Ilana Mercer, Part 2: Lady Paleolibertarian

So we got to know Ilana Mercer a bit in part 1. Now, the paleolibertarian wordsmith takes full command of her keyboard and her craft, and takes no prisoners in this explosive followup. Simply put, she ain’t skeered.

Even though I’m a recovering mainstream journalist by trade, I’ve only been at dissident blogging a few months shy of four years. And here’s my big takeaway: there is no point to alternative political writing and cultural criticism unless you’re willing to ruffle tail feathers and call a spade a spade. Anything less than connecting the dots, calling out your conclusions (no matter how socially unacceptable), and vehemently smashing sacred cows is just rhetorical masturbation.

Forgive my colorful language, but really, time is of the essence, and if truth is not your game but caring about fashionable opinion is, well, I’d personally rather watch paint dry. THAT is why I admire Ilana Mercer. She writes with bang, not a whimper. She’s my kinda lady.

“A very prolific commentator …
[Mercer] is to libertarianism what Ann Coulter is to conservatism.”

— Walter Block, Austrian School economist

DISSIDENT MAMA: How did you become acquainted with historian and historian Clyde Wilson? How does a woman like you become sympathetic to the Southern tradition, calling the Radical Republicans, the Antifa of 1865?

ILANA MERCER: First, to correct myself: The Radical Republicans were far more vicious and barbaric than are the Antifa punks and thugs. After all, these Republicans supervised the genocide of some 60,000 Plains Indians from 1865 to 1890, led by General Sherman himself.

Clyde and I have a natural affinity. I believe we share a worldview of how decency and justice ought to look. Clyde is a genuine Southern gentleman, one of the last. I had always loved his work for a very particular reason: In addition to an analytical mind, Professor Wilson, who certainly has The Fire, doesn’t write dry, desiccated history; he tells history like a Southerner, he brings it to life in the writing tradition of Thomas Babington Macaulay. 

The first time I had reached out to Clyde was to fact-check the 2004 column, “Hollywood’s Hateful Hooey About The South.” Sadly, we’ve never met. But we became firm friends when he was among the very few in our fractious ideological tribe to shoot back admiring and encouraging nods to my weekly column, now in its twentieth year. He also reviewed my books. He and Jack Kerwick.

Clyde, moreover, would always zero-in analytically on how this writer’s work differed from the standard libertarian line, from legal anarchism to trade deficits, to immigration, to certain logical issues (“from the fact that many libertarians believe that the state has no legitimacy, many arrive at the position that anything the state does is illegitimate”), to a form of determinism, whereby the state is blamed for the sins of man.

As to a “woman like me” and the Southern tradition: Justice is a theme in my work. My father, an old-school liberal, was a great influence vis-à-vis justice. I recall his fist coming down on the table after Waco: “They, the US federal government, murdered those people,” he bellowed, enraged. A man like dad, who abhors slavery, also abhorred Lincoln equally for his biblical blood lust.

“Gone With The Wind” I read at age 12, in Hebrew, the language in which I was educated. As a reclusive intellectual, I’m drawn to an earlier time when women like me would feel at home: when men behaved like gentlemen, and intelligent, cultured women were cherished, treated like ladies, not as rivals and enemies. I mean, even Dr. Johnson (no friend of the South’s secession), was deferential to the few heavy-hitter women of his day. I guess I just don’t much enjoy the trashy Yankee manners and mannerisms that have come to define America.

As Ashley Wilkes, Margaret Mitchell’s fictional character, put it, there was a certain symmetry and grace to life in the South. By liking that genteel aspect of the South, I do not mean to detract from the suffering of slaves. Again, I’d just be happier in, say, a 19th Century salon, with individual liberty for all and the accoutrements of modern life. LOL.

I would also call myself a Southern agrarian on many issues of philosophy. 

DM: You live in Washington State. Are you near the “Soweto-style” city of Seattle? And how are things out there politically?

IM: We are in the suburbs, a small town, which is, alas, getting bigger by the day. Progress, right? (Wrong!) But I am fully aware the barbarians could advance on us, thanks to the central planners and the technocrats who run and set the libertine, lawless tone for the place. We’ll be ready. Those who are conscious ought to live with the realization that the police might not pitch up. We also know that should we defend ourselves in the USA today, we risk being destroyed by the law, by which I mean not the U.S. Constitution. That thing has long since been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.

Long since underway is a drive to invert and eviscerate bourgeoisie morality. The suburbs are an instantiation of that way of life. Coming to all our neighborhoods is what Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, initiated when he sued “Huntington Beach, a coastal city in Orange County, for failing to comply with the state’s housing-supply law.” The code Kamala and Joe use is “housing for all incomes.” In your suburbs, not theirs.

DM: It seems to me the biggest character assassins of the right are supposed “conservatives,” who are subversives using the “logic” of the left and actively working against populist/conservative/paleolibertarian/trad-Southern coalition building. What say you?

IM: This has been covered. A lot of what you say has become cool, somewhat hollow, phraseology in our largely flaccid, self-cannibalizing, philosophical camp. I say this as someone who has been anatomizing, analyzing and eviscerating the prevailing neoconservative orthodoxy since 1999, and whose newspaper syndication was terminated when I came out, in Sept 19, 2002, against Bush’s war.

