A Woman Of The Right: The Person Vs. The Polemicist

“A Woman Of The Right: The Person Vs. The Polemicist” is a medley of recent videos. Or, as my editor puts it (he’s funny), “Ilana Mercer explains why some claim she ‘eats nails for breakfast’” I don’t, of course.

Hello patriots. This is an introduction to those new to my YouTube channel—and my work. My name is ilana mercer. 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 war to race to trade deficits to anarchism to immigration to populism; as a valued reader put it, “We’ve learned to trust you.”

For 21 years these first principles have been applied to the day’s events with verve, vim and a good deal of muscular style. Alas, as an English letter writer to London’s Times Literary Supplement once put it, “Mercer eats nails for breakfast.”

This doesn’t always sit well with me. I had never imagined people would think a writer is an ogre simply because she uses the English language as it was once meant to be used, with deadly precision. (Have they read our American Antifederalists?) But, that’s my written work. The pleasant surprise element comes in here, where the person, not the prose, gets to make an appearance.

Another reader framed the muscular style less pejoratively: “A few years ago I said you wrote like a man. … Well now I think you also think like one.”

Since no woman wants to be thought of as a man on all fronts, I’m happy for the chance to appear occasionally in person to introduce my work to you.

Said a former—and formative—editor of mine from the Canadian press. “In your columns, you’re a take-no-prisoner demon,” in your videos, you are gentle and composed, your demeanor proper enough to be conversing with the Queen.”

Here I am more ilana the person than ilana the polemicist.

As to my views. I’m a libertarian of the hard-right. Lots of libertarians refer to themselves as neither left nor right. I’ve never done so. I’m a woman of the Right. Yet another clever reader put it thus: She’s so Right (as in right-wing) that she’s Left. That is as it should be. Certainly, before Trump, my typically Old Right anti-war position got me called a lefty by neoconservative readers and editors.

Another facet of my thinking that elicits the same “lefty” pejorative is that I’m never party-centric. Seeking immutable truth, in a postmodern environment, in which truth is devalued and rendered relative and subjective, demands transcending crass, opportunistic, party politics.
Self-evident truths are axiomatic truths, propositions that cannot be denied when squared with the reality around us. Reality is my guide.

I like to say that reality is the rational man’s anchor and that the strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality. My own ideas are intricately tethered to reality, which is likely why they have stood the test of time.

As mentioned, I’ve burned as hot as a Babylonian kiln against Uncle Sam’s wars of aggression. Wage Walls, Not Wars, I like to say. Indeed, I have always been as resolutely against America’s open borders as I am against her sanctimonious poisonous spreading of democracy around the world by prosecuting illegal, immoral, un-constitutional wars of aggression all over.

The motto on my eponymous website is “Verbal Swordplay for Civilization.” Nevertheless, I’m not squeamish. The Jewish sages–who were, ironically, pacifists in exile for 2000 years–counselled: “He who rises to kill thee—you rise a little earlier to … .” The viewers can complete the sentence. I have to mind the Deep Tech overlords.

Finally, why do I call myself a paleolibertarianism, and this is my idiosyncratic take: It’s how I’ve applied certain principles week-in, week-out, for years. In my definition, a paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which other foundational libertarian principles, by which all decent people should live, won’t endure.

This is precisely the reason for the institutional rot around us—where liberty and citizen sovereignty are crumbling as fast as our buildings: By central-planner design, America has been turned into a territory for trade, and nothing more. It is no longer a nation. Other than commerce and consumption, the glue, the fellow-feeling, that bind us together has been dissolved by DC design over decades.

But there is life after politics. And this is where I come in.

1. “On First Principles, The Person Vs. The Polemicist, And Life After Politics”

2. “Conservatives MUST Recognize Aggregate Group Differences While Cherishing The Individual”

3. “The Controlled Opposition: Candace On Tucker Is Wrong About The Riot & Rut Crowd” (Or, “The Democrats Ate Their Homework Argument”)