This column is Part 3 of a 3-part series. Read Part 1, “Big Tech’s Financial Terrorism And Social Excommunication” and Part 2, “Justice Thomas’ Solution to Big Tech’s Social And Financial Excommunication.”

It is inarguable that by financially crippling and socially segregating, and banishing politically irksome people and enterprises—the Big Tech cartel is flouting the spirit, if not the strict letter, of the Civil Rights Act.

For how do you make a living if your banking options are increasingly curtailed and constantly threatened, and your ability to electronically communicate with clients is likewise circumscribed?

Do you go back to a barter economy (a book for some bread)? Do you go underground? Cultivate home-based industries? Do you keep afloat by word of mouth? Go door-to-door? Return to stamping envelopes? How can you, when your client base is purely electronic?

Telling an individual he can’t open a bank account on account of the beliefs and opinions swirling in his head teeters on informing your innocent victim he might not be able to make a living, as do other, politically more polite Americans, and despite his innocence: Our only “offenses” as dissidents are thought crimes, namely, speaking, or typing or wafting into the air unpopular, impolite words.

“[I]n assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power,” Justice Clarence Thomas has argued, “what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.”

To paraphrase this Supreme Court jurist: Sure, there are alternatives to The Big Tech, but these make a mockery of the outcast. It would hardly be hyperbole, in driving home Justice Thomas’s point about comparability, to put it thus:

With respect to financial de-platforming, barring someone from PayPal is like prohibiting a passenger from crossing the English Channel by high-speed train, via ferry and by means of 90 percent of airplanes. “Have at it sucker.”

By Deep Tech decree, some Americans are worth more than others, based not on their actions, but on the voiced thoughts in their heads. This cannot stand.

The letter of the law needs changing. Do it.

Civil Rights Act

Thus, the preferred remedy to Deep Tech depredations would build upon existing Civil Rights Act jurisprudence.

As a reality-oriented conservative libertarian, I inhabit and theorize in the real world. From the conservative-libertarian’s perspective, Barry Goldwater got it right. Civil Rights law is an ass, for it infringes on property rights. But the onus is on flaccid Republican lawmakers to ensure that that ass can be ridden by all equally (with apologies to adorable, much-abused donkeys for the cruel metaphor).

These are existing laws that are already enforced. I see no reason to reject the application of civil rights solutions to wicked, woke bullies because existing laws that’ll never be repealed go against my core beliefs. What is libertarianism? The art of losing in life because of a slavish devotion to theoretical purity?

In this vein, why is it legal for PayPal to prevent law-abiding individuals from transacting financially, but the Civil Rights Commission prohibits a small business owner from refusing to bake a cake for gay nuptials?

Yes, state anti-discrimination Acts variously decree that people of different persuasions cannot be denied “equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of a place of public accommodation.”

Civil Rights law must be applied evenly. In the cause of neutralizing Deep Tech, it is but a small thing to extend the prohibition against such discrimination to innocent thought criminals.

Develop a powerful civil-rights based argument in defense of the rights of law-abiding individuals to expressed their worldviews without being excommunicated socially and financially. Then take it to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Imposing The Negative Duty Of Tolerance

Another proposal (made cryptically on Twitter by Richard Spencer) is to proclaim social media platforms as free speech, censorship-free zones. Both Republicans and Democrats would have to contend with speech they abhor.

A federal proclamation of social media platforms as censorship-free zones, as I see it, could be a kind of codified declaration of shared public values.

I like the idea, as it concerns a negative duty, which requires only that we refrain from injuring others in the real sense (as opposed to the bogus, snowflake sense, which encompasses hurt feelings). I have no qualms about imposing the harmless negative duty of tolerance on intolerant tyrannical entities—business or bureaucracy—when in violation of individual, natural rights.

Differently put, natural rights antedate the state apparatus. It matters not who restores or upholds authentic negative rights violated—state or federal authority—just so long as someone does.

Alas, Spencer’s idea of unfettered free speech would have worked for the old liberal left; but not with the new, illiberal left, which relishes its power to culturally and economically crush conservatives.

Homesteading

Of theoretical importance is the fact that value created on Twitter and Facebook is derived in large part from the users of these platforms, who have homesteaded and titivated their pages, in a manner.

Some will claim that by privileging platform users as opposed to platform proprietors with creating value on the cyberspace domain, through acts of homesteading, I am echoing Marx’s Labor Theory of Value. Again, I reject the defeatist argument from theoretical purity.

All the more so considering that the commodities the Tech overlords are enjoined to tolerate are harmless, ethereal pixels, words wafting into the ether.

