Tag: Ilana Mercer

Little America at the tip of Africa

In this interview, two South African authors have a conversation about important issues affecting the country, the USA and society generally. They both grew up in and around Johannesburg and, thanks to the internet, discovered each other’s work a few years ago. Ilana Mercer lives in Washington State, in the north-western corner of America.

ILANA MERCER: There’s an elephant in the courtroom in which Oscar Pistorius is being tried for the murder of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. It is the unidirectional, black-on-black and black-on-white violent crime in South Africa. The fear of being butchered was likely behind the blade runner’s irrational, irresponsible actions. I had hoped that Pistorius would speak up. 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. The world is praising the proceedings in that court. However, “making sport of a caged animal that has confessed” is how a South African reader described this courtroom Colosseum. What do you think?

DAN ROODT: I largely agree with that. One of the columnists on our Praag.org site described the trial as a “canned hunt and a legal travesty.” Most people watching it probably do not know that only 8 percent of murder cases in South Africa result in a conviction, so killers have a 92 percent chance of literally getting away with murder! South Africa is both the murder and especially the rape capital of the world. Usually the statistics are massaged in such a way that only murder proper, called “first-degree murder” in the United States, is included in the absolute number of murders. But if one also counts other homicides with a lesser culpability, we are the world champions, even above India’s 43,000 homicides. But, of course, India has over 1 billion people, whereas we have just over 50 million. Even for first-degree murder, we have more of those per year (16,000) than the U.S. (14,000), which has six times our population.

Regarding the court procedures, Pistorius is spending a lot of money on his legal team, and the state is using an experienced Afrikaner prosecutor, Gerrie Nel. However, there has been large-scale affirmative action applied to the appointment of judges, so that many of them lack the knowledge of the law and the experience to do their job properly. In many cases, black offenders, especially, get off very lightly and in practice do not serve more than 10 years for first-degree murder.

The government is also applying pressure on lawyers to apply affirmative action in their own ranks as most of the top-level senior lawyers, or advocates, as we call them, are still white. They are preferred by the big-spending corporate clients in civil cases, especially. A lawyer friend of mine recently told me of one tedious corporate court case in Pretoria that has lasted 10 years and consumed $5 million in legal fees, also swallowing up her whole life. Ironically, even the president, Jacob Zuma – who has had more than 500 charges of corruption against him and was also accused of rape in December 2005 – used white Afrikaner lawyers to get him off, using their technical knowledge of the law and court procedures.

There is also rampant corruption in the criminal justice system, with policemen and petty court officials being bribed to make documents and evidence disappear, so the kind of televised court-room soap opera of the Pistorius trial is not at all representative of the vicissitudes of the average trial.

Unlike in the U.S., South Africa does not collect crime statistics broken down by race anymore, but we know that the vast majority of prison inmates serving time for violent crime are black. White offenders – which include white-collar crimes like fraud or insider trading – only constitute 1.8 percent of the prison population, while whites make up under 10 percent of the total population. A recent reliable survey showed that whites are disproportionately victims of house robberies, constituting about 50 percent of the victims, while the perpetrators are almost invariably black.

The image of South African blacks disseminated by the global media is of a population of kindhearted, forgiving people like Mandela, whereas the reality demonstrates something entirely different. There is something inexplicably sadistic about murders and assaults by black perpetrators on their white victims in South Africa, which often include lengthy and dehumanizing torture sessions, mutilation of bodies, sexual violence, and so on. Often the victims are children, including toddlers and babies. Every week we read about farm murders in the press where the victims are normally elderly white farmers, regularly ambushed on a Sunday morning when they return from church attendance.

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

MERCER: The South African Constitution, naturally, sanctions the prosecution of individuals based on the things they say. Conversely, Americans are supposed to enjoy a constitutional right to speak freely. The freedom gap is, however, narrowing. The establishment – politicians, journalists, jurists, educators and academics; “conservatives” as much as liberals – trip over one another in a collectivist, concerted effort to ruin an “offender.” The latest individual to be crucified for committing America’s original sin – harboring impure racial thoughts – is Donald Sterling. You’ve written that, while “few people in the U.S. have had any direct experience of racism, they nevertheless discern racism in other people’s body language, in their use of euphemisms or in being patronized by others.” Explain how this “metaphysical racism” now works as an “engine of history.”

ROODT: Unfortunately, ever since the 1960s, South Africa has been influenced by America in a very bad way. Instead of looking to the U.S. for lessons in self-reliance, the right to self-defense, or how to finance start-up tech companies, we have simply imported your liberal, pathological political correctness. That includes the sensitivity around language and terms with a racial connotation. I cannot begin to tell you how many words there are in South Africa to describe people of various races including, of course, pejorative terms. I seem to recall that my generation was very sensitive to using some of those words, and there was a famous case in 1978 when the old government’s censors banned a satirical novel entitled “Magersfontein o Magersfontein!” for containing a piece of dialogue in which the word “kaffir” was used in an ironic way. This is our equivalent to what you call the “N-word” in the U.S. In print these days, most people here also refer to the “K-word,” as there is just such a taboo against using it. However, if you go to any school playground or university campus in South Africa, young whites are using it as a way of rebelling against the system. How long this will last, I do not know, because the government and mainstream, politically correct society are clamping down on it and even giving people suspended prison sentences for a first offense after being found guilty of using the “K-word.”

So in South Africa you can torture an elderly white lady and maybe get away with it, but you will be prosecuted for speech crime for using racial epithets. I would not be surprised if all telephone conversations will be monitored, NSA-style, at some point in the future to ensnare those who use so-called racist language.

When it comes to “metaphysical racism,” that is at a far more subtle level. Someone who first alerted me to this was the documentary filmmaker Craig Bodeker from Denver, Colorado, with his piece “A Conversation About Race.” Many people in the film say that “racism is everywhere,” surrounding us like sin or some invisible element. Also, in “A Conversation About Race,” I learned that some American blacks think that a compliment from a white could be a sign of racism. So either an insult or a compliment could be construed as racism.

In South Africa, some of the liberal commentators such as Steven Friedman who writes in the Johannesburg Business Day claim that blacks were damaged by apartheid and therefore cannot be expected to perform at the same level as whites. In the U.S., this claim is made about slavery, that the insidious effects of slavery are still present, which would explain the academic achievement gap, but also differences in wealth and income. Colonialism also comes into it, as far as other African countries are concerned. The fact that Africa has remained underdeveloped for so long is almost always blamed on colonialism, notwithstanding that it was colonialism that had introduced Africa to the wheel and to writing, not to forget science and technology!

Whereas about a decade ago, the British magazine The Economist had described Africa as “the hopeless continent,” it now sees Africa as a fast-growing continent, not very different from countries like China, Hong Kong or South Korea. Even Goldman Sachs thinks that Africa will soon be a developed continent competing on an even keel with Europe, North America or Asia.

The flipside of the new optimism about Africa, including South Africa, is that every failure or missed growth target is somehow backwardly rationalized in terms of racism, colonialism and apartheid. In short, “metaphysical racism.” So even when it comes to technology, the economy and education, there is always a cloud of racism somewhere that the developed world has to address by offering aid money or some form of expiatory confession from Western leaders.

I always wonder: If Africa is now standing on its own two feet and growing so fast, why do so many countries still need development aid? Why do South African blacks still need affirmative action, including racial quotas in sports?

ILANA MERCER: The dominant-party state that is South Africa is steeped not in an African creed but in an American one. One of your most astute observations has been that post-apartheid South Africa is very much a creature of the Anglosphere. In the U.S., centrally planned and enforced multiculturalism is twinned with open borders for Third World peoples. How has South Africa fallen in line?

DAN ROODT: Many people see South Africa as an experiment in multiculturalism and open borders. Almost robotically, we’ve adopted most of the American liberal precepts in a very naïve, knee-jerk fashion. Some people are even urging that we abolish borders completely, to allow any of the billion Africans north of our country to come and settle in South Africa, much like your government is doing vis-à-vis Central American dependents. However, our experience of the massive illegal immigration we have had since 1994 is that it increases intolerance, especially among the poor and the unemployed. Locals regularly kill foreigners, and we have had so-called xenophobic riots.

