Fox News – praag.org

Ilana Mercer: Donald, Don’t Let Fox News Roger America … Again

Bless Donald Trump. Inadvertently, by just being Donald, Mr. Trump has delivered more good news to liberty lovers.

In his bid for the presidency, Mr. Trump is not only threatening the Republican establishment, but is forcing a war with the cable news channel that does the Republican regimists’ bidding.

The Fox News Channel backed Genghis Bush’s wars. The Powers That Be at FNC now wish to roger (Ailes) America, again, by delivering the country to neoconservative tool Marco Rubio, or to fool John Kasich (governor from Ohio), or to Ms. Fiorina, whom tacky media types call “Carly.” However, this little lady’s honeyed words conceal a burning desire to commit the country to an arms race with China and Russia.

Not for naught did Scott Walker go from 2 percent in the polls, to zero, to sayonara. Walker, that live wire, picked up his marbles and went home, blaming Trump for making him sad. But like the rest of the establishment’s candidates, Walker had served up the same sub-intelligent, hackneyed lies about the root-causes of the migration problem plaguing Europe.

Syrian, Iraqi and Libyan populations are on the move, the neoconservative posse preaches, because of a failure to remove Bashar Hafez al-Assad, a man who was the source of stability in Syria, much like Saddam Hussein was in Iraq.

Have we learned nothing about the perils of toppling law-and-order dictators, only to see the rise of barbarians worse than their predecessors? Evidently not.

Bar Rand Paul and, to a degree, Donald Trump, all the Republican candidates insist that American exceptionalism lies in leading the world not in technological innovation, comity, commerce and as exemplars of individual rights—but by projecting military power the world over. The US government’s bankruptcy, the candidates see as having no bearing on their own unanimous plans for an arms race with the other super powers and a renewed military offensive in the Middle East.

Since the second primary season Republican debate, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in California, FNC’s Sean Hannity has been promoting Rubio’s rabid ideation with zeal. Rubio regularly trashes Vladimir Putin for trying to prop Assad up, so that the Islamic State does not capture Damascus.

Regrettably, other than to sensibly say that he’d get along with Putin, Trump made absolutely no attempt to demonstrate a familiarity with the issues, at Simi Valley. He might want to rethink his relaxed approach, for it belies the candidate’s claim to have surrounded himself with the best people possible, or to have good judgement.

Trump’s good judgment has since surfaced in a conversation with Greta Van Susteren: “If Putin goes into Syria and is “able to knock out ISIS,” that’s not the worst thing he’s ever heard, Trump told the host.

That excellent instinct—allow Putin to degrade and destroy ISIS if he wants to—comes from a very different perspective than Rubio’s lamentations about Russia “replacing us as the single most important power broker in the Middle East.”

You see, Trump’s instinct is to conduct foreign policy that benefits Americans. He doesn’t want Americans dying for nothing. Rubio’s prime objective is to conduct foreign policy that aggrandizes Washington. Like other neoconservatives, he dreads being a politician in a country that is no longer the world’s military hegemon.

For if America busies itself not with elective wars, but with commerce, the shift in power and prestige will be away from politicians who prosecute wars, and back to The People who produce prosperity.

“I’m owned by the people!” affirmed Trump, who wants what the people want.

Having spent a total of two years of his working life outside government, Rubio—reflexively, not consciously—wants what’ll glorify The State, the thing by which he survives and thrives.

And what does the battered GOP base want?

The base, I hope, has wizened up to the neoconservatives.

The base, I hope, will realize that neoconservatives are still in the business of creating their own parallel reality and forcing ordinary Americans, Europeans and Middle-Easterners to inhabit the ruins.

As I read it, the GOP base wants government to reverse the things it has done; to repeal laws, wars and do no more harm.

Unless in defense of the realm, Americans are uninterested in more of the same foreign-policy folly. Let us keep our military mitts to ourselves and defend our own borders. That, it would appear, is the prevailing sentiment among Republican voters, although not among the regimists who congregated at the Reagan Library.