Big Tech bullies don’t have to entertain Nick Fuentes or Richard Spencer in person in their kitschy McMansions. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sundar Pichai (Google), Tim Cook (Apple) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) only have to tolerate the pixelated, written or spoken words of their ideological enemies.

Make them!

©2021 ILANA MERCER
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Fox News’ Tucker Carlson appears in thrall to Lara Logan’s political observations—to her “philosophical” meditations, too. Although treated as a Delphic oracle of sorts; Logan is no Roger Scruton.

You might have heard Logan claim, recently and repetitively, that everything in the world is simple. “Everything is simple,” she keeps intoning in her appearances on Fox News.

Applied to the fiasco in Afghanistan, Logan’s Theory of Simple is that, considering that America is omnipotent, whatever occurs under its watch is always and everywhere planned and preventable.

Ridiculous and wrong, yet Tucker, whom we all love to bits, giggles in delight.

“They want you to believe Afghanistan is complicated,” lectured Logan. “Because if you complicate it, it is a tactic in information warfare called ‘ambiguity increasing.’”

“So now we’re talking about all the corruption and this and that,” she further vaporized. “But at its heart, every single thing in the world… always comes down to one or two things …”

Logan likely recently discovered Occam’s Razor and is promiscuously applying this principle to anything and everything, with little evidence or geopolitical and historic understanding in support of her Theory of Simple.

Occam’s Razor posits that, “the simplest explanation is preferable to one that is more complex,” provided “simple” is “based on as much evidence as possible.”

A nifty principle—and certainly not a philosophy—Occam’s Razor was not meant to apply to everything under the sun.

Misapplied by Logan, why? Primarily because Logan’s explanation for America’s defeat in Afghanistan—that the United States threw the game—is hardly the simplest explanation, despite her assertion to the contrary.

The simplest explanation to the US defeat in Afghanistan, based on as much information as is possible to gather, is that, wait for this: America was defeated fair and square. As this columnist had argued, the US was outsmarted and outmaneuvered, in a mission impossible in the first place.

Unlike Logan, who is convinced America could have won a war other superpowers had lost, Mike Martin, a former British army officer in Helmand province, now at King’s College, London, had this to say about the ragtag enemy:

This was “probably one of the best conceived and planned guerrilla campaigns ever. The Taliban went into every district and flipped all the local militias by doing deals along tribal lines.”

What do you know? The Economist did not ask Logan for her “analysis” of “why America failed in Afghanistan.” Instead, the august magazine called on Henry Kissinger, a stateman with a sinewy intelligence, for his analysis.

Kissinger said what this writer had written in columns like, “‘Just War’ For Dummies (2003), “Afghanistan: A War Obama Can Call His Own” (2008) “To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question” (2012), “Grunts, Get In Touch With Your Inner-Muslim” (2012), and others.

Tribal Afghanistan is thoroughly decentralized, always has been. Our indisputably brave soldiers had been ordered to, at once, woo and war against a primitive Pashtun population that disdained the central government we were dead set on strengthening. (“Afghanistan: A War Obama Can Call His Own,” 2008)

Since Baksheesh (bribery) is in the political bone marrow of Afghanistan; American money and profligate spending habits only fed this proclivity for pelf and strengthened feudal fiefdoms and warlords.

And Afghans simply have more of an affinity for the Taliban than for the Wilsonians who were attempting to westernize them. Those we collaborated with are currently being called “our allies.” But it was not uncommon to hear of an Afghan policeman or soldier leading our men into an ambush, or opening fire on his American “colleagues,” during a joint operation.

Now, all we hear from Logan and the neocon Rambo Rescuers of Fox News is of the urgency of bringing these “Afghan allies” to America.

Back in the day, it was curiously observed that the Afghani soldiers “fighting” alongside our men frequently suffered few casualties; Americans invariably paid the price. In 2009, I quoted Specialist Raquime Mercer, 20, whose close friend died in one of those attacks by an “ally.” He said: “You don’t trust anybody here.”

Now we consider them trustworthy—even eligible to take up residence in our neighborhoods.

Wrote Jim Sauer, a “retired Marine Corps Sergeant Major and combat veteran with over thirty years of service” (2009), about our Afghan allies:

…the bulk of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) are not fighters, nor are they ‘true believers.’ They are simply cowards – frauds – corrupt to the core by any standard and apostates to their own faith. They are slovenly, drug-addicted, dimwitted, and totally unreliable at any level… They thrive on their petty powers and refuse to shoulder any burden or responsibility. Does this sound too harsh? Not for the Marines and Soldiers who have been killed by the treachery of ANA and ANP.