In some towns close to the border, the foreign population is about 80 percent. Foreigners have access to public health-care facilities, so many are “obstetrical tourists” who come here to have babies – “anchor babies,” as you call them in the U.S. Generally speaking, state hospitals are getting worse and worse, also as a result of being overburdened with foreign Africans.

Recently, there was a court decision that foreign children that have been orphaned or separated from their parents, for example in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, also qualify for free public education in South Africa. After Lawyers for Human Rights had sued for the privilege, the government did not oppose their petition to the court.

Open borders will lead to even more ethnic strife, and we may even import some of Africa’s civil wars as the belligerents pursue their combat in South Africa. In your country, it’s gang warfare.

MERCER: Under the Afrikaners, South Africa was a European-style nation-state – Christian and biracial, in the main. Under Mandela’s African National Congress, it has adopted multiculturalism, which subsumes an “American radicalism that aims at abolishing the nation-state and replacing it with a kind of global corporatism and welfarism,” to quote your work. South Africa is now an “Afro-Saxon” nation. Explain, please.

ROODT: Yes, I think those remarks of mine are borne out by what is happening in Europe right now. There is some kind of revival of the Western spirit going on in places like France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Austria and Hungary. It is something of a truism that Afrikaner nationalism in the 20th century was based on European-style ethnic nationalism. If you look at it more objectively and free of the moral hysteria and distorted accounts, apartheid or separate development was an attempt to impart European-style ethnic nationalism to South Africa’s African tribes. To some extent, it worked, and it still has an effect to this day. For example, there has been a resurgence of Zulu nationalism in South Africa, and to some extent the ANC under Jacob Zuma has become a vehicle for Zulu aspirations and advancement. With the difference that it is no longer limited to the old homeland of Kwazulu. The whole of South Africa has now become “one big Bantustan,” as the liberal commentator R.W. Johnson has characterized it.

But in other respects, South Africa has become a colony of the USA, culturally speaking. Blacks identify with African-American culture. You hear American rap music wafting from their cars, and they have adopted the same kind of victim’s discourse that you find in the USA. There is actually a Kenyan professor who teaches in the USA., as far as I know, Ali Mazrui, who coined the term, “Afro-Saxon” for the English-speaking blacks in Africa, the USA, the Caribbean, in Britain, and so on. In fact, they outnumber the original English-speaking population of England! The black elite in South Africa identifies with this global Afro-Saxon culture, and they see themselves as being an important part of it, using South Africa’s wealth and developed infrastructure to advance the Afro-Saxon cause.

Talking about the welfare state, one of the worst fears of the old apartheid theorists was that ultimately the productive, developed part of the economy would have to subsidize the unproductive, impoverished, undeveloped part, dragging both down into an equally distributed poverty. This is more or less what is happening in South Africa now as we have a welfare state for 50 million people, supported by only 2 million real taxpayers. The funny thing is that multiculturalism and affirmative action actually disguise this process completely, so that you can no longer really tell who the producers are and who the consumers of wealth are.

In the same way, knowledge and expertise also end up being distributed in such a way that you no longer know who really has it: Is it the person who does the job, or his secretary or assistant or deputy or whoever? The other day I heard that an ex-taxi driver was appointed to a top job in our central bank, but he is barely able to write an email and knows nothing about banking. Yet he has some outside white mentor or adviser who actually helps him do his job and is also his business associate. So everybody tries to exploit this made-in-America spoils system.

Unfortunately, the USA seems to be in imperial mode, and so it wants to export its multicultural model everywhere, including to Europe where there are still real nation-states in which people speak the same language, have a common history and identity and have not been transformed by immigration. You only have to come to South Africa to see the American model in its most extreme form, where race and political correctness dominate everything.

When it comes to issues of race and ethnicity, we have also imported the sensitivity around language and ideas that pertain in the USA. Once I actually quoted a black columnist complaining about the low scores in math recorded in black schools in Soweto. The next thing I was denounced as a racist. Even if you just try to defend your language and culture, or the right of free association, that is also seen as racist. Too much criticism of government corruption or affirmative action is likewise deemed racist.

Welcome to Little America at the tip of Africa.

On the war path with Samantha Power

Trust Republicans to give battle over the wrong broad and for the wrong reasons.

Political posturing aside, Susan Rice, whom Barack Obama has appointed to be his national security adviser – despite or perhaps because of her role in developing the administration’s Benghazi fable – is likely less dangerous than Samantha Power, who will be sent to the United Nations in Rice’s place.

Rice, you’ll recall, was shoved out onto the Sunday shows – five days following the Sept. 11 attack on the mission in Libya last year – to tell tall tales about the genesis of that attack, and to saddle the blame for U.S. fatalities there on an anti-Islam filmmaker. (The man still languishes in jail.)

Formerly at the National Security Council, and acting as senior White House security adviser at the time, Power knows a thing or two about the Benghazi pickle. More to the point: In cahoots with Rice and Hillary Clinton – the woman who cracked the whip at Foggy Bottom – Power was responsible for Obama’s war on Libya, having “developed” a doctrine every bit as intellectually and morally bankrupt as the Bush Doctrine (which advocated waging war to ostensibly prevent it).

Writing in The Nation, a magazine of the ultra-left, Tom Hayden has illustrated just how dangerous is Power’s “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. A former California state senator, Hayden is also a ’60s flower-power peacenik, whose progressive pedigree can be traced back to Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Jane Fonda.

According to Hayden, Power is an “Irish internationalist”; a “humanitarian hawk” who “see[s] war as an instrument for achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” She “advocates American and NATO military intervention in humanitarian crises.” As she sees it, “The United States must … be prepared to risk the lives of its soldiers to stop the threat of genocide.”

Hip to Power’s hypocrisy, Hayden points out that “like U2′s Bono, another Irish human rights activist,” she “has been less preoccupied by the human rights abuses inflicted by the British during the 30-year war in the northern part of her own country.” Indeed, like her neoconservative philosophical clones, Power considers herself a redeemer of mankind – but not, mind you, of her own kind.

Power has still to scale the Senate Foreign Relations committee for confirmation. My guess is that the leggy fanatic will clear the hurdle by offering as confirmation quid pro quo a softer stance on, say, Israel. And voila, onward to Syria.

By far the more dangerous of the two Obama Amazons is Samantha Power. Susan Rice, in a sense, has been neutralized by scandal; she’s under scrutiny. And if you’re wondering what a U.S. ambassador at the U.N. could possibly do by way of taking the country to war, think of John Negroponte. He pushed for the Security Council resolution “that President Bush eventually cited in going to war in Iraq.”

If they play rough, Republicans will lap up the ladies’ foreign-policy antics, starting with the senior Republican senator from Arizona. John McCain recently crossed enemy lines to cavort with Syrian rebels, the type of chaps who lunch on enemy lungs. He, Lindsey Graham (another senior Republican senator) and their colleagues can’t wait to supply the noble savages of the world with rations.

The only time Republicans will shake fists and point fingers is over a war delayed, one that isn’t led by the U.S., or a war waged without the necessary conviction (read collateral damage).

In all, white progressives like Power derive an erotic rush from swooping down to save The Unknown Other, whether he likes it or not. The coolest place from which to keep this hot thrill going is the global geopolitical scene.

To expect someone like Power to care about her homies first is a lot like expecting Angelina Jolie to adopt a poor white baby (an Afrikaner living in a shantytown , for example). How unglamorous! There’s no chic value in that. In Jolie’s defense, it’s her money. It’s hers to do with as she pleases. In a public servant, however, Power’s proclivities amount to treason.

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

Edmund Burke certainly thought so. These sellouts of American interests would do well to ponder Burke’s wisdom:

“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.”

Also read Ilana’s blog.

Obama’s the sinner; Holder his ‘sin eater’

Big media have been willing, even eager, to pass the buck for Barack for the past five years. But the Fourth Estate rose as one on its proverbial hind legs when the president made the mistake of going after their own: members of the media.