Therefore, it is to Rand Paul’s prescriptions during the debate that Trump should look, and not to the War Tourette’s of the rest:

Refrain from a rash foreign policy.
Engage with Russia and China.
Talk to the Mullahs before you “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” (a jingle popularized by jingoist John McCain).
Leave dope policy to the states (not ideal, for consumption is to be left to the individual, but better than most).
Do not sign on to bomb Assad out of existence. You’ll miss him when he’s gone.
Remind Hillary Clinton who broke Libya.

Donald Trump has done another fine thing since Simi Valley, about which the media is audibly silent.

In the honorable tradition Benjamin Franklin wished to establish, Trump said he’d forfeit a salary as president. Many of our Founding Fathers believed America’s representatives ought not to be paid at all.

As a man among metrosexuals, Trump’s demeanor, naturally, is unlike that of his fork-tongued adversaries.

Nevertheless, Trump was genial, even gracious, at Simi Valley. He showed contrition over his unkind cuts about Carly Fiorina’s face. Fiorina could have cracked a smile, but didn’t. (Or, perhaps she couldn’t, considering the likely nips-and-cuts suffered by The Face).

And Trump refused to grovel.

Good. Groveling about impolitic statements is the first sign of a housebroken GOPer.

So here’s why Trump is good for liberty:

By waging internecine warfare against the political masters and their mouthpiece (FNC), Trump is undermining the bastions of neoconservatism in America; he is dealing a structural blow to the edifice of Beltway Republicanism.

In response, the Beltway boys are rising on their little hind legs.

As Megyn Kelly riffed about Trump’s sexism, Fox News commentator Rich Lowry blurted out this on Kelly’s File: “Carly Fiorina cut Trump’s balls off with the precision of a surgeon.” (Kelly, who is turning out to be rather vacuous, detected no sexism there.)

Another slick Republican strategist, Rick Wilson, a regular on CNN, recently asked Trump supporter Ann Coulter on Twitter if Trump paid her “more for anal.”

Trump, for his part, fired first on the political flank. Now, in a pincer movement, Trump opened up a new front and is gunning for the establishment’s media megaphone.

This is why Trump’s war with Fox News is part of a just, liberating war.

**
Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, “Return to Reason.” She is a contributor to The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. She blogs at www.barelyablog.com
Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer “Friend” her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ilanamercer.libertarian

Ilana Mercer: Motormouth Megyn Kelly & The Mad Matriarchy

It’s “R & R for Megyn Kelly,” the Fox News channel announced last week on its website, followed by a gooey note from Kelly herself. Why was FNC broadcasting the vacation schedule of the Golden Goose that henpecked Donald Trump? Had Kelly been licked into shape by Trump? Was she off to lick her wounds?

Since the testy exchange between Trump and Kelly, at the first prime-time Republican debate, in Cleveland, Ohio, the anchor’s eponymous TV show, “The Kelly File,” has covered the meteoric rise of Mr. Trump sparingly. Perhaps Kelly has come to view herself as a kingmaker. Perhaps she thinks that should she choose not to report about a newsmaker; he’ll somehow fade into obscurity.

Full disclosure: At first blush, I was impressed by the quality of Fox News’ journalism, in Cleveland, writing too exuberantly that “the true stars of the debate were the ruthless, impartial, analytical” reporters. Better that Kelly be the one to ask foolish, fem-oriented questions of The Donald than future Dem moderators. It neutralizes the latter. Or so I reasoned.

Moreover, it’s indisputable that compared to previous presidential debates overrun as they were by Democrat journos—Kelly, Bret Baier and Chris Wallace did a good job.

No presidential debate should, however, be gauged by how it departs from debates in which questions such as these are posed:

“Senator Obama, how do you address those who say you’re not authentically black enough?”

“Senator Dodd, you’ve been in Congress more than 30 years. Can you honestly say you’re any different?”