The Taliban does not speak for the small sector of Afghans groomed by America during the occupation. Widely supported by most Afghanis, however, the Taliban tried to tell us that, “the presence of infidels in a Muslim country is a … sin,” and that they would not tolerate the “accursed Western invasion, which [was] forcing itself upon us in the name of democracy.”

They didn’t.

The authentic Kissinger (Henry, not Lara) agrees, speaking about the occupation as “a process so prolonged and obtrusive as to turn even non-jihadist Afghans against the entire effort. Afghanistan,” writes the elder stateman, “has never been a modern state. Statehood presupposes a sense of common obligation and centralization of authority. Afghan soil, rich in many elements, lacks these.”

Islam. Occupation. Tribalism. Traditionalism. Baksheesh in the blood. Only simpletons think failure in Afghanistan was simple.

**

NEW. WATCH: “With Friends Like Gen. Mark Benedict Milley, America Doesn’t Need Enemies”:

©2021 ILANA MERCER
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In what should serve as a lesson for Americans today, recall that 30 years ago, on February 2, 1990, F. W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, turned the screws on his constituents, betraying the confidence we had placed in him.

I say “we,” because, prior to becoming president in 1989, Mr. de Klerk was my representative, in the greater Vereeniging region of Southern Transvaal, where I resided. (Our family subsequently moved to Cape Town.)

A constellation of circumstances had aligned to catapult de Klerk to a position of great power. A severe stroke forced the “The Crocodile,” President P. W. Botha, from power in 1989. Nothing in the background of his successor, President, F. W. de Klerk, indicated the revolutionary policies he would pursue.

To a 1992 referendum asking white voters if they favored de Klerk’s proposed reforms, we returned a resounding “yes.” Sixty-eight percent of respondents said “yes” to the proposed reforms of a man who sold his constituents out for a chance to frolic on the world stage with Nelson Mandela.

For it was in surrendering South Africa to the ANC that de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela.

Why was de Klerk trusted to negotiate on behalf of a vulnerable racial minority? For good reason: De Klerk had made his views abundantly clear to constituents. “Negotiations would only be about power-sharing,” he promised. At the time, referendum respondents generally trusted de Klerk, who had specifically condemned crude majority rule. Such elections, in Africa, have traditionally amounted to one man, one vote, one time. Typically, elections across Africa have followed a familiar pattern: Radical black nationalist movements take power everywhere, then elections cease. Or, if they take place, they’re rigged.

Among much else, de Klerk’s loyal constituents agreed to his scrapping of the ban on the Communist-sympathizing ANC. Freeing Nelson Mandela from incarceration was also viewed as long overdue as was acceding to Namibia’s independence, and junking nuclear weapons. Botha, before de Klerk, had, by and large, already dismantled the most egregious aspects of apartheid.

What de Klerk’s constituents were not prepared for was to be legislated into a permanent position of political subordination. President de Klerk, the man entrusted to stand up for crucial structural liberties, went along with the great centralizers. He caved to ANC demands, forgoing all checks and balances for South Africa’s Boer, British and Zulu minorities.

By the time the average “yes” voter discerned the fact that de Klerk had no intention of maintaining this opposition when push came to shove, it was too late.

Thus, with de Klerk’s collaboration, and under the wing of the American eagle—in particular, U.S. negotiators like Herman Cohen, undersecretary of state for Africa—the Afrikaner, Anglo and Zulu minorities were ordered to forgo minority veto power, meaningful power-sharing and checks on power in the form of a second chamber in the legislature. Substantive devolution of authority to the regions of South Africa was also denied.

Yet somehow, a new generation of South Africans, Afrikaner and English, reveres F. W. de Klerk, even crediting the former South African president as a reformer, who led “the country out of the political dead-end [in which] it found itself.”

“Today,” declares de Klerk adulator Pieter du Toit, “South Africa is a democracy, with rights-based guarantees.” The writer, editor of a large internet news site, is perfectly serious when he touts South Africa as a country that affords its citizens “rights-based guarantees.” For this reason, du Toit should not be taken seriously.

Universal suffrage is not to be conflated with freedom. As Iraqis learned after their “liberation,” ink-stained fingers don’t inoculate against blood stains, or, rather, rivers of blood.

As the democratic South Africa amply demonstrates, political rights and a paper constitution don’t secure the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

A civilized society, ultimately, is one in which the individual can go about the business of life unmolested. If he can’t do that simple thing, of what value is the vote or a constitution? Extant societal structures that safeguard life and property can always be improved upon. But once these bulwarks against mob rule and mayhem disintegrate, as they have in South Africa, they’re seldom restored.

