immigration is meaningless without reference to “borders and to the thing they bound—a nation, to wit, the voluntary bonds that unite members of a civil society in common purpose.” She accuses George W. Bush of being oblivious to this glue, and sums up the President’s “borderless” worldview as one that “Invites an invasion by foreigners and instigates one against them.” These “are two sides of the same neoconservative coin," she quips. Ilana is in favor of a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border: “If you really want to see an immigration liberationist rise on his hind legs,” she taunts, mention such a fence. “Hysterical yelps of ‘tear down this wall’ will ensue. Irrational minds have transformed a defensive wall à la the Emperor Hadrian’s, intended to keep the ‘barbarians’ out, into the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall, constructed to keep people in.” |
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Iraq
Ilana has opposed the invasion of Iraq from the get-go. Norman Singleton, aid to the Republican Congressman Ron Paul, has said this about Ilana’s “Classical Liberalism and State Schemes”: "Ilana Mercer presents one of the best refutations of liberventionism I have read. Mercer demonstrates how support for global crusades for ‘human rights’ are fundamentally incompatible with a belief in small government, individual rights and a skepticism about state power. Particularly good is Mercer’s argument that war is a giant redistribution program.” Indeed, “at bottom, ‘philanthropic’ wars and nation-building are transfer programs—the quintessential big-government projects,” Ilana expatiates: "Smart and principled conservatives understand, moreover, that top-down central planning—economic or political—is always doomed to fail. The inverted, perverse incentive structure that invariably characterizes such endeavors guarantees failure. To wit, as a government project, the multi-billion enterprise in Iraq is bankrolled indefinitely by taxpayers and shielded in perpetuity from bankruptcy. Wrongdoing and incompetence in government are rarely punished, but are, rather, rewarded with budgetary increases. Government departments and fiefdoms accrete through inefficiency. Failure translates into ever-growing budgets, powers and perks—for the top dogs, not for the grunts on the ground.” In the ramp-up to war, Ilana argued that in “mere months” the Bush administration managed to “break down and even invert certain civilizing precepts, which only a short while ago united” Americans. As is evident from her many essays on the topic, she was referring to a respect for the natural law and the prohibition against unprovoked aggression, the Constitution (it prohibits the President from declaring war), Just War Theory, and what “the Founding Fathers provided.” To wit, “a limited, constitutional republican government, by definition, doesn't, cannot, and must never pursue what Bush is after, … a sort of ‘21st-century Manifest Destiny.’" Ilana has responded to what she terms the “creativepost-hocarguments… made to justify the unnecessary war, waged on a sovereign nation that had not attacked us, was no threat to us and was certainly no match for us,” first with facts. She has pointed out repeatedly that, “there were many experts—credible ones—who absolutely rejected the contention that there were WMD in Iraq. They were as numerous as the loud voices who promoted this lie. However, the media shut us out.” Next, Ilana has galvanized analytical arguments to dispel falsities about the invasion: “To say that Saddam may have had WMD is quite different from advocating war based on those assumptions,” she reasons. “It’s one thing to assume in error; it’s quite another to launch a war in which thousands would die based on mere assumptions, however widely shared.” Ilana rejects accusations of pacifism leveled at her: “I supported going after al-Qaida in Afghanistan,” she ventures. “That was a legitimate act of retaliation and defense, accommodated within St. Augustine's teachings, whereby a just war is one ‘that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects.’” Finally, Ilana characterizes the stay-the-course prescription as tantamount to “persisting in what is impossible to accomplish. Faction fighting in Iraq is as old as the sand dunes, and tyrants as ubiquitous as the Tigris,” she states, adding that, “Hussein’s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people. What a shame it’s too late to dust Saddam off, give him a sponge bath, and beg him to restore law and order to Iraq.” |
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Islam
Ilana, who grew up in the Middle-East, rejects the “religion of peace” appellation. “Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary precondition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one,” she argues. The reason why “Muslims today are at the center of practically every conflict in the world—and were slaughtering innocent, pacifist Jews in Israel well before the Jewish state was a figment in the fertile mind of Theodor Herzl”—can be found in the Qur’an, she states. “The Muslim holy book,” moreover, “doesn’t brook interpretation or reformation, because, as the Islamic tradition has it, the Qur’an is not Mohammed's word; it is God’s eternal word, seen as something sent from Heaven, never to be adapted or altered,” Ilana explains. “The Qur’an counsels conquest, not coexistence, especially in its later edicts, which override the earlier ones,” she observes. In an essay for The New Individualist, Ilana concludes that, if anything, “Osama bin Laden has heeded, not hijacked, Islam.” In the same piece she also argues that “[t]he Quran’s ruthless particularism runs counter to the universal concepts of justice and love of the Hebrew and Christian bibles.” Naïve Westerners, who’ve been raised to believe The Other is just like them, don’t understand Islam and its adherents. Or, for that matter, the meaning of “Taqiyya—the seldom-discussed Islamic practice of lying to non-Muslims in order to win political battles and protect Islam.” As Ilana demonstrates, media “malpractitioners” uphold “this Scheherazade-worthy charade.” |
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Israel
As both a libertarian and a Zionist (a position for which she has been attacked), Ilana argues that Israel does itself no favors by conflating America's unlimited worldwide war on Islamic terror with its own narrowly delimited and legitimate battle for survival, conducted since that country’s inception. The Palestinian Authority, she notes, has established itself as an anarcho-terrorist territory.Left-liberal, root-causes thinking blames the thriving society (Israel) for the dysfunctions of the “savage” one adjacent to it (PA). But asIlanaputs it, “human action is the ultimate adjudicator of moral worth;societies are only as good as the individuals they comprise.” No amount of words, maintains Ilana, is going to change that Palestinians don’t live under the rule of enlightened Western law, don’t have a free and ferociously critical media or liberal courts, canonize suicide murderers, sanction the ‘honor killings’ of women and their subjugation, and are more likely to approve when their coreligionists strap on belts of nails and dynamite and blow up innocents.” By making concessions to such an entity, Ilana argues, Israeli leaders have abandoned the national interest and their obligation to ensure the nation endures. Conversely, Ilana strongly condemned Israel’s recent “leveling of Lebanon” and the “collective punishment of innocents” during that operation. She advised, instead, that Israel “consider stationing on the borders the best of its special-operations units … trained in precision, deep-penetration operations.” Ilana categorically opposes foreign aid handouts to Israel. Israel ought to stop sacrificing its sovereignty and cease being a US satellite state. Independence, she observes, means cutting the Gordian Knot once and for all. |
