Wednesday, May 16, 2018


May 16, 2018



MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey



Four Superb Columns by Ilana Mercer:

Four Good Reads with Solid Wisdom



Friends,

By now those who have been reading the MY CORNER column  for any length of time will know that national columnist Ilana Mercer is a good friend, and that I consider her one of the most perceptive writers on the present American journalistic horizon. Her essays never fail to hit their target, usually well-deserving totems of puffed-up Establishment and left wing piety (or, better, impiety!).

Ilana’s items show up on Townhall.com, The Unz Review (where I sometimes appear as well), LewRockwell, and elsewhere. Her published books include, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for American from Post-Apartheid South Africa (Ilana is a native South African) and The Trump Revolution….all are to be highly recommended.

I have been saving several of her most recent columns, with the desire to send them out to readers, and today I take that opportunity by remitting on to you four, each offering excellent and at times pithy analysis, but always on target…and thoughtful.

The first of these is a review of and commentary about a recent book by a leftist academic, Yascha Mounk (Harvard University), which attempts to “explain” the rightist populist revolt against the managerial establishment…and as usual, he gets it wrong. But Professor Mounk is by no means unique: the same failure to understand and perceive what has been going on exists among the scribblers and pundits on the so-called “Neoconservative right,” whose disdain for the traditional beliefs of the “deplorables” only confirms, once again, that the Neocons are simply a slightly-more-conservative branch of the progressivist revolution: their long range objectives remain essentially the same as their blood-brothers on the farther Left.

The second column by Ilana takes a look at the manufactured hysteria which erupted after the re-election of Vladimir Putin as president of Russia. All across the so-called “spectrum of American opinion”—from Democrats to GOP leaders—cries of outrage against that “authoritarian thug in the Kremlin” were punctuated by implicit appeals to, “hey, look how good-two-shoes and clean our democracy is,” here in the United States. But those offering such critiques only exposed their own craven ignorance.

The third column is Ilana’s commentary on a recent visit she made to Texas, and how she fell in love with that state…and with the Southland, and how she focused on what she labels “the Yankee mindset.” Well, she already loved the South, but this trip only confirmed that. You see, Ilana and her family live up in the state of Washington, not exactly a bastion of good old Southern hospitality.

Finally, I submit an example of Ilana’s sharp and critical wit, superbly pointed commentary with acidic (and humorous) double-entendre that should send any “social justice warrior”/open borders fanatic type up a wall in a spasm of bawling bluster. Piercing humor is something that most on the lunatic left just cannot handle—they are overly, burdensomely, serious about their issues and about themselves. As I have pointed out more than once in MY CORNER, they are prisoners of a collective lunacy that posits an unreal counter-reality that is outside reason and outside the norms of nature, itself.

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Trashing Populism: Dim-Bulb Academic Vs. Deplorables



Ilana Mercer   Posted: Apr 13, 2018 9:19 AM

To say that academic elites don’t like ordinary folks is to state the obvious.  To them, Lanford, Illinois—the fictional, archetypal, working-class town, made famous by Roseanne and Dan Conner—is not to be listened to, but tamed. A well-functioning democracy depends on it.

Taming Fishtown—Charles Murray’s version of Lanford—is the thread that seems to run through a new book, “The People vs. Democracy,” by one Yascha Mounk. You guessed it. Mr. Mounk is not an American from the prairies; he’s a German academic, ensconced at Harvard, and sitting in judgment of American and European populism. If only he were capable of advancing a decent argument. “The number of countries that can plausibly be described as democracies is shrinking,” laments Mounk (“Populism and the Elites,” The Economist, March 17, 2018): 

“Strongmen are in power in several countries that once looked as if they were democratizing … The United States—the engine room of democratization for most of the post-war period—has a president who taunted his opponent with chants of ‘lock her up’ and refused to say if he would accept the result of the election if it went against him.”

Elites ensconced in the academy are likely selected into these mummified institutions for a certain kind of ignorance about political theory or philosophy. Plainly put, a chant, “lock her up,” is speech, nothing more. This Trump-rally chant might be impolite and impolitic, but on the facts, it’s not evidence of a “strongman.”

Notice how, deconstructed, nearly every utterance emitted by the technocratic and academic elites turns out to be empty assertion? Even the subtitle of the book under discussion is sloppy political theory: “Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It” implies that democracy is the be-all and end-all of liberty. Quite the opposite.

America’s Constitution-makers did everything in their power (except, sadly, heed the Anti-Federalists) to thwart a dispensation wherein everything is up for grabs by government, in the name of the people.