Far and away the most perplexing paragraph in du Toit’s ode to de Klerk is his historical justification for de Klerk’s giving the shop to the ANC:

“When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989,” writes du Toit, “along with a series of governments in the Eastern Bloc, [de Klerk] knew it was a matter of time before the Soviet Union fell, and with that the ANC’s biggest support base. De Klerk recognized the moment to move forward.”

Let me see if I grasp the logic of a surrender without defeat:

The ANC’s biggest backer, the USSR, was on the verge of collapse. Therefore, goes the author’s logic, the time was ripe to surrender South Africa to the Soviet Union’s satellite, the ANC? This is worse than a non sequitur. It’s nonsense.

At the time de Klerk, pushed by American negotiators, gave away the store, the ANC heroes were a ragtag bunch of exiled has-been communists, scattered all over Africa and Europe; monosyllabic, apathetic, oft-inebriated men, whose main admirers were their Swedish groupies.

By contrast, someone who did have real power was Constand Viljoen, a military hero and former chief of the South African Defense Force. General Viljoen represented the hardliner Afrikaners and the security forces. Viljoen believed, correctly, that de Klerk had shirked his responsibilities to the electorate. He planned on leading a coalition that would have deposed the freelancing de Klerk and negotiated for an Afrikaner ethnic state.

Ditto Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, chief minister of the KwaZulu homeland and leader of the Zulu people and their Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). His championship of self-determination had been denied.

Buthelezi was fed up to the back teeth with being sidelined. He and his Zulu impis (warriors) were every bit as fractious as Viljoen; every bit as willing to fight for their rightful corner of the African Eden.

For setting his sights on decentralized sovereignty in Zululand, the Zulu royal and his following (close on 20 percent of the South African population) were condemned as reactionaries by the West, whose interests de Klerk was, by now, championing.

Alas, the African gentleman (Buthelezi) and the Afrikaner general (Viljoen) were no match for the conniving communists (ANC) and their knavish collaborator:

F. W. de Klerk.

Citations are in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011) by ilana mercer

©2020 ILANA MERCER
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February 6

* President F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela (Photo by © Louise Gubb/CORBIS SABA/Corbis via Getty Images)

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From the riffs of outrage coming from the Democrats and their demos over “our democracy” betrayed, infiltrated, even destroyed—you’d never know that a rich vein of thinking in opposition to democracy runs through Western intellectual thought, and that those familiar with it would be tempted to say “good riddance.”

Voicing opposition to democracy is just not done in politically polite circles, conservative and liberal alike.

For this reason, the Mises Institute’s Circle in Seattle, an annual gathering, represented a break from the pack.

The Mises Institute is the foremost think tank working to advance free-market economics from the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics. It is devoted to peace, prosperity, and private property, implicit in which is the demotion of raw democracy, the state, and its welfare-warfare machine.

This year, amid presentations that explained “Why American Democracy Fails,” it fell to me to speak to “How Democracy Made Us Dumb.” (Oh yes! Reality on the ground was not candy-coated.)

Some of the wide-ranging observations I made about the dumbing down inherent in democracy were drawn from the Founding Fathers and the ancients.

A tenet of the American democracy is to deify youth and diminish adults. To counter that, I’ll start with the ancients.

The Athenian philosophers disdained democracy. Deeply so. They held that democracy “distrusts ability and has a reverence for numbers over knowledge.” (Will Durant, “The Story of Philosophy,” New York, New York, 1961, p. 10.)

Certainly, among the ancients who mattered, there was a keen contempt for “a mob-led, passion-ridden democracy.” The complaint among Athenians who occupied themselves with thinking and debating was that “there would be chaos where there is no thought,” and that “it was a base superstition that numbers give wisdom. On the contrary, it is universally seen that men in crowds are more foolish, violent and cruel than men separate and alone.” (p. 11)

Underground already then, because so subversive—anti-democratic thinking was the aristocratic gospel in Athens. Socrates (born in 470 B.C.) was the intellectual leader against democracy and for the even-then hated aristocratic philosophy. Socrates’ acolytes, young and brilliant, questioned the “specious replacement of the old virtues by unsocial intelligence.”

The proof of the foolish, violent and cruel nature of the crowds is that the crowds, not the judges, insisted on making Socrates the first martyr of philosophy. He drank the poison at the behest of the people.

No wonder Plato, Socrates’ most gifted student, harbored such scorn for democracy and hatred for the mob—so extreme that it led this controversial genius to resolve that democracy must be destroyed, to be replaced by his planned society; “the rule of the wisest and the best, who would have to be discovered and enabled.”