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Neoconservatism
Mercer has argued that “Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin;” traditionalist Lawrence Auster noted that this concept was “first articulated by Ilana Mercer and then turned into a neat slogan by Steve Sailer.” Indeed, on January 16, 2004, Mercer's “Return To Reason” cyber column encapsulated the scheme as, “Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them.” Later, on January 25, 2004, Steve Sailer, “turned [that idea] into a neat slogan,” naming the policy, artfully, as “invade the world/invite the world.” This radical strategy permanently destabilizes the homeland and the world and gives western governments all the power, everywhere. Mercer views neoconservatives as having corrupted the constitutionally-prescribed use of the American military, employing it as a force “to patrol the borders of Kosovo, Korea, and Kurdistan” while “our own borders remain perilously porous.” These “conservative poseurs,” she notes, seek to remake America into “a disparate people, forced together by an abstract, highly manipulable, coercive, state-sanctioned ideology,” in effect, a “propositional nation” that overrides the traditional nation in which Americans shared language, customs, faith, and culture. Mercer states that an aversion to the concept of nationhood arises from “an inability to distinguish the nation from the State,” the common values, culture, and traditions of the former having once been conducive to liberty in the U. S..“The real individualist,” she adds, “ knows who he is and whence he came.” |
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Patriotism
“Patriotism,” writes Ilana, “is a very modest thing. Here’s what it’s not: it’s not an allegiance to the government of the day, or to its invariably un-American policies. It’s an affinity for your community; it’s an understanding of the great principles upon which this country was founded—which have been excised by successive governments, Republican and Democratic alike. And it’s a commitment to restoring the republic of private-property rights, individual freedoms, and radical decentralization.” |
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The Therapeutic Society
In her book, Broad Sides , Ilana underscores that “a free society cannot function unless its members assume or are made to assume full responsibility for their actions.” Indeed, an abiding theme in her work is individual free-will and the exploration of causality and culpability vis-à-vis crime, misconduct, and immorality. In particular, Ilana opposes and exposes the "medicalization of misbehavior.""In the progressive’s universe, evil actions don’t incriminate, they mitigate."The pop “experts,” she says, “work to place bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to ‘therapeutic’ interventions. The Drew Pinskys of the worldconjure so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals.” In “Mel’s Malady; Foxman’s Fetish,” Ilana writes this, with reference to Gibson’s alcoholism: "The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the ‘experts’) have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels. At the root of this diseasing of behavior is the eradication of good and bad. Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, moreover, makes it amenable to external, ‘therapeutic’ or state interventions. Liberals first, and conservatives in short succession, have taken to the idiom of disease like ducks to water. Left and right now insist, based on wispy pseudoscience, that just about every human excess is an illness as organic as cancer or diabetes. A teacher who seduces her underage pupil has to be ‘sick,’ or else she’d not have indulged her fantasies. The same post hoc illogic is applied to the morbidly obese: if you overeat, you’re diseased! Are you a dad who dotes on his kids when they are around, but fails to mail them child support money when they return to mom? There’s a Harvard professor by the name of Dr. John Ratey who’ll cheerily diagnose you with ‘Environmental Dependency Disorder’: you remember your kids only when they are present. And so it goes: the arsonist has ‘pyromania,’ the thief is inflicted with ‘kleptomania,’ and Bill Clinton was not promiscuous, but a ‘sex-addict.'” No Szaszian thinker will miss the thread that holds “Rah-Rah for Rioters” together: "Whether the mediacrats are applying their cerebral sinew to individual or group-orchestrated crime; to psychological or sociological ‘causal factors,’ bad deeds are invariably caused—never committed. And they are caused by factors outside the perpetrators. …” And this from “Coddling Killers”: Root causes are the rationalizations liberals give—usually after the fact—for their immoral actions or for the immoral actions of others. The paradox at the heart of the root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances. |
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The Deep State
Via Wikipedia's "Managerial State" entry: "Ilana Mercer has connected the concept of the 'Managerial State' to that of the 'Deep State,' bandied about in the Trump era. The Deep State Mercer speaks of as, ... the intractable, permanent state—the bureaucracy, or the unseen, unelected Juggernaut that reflexively maintains the status quo in government departments … those extra-constitutional processes and forces that make voter-supported change near impossible.[11] On the Left, observed Mercer, the Public Broadcasting Service's Bill Moyers had spoken about the concept 'Deep State' in 2014. On the right, James Burnham wrote about the 'Deep State' in 1941, except, says Mercer, Burnham called it the 'Managerial State.'" |
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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Visit Ilana online: www.ilanamercer.com
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Mercer, Ilana
Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa/by Ilana Mercer, 1st ed.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN978-0-9827734-3-7
1. United States – Diplomatic history - Foreign and general relations.
2. Social Sciences – Social pathology - criminology.
3. Law – Natural law – property.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011930725
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