For doing their jobs, Associated Press journalists were spied on and had their telephone records and other personal information seized by the head of Barack Obama’s Justice Department, Attorney General Eric Holder. For doing his job, Fox News Channel’s James Rosen was framed by the same department for the crime of conspiracy to leak classified materials.

IRS bloodhounds Douglas Shulman and Steven Miller, likely in charge of hounding conservative organizations unsympathetic to Obama, had practically taken up residence at the Big Dog’s House. Yet, curiously, conservatives have largely avoided linking Barack Hussein Obama to this and to the other scandals reverberating throughout his administration.

Republicans have eddied around the issue, merely describing the president’s stance with respect to the Rosen, AP, Benghazi and the Internal Revenue Service affairs as “disconnected,” “lacking focus.” An “absentee presidency,” surmised the conservative bloggers at Powrline. “The Spectator President,” pronounced Patrick Buchanan. Judge Andrew Napolitano’s brief was equally narrow. He avoided so much as hinting that Holder had likely been carrying out the wishes of his bosom buddy.

Although it’s hard to know what to make of it here, Republican rigor mortis is par for the course. Fortunately, for every mealymouthed Eric Cantor—the House majority leader is responsible for the “disconnected” description—there are progressives like Salon’s Joan Walsh, who, spittle flying, are tying the president to the infractions liberals consider unforgivable. “If you want to know how Obama feels about the AP and Rosen controversies,” reasoned Walsh, “compare his reactions to the three different ‘scandals’ the GOP has been working overtime to conflate … .”

“On Benghazi, Obama has been uncharacteristically defiant,” noted Walsh. He defended the women involved and accused the GOP of staging a “sideshow.” “By contrast, he quickly called the IRS targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny ‘outrageous’ and ‘unacceptable.'” “On the AP and Rosen controversies” the president equivocated. He tried “to have it both ways,” observed Walsh.

To the news that the president’s former senior legal advisor (Eric Holder), as The Huffington Post reported, “personally signed off on the warrant that allowed the Justice Department to search Rosen’s personal email,” Obama has responded by holding Holder still closer to him—he praised the AG and charged him with probing his own malfeasance.

Concludes Ms. Walsh: “the DOJ’s media probes reflect administration policy.”

Obama’s feeble response to “the outcry over the AP and Fox scandals” Jonathan Turley has also taken as evidence “that these are Obama’s sins.” Writing in USA Today, professor Turley, a civil libertarian who is “neither a Republican nor conservative,” smarted over what he termed “the greatest attack on the free press in decades.” Turley goes well beyond other liberals in fingering Holder for supervising a “comprehensive erosion” of civil liberties, privacy rights, and press freedoms. Deftly drawn deductions have enabled this cool brain to elegantly connect the philosophical dots between The Boss and his underling’s pervasive and persistent assaults on due process.

“Holder is what we call a ‘sin eater’ inside the Beltway — high-ranking associates who shield presidents from responsibility for their actions,” posits the professor.

“Richard Nixon had H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Ronald Reagan had Oliver North and Robert ‘Bud’ McFarlane. George W. Bush had the ultimate sin eater: Dick Cheney, who seemed to have an insatiable appetite for sins to eat.”

Alas, having reasoned that, “feigned ignorance” notwithstanding, Obama is the original sinner, and Holder his “sin eater,” Prof. Turley stopped short of calling for the impeachment of the president for his many “mortal sins.”

From the expansion of surveillance-state USA, to the leveling of Libya, to forcing individual Americans to purchase healthcare and religious organizations to fund birth control; to the crafting of a Kill List featuring his chosen targets for extrajudicial elimination, to running guns to Mexico’s goons, while gunning for America’s guns—Barack Hussein Obama’s philosophical fingerprints are all over his administration.

While pitting a favored voting bloc against the rest of us, Obama told militant Latinos: “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”

The link between President Obama and the policies his minions have pursued seems patent enough. Obama is the philosophical felon, the fulcrum on which everything pivots.

Also visit Ilana’s blog.

Obama has placed the US press under surveillance

Ilana Mercer

by Ilana Mercer

No wonder the language being deployed to describe the forlorn Associated Press reporters is something redolent of a jilted lover.

The AP has been violated by its beloved Barack Obama and his gang-bangers. The news agency has gone from sexting, so to speak, with the president, to being snooped on by him.

Politico offered readers an endearingly intimate glimpse, “Inside the AP,” where the flaccid folks were overcome by feelings of “fear” and “determination.” Nevertheless, they had not lost their resolve and were proceeding with “heads-down determination.”

What made The Beloved and his dream team turn to rough play?

According to the (idiomatic) mainstream, Obama’s Justice Department had been monitoring AP phone lines in D.C., in the Hartford and New York bureaus, and in Congress. Subpoenaed too were the phone logs, “credit card receipts, airplane records and other digital information” belonging to individual AP editors and reporters. All this in violation of Fourth Amendment protections; without presenting a judge with evidence of probable cause and absent a search warrant (all SOP, or standard operating procedure, at the Transportation Security Administration).

The Justice Department in the person of Attorney General Eric Holder has claimed, comically, to have been looking to plug a “very, very, very, serious leak.” Perhaps “the most serious” since the AG started his prosecutorial career in 1976.

A pesky detail has eluded all those invincibly stupid special interests who’re piping up for the privacy of the press, as opposed to fighting for the privacy of all Americans.

Have the various tele-lawyers, the director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and protesting members of the House Judiciary Committee forgotten the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, whose provisions were extended until Dec. 31, 2017, by the people’s representatives?

There is nothing new about warrantless wiretapping – other than that the American people haven’t been particularly exercised about them. They’ve trusted Uncle Sam to go about this activity judiciously.

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

Peeping Sam had promised, after all, that covert surveillance would never be executed against “United States persons.” Were a “United States person” to fall under suspicion, he or she would not be subjected to surveillance without “judicial and congressional oversight,” puled the same perverts.

It’s not as if the National Security Agency (NSA) under George W. Bush was not accused of bypassing the courts to spy on the 43rd president’s many critics. It was! Sideshow “O,” however, has done Bush one better. Obama is using the FISA provisions against “friendlies.”

George Bush, you’ll recall (or maybe not), also authorized the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP). Subsumed within the PSP are activities whose scope has yet to be disclosed. Attorney General Holder – at the behest of President Obama, no doubt – is expanding the remits of the Surveillance State, as did “W” before him.

The incontinent coverage of the AP outrage has a delusional quality. Contra those whose job it is to feign indignation on TV – America is not a free country. Media convulsions notwithstanding, the government is reading over your shoulder – has been doing so for some time. It can spy on Americans without breaking the law.

It is perfectly permissible for the state to monitor you, me or The Other Guy, without a “perfunctory nod to due process and legal restraint.” In other words, without a court order.

National Journal is agreed, writing that “the Obama administration technically broke no rules.” Companies that give up this information to the government have “immunity,” which has been “built into a 2008 revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”

Here’s the other rub: FISA permits surveillance sans court order, explains Wikipedia, for “the period of one year provided it is only for foreign intelligence.”

And provided the president has authorized the fishing expedition.

In my understanding of the impossibly complex and cancerous Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Obama has to have authorized the dragnet that was cast at the Associated Press.

Reflections On The Boston Bombers & Boyhood In America

Ilana Mercer
by Ilana Mercer
Whereas American media has shed mostly darkness on the “apparently” mysterious motivation behind the ruthless, savage, April 15 attack on the Boston Marathon—a Chechen leader offered some valuable insights about these homegrown terrorists:

[The] Tsarnaevs … were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of this evil in America.

The man makes a profound point. Here, and not in Chechnya, did the Tsarnaevs receive a liberal, lax, progressive education, emphasizing the wicked ways of the West and the righteousness of its “victims.” It is here in America that these invertebrates matured into aggrieved ignoramuses.

“If we Americans cannot even agree on what is right and wrong and moral and immoral, how do we stay together in one national family?,” prodded Patrick J. Buchanan, in a recent column.