Plato’s “Republic,” seconds the Economist, “is haunted by the fear that democracies eventually degenerate into tyrannies” (June 22, 2019). To libertarians, Plato of the planned society was wrong. However, the fear reverberating throughout his “Republic” is righteous.

A democratic utopia of freedom cannot come about because of the nature of man, thought Plato. Men “soon tire of what they have, pine for what they have not, and seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another.” (“The Story of Philosophy,” p. 19.)

Plato agreed, that “the diversity of democracy’s characters … make it look very attractive.” However, “these citizens are so consumed by pleasure-seeking that they beggar the economy”; so hostile to authority that they ignore the advice of sages, and so solipsistic and libertine that they lose any common purpose.

Most agreeable to libertarian thinking was Aristotle, who ventured that democracy is based on a false assumption of equality. It arises out of the notion that “those who are equal in one respect (under the law) are equal in all respects. Because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” (P. 70)

Tocqueville, too, was not sold on the new American democracy. He conducted “his extensive investigation into American life, and was prepared to pronounce with authority [about what he termed the new democracy].” (Russell Kirk, “The Conservative Mind,” Washington D.C., 1985, 205-224)

The American elite, Tocqueville observed, does not form an aristocracy that cherishes individuality, but a bureaucratic elite which exacts rigid conformity, a monotonous equality, shared by the managers of society.” (p. 218) Remarking on “the standardization of character in America,” Tocqueville described it as “a sort of family likeness” that makes for monotony. (p. 210)

What menaces democratic society … a tyranny of mediocrity, a standardization of mind and spirit and condition …  The mass of people will not rest until the state is reorganized to furnish them with material gratification.”

“Pure democracy makes libertarian democracy impossible,” posited Tocqueville. (p. 213) “In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within certain barriers, an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them … his political career is then over, since he has offended the only authority able to defend it. … Before making public his opinions, he thought he had sympathizers, now it seems to him he has none any more, since he revealed himself to everyone; then those who blame him criticize loudly, and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away without courage. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort, which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.” (p. 218)

Consider that Tocqueville was writing at a time so much smarter than our own.

Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans.

This column, now in its 20th year, can attest that writing in the Age of the Idiot is about striking the right balance of banality and mediocrity, both in style and thought, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines and positions, poorly.

Let us not forget Friendrich Nietzsche (admired by H. L. Mencken, whose genius would have remained unrecognized had he been plying his craft in 2019).

Born 39 years after Tocqueville, Nietzsche saw nothing good in democracy. “It means the worship of mediocrity, and the hatred of excellence. … What is hated by the people, as a wolf by the dogs, is the free spirit, the enemy of all fetters, the not-adorer, the man who is not a regular party-member. … How can a nation become great when its greatest men lie unused, discouraged, perhaps unknown … Such a society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of vertical—not the superior man but the majority man becomes the ideal and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else; even the sexes approximate—the men become women and the women become men.” (“The Story of Philosophy,” p. 324.)

For their part, America’s founders had attempted to forestall raw democracy by devising a republic.

In his magisterial “Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government,” constitutional scholar James McClellan noted that universal suffrage and mass democracy were alien to the Founders: “They believed that a democracy would tend toward mediocrity and tyranny of the majority.” Writing about the first state constitutions (penned between 1776-1783), McClellan attests that, “A complete democracy on a wide scale was widely regarded throughout the colonies as a threat to law and order.”

Why, Pennsylvania became the laughingstock in the colonies when it “abolished all property qualifications for voting and holding office. This confirmed the suspicions of many colonial leaders that an unrestrained democracy could drive good men out of public office and turn the affairs of state over to pettifoggers, bunglers, and demagogues.” A conga-line of those you witnessed at the CNN/New York Times Democratic debate, the other day.

“The Founders wanted representation of brains, not bodies,” observed McClellan, noting that, at least “for a number of years, the best minds in the country dominated American politics.” No more.

**

Watch ilana mercer’s entire address, “How Democracy Made Us Dumb,” on YouTube.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
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October 17

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On the eve of the federal convention, and following its adjournment in September of 1787, the Anti-Federalists made the case that the Constitution makers in Philadelphia had exceeded the mandate they were given to amend the Articles of Confederation, and nothing more. The Federal Constitution augured ill for freedom, argued the Anti-Federalists. These unsung heroes had warned early Americans of the “ropes and chains of consolidation,” in Patrick Henry’s magnificent words, inherent in the new dispensation.

After 200 years of just such “consolidation”—in the magisterial “Liberty, Order, And Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government”—constitutional scholar James McClellan distilled the Anti-Federalist argument with the respect it deserves.