“Congressman Kucinich, your supporters certainly say you are different. Even your critics would certainly say you are different … What do you have that Senators Clinton and Obama do not have?” [Wait a sec. I know the answer: a trophy wife.]

And how about this intellectually nimble follow-up?

“Senator Clinton, you were involved in that [how-am-I-different] question. I want to give you a chance to respond [to that how-am-I-different question].”

“Senator Obama, you were also involved in that [how-am-I-different] question, as well. Please respond.”

The final crushingly stupid question to the 1-trick donkeys debating, in the 2007 CNN/YouTube Democratic presidential debate, was this:

“Who was your favorite teacher and why, Senator Gravel?”

The “journalist” pounding the presidential candidates was jackass Anderson Cooper of CNN.

Before she beat a retreat, Kelly had assembled a studio audience of Republican establishmentarian, to whom she directed another leading question: She herself knew nobody who’d call a woman a pig or a dog. Could they say the same? Kelly was alluding to the litany she had directed at Trump during her Cleveland performance (where she had cast herself as leading lady).

Kelly: “You’ve called women you don’t like, ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.”

Trump [in good humor]: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”

Megyn [bare-fanged]: “No it wasn’t. For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell. Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?”

Still under the brain-addling spell of the Cooper-Candy Crowley brain trust, I thought no less of Kelly for that dumbest of questions. Her anti-individualist, collectivist feminism is news to her fans, but not to me. Kelly’s vocabulary is of a piece with the nauseating vocabulary of third-wave feminism.

More irksome was the allusion to the dignity of The Office. A while ago, fancy pants Kelly joined Don Lemon (CNN), Cooper and Rachel Mad Cow to editorialize angrily at Obama for damaging the dignity of The Office. These celebrity journos were, in fact, green with envy over GloZell Green, a YouTube sensation to whom president Obama granted an interview. Good for him.

Our TV narcissists—they live not for the truth, but for a seat at the Annual White House Sycophant’s Supper, or alongside the smarmy Jon Stewart (or his unfunny South African replacement), or next to the titillaters of “The View,” or on the late-night shows—were jealous. Dented was the vanity of the egos in the anchor’s chair.

Besides which the American presidency was pimped out a longtime ago—well before the current POTUS and FLOTUS held soirees sporting disco balls and the half-nude, pelvis-grinding Beyoncé.

Kelly herself has fast succumbed to the female instinct to show-off, bare skin, flirt and wink. She now also regularly motormouths it over the occasional smart guest she entertains (correction: the one smart guest, Ann Coulter). At the same time, Kelly has dignified the tinnitus named Dana Perino with a daily slot as Delphic oracle.

Trump, on the other hand, has proven he can be trusted to beat up on the right women.

Exhibit A is Elizabeth Beck, a multitasking “attorney,” who once deposed Donald Trump while also waving her breast pump in his face, demanding to break for a breast-pumping session.

“You’re disgusting. You’re disgusting,” the busy billionaire blurted in disbelief. And she was. Still is. Accoutered for battle, Beck recently did the rounds on the networks. In addition to a mad glint in the eye, Beck brought to each broadcast a big bag packed with milking paraphernalia.

Had she cared about boundaries and propriety, Kelly would have asked Trump how he kept his cool during a legal deposition, with an (ostensible) professional, who insisted on bringing attention to her lactating breasts.

Writes Fred Reed, who regularly tracks our malevolent matriarchy’s “poor sense of social boundaries”:

The United States has embarked, or been embarked, on a headlong rush into matriarchy, something never before attempted in a major country. Men remain numerically dominant in positions of power, yes, but their behavior and freedom are ever more constrained by the wishes of hostile women. The effects have been disastrous. They are likely to be more so. The control, or near control, extends all through society. Politicians are terrified of women. … The pathological egalitarianism of the age makes it career-ending to mention that women in fact are neither equal nor identical to men. …

Not quite in the league of Elizabeth Beck yet, Megyn Kelly was, nevertheless, in need of a dressing-down and a time-out.