“A common faith and moral code once held this country together. But if we no longer stand on the same moral ground, after we have made a conscious decision to become the most racially, ethnically, culturally diverse people on earth, what in the world holds us together? The Constitution, the Bill of Rights? How can they, when we bitterly disagree on what they say?”

As Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam discovered, reluctantly, diversity in fact immiserates. The greater the diversity in a county or country, the more distrustful and depressed are its inhabitants.

America’s practically pornographic rituals of public grief—what are they if not a neurotic symptom of this disconnect? A diverse and distrusting people, lacking in a shared national DNA, are thrust together by the crisis of the day. In the absence of any core value over which to unite, we Americans meet on the only common ground we share: the graveyard. We come together to bury or remember our dead. We unite to grieve over tragedy and misfortune that have befallen us for no other reason than that we exist in the same space in time.
As to America’s ingenious and inspired founding documents aforementioned: The vast majority of the people in this variegated land remain ignorant of them. Or, if familiar with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (or better still, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers)—they’ll have been taught contempt for their framers and the philosophy these magnificent men espoused. When he hears parents, pedagogues, politicians and media sycophants pound on about the country’s Founding Fathers as the archetypical pale, patriarchal oppressors—a young man quickly learns to reject his adopted country’s heritage and look elsewhere for roots.

Boys, especially, require strong, moral men in their lives—men who affirm their masculinity. American boys, however, are mired in an estrogen-infused, cloistered world where real men in authority are a threatened minority. The nation’s schools have been, for the most, drained of manliness. Almost to a man are they staffed by feminists (mostly bereft of the Y chromosome).

Newtown shooter Adam Lanza was a product of a freewheeling, fatherless household. The tele-experts have been mum about a mother who was weak and ineffectual. Nancy Lanza was filled with fear. She used a menacing gun collection to overcompensate for her parental inadequacies. A strong, caring male might have taught the troubled Lanza to handle firearms responsibly; might have helped diffuse the lad’s rage. A manifestly weak woman playing at make-believe manhood only added fuel to that fire.

Reflecting this warped reality are America’s revised history textbooks, which are short on heroic figures and long on “history from below.” Physicist Myron Pauli, a featured writer on BarelyABlog.com, recently recounted his surprise at learning from his daughter’s “history” book that “World War II was fought primarily by women, Navahos, Mexicans, blacks, and Japanese-Americans.” The next edition, presumably, will illuminate the “neglected” role of the homosexual, hermaphrodite, and transgendered community in winning that war.

Boyhood today means BB guns and “bang-bang you’re dead” are banned. Tykes have a choice: undergo anger management and anti-bullying instruction or be chemically neutered by way of ADHD meds. Concomitantly, although your kids (boys and girls) desperately need discipline, the rare classroom disciplinarian risks litigation (from you!).

And, as his real nature craves heroic tales about yesteryear’s warriors and explorers, a little boy is required to hack his way through a page-turner like “One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads.” The smashing success of politically incorrect books such as “The Dangerous Book for Boys” proves just how much little boys want to be boys again. The book reintroduced a new generation of youngsters to the joys of catapult-making, knot-tying, stone skimming, astronomy (concocting rocket fuel from saltpeter and sugar is not in the book, but is a lot of fun—or so my husband tells me). In short, more of the stuff of Boy Scouts, before the organization was hounded and hogtied by politicized girls and gays.

This very sexual activism is practiced by the president of the United States. No other than Barack Obama tinkled basketball player Jason Collins to congratulate him on stepping out as the first openly gay player in NBA history. Imagine Vladimir Putin or the president of Chechnya doing the same. Impossible!”

A huge step forward for our country” is how a hugely hyperbolic (and frightfully masculine) First Lady tweeted out about Collins’ “accomplishment.” Small mercies, Michelle Obama did not call the festive affair a giant leap for mankind.

In the unmanly (because so undignified) mosaic described so far, pride-of-place must be reserved for the American president. To a boy from a Muslim culture, America’s man-in-chief has to represent a mass of contradictions. This president and those before him lead the lavish and licentious lifestyle of an emperor. This as they bomb and obliterate other people from afar. Hardly honorable, much less manly.

©2013 By ILANA MERCER

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.

Self-segregation trumps imposed multiculturalism

Ilana Mercer

Ilana Mercer on multiculturalism, political correctness, and more

FLORIDA, January 28, 2013 — Ilana Mercer is a rarity.

Originality is rare in punditry these days. Every time a new narrative-of-the-day arrives, we take refuge in groupthink rather than thinking for ourselves. Not Mercer.

Originally from South Africa, she moved to Israel after authorities pressured her anti-apartheid father. Today, Mercer is one of America’s leading paleolibertarian voices. She not only has a prominent column for World Net Daily, but is the author of Into The Cannibal’s Pot, a book about what has happened to her home country over the years.

Mercer shares her views about topics ranging from political polarization to race relations.
****
Joseph F. Cotto: This seems like one of the most polarized eras in American politics. Why do you think that our country’s political atmosphere has become so divisive?

Ilana Mercer: I think you are correct in your assessment regarding the unparalleled polarization of American society. Have you noticed how commentators on both sides of received political wisdom attempt to diminish the fact you articulate by referring to America’s fractious history? Nevertheless, this is a complex issue that is hard to answer briefly. I’ll try. In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” economist Milton Friedman underscores this important point: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”

Underway today in the USA is a monumental clash between individualism and collectivism; between the forces of reason and reality, against force and coercion. The “philosophical” differences between the Republikeynesians, on the one hand, and the Democrats, on the other, are insignificant. The first believe individual rights should be carefully calibrated by central planners; the latter believe these natural rights can be overridden.

There is also a cultural dimension to these irreparable divisions. We are today, thanks to social engineering, a deracinated and divided society. We are no longer what John Jay termed “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” There can be no unity without community. The glue of togetherness is gone, replaced by a flimsy, fluid, and thoroughly fake unity peddled by politicians. “Ideas” they call it. On the one day, it’s a crusade for democracy; on the next, it’s a war against racism.

Cotto: From foreign terrorism to domestic riots, we live in an increasingly challenging world. In order to face it, America must have a sufficient national security policy. What would you say that this should entail?

Mercer: It depends on your definition of “a sufficient national security policy.” If it means protecting borders and people not our own—which is how both Republicans and Democrats conceive of “national security—”then, no, we disagree on what is a “sufficient national security policy.” US foreign policy operates upon the premise that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching and controlling all corners of the world. I’ve opposed this foreign policy folly as long as I’ve been writing. (And in particular, in Jan. 16, 2004, I pointed out that, “Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin.”)

Republicans profess to understand why the Welfare State cannot bring prosperity. Why don’t they get that the Warfare State, which operates on the same principles and by the same principals, cannot bring security? Remember, the military, the ostensible vehicle for national security, is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government.

The quest for ultimate security has given us Police State USA, the TSA, and wars that have bankrupted us. Bankruptcy is inimical to national security. We won’t be too secure if China quits funding the federal behemoth. Or if the Moody’s credit-rating agency downgrades U.S. Treasuries to junk bond status, befitting the banana republic we are becoming.

A rational, constitutional “national security,” guided by the principles of limited government, would involve a defense of America’s borders alone, a well-armed citizenry, strong secessionist, states’-rights movements, and the end to an immigration policy that has turned our country into a mass of hostile, competing factions.

Cotto: Multiculturalism is spreading rapidly across the Western world. This has led not only to cultural barriers, but tremendous religious and ethnic conflicts. What are your views on the subject?

Mercer: Multiculturalism as practiced in the West amounts to top-down, centrally enforced and managed integration. Show me a historical precedent where forced integration has worked. As it works across the Anglo-American and European spheres, one group (the founding, historical majority) is forced by self-anointed and elected elites, on pain of public and professional ostracism, to submerge its history, heroes, customs, culture, language, and pander to militant minorities, who’ve been acculturated by the same elites in identity-politics warfare.