“Today,” claims our author,  “the popular will is increasingly coming into conflict with individual rights.” To this end, “liberal elites are willing to exclude the people from important decisions, most notably about immigration in the case of the European Union.”

He has excluded Americans from the immigration, decision-making equation. But they, too, have been eliminated from decision-making on these matters. Perhaps the anti-populism tinkerer, for Mounk is no thinker, views the levels of “exclusion” in the US, on this front, as acceptable. Perhaps he thinks that the flow of up to two million into the US every year—changing it by the day—is done with the right degree of democratic inclusion. (How about a federal referendum on immigration, to test that?)

The popular will is fine—provided it restores the obligations of government to its constituents, not to the world, protects nation-state sovereignty, respects the founding people of Europe and the West; and protects their traditions, safety and identity. For example, by eliminating the weaponization of political concepts against The People. In the context of immigration, constructs that have been weaponized are multiculturalism and diversity.

If anything, populist leaders who want to denuclearize constructs which have been weaponized by the state are authentic leaders. The opposing elites are the interlopers.

Your common, garden-variety academic is selected and elevated in academia precisely because of a pre-existing condition: a globalist, deracinated disposition. For that matter, humanity does not have a right to immigrate en masse to the United States or to Europe. There is no natural right to venture wherever, whenever—unless, perhaps, migrants can be confined to homesteading frontier territory.

Regrettably, the developed world is running out of frontier territory to homestead. Besides, the only potential immigrants who still have that frontier spirit are South-African farmers. But American and European elites are uninterested in refugees who are ACTUALLY and actively being killed-off. That would be too much like preserving “white privilege,” which is certainly not what Mounk’s about. He moans, instead, about dangerous populists, and how they’re “willing to dispense with constitutional niceties in the name of ‘the people.’”  Which “constitutional niceties” have populists dispensed with? Repealing, statutory, man-made law the Left, invariably, depicts as fascism, when in fact repealing positive law is often liberating; strengthening the natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “Politics,” our author continues, “is defined by a growing battle between illiberal democracy, or democracy without rights, on the one hand, and undemocratic liberalism, or rights without democracy, on the other.”

It’s hard to know what to make of such bafflegab, only that the author’s political theory has been through the progressive smelter. Democracy unfettered—social democracy, Third Wayism—adopted by all “free” nations, the US as well, is antithetical to the liberty envisioned by the American Founding Fathers.

Why so? Because in this fetid democracy, every aspect of individual life is up for government control. The very idea that a few hundred clowns in two chambers could represent hundreds of millions of individuals is quintessentially illiberal. And impossible. 

The kind of “undemocratic liberalism” the author sneers at is likely the classical liberalism of the 19th century, where the claims the mass of humanity could levy against individuals in a particular territory were severely curtailed, if not non-existent.

Finally, what would an academic be without a brand of demeaning, economic reductionism? The lumpenproletariat are economically distressed. That’s Yascha Mounk’s final diagnosis. That’s why populism is surging. Tossed in their direction, Chinese-made trinkets will do wonders to improve the mood of this seething, racist, mass of Deplorables. Then Mounk and his friends can move in to make the right decisions for us.

Harvard’s Chosen’s One chalks populism up to “the laws of globalization.” Deal with it or die.

Or, as advocated by Kevin D. Williamson, a NeverTrumper formerly of National Review:

“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.” (“The Father-Führer,” March 28, 2016.)

You see, working-class “losers” are being labelled illiberal fascists for—wait for it!—wanting a local economy around which to center flesh-and-blood communities.

A real Heil-Hitler moment!

This populism-detesting academic (Yascha Mounk) is a theoretical utilitarian and a bad one at that. He refuses to “grapple with the nuances” of the issues that make for misery or mirth among ordinary men and women. Instead, he grumbles that his gang of “technocratic elites” needs to moderate its ambitions, given that they’re not working with much (dumb Deplorables).

Here’s the truth about the nationalism against which the political and pedagogic elites rail:

“[It] has often been cast by the historically triumphant Left as fascistic. Yet historically, this Right rising has represented broad social strata: It has represented the bourgeoisie—middle-class, liberal and illiberal, standing for professional and commercial interests. It has stood for the working class, the landed aristocracy, the (Catholic) clergy, the military, labor unions, standing as one against the radical Communist or anarchist Left, which promised—and eventually delivered—bloody revolution that destroyed organic, if imperfect, institutions.” (“The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” p. 234)

John Quincy Adams Is Turning in His Grave


ILANA MERCER • MARCH 22, 2018

 “This is just a truly astonishing moment coming from the White House podium,” tweeted MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt. Like the rest of the media pack-animals she hunts with, Ms. Hunt had been fuming over President Trump’s telephone call to Vladimir Putin, congratulating him on winning another term as president.