**
Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. Follow her on Twitter. “Friend” her on Facebook.

2014: The year of living racially

My man Richard Sherman said something that kicked off the 2014, year-round, banal, racial back-and-forth that parades as debate in the U.S.

Other than that the Seattle Seahawks are my team, on account that they’re from my neck of the woods; what I know about American football is dangerous. So naturally, I was rooting for, if not watching, the Hawks, when, following their victory over the San Francisco 49ers, Sherman said That Thing. And from their citadels of stupidity, U.S. mainstream media—conservatives, liberals and libertarians—went into full St. Vitus mode

“I’m the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like [Michael] Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get. Don’t you ever talk about me!”

Sherman sounded good to me. Still does. The man was pumped, as men ought to be in a testosterone-infused game. The Seahawks’ cornerback was correct to point out that his “outburst,” following the “defensive play that sealed his team’s trip to the Super Bowl,” was an extension of “his game-time competitiveness.”

“Let’s not make thug the new N-word,” pleaded John McWhorter, a scholar of color, whose intellectual and moral authority in the culture stems primarily from the concentration of melanin in his skin cells, not from the force of his argument.

Come again?

As in January of last year, I still don’t get the reason for the fuss over what Sherman said. His boisterous bit of theatre set in motion some racial, national free-association, which no man or woman with a brain cell to rub between them can follow.

Speaking of mindlessness, in February, the president of black America launched his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. Barack Obama claimed “this initiative” as his “lifelong goal,” “even after he leaves office.”

If to go by Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” “rising inequality and declining mobility,” as well as “widespread decay in moral fiber”—these are as serious and widespread among “white, lower-status, less well-educated Americans,” as they are among the black and Hispanic communities. It was against this backdrop that Obama signaled his intention to deploy his signature initiative to keep at least $200 million belonging to “leading foundations and businesses,” for “programs aimed at minority youth of color.”

“Winning” means “spinning.” In April, the media-run, Barack Hussein Obama witness-protection program got a boost: a secretly recorded, racially charged private conversation between one Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, and his mistress du jour, a dark-haired Jenna Jamison look-alike. Joy! Here was another cover for a “news” media that had refused to cover the many outrages and scandals of the Obama presidency.

CNN took a break from its non-stop, no-news vigil for missing Malaysian Airline Flight 370 to ride the Sterling racism ass. Hard. And from abroad, the president who promised to see to it that ebony and ivory would live together in perfect harmony told the world that the U.S. “continues to wrestle with the legacy of race, slavery and segregation,” a lie he would repeat throughout the year.

August saw the start of Trayvon Martin round two. The shooting death, in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown (black) by police officer Darren Wilson (white), sparked country wide unrest among the perpetually restive, when the officer was vindicated by the grand jury. It transpired that prior to being gunned down; Brown had robbed a convenience store and tackled the cop.

In their shared hatred for white America, Attorney General Eric Holder and Mr. Obama were like two pimps in a pod. Both rushed to racialize what was strictly a law-and-order incident. “I am the attorney general of the United States, but I am also a black man,” declared the AG to his black constituents.

Hitherto, the president of black Americans had been mum about cops, soldiers or white kids coming under black attack. But he just couldn’t put a sock in it when it came to his personal affinity for Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. True to type, Obama saddled a “deeply rooted” racism plaguing the U.S. for the mishaps between cops and the communities of color they police.

One among many pig-ignorant panels on CNN—this one comprising Marc Lamont Hill and two interchangeable females—magically coalesced around a consensus parroted widely in pixels and print across the country: There was absolutely nothing racial whatsoever about the latest attack upon whites by blacks, this time of a store keeper in Memphis, Tennessee. Only a week back, the same sort of empaneled fools were intoning in unison about the ostensible racism behind the Ferguson killing ad nauseum.

Well, of course.