As a libertarian, I believe that the right to include or exclude; associate with or dissociate from, is inherent in the right of private property. Private property is a civilizing institution. How better to keep the peace than to respect the right of free private-property owners to keep their distance (or not)—to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will? This foundation of civil society is being dismantled for the sake of militant multiculturalism and policed pluralism

Cotto: Political correctness has brought many changes to American public discourse. How do you regard its legacy?

Mercer: As I write in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” “PC is the law of rule — mob rule — as opposed to the rule of law. Political correctness is tyranny euphemized. In fiction, the Orwellian Ministry of Truth is a reified entity. In reality, there isn’t one concrete ministry that decides how the nation thinks — there are many such entities. America’s many Ministries of Truth include the education system, most churches, the self-anointed ‘intellectuals,’ the ruling duopoly and their attendant TV bobbleheads. They issue countless edicts. This ‘dark art of rule’ demands obedience.

“Choose to disobey, and you risk public shame, libel, and loss of livelihood. Sometimes The Ministries of Truth will lunge for your property in the form of a law suit. Canada’s Ministries have a special Kangaroo Court in which they judge Un-PC speech (mainly), and from which traditional legal defenses have been barred. Examples of such expunged defenses: an appeal to truth and the lack of intent to harm. This self-inflicted tyranny, so typical of Western societies, plays a role in collapsing our societies.”
Cotto: Much to our country’s detriment, race relations appear to have soured during recent years. Some might say that this is rooted in generational poverty, while others would blame an increasing number of culture clashes. What is your take on this dilemma?

Mercer: I would probably dispute the thing you finesse or define as “race relations.” There are presumably many good relationships between fair-minded individuals—black, white, brown, etc. I have those. I am sure you do too. But, as for “race relations” in the collective sense, these consist in whites, as a group, accepting that all blacks have an eternal claim against them—for no other reason than that they are white. For ever after, whites have accepted that they are destined to be roped into the Sisyphean struggle to appease the unappeasable. Or so African Americans repeatedly tell them. White liberals, the vast majority of Obama’s base, lap up the libel of a racist America. The same curvature of the spine afflicts the “conservative” priesthood. Sane individuals reject this Mark of Cain; as they should a false accusation of hate they don’t harbor; hate The Other harbors.

Numbers from The Bureau of Justice Statistics confirm that white-on-black hate crimes are practically (and certainly statistically) non-existent. These are manufactured myths. Young, white, and poor: Now this is the group that is more likely than any other age group to be well represented among the reported victims of hate crimes. A significantly higher percentage of victims of violent racial hatred say their attackers were black.” “Nine out of 10 of them identify their race as the reason blacks targeted them.” Now tell me who’s doing the hating?

Originally published by the Washington Times Communities

Pimping the culture

by Ilana Mercer

The marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art or pop culture – it does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences acted upon by consumers. That snapshot, in 2013, tells us that when it comes to “Bread and Circuses,” Rome and its provinces wallow in the same lowbrow popular culture.

Incidentally, to judge the quality of a cultural product is not to begrudge the preferences of the people who purchase it. It is simply to apply timeless, objective standards in assessing these products.

In its salient features, the Commander In Chief’s Ball resembles the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. There, some of the most pretentious, worthless people in the country – in politics, journalism and entertainment – convene to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the people, whether the latter know it or not.

By and large, when it comes to entertainment, the people and the elites are on the same empty page – most of the musicians whose products they patronize, or with whom they fraternize, can’t read music, much less play it.

“Grammy and Academy Award winner” Jennifer Hudson, to whose primal screams the president and first lady attempted to dance, doesn’t sing; she screams. Voice coaches once considered the Hudson brand of “vocal wobble” a deficiency in technique and talent. But then, “Why be a musician, when you can be a success?” Such cacophony currently plays to full houses. It is to their credit that the First Couple smoothed the noise over with some smooth moves.

“We all know Beyoncé can sing,” came the response from inaugural organizers to the rumors that the singing sensation lip-synched to “The Star Spangled Banner.” Beyoncé is another performer who distinguishes herself with an obscene bump-and-grind routine and a din of discordant, jarring yelps.

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

We know not definitively whether Beyoncé moved her mouth to a prerecorded version of the national anthem, but much like babies banging on a play-play piano, the nation is preoccupied with the matter.

We do know this: As a studio musician close to home has explained to me, the T&A line-up at the Inaugural and Commander In Chief’s Balls would be reduced to embarrassing grunts, out-of-tune yelling and bedroom whispers, if not for the magic of Auto-Tune, which is the “holy grail of recording.” Auto-Tune “corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments, in real time, without distortion or artifacts.”

Auto-Tune technology is what makes a cast of vain ventriloquists like Katy Perry and Glee what it is.

More sounds that curdled the air were those of Alicia Keys pounding on the piano keys.

“Obama’s on Fire. Obama’s on Fire,” the smirking Ms. Keys chanted tunelessly over and over again. The tradition of a praise singer or a tribal poet laureate still flourishes in Africa. But the tribal poet, unlike Keys, is a splendid performing artist. I know. I’ve seen him in my native South Africa convey the glory of the African savanna – even bring to life moribund leaders – with mesmerizing words and movement.

To sing well, you need a finely tuned instrument and musicality. An example of such an instrument is Carly Simon’s voice in this live performance of “That’s The Way I Always Heard It Should Be – 1972.” Hers is an evocative and nuanced voice. As to the lyrics, you’d have to be both literate and complex to write as evocatively.

To counter the assault on the ears popularized even further by the current White House, do lend an ear to the opera group “Seven,” singing the National Anthem at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., Aug. 30, 2012.

However, the National Anthem – the words to which were written in the aftermath of the Battle against the British, at Fort McHenry, Sept. 14, 1814 – is not much of an antidote to the ugliness of the Inaugural soiree.

So here are the sounds of “Seven” singing “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee,” set to Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” Enjoy! (This rendition has garnered only 173 YouTube views.)

I’d rather listen to the dodecaphony of 12-tone music than sit through the guttural battle cries emitted by today’s performers.

The fiscal cliff: a lemming’s lunacy

Since the chicken-little metaphor is hackneyed, let us use the alleged lunacy of the lemming as a metaphor for the prattle that rises from the cattle that is America’s intelligentsia, in general, and on the fiscal cliff, in particular. “Alleged lunacy” because the idea that the adorable fury critter plunges periodically to its death, en masse, is a figment of another intellectual powerhouse: the think tank known as the Walt Disney Company.

From the late-night talk show hosts and their guests, to the daytime cable news comedians and their hangers-on: All are discussing the country’s impending and “horrifying” collective tumble down the thing called the “fiscal cliff.”

As the fiscal-cliff chant goes, the country is headed for an economic precipice due to a bundle of laws that will take effect at the bewitching hour of midnight, December 31, 2012. Only a compromise between our factioned overlords in DC, who enacted the law in the first place, will avert mass suicide.

Let us unpack this linguistic construct.

At least some of the noisy nomenclature refers to a package of spending cuts, “deep, automatic cuts,” by Barron’s telling, bundled in the Budget Control Act of 2011. About.com has counted “over 1,000 government programs – including the defense budget, Medicare,” and unemployment benefits (99 weeks’ worth), as slated for slashing, and concedes that the “deficit, as a percentage of GDP, would be cut.” “The federal budget deficit will be immediately cut in half, shrinking to approximately $641 billion in 2013 from the approximately $1.1 trillion in 2012,” estimates financier Peter Schiff.

I’m inclined to think of this “budget sequestration,” described by Wikipedia as “broad and shallow,” as no more than cuts to designated increases in spending.

However you slice it, why, pray tell, is this a bad thing? Even the country’s lying money mavens agree, on occasion, that cuts in state spending are good for the private, productive economy. Torture them on The Rack, and they will confess that unless US government spending is slashed, we run the risk of becoming Greece. (The truth is that the tipping point has been reached. We are Greece in denial.)

The country’s “wise” men have thus classified the government-cutting component of the fiscal free-fall as a catastrophe.