Reliably opposed to a truce were party heavies on both sides. Sen. John McCain joined the chorus: “An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections,” he intoned. Another Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley, told a reporter testily that he “wouldn’t have a conversation with a criminal. I think Putin’s a criminal. What he did in Iraq, what he did in Libya.…” Wait a sec? Remind me; was it Putin or our guys who wrecked those countries? So many evil-doers on the world-stage, it’s hard for me to keep track.



“When I look at a Russian election, what I see is a lack of credibility in tallying the results,” sermonized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “I’m always reminded of the elections they have in almost every communist country.”



Actually, what the International Election Observation Mission found in Russia’s presidential election of March 18 was far more nuanced. Why, in some ways the Russian elections were very American: In the difficulty dissident candidates have in getting on the ballot, for example.



Ask Ron Paul or all those anonymous, aspiring, independent, third-party candidates about the US’s “restrictive ballot access laws and the other barriers erected” by the duopoly to protect their “de facto monopoly in America,” to paraphrase Forbes.com.



As for jailing journalists, frequently for life: Not Russia, but an American ally, Turkey, is the world’s biggest offender. But hold on. Isn’t Trump turning on the Kurds to pacify the Turks? Maybe it’s something the Saudi’s said. Go figure.



What doesn’t change is the interchangeability—with respect to any peaceful overtures made by President Trump toward Russia—of the Stupid Party (Republicans) and the Evil Party (Democrats). And yet, the same self-interested individuals protest, periodically, that Trump’s recklessness risks plunging the country into war.



The president wants to cooperate with the Russians. International confrontation being their stock-in-trade, the UniParty won’t countenance it. Politicians in both parties have not stopped egging Mr. Trump on, rejecting the détente he seeks with Russia, and urging American aggression against a potential partner. Yet, incongruously, in October of 2017, a Republican Senator, Bob Corker, saw fit to complain that the president was “reckless enough to stumble [sic] the country into a nuclear war.” To please and curry favor with an establishment that detests him and is vested in the geopolitical status quo—POTUS even signed sanctions into law against Russia.

Cui bono, pray tell? Who benefits from this standoff?

General Barry R. McCaffrey has “The Answer.” The Trump congratulatory courtesy call to Mr. Putin shows the president’s refusal to protect US interests, tweeted the general.



“US interests” or your interests, sir? Who benefits here? Ordinary Americans, or the media-military-industrial-complex; the swamp organism Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address: “The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – … felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government … [of] an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.”



Not to mention the attendant barnacles who suction onto the ship of state: professional TV talkers, think tank sorts, self-anointed intellectuals (who’re not very intelligent). All are vested in an American-led order, so long as they get to dictate what that (martial) order looks like.



The same political flotsam “argues” against President Trump’s desired détente with Russia using the following logic: If the “master of the political insult,” Donald Trump, “declines to chide Putin,” to quote NBC and CNN standard issue “analysts”—something is off. Ergo, Trump is beholden to Putin and to Russia. The Russians have something on him.



Such a line of “reasoning” fails basic logic, simply because it’s inexhaustive. In other words, there are other, highly plausible explanations as to why the president is not warring with Russia, not least that diplomacy is a good thing; that POTUS ran on a promise of peace with Putin; that he had articulated, as a campaigner, an idea entertained by most Deplorables. Namely that Russians are at odds with Islam and ISIS; that Putin is a Russia First, nationalist, whereas our Anglo-Europeans “allies” are Islam-friendly globalists.



Had POTUS kept pressing the perfectly proper positions he ran on, he might have retarded the Russia political wildfire, now raging out of control. Philosophical consistency would’ve served him well as an antidote to the political opportunism around him. Instead, President Trump has surrounded himself with appointees who deliver a message discordant to his. What comes out of the White House is an ideological cacophony. Hiring different perspectives in business could well be a strength. But it’s a weakness when politics and policy are in play. Needed to advance a political agenda is a team that shares the political philosophy underlying the agenda.



MSNBC’s Miss Hunt and her political clones were particularly galled by Sarah Sanders. The White House press secretary was asked whether the Russian election was free and fair. She replied: “We don’t get to dictate how other countries operate.”



What’s outraging our neoconservative-Jacobin establishment is that the White House is practicing, if only fleetingly, what another American president counseled in a bygone Independence-Day speech: detachment and diplomacy in foreign policy.