As “strong advocates of States’ Rights,” Anti-Federalists held that “self-government, independence, and individual liberty were best protected at the local level. A distant and powerful central government,” the kind cooked up at the Philadelphia convention, was anathema to these “cherished values.” To that end, Anti-Federalists fought to preserve the “loose-knit relationship” that had existed between the “Confederation government and the States.”

Should the Federal Constitution be ratified, there would be “no checks, no real balances,” thundered Patrick Henry. Instead, the country would live under a “powerful and mighty empire.” Writing under the assumed name “Agrippa,” yet another Anti-Federalist scoffed at the idea of an enormous “uncompounded republic,” “containing 6 million white inhabitants,” all “reduced to the same standard of morals or habits and of laws.” This “in itself is an absurdity,” mocked “Agrippa.”

The Tower of Babel that is 21st century America is home not to 6 but 317 million alienated, antagonistic individuals, diverse to the point of distrust. These modern-day Americans, some of whose ancestors were brought together by a “profound intellectual and emotional attachment to individual liberty,” possess little by way of “social capital” to unify them. Surveys say Americans today avoid one another and hunker down unhappily in front of the TV, instead. This would have hardly surprised “Agrippa.”

So, too, did Anti-Federalists predict the problem of representatives who had been imbued with excessive power. “Once elected, representatives would be far from home, comfortable in their jobs, enjoying a big salary … living in some distant, yet-to-be-built city far removed from the watchful eye of the people they represented.”

Sound familiar?

From “Brutus” came perhaps the most “perceptive and far-reaching examinations of congressional power from the Anti-Federalist perspective.” Writing in the New York Journal, “Brutus” observed that “the ‘most natural and grammatical construction’ of the General Welfare Clause in Article I is that it authorizes the Congress ‘to do anything which in their judgment will tend to provide for the general welfare, and this amounts to the same thing as general and unlimited power of legislation in all cases.”

“If only the high-minded Framers had written the Constitution with crooks in mind,” lamented this column in 2008.“Brutus” was not nearly as charitable. Bitterly did he complain about a Constitution that was “written ‘in general and indefinite terms, which are either equivocal, ambiguous, or which require definition.'”

The Commerce Clause has given us the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. “ACA,” or “Obamacare,” forces 21st century Americans to purchase the federal government’s version of health insurance, or risk punishment. The Clause was the focus of scathing Anti-Federalist critique. “What is meant by ‘the power to regulate?” they demanded to know. “What, precisely, is ‘commerce'”? The new Constitution, argued the prescient Anti-Federalists, is mum on these matters, providing little by way of precision in definition.

Brilliant too was “Brutus” in his prediction that, if instituted, the “new system of government” would see the Federal judiciary “swallow up the State courts.” Back then, “Brutus” saw Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution as vesting the judicial branch with the kind of power that would bring about “the entire subversion of the legislative, executive, and judiciary power of the individual states.”

As the saying goes, “a prophet is not without honor save in his own country.”

To observe Obama (and predecessor) in action is to realize that Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry and New York Anti-Federalist “Cato” were prophets who deserve a lot more honor in their own country. Both forewarned of an imperial presidency in the making. “‘The president,’ wrote “Cato,” has so much power that his office ‘differs very immaterially from the establishment of monarchy in Great Britain.'”

Indeed, President Barack Obama habitually “uses executive orders to circumvent federal legislation.” He exempts his “friends or political cronies” from oppressive laws his subjects must obey. And he orders the suspension of “duly enacted [immigration] law”—even “barring enforcement”—because he does not like the law.

A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia.

To deny that the Anti-Federalists were right is to deny reality.

Having prophesied that Philadelphia was the beginning of the end of the freedoms won in the American Revolution, our Anti-Federalist philosophical fathers fought to forestall the inevitable. They failed.

©2013 By ILANA MERCER
WND, Economic Policy Journal, American Daily Herald
&  Praag.org. 
December 6

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The force of the to-pee-or-not-to-pee position is just up Beavis and Butthead’s philosophical alley ~ilana

It’s okay to kill ’em, but it’s not okay to pee on them once they’re dead.

This sums up the piss-poor discussion over the LiveLeak clips of “four United States Marines urinating on three dead Taliban fighters.” According the New York Times, the videos, “posted on public video-sharing Web sites including YouTube, began ricocheting around international news Web sites on Wednesday,” January 11.

The urinators “are members of the Third Battalion, Second Marines, which completed a tour of Afghanistan this fall before returning to its base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.” They kicked off the wee odyssey in the northern part of Helmand Province.