Let us continue to unpack this political portmanteau. The next component in the fiscal-cliff equation is private property seizures (tax hikes). Although the US government no longer pays for its obligations, it continues to borrow against the future earnings of its people. What is not borrowed or counterfeited by the Fed is confiscated from individual Americans.

Conveniently lost on the Republican quislings who are now weaseling out of their nominal commitment to refrain from additional theft of private property is the distinction between what is mine and what is thine: Taxes are private property plundered. The fiscal-cliff deal includes the expiration of a temporary reprieve previously granted to private property. The Bush tax cuts will sunset, as will the temporary payroll tax cuts and certain tax breaks for businesses. Also to take effect are taxes tied to President Obama’s health-care behemoth.

It is alleged that to fail to confiscate this private property is to add $3.18 trillion to the national debt. The notion, however, that one must “pay for tax cuts” is ridiculous—the government here (and everywhere) is the proverbial burglar promising to return stolen goods just as soon as its financial position has improved. If anything, tax cuts for high-income earners, who also pay for most of the plunder, are nothing short of a return of stolen goods.

Loot plundered from individuals will invariably vanish into the federal maw, where all funds are fungible and none are accounted for.

What should be obvious to the few who understand the natural laws of economics is that slashing government, however symbolically, is to be encouraged; the confiscation of private property to be vehemently opposed.

Will the US Follow South Africa Down the Path of White Decline?

by Dan Roodt

In the aftermath of President Obama’s victory, the Wall Street Journal described the GOP as the WOP, the White Old Party. Indeed, the Republican Party finds itself in a demographic death spiral as youth, single women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians overwhelmingly vote Democrat.

In fact, the Democratic Party could become the American version of South Africa’s ANC as immigration and high non-white birth rates ensure a steady stream of Democratic voters eager for “change” or even South African-style “transformation:” the ANC’s term for racial revolution and ever tighter anti-white measures.
The latest proposal is for all charities, such as orphanages or soup kitchens to lose their non-profit status if they serve any whites at all. It would mean that charitable organizations could serve only blacks and that whites would not be allowed to help each other in any organized way, even to alleviate poverty or care for orphaned white children.

In the United States, such extreme anti-white measures are probably unthinkable today, but as recently as the early 1980s the idea of a black president in South Africa was deemed equally unthinkable. Even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s spokesman Bernard Ingham said at the time: “Anyone who thinks the ANC will form the government of South Africa is living in cloud cuckoo-land.”

In the 1960s, so-called apartheid South Africa was still considered such a desirable place to live that 500,000 Britons emigrated there, fleeing socialist Britain.

The question therefore arises: how could South Africa, once seen as a leading Western power more or less on par with Canada or Australia, collapse so quickly to become “just another African country?” And what lessons can white Americans draw from our tragic demise, as they ponder the outcome of a Presidential election in which the evidence of a demographic turn for the worse is clear for all to see?

Ilana Mercer’s book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa went some way towards portraying the horrors and mayhem of whites living under a hostile black government, but the underlying causes of South Africa’s spectacular collapse still need explanation.

A century ago, South African whites still enjoyed demographic parity with blacks and were a majority in most towns and cities. In 1950, demographers sympathetic to the National Party shocked everyone at a Stellenbosch University conference by stating that the black population could grow from 8 million to 20 million by 2000. This prediction seemed so outlandish no one believed it. The recent census confirmed that blacks now represent 40 million, far overshooting the “nightmare scenario” of 1950.

South African whites feared communism more than anything else, but American racial ideologies such as affirmative action and so-called BEE (“black economic empowerment—our version of minority procurement) are doing vastly more damage to them. At least under communism the Bolshoi ballet still functioned and the Soviet Union still had a space program. The pursuit of diversity and multiculturalism in South Africa has, however, led to across the board decline; some small towns regularly suffer water and electricity shortages.

In my opinion, America’s future will not resemble its past, but will look more like today’s South Africa. As the number of whites declines, loss of power will follow, leading to aggressive legislation pushing whites out of jobs and most positions of power.

Many whites will emigrate or move to the remaining red states, just as South Africa’s whites have emigrated since 1994. But ultimately there will be no place to go as the global demographic decline of whites means that even European countries suffer the same fate of dispossession.

Demography is destiny, as Auguste Comte said. There is a mysterious process whereby whites react to racial domination not by rioting or claiming special privileges as other races do, but by working harder, having even fewer children, and quarrelling among themselves. We see this happening in South Africa, in Western Europe and, of course, in America where white Republicans and Democrats are like two dogs fighting over a bone, while a third is about to run away with it and leave them with nothing.

The Republican Party is poised to adopt the attitude of South Africa’s liberal opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, which has forsaken its core white support and practices affirmative action in its own ranks. There are three women on its election posters: one white, one colored or mixed-race, and one black, at once expressing the party’s diversity and its disdain for the white male.

Jared Taylor asks that the Republican Party be loyal to its electorate and become the unabashed champion of white interests. Again, the history of South Africa is instructive. British Prime Minister Harold McMillan made a famous speech in the South African parliament  on February 3, 1960 in which he warned us that “the wind of change is blowing through the African continent” and that ultimately we would have to surrender power to the nonwhite majority. Our brilliant leader, Hendrik Verwoerd, promptly replied in an unprepared speech that “the tendency in Africa for nations to become independent, and at the same time to do justice to all, does not only mean being just to the black man of Africa, but also being just to the white man of Africa.”

Verwoerd’s slogan of “justice for the white man too” was rejected by most of the Western world. Lest we forget, the rank and file of the Republican Party rebelled against Ronald Reagan’s veto and passed sanctions against South Africa on Sept. 29, 1986.

Since that time, the U.S. has consistently pursued an anti-white foreign policy. In Southern Africa it supported black Marxist movements such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO). In Europe, it has called for a large Muslim state, Turkey, to be included in the European Union. Would the American elite ever adopt a pro-white policy domestically while pursuing the opposite of such a policy externally?

There are three forces that are likely to determine the Republican Party’s position on white interests. The first is the wishes of its own electorate; the second is the corporate sector that funds the party, and the third is the mainstream media. America’s large corporations support affirmative action and diversity, while the media support multiculturalism. The GOP will follow their bidding and betray its voters.

Like the whites of the former Rhodesia, South West Africa, and South Africa, Republicans will embark on a forlorn search for conservative allies “of color” whom non-white voters will reject as “traitors.” Even if a black woman such as Condoleezza Rice could be fielded as the next Republican presidential candidate, it is doubtful whether many blacks or Hispanics would vote for her.

Pat Buchanan and others have already chronicled “the death of the West,” but we need to understand the laws of this process, because it follows a pattern of false hopes, interspersed with successive betrayals by white leaders. The final days of the Roman Empire followed the same fatal chain of events.

The crisis is far deeper than most Americans realize. South Africa went from being a powerful, Western country to capitulation in just ten years: from 1980 to 1990. President Barack Obama has already started to fire some of his best generals, just like F.W. de Klerk purged his army of all pro-white generals prior to surrendering to the ANC.

I fear that white Americans take false comfort in “still being the majority.” They do not realize how quickly they will lose that status as global demographics change, and immigration to the US accelerates. South Africa is now being overrun by immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. But America too will become a haven for African immigrants as the population of our continent doubles from the current one billion to two billion within the next 30 or 40 years.

It could even be that Africa’s burgeoning population poses a far greater demographic risk to Americans than Mexicans. Unprecedented technological change, especially in communications, has put immigration information at the disposal of Africans in even the remotest villages.
American whites could become a minority much sooner than they think. That has been our experience in South Africa; people appreciate the enormity of the changes only after it is too late.

Some white Americans may clamor for self-determination, and the South may want to secede again. However, any breakaway group will find itself in the political wilderness, without media support and fighting the forces of demography and history.

We need to form a global network to keep America from falling into the hands of anti-white zealots. We should constantly compare notes on successes and failures, taking heart from every advance. The United States is such a military and economic power that the battle now taking shape within its borders could well determine the fate of the West. If the United States goes the way of South Africa, whites everywhere will be in danger.