Read Ilana Mercer’s book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa:

<br />

Memorable to a majority marginalized was Martha MacCallum’s plainspoken, Fox News column about Brendan Tevlin. The blond, blue-eyed anchor’s words reached deeper than the convoluted fare of most: “A 19-year-old, suburban boy. Strawberry blond, athletic, bright and smiley. … When I look at this picture of Brendan Tevlin, I think, he could have been my son.” Brendan Tevlin of New Jersey was murdered by Ali Muhammad Brown, an African-American. A precious boy’s death at the hands of the detritus of humanity did not rate a mention by Big Media and its protégé.

Alas, white commentators—liberals, conservatives, even libertarians—and their fans converge on matters racial. All are constitutionally primed to convulse hysterically over race.

Take Judge Andrew Napolitano. A left-leaning, highly principled libertarian, the judge wrote a hot mess of a column, asserting that in Ferguson we saw “the error and perversion of the grand jury,” not to mention a “toxic mixture of a black underclass and a white power structure and the corrupt advantages people on the make and people on the take can exploit from it.” That’s left-libertarianism for you: In-thrall to postmodern constructs like “power structure,” “white privilege,” the left-libertarian’s tinny, rigid adherence to bogus theory is often foisted on facts that don’t fit. Thus did John Stossel mar a perfectly reasonable column on Ferguson,” with a nod to the endemic racism meme.

As far as promoting the demonstrably false racism meme—what speech is racist, which feelings are bigoted; the kind of humor that is off-color; the fears of The Other that are forbidden—conservatives too are indistinguishable from liberals. Consider the witty email exchange between a Sony executive and a producer concerning Obama and his racial proclivities. Leaked as it was by hackers, these emails were ruled by Megyn Kelly of Fox News to be wrong, racist and racially insensitive: all the dumb things liberals say about risqué expression.

Lesson no. 1: When they rabbit on about race, America’s chattering classes—blacks, whites, Democrats, Republicans and libertarians alike—exhibit an unthinking habit of mind. These are individuals (for they are not individualists) who’ve been trained by their political and intellectual masters to respond in certain, politically pleasing ways.

Don’t listen to them! Americans are not racist.

Despite the mindless racial merry-go-round manufactured by American media and cognoscenti, I suspect even liberals may have internalized another important lesson of survival: Never elect a black liberal president again.

That’s lesson no. 2.

Follow @ilanamercer

Like Ilana Mercer’s Facebook page

Read Ilana in German on Junge Freiheit.

Jihad’s homegrown enablers

Ilana Mercer reveals true inspiration for ‘beheading in the homeland’

“Is this treason?” asked Megyn Kelly. The Fox News anchor was referring to American citizens who had joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and expected to return to the U.S. upon completing their tours of duty abroad.

Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey believes that “unless [his] passport is revoked,” an American citizen who holds an American passport and who has fought for ISIS – maybe even decapitated a dhimmi or two – “is entitled to come back” to the U.S.

Comey was discussing these American exported fighters for ISIS on “60 Minutes.” He promised to “track them very carefully.” At least, as carefully as the intelligence community tracked the brothers Tsarnaev. Also known as the Boston bombers, the Tsarnaevs’ fealty to their American friends and neighbors drove them to murder three and maim many more.

Judge Andrew Napolitano’s retort, on “The Kelly File,” was (oddly) first to praise this FBI director’s mettle as a man and a lawyer, while disputing the legal grounds for Comey’s odd position:

“Comey forgot there’s a statute called providing material assistance to a terrorist organization,” explained Napolitano. “So if he knows that Americans have been fighting with ISIS and he also knows that the secretary of state has declared ISIS a terrorist organization – that is more than enough evidence for him to arrest them upon their re-entry to the U.S. It is crazy to let them back in and wait and see what they do.”