Since then, this column has burned as hot as a Babylonian kiln against every tenet of what friend and commentator Jack Kerwick calls the “Big Con.” Since the work is analytical, there are nooks and crannies of conservatism that I’ve exposed. Most recently it has been this camp’s congenital inability to cop to the dangerously anti-white tenor of American politics.

You ask nobly about “bridge building, strengthening alliances, creating parallel institutions, boycotting.” Well, here’s my own reality:

I’ve written a paleolibertarian weekly column for two decades, in which firmly held first principles and a reality based analysis have combined to yield a predictive bit of writing (fun, too) on the most controversial and pressing issues of the day. From race to trade deficits to anarchism to immigration to populism, as a valued reader put it, “We’ve learned to trust you.”

The latest major effort is deconstruction of the racism construct, real analytical arrows in our camp’s quiver, against the leftist proponents of racial subjugation.

• ‘Systemic Racism’ Or Systemic Rubbish?
• Was The Cop’s Knee On George Floyd’s Neck ‘Racism’? No!
• Ethnocidal ‘Critical Race Theory’ Is Upon Us Like White On Rice
• Racist Theory Robs And Rapes Reality

Yet, my most radical of tracts have found homes with outfits which the paleo community routinely disparages as “Straussian” and “Big Con”; but not with a single publication claiming my own ideological affiliation. For these publications, excommunication, and the intellectual ossification that comes with it, are de rigueur.

The intellectual oligarchs of the Old Right think that their publications create stars. Not so. The paleo publications must either reflect the reality of the writing landscape as it is, or, if they are not, they are creating a parallel universe for themselves. 

My weekly column is not published and has never been regularly featured by a single paleo publication. Oh, they publish the usual syndicated material appearing in hundreds of other “Big Con” newspapers in the country, but not my high-minded, labor-intense, woefully underexposed, original column. 

Some of the people the paleos disparage as “Big Con,” or “Straussians” – they, however, publish this radical column quite regularly. In doing so, this odd amalgam, among whom are very fine people (such as my editors), are publishing one of the most potent antidotes to America’s most pernicious shibboleths.

So, who, from my vantage point, shows more philosophical leadership and intellectual honesty? That was rhetorical.

Oh, occasionally a column of mine has been posted on this or the other paleo site, but that’s not the same as letting the strongest fire power we have reach our young readers week in and week out. They don’t. The paleo community huddles in atrophying intellectual attics, praising itself, hiring mediocrities that hog the space with their own meandering milquetoast output, as they disparage the Big Con using hackneyed, recycled argument. 

The biggest enemies of the paleo faction are its own, not Big Con, which is defeatable with potent epistolary fire power.

You asked about cancel culture and the SPLC. Yes, the Southern Poverty Law Center has me and others in our camp on its hit list and has forced at least one D.C. outfit to expunge my column from its pixelated pages. But at least the Daily Caller had deigned to feature my column regularly before they ran scared from the SPLC. Our side, the paleo community, has not needed the SPLC to prompt it into a fright and flight response with respect to my work. It has long-since de facto canceled me. What “leadership”! Marginalizing leaders in your movement!  

DM: Would you be a proponent of repealing the 19th Amendment, and are Karens (Yankee women) the problem like always?

IM: I’m on record saying, in 2005, that I’d give up my vote if all women were denied the vote. A fact recollected here in 2012: 

“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.”

DM: Any parting advice for us “newbies”?

IM: Use your given, real name, young lady.* Go by your name. I believe you are named for a wonderful Hebrew matriarch. I say this for obvious reasons: You are so much more than a mother. (And kids are overrated. Humor alert.)

In addition to Mercer’s weekly columns and “Barely a Blog” essays at found at her website, she’s also the author of three books: “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” and “”Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Culture.” You can follow Mercer on Gab, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn, but not on Facebook, since the keepers of acceptable opinion have banned her, which means if you want to pursue truth, you should definitely read what Mercer has to say. Censors be damned!

*Postscript: Not many of you know, but I got doxxed earlier this year by an "Internet hate expert" and then was subsequently Twitter stalked by a few of her jack-booted evangeleftist bullies, who think it's a Christian virtue to try to ruin people's lives through "cancel culture." It was pretty rough at first, having idiots who for some reason have all the power act morally superior to you and get their rocks off threatening everything you hold dear. Honestly, it died down fairly quickly, probably because I'm such small potatoes. (If I ever get in the SPLC's cross hairs like Mercer, I suppose I'll know I've "made it" at that point.)

But with the expert and loving advice of a few of my wise mentors and caring compatriots, I decided not to publish the blog post I wrote about the dox, even though that was, of course, my first impulse. In fact, I didn't acknowledge or react to it at all (publicly), and instead embraced the out, quietly added my real name to my DM "about" page, and haven't looked back since. Sit and spin, haters!

Yours truly, Rebecca Dillingham, a.k.a. Dissident Mama

Article originally published September 28, 2020, at DissidentMama.net.