The D-bomb has dropped

by Ilana Mercer

In our democracy – for we are no longer a republic that upholds individual rights and limits central power – you vote not for the representative who will defend your inalienable, individual rights. Rather, if you are The Rich – whom the left treats as a reified, rigid state-of-being – you vote defensively. If you are The Poor, you vote extractively – you empower your guy to steal The Other Guy’s stuff and hand it over.

Elections are when the politically dominant majority gets to thump the politically weak minority.

The Moron Media, left and right, are sticking to their story. Barack Obama had “out-hustled” Mitt Romney. Obama ran a better “ground game.” He triumphed “in the trenches,” “neutralized” his rival. He had not stopped campaigning since 2008. The president’s mega-machine was unbeatable, even though his vision was lacking. (As I like to say, a visionary bureaucrat is a voracious one. The best leader is one who leads in limiting his leadership.)

Had Romney, say some of the analysts, been a better tactician, scrappier, less of a patrician – he’d have won.

The media so arguing have advocated for immigration policies that have helped, over the decades, to replace the American people with a new, vastly different people. Although whites broke for Romney in a big way – as a proportion of the voting public, the founding majority is teetering on minority status. It has shrunk to the point where it is becoming powerless against a coalition in opposition.

As an extension of their life’s work, the “news” people aforementioned have anointed a string of progressive commentators who are distinguished from the Democrats with whom they cavort in studios in one way only: They call themselves Republicans.

This lot’s line on the Republicans’ Nov. 6 defeat went as follows: Be nicer to the axis of Asians, blacks, browns (and brown-nosing bimbos) who handed the Democrats a handy victory.

In a word, neutralize the D-Bomb.

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

For years, those of us who’ve warned about demographics have been dubbed racists. But the D- Bomb has dropped. Its debris is scattered across “the field” upon which Mitt Romney said he “left everything.”

Asians, blacks and Latinos united for Obama.

As always, women voted with their wombs, although married sisters were less wild for big daddy O. (Oh, how we suffer for the female suffrage! I once vowed to “give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.”)

To the pox of the 19th Amendment – it granted women the vote – add the 26th Amendment. Smuggled into the Constitution by statute, it artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, the vote grants youngsters a claim on the livelihood of those who do.

Overlapping voter categories notwithstanding, Obama thus curried favor with females – single ladies, in particular – the faithless, kids and minorities.

Put differently, those earning less than $50,000 trended Barack Obama; those earning more than $50,000, and certainly individuals in the upper-income tax bracket, preferred Mitt Romney.

People with higher incomes constitute a minority, an economically dominant minority (to paraphrase Amy Chua). People with low incomes are in the majority, a politically dominant majority.

The rich are politically impoverished; the poor politically rich. The rich dominate the economy; the poor dominate the polity.

When elections roll around, the politically powerful exact their revenge against the economically powerful.

What kind of a right gives one man control over another man’s life? In a democracy, the right to vote does just that.

As for demographics, they have become destiny. They were not necessarily so. Demographics have been the excuse central planners have advanced to persevere with immigration policies that destroy civil society and shore up the welfare state.

The now-waning West became great not because it outbred the rest of the world. The West was once great because of its human capital – innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas and the willingness to defend such a civilization, not because it was more populated than the rest of the world.

America doesn’t need more people; it needs better people.

Making nice with constituencies that vote repeatedly and habitually for the candidate who promises them more stuff is tantamount to sleeping with the enemy. The only voters who could be swayed by the promise of the free market are the Democratic Party’s Asian supporters, since they enjoy higher incomes and stabler families than the party’s Hispanic and black devotees.

Ultimately, elections are about perception – the way in which the people perceive the political planks of the two parties.

The American people perceive the Democratic Party as the party of entitlements. They think of the Republican Party as the party of austerity.

History and reality tell us that both parties have grown government into the gigantic, intractable, wealth-gobbling Thing that it is. But in the age of reality TV, reason and reality are meaningless.

Perception is everything.

The idea of an American People is yet another misconception. The extravaganza that had one adorable, carrot-topped kid bawling “no more ‘Bronco Bamma’ and Mitt Romney, please” has ended. But if this advance auction of stolen goods – H. L. Mencken’s definition of an election – proved anything, it is that America is a mass of competing factions.

Some vie to keep more of their rightful property; others fight to get their paws on that very property.

And the tipping point has arrived. This, Nov. 6, 2012, has proven.

Ilana Mercer is a classical liberal (libertarian) writer and a fellow at the “Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.” She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” “The titular tease,” explains Ilana in the book, “is meant as a metaphor and is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery.” Ilana’s website is IlanaMercer.com.. She blogs at www.barelyablog.com.

Conservatives and the diversity dross

The next news item is unremarkable. “The U.S. government,” reports Fox News, “paid a Chicago consultant hundreds of thousands of dollars to put on diversity training workshops that, according to one watchdog, included an exercise in which employees were told to chant ‘our forefathers were illegal immigrants.’”

What do you expect from “the U.S. government”? It’s a criminal gang out to erase every vestige of a history that might rekindle in a pliant people the quest for freedom. The government, and its excrescences, do these things reflexively rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy. Like a big amorphous amoeba—a simple, single-celled organism—government will instinctively act to preserve its own integrity.

The people to condemn in his story are the “Conservative group Judicial Watch.” While we are grateful to JW for uncovering the bestialities of bureaucrats—in the substance of their complaint, they are almost as complicit as government. They complain that,

“Instead of being diversity-oriented or tolerance-oriented, it’s more about adopting a mindset,” said Lisette Garcia, a senior investigator with the group.

Garcia of Judicial Watch is quite fine with the government conducting mind-control workshops on taxpayers’ dime, so long as these indoctrination sessions transmit true “diversity and tolerance,” as promised.

What kind of a conservatism is this? The watchdogs are worse than the dogs in power (my apologies to dogs). At least the people who dreamed up the “diversity intelligence advantage course” know what they are after. What do Garcia and her friends want?

A truly conservative watch dog would, first, object to the unconstitutional appropriation of taxpayer funds. Second, they would reject the diversity doxology. Americans should not relinquish their birthright for a mess of pottage.

Were Lisette Garcia of Judicial Watch a true conservative she’d take the opportunity to mention that “Thomas Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.”

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”

Read Ilana’s blog.

Winning a battle of wits with a half wit

by Ilana Mercer

It was hard not to feel sorry for President Barack Obama during what was the first of three presidential debates. The dejected demeanor and the perpetually lowered gaze conjured an unprepared student peppered by a pedantic teacher with questions he could not possibly answer.

The president’s pose spoke to the beating he was receiving at the hands of his opponent, Gov. Mitt Romney.

Obama campaigner Chris Matthews – a proxy for this president, who cloaks himself in the raiment of a newsman – demanded to know: Why was Obama staring down at his “notes” and scribbling? What was he waiting for?

To describe what Gov. Romney had done in the course of the 90-minute debate, Matthews, who possesses a nimble intelligence his candidate is without, reached for wild man Charlie Sheen’s zinger: “What was Romney doing? Winning!”

Moderator Jim Lehrer is an old-school newsman who has never in the course of a long and distinguished career revealed his own political bias. Now the pack men of the media were piling on the PBS anchor for not controlling the debate’s outcome, and for allowing a free to-and-fro between the men.

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

And since Mitt won hands down, the moderator must have been bad. Or so goes the loser’s lackluster logic. Never mind that reasoning backward is an error in logic. So how does post hoc ergo propter hoc work? Had Obama won the debate under the same emcee’s minimal intervention, Lehrer would have been lauded.

“Passive and unprepared,” chimed another MSNBC regular.

“I was stunned,” confessed thug extraordinaire Ed Schultz of “The Ed Show.” The vulgar and venomous Schultz has openly and repeatedly referred to Republicans as “the enemy,” on his MSNBC extravaganza. If what we saw was indicative of what was to come, Schultz lamented, Obama was in serious trouble.

Arrogant to the end, press pack animal Chuck Todd conceded that Romney’s debate on Oct. 3 qualified him for the first time as a “credible candidate.”