Judging from the tenor of her popular show, Kelly believes that American citizens owe allegiance to the U.S. government. I’d counter that it is to his countrymen – neighbors, co-workers, community – that an American owes his loyalties, as expressed in the practice of civility and non-aggression. The chances are good that a veteran of jihad à la ISIS will re-offend: resort to the intimidation, terrorization, even decapitation of innocents stateside. Thus, based on his criminal history and religious proclivities, the homegrown jihadi ought to be kept out of the U.S. The right to venture wherever, whenever is no more than a positive, manufactured right, forfeited on the violation of authentic negative rights.

As to Kelly’s initial question regarding treason: Indeed, the case of FBI Director Comey is clear-cut. He betrays the people who pay for his keep.

Still on the topic of the home-grown jihadis, conservatives are losing their heads over the classification of a Muslim butcher from Moore, Oklahoma. Thirty-year-old Alton Nolen, an angry black man who had converted to Islam and was terrorizing co-workers into doing the same, beheaded a co-worker at a Vaughan Foods factory. Conservatives say no justice can be had unless it is determined that Nolen is an ISIS-like Islamist terrorist.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, however, is incidental to Nolen’s crime. ISIS might have been a catalyst and an inspiration for the slaughter, but a beheading in the homeland will be inspired by Islam, pure and simple. It’s elementary.

Cautioned Samuel P. Huntington, author of “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order”: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

Our taqiyya-talking president – like his predecessor, George Bush – affirms Islam at every turn, most recently in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, on Sept. 24:

“[W]e have reaffirmed that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam. Islam teaches peace. Muslims the world over aspire to live with dignity and a sense of justice. And when it comes to America and Islam, there is no us and them – there is only us, because millions of Muslim Americans are part of the fabric of our country.”

The thesis of a great American scholar did ignoramus Obama dismiss with one sentence: “… we reject any suggestion of a clash of civilizations.”

Off TV, for they are seldom welcome on the boob tube, other Western scholars of Islam have offered more correctives: In Islamic law, ISIS, as caliphate, is allowed to wage offensive jihad. Islam, moreover, does not prohibit the killing of Muslims. If one becomes a Muslim and one commits adultery, leaves the faith or kills another Muslim – one has forfeited the right to live.

Yet another home truth: Islam attaches to angry, innately violent individuals, like former inmate Nolen. Thanks to multiculturalist efforts to appease the Islamist lobby, going back to Bush, a Muslim chaplain corps was created in the U.S. military and a front for the Muslim Brotherhood employed to minister to the approximately 20,000 Muslim soldiers. The same sort of religious recruiters – the left calls this “Islamic outreach” – are active in penitentiaries, where there are over 300,000 Muslim inmates, most of them African-Americans. Jails are now the top recruiting grounds for ISIS in the U.S.

Clearly, what matters most is not to identify the Muslim murderer of Colleen Hufford, of blessed memory, as a terrorist, but to point to Alton Nolan’s muse: Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. Then, Nolen should be speedily tried, and his descent into hell hastened.

Follow @ilanamercer

Like Ilana Mercer’s Facebook page

Read Ilana in German on Junge Freiheit.

Where’s America’s right to referendum, secession?

by Ilana Mercer

[followbutton username=’IlanaMercer’ count=’true’ lang=’en’ theme=’light’]

Like Ilana Mercer’s Facebook page

From a node in the neoconservative network, a Fox News studio, Charles Krauthammer has complained about the eviction of the Ukrainian Navy from the city of Sevastopol, where it was headquartered. Not a word did the commentator say about the city’s location: Sevastopol is on the Crimean Peninsula. It would appear that the city now falls within Crimean jurisdiction – starting March 16, the day the people of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine.

By most estimates, between 97 and 93 percent of Crimean voters said yes to a reunion with Russia. High too was voter turnout. McClatchy pegs it at 83 percent of registered voters in Crimea. BBC News was agreed, also reporting a ballot of “more than 80 percent.” Zerohedge.com counted a “paltry” 73 percent turnout, still “higher than every U.S. presidential election since 1900.”