Quick to distinguish themselves were the pro-pee pundits. For a ghastly moment, I was back in 2002, watching the anchorwomen of Fox News countdown to obliterating Iraq. How like watching bitches in heat that experience was!

The force of the to-pee-or-not-to-pee position is just up Beavis and Butthead’s philosophical alley. The repartee of the two animated MTV characters, the products of Mike Judge’s genius (think “Idiocracy”), would go something like this:

Butthead: “Beavis, check this out. What’s better; to have a dude waste you or whiz on you, uh huh huh?” (Sound effects are here.)

Beavis: “Yeah, yeah, I’ll take the whiz, Butthead, gimme the whiz, yeah, yeah.” (More grunting.)

As the Daily Mail noted, the dead Afghans may have been civilians or insurgents, we simply do not know. Whichever is the case, they would have, I wager, welcomed the kind of options even Beavis and Butthead are capable of entertaining.

For the truth about the people we are pissing on and pissing off in Afghanistan is quite simple. America’s indisputably brave soldiers have been ordered to, at once, woo and war against a primitive Pashtun population. These Pashtuns disdain the central government we desperately want them to obey. So it goes: We help local groups believed to be patriotic, but, at the same time, end up establishing an authoritarian protectorate they despise.

According to Matthew Hoh, a former member of the Marine Corps, who was cited for uncommon bravery in Iraq, we “are losing soldiers and Marines in combat to people who are fighting us really only because we’re occupying them. … In Afghanistan, everything is much more localized,” Hoh explained in numerous interviews, in 2009.

“Allegiance is really to your family and then to your village or your valley. And that’s what they fight for. There has not been a tradition of central government there and I don’t believe central government is wanted.” Currently, and consequent to US colonization, these poor primitives, hankering after communal autonomy, have come to conflate the central government and the foreign occupiers, and are fighting both.

Matthew Hoh went on to take a position as Foreign Service Officer in Afghanistan, only to resign in protest over the Afghan war, having “lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purpose of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan.”

But Hoh is no hero to the war hos at home.

Yes, America’s neoconservative pundettes are back. Never underestimate the contribution neoconservative women in the scribbling and broadcasting professions have made to sexing up war. When babes with bursting décolletages quake and quiver for action, their fans do more than just look, they listen. Babes in Brownian Motion have been instrumental in keeping their fans tuned-out, turned-on, and hot for war. Mistaking jingoism for patriotism, their atavistic followers have rewarded them with lifelong loyalty (and royalties).

And the silly sex clearly likes water sports.

One gushed about the Golden Shower, calling it “a victory tinkle.” Another promised she’d “drop trou and do it too.” Still another woman for war heaped scorn on Afghani Islamist culture, alluding to its proclivity for “child rape (sanctioned by polygamous ‘marriage’), to normalized pederasty (dancing boys), beheadings, Islamic male supremacism and zero freedom of conscience.” As if the vileness of their faith justifies our vanquishing of Muslims—and our prosecuting a decade-long, futile war against them in Afghanistan. Let us leave the Afghani to their horrible habits and stop inflicting ours on them.

Aghast, Russia Today (RT) editorialized about CNN contributor Dana Loesch, who egged on the Dana Show listeners, during a January 12 broadcast: “I want a million ‘cool points’ for these guys. Is that harsh to say? C’mon people, this is a war. Do I have a problem with that as a citizen of the United States? No, I don’t.”

Still and all, I disagree with the impressive Allen West, a Republican Representative from Florida, and an ex-Army lieutenant colonel. West joined Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in advocating “maximum punishment” for the urinators. “It is absolutely inconsistent with American values and the standards we expect from our military personnel,” crowed Clinton. I don’t believe the Marines are at fault. Blame the people who keep them in that country, aided by the King’s comitatus—battle-crying babes included.

Who can forget Hillary’s crassness and cruelty when informed that Col. Muammar Gadhafi had been butchered by her Libyan proxies, the National Transitional Council? “We came, we saw, he died,” cackled Clinton, conjuring Julius Caesar.

The gorgon who heads Caesar’s state department did everything but squat on Gadhafi’s corpse. Now she expresses “total dismay” and wants the Marines to pay.

Spare us.

©2012 ILANA MERCER
WND & RT
January 20

* Screen pic credit

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A succinct distinction between a republic and a democracy shows that the American republic rests in peace and that voting in the Unites States is undeniably democratic, not republican. In Does Democracy Promote Peace, legal scholar James Ostrowski does just that:

Democracy is nothing more than the numerous and their manipulators bullying the less numerous. It is an elaborate and deceptive rationalization for the strong in numbers to impose their will on the electorally weak by means of centralized state coercion …
Both forms of government feature voting by the people to select officials. The primary difference between them is that while republican voting is done for the purpose of choosing officials to administer the government in the pursuit of its narrowly defined functions, democratic voting is done, not only to select officials but also to determine the functions and goals and powers of the government.
The guiding principle of republics is that they exercise narrow powers delegated to them by the people, who themselves, as individuals, possess such powers.