In the left’s peanut gallery, comedian Bill Maher is a philosopher-prophet. Tweeted Maher: “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Obama looks like he DOES need a teleprompter.”

Also at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow provided the ultimate rationalization, which her co-hosts on the network and elsewhere quickly embraced. “The presidency spoils your ability to be a good debater.”

“In psychology and logic, rationalization (also known as making excuses) is an unconscious defense mechanism,” writes Wikipedia. It is intended to shield the fragile ego from reality.

Like Maddow, presidential hagiographer Douglas Brinkley took cover from real life on Fox News’ “Cavuto.” The yang to Lincoln idolator Doris Kearns Goodwin’s yin, Brinkley diminished Romney’s intellectual victory by applying that most stringent historical test to the governor’s performance: It was without a Reaganesque zinger. Obama, however, had not damaged his brand, claimed Brinkley. He was still a gifted “retail politician.” (Read community organizer.)

Indeed, CNN’s ecstasy meter – a monitor of women’s response to the candidates – crescendoed whenever Obama noodled on aimlessly.

To their credit, the groupies at MSNBC were far more cognizant of the failures of their man than their colleagues at, say, the Huffington Post. “Obama played offense and defense admirably well,” diarized one diarrhetic blogger during the Wednesday night “wipeout.” Or the New York Times, which framed the president’s intellectual flubs as no more than a tactical or stylistic tic. “Cool Hand Barry” they continue to call him.

Once an enthusiastic supporter of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, crunchy con Andrew Sullivan has for some time struggled to stay relevant. (I won’t bore you with the hackneyed hoaxes Sullivan once spewed for Bush, only to say here that there was not an occurrence he didn’t trace back to Iraq: anthrax, September 11 and too few gays in the military – you name it; Iraq was behind it.) Sullivan’s latest (always forgiven) faux pas was splayed on the cover of Newsweek, just the other day, and was provocatively titled, “President Obama: The Democrats’ Ronald Reagan.”

The ever-wrong Sullivan is no longer salivating for the guy “I love.” “… this was a disaster for Obama,” he tweeted. (Never mind, Andy. America loves you, whether you urge her sons to go to war needlessly, or make literary love to her dictators. And love means never having to say you’re sorry.)

For one reason only was Obama on the ropes, while Romney floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee: Romney’s superior intelligence, his ability to store immense amounts of information and apply it to bolster his arguments – abilities his rival, Barack Obama, manifestly lacks.

The belated scoop is this: The Child was not born in a barn and was never a brainiac.

Four years after his election–and a week since CNN’s Jessica Yellin revealed nothing but her own adoration in “Obama Revealed,” an agonizing hour with the president – a Washington Examiner investigation divulged the following facts, belatedly:

Obama was a child of privilege, not of hardship. He lived in Jakarta’s most exclusive suburb. His white grandmother (whom he once tarred with the taint of racism and with whom he lived in Hawaii) was a bank vice president. She sent him to an exclusive private school. Later on he was a shoo-in at Columbia and Harvard Law School. During his 12 years as a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Law School, his student-approval ratings were low. In fact, he was one of the lowest-ranked professors in his last five years at the university. There, did he teach tort law or bankruptcy law or civil liberties or civil procedures or criminal appeals, or, perhaps navigate the shoals of intellectual property law? No. Obama taught “racism” related law. He left no record of legal, scholarly writings.

Make no mistake; should he succeed in vanquishing Obama come Nov. 6, Romney’s brand of “repeal-and-replace statism” – not to mention maniacal militarism and Sinophobia – will be no victory for liberty.

If not for liberty, last night was, however, a small victory for reality.

Read Ilana’s blog.

Why I am so sad

by Ilana Mercer

I AM SO SAD – and it is not because a justifiably angry crowd of Libyans in Benghazi stormed an embassy that represents the brute force that destabilized their lives for decades to come.

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any U.S. provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw and conquered.”

To those who imagine the death of our diplomats in Libya turns on American free-speech, I say this: You have no right to deliver your disquisition in my living room. You have only the right to request permission to so do from this (armed) private-property owner.

By extension, you have no universal right to “free speech” on another man’s land. More so than to America’s diplomats – Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran.

I AM SO SAD – and it is not because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen a most inopportune time to insert himself into the middle of a rancorous American election season and by so doing make Mitt Romney’s foreign-policy bellicosity look good to a war-weary people that can ill-afford it.

Now is not a good time, Bibi. Israel is a wedge issue in the coming election. If Israelis love Americans as Americans love Israel, they need to understand that, “The Titan is Tired”:

“We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own – be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.”

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

I AM SO SAD – and it is not because another 9/11 has come and gone. The polls indicate that Americans want to move on; have moved on. Perhaps Americans have realized that it behooves our “overlords who art in D.C.” to keep them stuck in grief. By stunning us like cattle to the slaughter, the statists have been able to perpetrate in our name crimes way worse than 9/11.

I AM SO SAD because my sweet, kind friend, Thomas Szasz, has passed away. Tributes merely touch on professor Szasz’ unmatched genius and attendant achievements (professor of psychiatry emeritus, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, N.Y., and author of the seminal work, “The Myth of Mental Illness”).

I attempted to word what Thomas Szasz did over decades, in the advance praise he requested for one of his many magisterial masterpieces, “Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry”:

“Bit by barbarous and bizarre bit, Thomas Szasz dismantles psychiatry’s rickety scaffolding, exposing over two centuries of physical torture and tortured logic. Professor Szasz takes the necessary analytical and empirical solvents to this state-empowered fraternity of sorceresses. He also supplies the only salve for the psychiatric violence he correctly dubs ‘psychiatric slavery’: abolition: Now, ‘Let the sunshine in.’”

“This will be hard to beat,” Tom quipped. (“Tom” was how he’d sign off.)

Allow me, then, to speak but briefly to the tender friendship professor Szasz and I developed over the years. Briefly, for the breezy ease with which my countrymen share their feelings with strangers is alien to me. Abreacting à la Oprah in public bespeaks a shallowness that was foreign to Tom too. Whenever we communicated, it was in succinct, intense and precise language. We spoke a similar language. Dare I say that it was our shared ancestry as European Jews that accounted for these cultural commonalities?

For example, we came together – yet stood apart from libertarian mainstream – on the all-time moral litmus test: the state-sanctioned, slow execution of Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo.

Even eerier was the way we both drew on the allegoric power of William Faulkner to capture the late Ms. Schiavo’s plight, before knowing one another. “A Rose for Emily” was Tom’s source of inspiration, in June of 2006; mine was “As She Lay Dying,” in March of 2005.

“Kindred souls” was Tom’s reaction.

Late in 2009, we decided to meet near Huntington Beach, where, Dr. Szasz, nearing 90, was to address a conference. Alas, he was detained on the East Coast by bad weather, and my husband and I went on to visit in the vicinity. “Maybe I’ll mobilize myself and visit you next summer in Seattle,” he promised.

I last heard from Dr. Szasz on July 27, this year. Characteristically, it was in response to a column I had written, “‘You didn’t build that’: Obama’s political epitaph.” As he would so often do, the great man excerpted his favorite lines. “BRAVO, AGAIN!,” he added in capitals.

I replied:

Thank you, my dear. It seems so futile.
But I like hearing from you.
How have you been?

Tom wrote back laconically but poignantly:

Yes. Disheartening. “Virtue is its own reward.” – I am OK.

Would that everyone rationed speech thus; the entire mainstream punditocracy would cease to exist.

Earlier this year – it was in May – I made my way to Manhattan, where it was my distinction to address Victor Niederhoffer’s New York City Junto gathering as featured speaker. I inquired whether Tom would be gallivanting around, as was his wont.

Ever sweet and affectionate, there was a finality to his reply:

Many thanks, dear Ilana. Sadly no. I am OK but progressively weakening and everything is too much of a schlep. I enjoy and agree with all that you send me.
Love (without a first sight), Tom.

“Promise me,” I wrote back, “that this will not be unrequited love.”

“It is NOT,” Tom replied.