As rocker Ted Nugent might say, the Russians and Crimeans are blood brothers. Nugent got into trouble for using this perfectly proper appellation to describe his affinity for a politician, of all people: Texas Republican gubernatorial hopeful Greg Abbott. Notwithstanding that in the land of the terminally stupid, linguistic flourish can land one in hot water – blood brother is a good, if colorful, turn of phrase that denotes fealty between like-minded people. Steeped in state-enforced multiculturalism, America’s deracinated, self-anointed cognoscenti have a hard time grasping the blood-brother connections between the people of Russia and Crimea.

For no apparent reason other than that it is pro-Russian, Americans have reflexively aligned themselves against the swell for secession in southern Ukraine. Separatist referenda in Kosovo, Catalonia, South Sudan and Scotland have been accepted without demur by a political and media establishment unprepared to countenance a similar referendum in Crimea.

Guided by the pack animals of politics and punditry who seldom fail to shed darkness on whatever topic they tackle, a nation that struggles to locate the disputed territories on the map has been convinced of the menace posed by Russia. According to a CNN poll, 69 percent of Americans say they see Russia as a threat. A Rasmussen Report poll indicated that “52 percent support U.S. diplomatic action against Russia over Crimea.”

Helping to drive American Russophobia is the implacable logic exemplified by Bill O’Reilly of “The Factor,” yet another node in the network mentioned. At the suggestion that there are similarities between Russian and American military bellicosity, the TV host foams at the mouth. Fulmination is followed not by argument, but by a form of ad hominem or psychologizing.

It is absolutely verboten on this popular and powerful show to compare Russia’s “excursion” into Ukraine to America’s naturally illicit and illegal occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. In defense of their reflexive rejection of the reasonable, if inaccurate, comparison – for decades the U.S. has been far more aggressive than Russia in its forays abroad – Bill and his gang “argued” (on March 3) as follows:

President Vladimir Putin is a thug. That’s why his actions can’t be contrasted with the actions of “a good country” like the U.S. By “logical” extension, George Bush and Barack Obama are never to be fingered as thugs.

Why, Billy, some of you will inquire? Is it because these thugs are American? Precisely.

Next, Bill O’Reilly’s mind-reading gifts were galvanized to negate the juxtaposition of the actions on the ground of the Russian and American governments. Putin, it would appear, seeks the recrudescence of the Russian empire. On the other hand, the U.S., with a military presence in 148 countries and 900 bases worldwide, has neither sought nor achieved empire status.

Why, Billy, some of you will ask? Is it because the U.S. is a good country? You got it!

Be it in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Japan, Bahrain, Djibouti, South Korea, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Kuwait – even Aruba, Iceland, Indonesia, Kenya, Norway and Peru – wherever it plants its military boot, a “good country” is never an empire, only a force for good.

Me, O’Reilly would dismiss as “anti-American.” But what of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger? While Kissinger has condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea, he excoriated “the demonization of Vladimir Putin.” This antipathy “is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” “The United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington,” wrote the statesman in the Washington Post.

Is Henry Kissinger anti-American or simply smarter than some Americans?

At least Secretary of State John Kerry hung on to his sense of humor. “Unless you are the United States of America, you just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests,” Kerry lectured the congenitally incurious David Gregory, of “Meet the Press.”

I ad-libbed. Except for the first eight words in quotation marks, Secretary Kerry did indeed say the foregoing. Given America’s military record, the missing words are implied.

The O’Reilly school of “thought” could – and does – counteract that Crimea’s vote to join Russia was tainted by fraud. This is certainly possible. Nevertheless, it is none of our business. Americans have their own tyrants to dethrone.

We’re supposed to be the freest people in the world, aren’t we? Is this claim not the moral basis for America’s we-know-best global meddling? But if we Americans are the freest people in the world, where’s our right to a referendum on, say, that “little” legislative “blip” called Obamacare? And if we’re so bleeding free, where’s our right to secede from D.C.?