“[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”



The man who’d be casting pearls before swine today was John Quincy Adams. The sixth president of the United States (1825-1829), son of John Adams, spoke truths eternal on that July 4, 1821.



Texas Vs. The Pacific Coast: Explaining The Yankee Mindset



Ilana Mercer  Posted: May 11, 2018 12:01 AM

I recently traveled to Texas to speak about South Africa, at the Free Speech Forum of  the Texas A & M University. To travel from the Pacific Northwest all the way to College Station, Texas, without experiencing more of the "Lone Star State" was not an option. So, after driving from Austin eastward to College Station (where I was hosted by two exceptional young, Southern gentlemen), I headed south-west to San Antonio. There I lingered long enough to conclude:

The Republic of Texas is a civilization apart. Ordinary Texans—from my brief travels—tend to be sunny, kind and warmhearted. Not once did I encounter rude on my Texas junket. On the Pacific Coast, however, kindness and congeniality don't come naturally. Washington-State statists are generally aloof, opprobrious, insular. And, frankly, dour.

Southern historian Dr. Clyde N. Wilson tells of receiving "a package containing a chamber pot labeled 'Robert E. Lee's Soup Tureen.'" It came from … Portland, Maine.

Unkind cuts are an everyday occurrence around here, where the busybody mentality prevails. Stand still long enough, and they'll tell you how to live. They'll even give chase to deliver that "corrective" sermon. A helmeted cyclist once chased me down along a suburban running trail. My sin? I had fed the poor juncos in the dead of winter. (Still do. Bite me, you bully.) Having caught up with me, SS Cyclist got on his soap box and in my face about my unforgivable, rule-bending. Wasn't I familiar with the laws governing his pristine environmental utopia?

Didn't I know that only the fittest deserved to survive? That’s the natural world, according to these ruthless, radical progressive puritans. Yes, mea culpa for having an exceedingly soft spot for God's plucky little creatures.

When a Washington statist gets wind of your core beliefs—why, even if your use of the English language irks His Highness—he will take it upon himself to fix your "flaws," try to make you over in his sorry image.

For the distinct cluster of characteristics just described, Dr.  Wilson aforementioned uses the term Yankee. The professor, whose métier is American intellectual history, was described by Eugene Genovese as "an exemplary historian who displays formidable talent." Another stellar scholar, Thomas Landess, lauded Wilson as "a mind as precise and expansive as an encyclopedia."

Duly, Dr. Wilson makes the following abundantly clear: By "Yankee," he does not mean "everybody from north of the Potomac and Ohio.”  “The firemen who died in the World Trade Center on September 11 were Americans. The politicians and TV personalities who stood around telling us what we are to think about it are Yankees."

"Yankee" as a designation belongs to "a peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and a penchant for ordering other people around." 

"A perversity of character," said Thomas Jefferson succinctly of the Yankee character. Indeed, "Puritans long ago abandoned anything that might be good about their religion but have never given up the notion that they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image."

The cover of Wilson's "The Yankee Problem: An American Dilemma"is bedecked with the quintessential Yankee mugs of Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush and John Brown (who butchered his victims with his bare hands). The contemporary face of the fanaticism alluded to here is pundit Richard Painter,who is the spitting image of Brown. A Republican until Trump, Painter is now a member of the anti-Trump high-command at MSNBC. In zealotry, Painter could pass for the terrifying Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens.

A broader truth hit me in the solar plexus during the sojourn from the American Deep North to The South. On hand to better contextualize it is my friend, Clyde Wilson:

“Texas is still a Red State, despite a large number of minorities. That is because Texas, as you observed, Ilana, has a real culture. That means that there is a reality there that minorities can identify with and assimilate to. Unlike, say, Chicago or New Jersey or L.A., where they simply become aggrieved ‘victims,’ clamoring for special benefits, that being the only culture present."

"The peculiar character of the Yankee was observed by Tocqueville in the 19th century and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th. The first great American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, wrote a whole series of books about the New England Yankees who spread into and destroyed the unique culture of his home country of Upstate New York.

"One cannot really grasp American history unless you understand how Yankees have dominated and distorted it since the late 18th century.”

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Are Liberal Pervs Sexually Obsessed with Refugees?


ILANA MERCER • APRIL 26, 2018

It’s hard to feel sorry for liberals when they reap the results of the policies they force on the rest of us.

A middle-aged woman, who campaigned against the deportation of migrants from her native Sweden, was raped by the very refugees she advocates for. She met two Afghani teens on the street, outside a bar—no slut-shaming, please—voluntarily accompanied them to their taxpayer-funded pad. And the rest, as they say, is history.