The allusion to “narrow powers” is far removed from the realities of the American social democracy, particularly in light of the welter of new powers Washington has grabbed since September 11. With the governed in the U.S. exerting so few controls over those doing the governing, the original notion of the people having the same powers as their elected officials strikes one as positively quaint.

The powers available to power wielders in a democracy are, by definition, exceedingly broad and broaden with almost every bit of legislation passed. That we were once a republic and are now a social democracy makes clear that the Constitution has not halted this progression. The Constitution has, for all intents and purposes, been destroyed.

“The process of mutilation” Frank Chodorov dated to the Jackson Administration, but put the Constitution’s final expiration down to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. “The income tax,” wrote Chodorov in Imperium in Imperio, “insinuated a theory of government quite unknown to the Founding Fathers, holding that the function of government is to act as pater familias to society as a whole. To perform that role, the government must have access to all that is produced, as a matter of right, just as a feudal baron might lay claim to the fruits of his vassals’ labor.”

Successive Supreme Courts have contributed to the “mutilation” by interpreting the Constitution so that it no longer reflects the eternal verities the Founders spoke to, but the prevailing egalitarian redistributionist credo.

With natural rights being held hostage to the “greater good,” the vote in a democracy is not to select people who would protect the inviolability of the rights the Founders wanted to instantiate—the right to life, liberty and property. At best, the vote in a democracy is a toss-up between a candidate who would loot for welfare and the candidate whose preference is to pillage for warfare.

The one fellow will ransack the taxpayer in order to secure prescription medication for those who think their health is the collective’s responsibility; the other ‘virtuous’ chap thinks nothing of a shakedown in the cause of imposing democracy on far-flung nations, never with their democratic consent.

The vote in a democracy is about the coerced distribution James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, eschewed in his 1792 disquisition on Property: “What a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which he may freely give, but cannot be taken from him without his consent.”

In a democracy, “even the individuals who voted and who managed to pick a winner are not actually ruling themselves in any sense of the word,” say Linda and Morris Tannehill. They voted for a man, not for the specific laws that govern them.” And the laws that man and his faceless bureaucracy usher in have their own momentum.

Who among the traditional support base of George Bush would have foreseen his plumping for protectionist policies for the steel, softwood lumber and agriculture industries? Or for legislation like the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulation bill? Who would have predicted his newfound dedication to rights infringing anti-discrimination laws, not least the support for gender-based quotas in college athletics? All of these reflect presidential pandering in a democracy to the real constituency: the special interest group.

This voracious voter forms the largest and most powerful constituency. He is the backbone of the system, and possesses the greatest political pull, because the tax burden in a democracy rests on a minority. The majority of taxpayers in the modern-day social democracy pay very little tax but receive myriad government benefits anyway.

Oddly enough, conservatives continue to stubbornly associate Republican candidates with the no-longer extant republican principles, believing that systemic ills can be remedied at the ballot box: Get the right—Republican—guy in and all will be swell.

Their confusion is understandable. Republicans are the drag queens of politics. While the Democrat is open about his devilishness—he finds the idea of a constitutional government with narrowly delimited powers as repellent as Dracula finds garlic—modern-day conservatives are subtle about their aversion to a Jeffersonian republic.

Peel away the pules for family, faith and fetuses and one discovers either, what economist and political philosopher Hans-Hermann-Hoppe calls “neoconservative welfare-warfare statists and global social democrats”—Or, conversely, national socialists of sorts, who fuse economic protectionism, populism and support for the very welfare infrastructure which is at the root of the social rot they decry.

In a word, the social democratic bona fides of the Republican are beyond reproach. “Contrary to popular myth,” demurs Ostrowski, “every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government’s size, scope or power—and usually all three. Include regulations and foreign policy, as well as budgets approved by a Republican Congress, and a picture begins to emerge of the Republican Party as a reliable engine of government growth.”

Mr. Bush has certainly earned his Great Society Democrat credentials.

Ultimately, the vote in a democracy is for the social democrat who thinks nothing of mob rule as a moral philosophy. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn almost got it right when he said, “Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.” Correction: All that can be achieved with only 51 percent of the vote, making the slogan “freedom begins at the ballot box” a very cruel hoax indeed.

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