[followbutton username=’IlanaMercer’ count=’true’ lang=’en’ theme=’light’]

Like Ilana Mercer’s Facebook page

Blade runner killing and the media blackout

by Ilana Mercer

After decades of indifference from America’s infotainment industry, imagine my surprise to hear TV anchors like Megyn Kelly of Fox News allude to the killing fields of South Africa.

South Africa should be in the news every day. It isn’t. Scant few among the West’s Yellow Press care to chronicle the country’s favorite blood sport: murder. The Afrikaners, in particular – arguably that country’s founding people – are being killed off at genocidal rates with nary a murmur from the media – although the same crowd is on the scene to report on Nelson Mandela’s every wheelchair-bound move.

According to Genocide Watch, South Africa under the African National Congress is now at stage 5 of the 8 stages of genocide. However, were it not for a little-known, heroic Internet journalist (cited in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”), few would know who the victims of this racial onslaught are and how they die.

Soon jurist Alan Dershowitz was chiming in about “how dangerous” life in South Africa was. Dershowitz even denigrated the country’s judiciary as “a very politically correct judiciary,” “filled with people from the ANC and supporters of the ANC”; most certainly “not one of the finer judiciaries in the world.”

A subject that had been submerged since 1994 – the ramshackle state of post-apartheid South Africa – was suddenly being raised, if in veiled terms.

The reason for the heightened awareness among the criminally comatose is Blade Runner Oscar Pistorius’ run-in with the law. The Olympian amputee killed his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, in what he contends was a case of mistaken identity. This being South Africa, the crime scene in suburban Pretoria is rumored to have been contaminated by the new and notorious South African Police Services. And the prosecutor has overreached, charging Pistorius, who has no priors, with premeditated murder.

The high-profile murder is PC and TV perfect for a left-liberal media, in South Africa and beyond, that wish to peddle the myth of “colorless” crime in South Africa. It is no such thing. In the aggregate, violence in the Rainbow Nation – more appropriately called the “Rambo Nation” – is unidirectional: black on black and black on white. Violence against women generally flows in the same direction. Considering, moreover, that the country now has one of the world’s highest murder rates and lowest conviction rates, a South Africa thug can safely pursue his vocation without fearing the consequences.

South African authorities, universities and think tanks no longer provide information about victimization patterns by race of victim and offender. Nevertheless, in the research for my book, I uncovered data according to which, at 76.6 percent of the population, blacks committed 76.4 percent of “intimate femicides” (defined as “the killing of a female person by an intimate partner”). And they committed 68.3 percent of “non-intimate femicides”: “the killing of a woman by someone other than an intimate partner.”

Whites have proven woefully inadequate to the task of filling their pro-rata crime quotas (page 38). At less than 9 percent of the population and dwindling, the corresponding numbers for white South Africans were 3.9 and 2.6 percent, respectively.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

With respect to incarceration rates, whites “underperformed” again. According to the South African Department of Correctional Services, 113,773 criminals had been sentenced as of June 2008, of whom only 2,190 were white. Whites make up only 1.9 percent of the number of sentenced criminals.

Weighing in with 90,013 sentenced individuals – approximately 79.1 percent of the total number of criminals sentenced – blacks more than filled their per-population crime allotment.

This high-profile celebrity case involves a class of people – wealthy white South Africans – whose role in the country’s violent crime is statistically insignificant. Trust a hypocritical media to turn a statistical outlier, an anomaly, into a perfect foil for the continued blackout on the color of crime in South Africa.

The incontinent gushing over Pistorius has given way to condemnation. Paranoid about security is how the athlete’s “obligingly stupid” journo friends are now labeling him. They had only ever jetted in from low-crime or no-crime countries for an interview.

More at home among the international glitterati, Oscar Leonard Carl Pistorius is no Afrikaner “everyman,” says activist Dan Roodt, who is such a man. Even so – and for all his privilege – Pistorius knows the rapacity and invincibility of the criminal class in his country. Like every other Afrikaner, he knew in his gut what infiltrating gangs would do to a legless Boer. He had seen the mangled images.

Perhaps Pistorius will speak up.