Behind the European obsession with importing tall, dark, Middle-Eastern young men are hordes of horny, menopausal, Social Justice Warriors (SJW). “Bohemian witches” or “tie-dye hags” is how one risqué, Swedish, YouTube commentator calls this degenerate distaff.



Left-liberal women (like Chancellor Angela Merkel) certainly have a fixation—could it be erotic?—with rescuing dark, handsome, exotic-looking strangers.



Judging from their irrational, histrionic protests against President Trump’s travel ban, we appear destined to live or die by these females’ hormones (or their replaced hormones).



Some men in that part of the world are not much better. A Norwegian male was raped by a Somali asylum seeker. The last term—Somali asylum seeker—is something of a contradiction like the first (Norwegian man). The asylum-seeker honorific is given to practically anyone from the Dark Continent or the Middle-East who washes up on Continental Europe’s shores. The politician, Karsten Nordal Hauken, who says he’s heterosexual, went public with the details of his awful ordeal. “I was raped by a Somalian asylum seeker,” he wrote in a Norwegian newspaper. “My life fell into ruin.”



But it was Nordal Hauken, not his assailant, who proceeded to assault sensibilities with a confession that rivals the crime for reprehensibility. Hyperbole? I don’t think so. As Hauken, a self-described left-wing feminist, tells it, he has been wracked by guilt because one night of passion had caused his Somali assailant to be returned to sender.



After resting up in a Norwegian prison, the rapist is said to have been deported to Somalia. (I can find no evidence of said rapist’s whereabouts. Maybe he’s en route to America?) Hauken laments being overcome by “a strong feeling of guilt and responsibility. I was the reason that he would not be in Norway anymore …”  And: “I see [the Somali] mostly as a product of an unfair world, a product of an upbringing marked by war and despair.”



In his perversity, our leftist political powerbroker further mischaracterized the light sentence given to his rapist by the Norwegian State as “the ultimate revenge,” meted out by “an angry father confronting it’s [sic] child’s attacker.” Mr. Hauken also moans that the rapist, we’ll call him Mr. Priapus, would be “sent to a dark uncertain future in Somalia,” instead of enjoying, presumably, the bright future that awaits a man with his priapic proclivities in welcoming Norway. Hauken has since come to the conclusion that he might not have been raped after all, but simply subjected to “a cultural difference.”



What a penetrating observation!



A somewhat shallow analysis of this sorry specter was offered up in the British Spectator. It chalks up Hauken’s confession to a simple case of “Stockholm syndrome,’ used to describe hostages who take on the perspectives of their kidnappers.” “Perhaps the Hauken case,” opines The Spectator’s Douglas Murray, “could be used to coin the term ‘Norway syndrome,’ an affliction that causes rape-victims to feel concern over the prospects of their rapists?”



Tellingly, Mr. Murray collapses the distinction between the reaction of this male heterosexual and that of another rape victim: “a ‘no-borders’ activist on the French-Italian border.” She “was gang-raped by a group of Sudanese immigrants but was persuaded to keep quiet about her own rape, in case it was used to undermine the open-borders cause.” The woman is another fool who reaped the results of her folly. As far as we know, however, the raped woman has never publicly expressed a kinship with her gang rapists and is said to have been coaxed into silence.



Good or bad, the Norwegian Nordal Hauken has spoken openly about a reality few straight men would reveal: rape by another man. Hauken, not the female vanquished by the invaders, is the one said to feel for his violator. So far, Hauken has certainly shared his inappropriate feelings more promiscuously than most women would. Indeed, the liberal program aims to dissolve “the constitution of man” in the service of sexual sameness. It is predicated on the imbecilic belief that biology is incidental, and that men and women are essentially interchangeable.



Egalitarianism, the goal of the Left and the Political Right, rests on the blunting of male-female differences. In the service of egalitarian sameness, the man-vs.-female biological imperatives are rapidly, if reflexively, being dissolved. Survival, however, has a biological dimension. A submissive, effete civilization, made up of men like Mr. Hauken will not endure.



The repulsive specter of Karsten Nordal Hauken just about turning the other cheek to the man who spread both his cheeks is not an isolated case. The pale, liberal patriarchy is a pioneer in forever scrutinizing itself for signs of racism and deficits in empathy toward “The Other,” while readily accusing others of the same.It’s as though liberal men derive erotic pleasure from prostrating themselves to assailants and ceding to racial claims-making.



Could it be that liberal men are driven by a powerful homo-erotic impulsive? Who knows, but as the example of Nordal Hauken shows, this specimen is queering at a rapid pace.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011) & “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Facebook,Gab & YouTube


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