DID YOU notice the theme on the Tucker Carlson Tonight, July 18? Tucker Carlson got into TikTok mode, blaming China for pervasive American decadence, decades in the making.

The host petulantly saddled China and its algorithms for, among other things, America’s gutter culture, as acted out on TikTok.

If we are to believe Mr. Carlson, the Chinese made those Americans hos disrobe and simulate all manner of sex on TikTok. The Chinese made American TikTokers gesticulate and grunt and generally privilege Ebonics over English. And the Chinese made the same pornographic performers worship hip-hop and rap and energetically deploy their lower bodies to signal mating behavior that jibes with that of primates.

A non sequitur is when your argument’s conclusion does not follow from its premise. Milking illogic to incriminate China for cultural trends that pervade mainstream America culture—why, Laura Ingraham herself professed her love for the rap hump-a-long genre—Tucker offered up his proof for the blame-China thesis:

Chinese TikTokers are seen practicing piano, manners and magic cube mental skills, whereas Americans can be observed doing what they do on … TV, in the movies, on reality shows, on campuses from kindergarten to college and on political panels.

Say no more. Point proven (mine). QED. Doing dumb and degenerate has become the Alpha and Omega of American life. TikTok reflects not Chinese machinations, but the broader American culture.

China’s culture until Communism was Confucian, which is high-minded and genteel. And, contra ConOink (my variation on ConInc), China is reactionary, returning not to Communism, but to Confucianism.

America’s youth, enabled by indulgent and permissive parents and pedagogues, have become increasingly licentious, lippy and libertine. Most are ignorant and lousy at writing, reasoning, and conversing coherently about anything other than raaaaaacism and, “Like my sexuality.” The kids have also become un-moored from their finest traditions, which are being embraced by …the Chinese: They are returning to things classical, traditional and eternally and universally beautiful.

You don’t see many of China’s youth act out in estrus, because they can’t. China has banned corrupt hip-hop culture, and has a new export: Western classical music.

“Once, classical music generally traveled from the West to the rest,” marveled the Economist. “Now China is reversing the exchange, not merely performing Western classical music in China, but exporting it. …”

In China, they’re inclined to consider a youth-obsessed society such as ours a silly society. The standard inquiry, among Taiwanese engineers, I am told, about their American counterparts in hardware engineering is, “How many grey hairs and no-hairs are in the group?” Unlike their youth-worshiping American colleagues, these wise instinctual Confucians reason that the presence of “grey hairs and no-hairs” in the collaborating high-tech team bodes better for the project.

On the other hand, “in America,” as Oscar Wilde had observed, “the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.” And adults are always on-hand to facilitate their folly.

From Fox News we move to LinkedIn for a snapshot of the Zeitgeist. There, conservative adults, ostensible grown-ups, ooze over the vacuous, rah-rah of children, in this instance, a girl waxing fat over the unfettered freedoms enjoyed in the USA. She went to Israel, courtesy of Harvard University. There, a rabbi obsequiously called America, not his own country, the best country in the world. She took to TikTok to deliver her own Sermon on the Mount (good career move), when not a single member of this girl’s entourage clapped.

Well, neither was Julian Assange clapping. He is the greatest libertarian alive, if barely. Why is Assange so fearful of being extradited to the USA? Does this bravest of freedom fighters perhaps fear being locked-up for life, and possibly Epsteined in the “freest” country’s dungeons?

Have the Panglossians at Harvard heard about private-sector driven financial de-platforming, en masse? Speech restrictions? Has the tom-tom drum passed on the news to Israel Firsters that some of our American colleagues struggle to find banks through which to transact financially?

We have just lived through three years during which the Pharma State has consolidated power as never before. On pain of taking the Covid jab, the State, sans GOP objection, has de facto established license to shutter a subject’s business, deny him freedom of movement, quarantine, fire, and separate him from loved ones. Under Republican and Democrat reign alike.

The DOJ (Department of Justice) doesn’t stop prosecuting deplorables when the guard changes in D.C. The ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) is more or less the same whichever the game. The overarching Permanent State is in operation just as viciously during and on the Republicans’ watch—although Fox News marionettes and the pols and party operatives running the show would like you to think these depredations began with Biden. Addled brains are good for their ratings and their political power.

Arrests of political opponents without due process have become more common in police state USA than in Apartheid-era SA, which, as chronicled in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot,” was unsurprisingly (because run by the pale patriarchy) legalistic and by-the-book.

For what it’s worth, as a dissident writer for over 23 years, my written speech would be far less imperiled and less cancelled in Putin’s Russia than it is in the USA today.

The American Administrative, Surveillance and Security State is the most powerful and feared in the world. And the Kids, progressive and conservative, are clueless.

If thought mediates action—then neither faction can conceptualize clearly about freedom, and thus will fail to fight for it.

My ‘I might be a Chinese spy’ look

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, July 21
Unz Review, July 21
The New American, July 22

The post Crappy Conservative Thinking: Protecting Power, Not Freedom appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

They’re unwilling to defend true dissidents, but Beltway lite libertarians and Con Inkers are forever genuflecting to privileged legacy journalists, who can afford to voluntarily leave their rich gigs in “protest” of cancel culture.

The Right hasn’t shut up about the New Yorker’s Andrew Sullivan, who is far less banal than the New York Times’ Bari Weiss. Both belong to the “nothing new, more of the same” neoconservative tradition. Her resignation antics are a storm in a C-cup; his “defiant” departure is the fussy equivalent (just for gay men).

For a more meaningful scandal, to the Right at least, consider the farce of a Conservative news and opinion organization (founded by a dragon slayer of a broadcaster), which has published lacerating pieces condemning America’s foremost hate group, yet has proceeded to purge writers, in compliance with the demands of said shakedown hate group.

American conservatism capitulating to America-haters? Negotiating with terrorists? Hypocrisy? Yes, yes, and yes.

Prone is the natural position of the Establishment Republican, Con Inker, neoconservative, whatever his latest opportunistic, political permutation may be.

The news site is the Daily Caller. The hate group is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The ransom demands issue from the illiterati of the SPLC, who regularly publish lists of—and hit pieces against—untouchable dissidents. They then proceed against us with all the vigor of a “a money grabbing slander machine,” to quote John Stossel, a veteran investigative journalist who has exposed this corrupt syndicate that lives off destroying people.

For his part, economist Thomas DiLorenzo has skillfully pried apart the revenue-rich, “racial racketeering” of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showing it to be nothing more than a “hate group hedge fund.”

Wrote the great leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn, in the New York Press, in 2007: “I’ve long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life. The reasons: a relentless fundraising machine devoted to terrifying mostly low-income contributors into unbolting ill-spared dollars year after year to an organization that now has an endowment of more than $100 million.”

An organization that shakes down paupers and pensioners to support its “ritualized forms of defamation.”

One would expect the Daily Caller, which has written against cancel culture and the Southern Poverty law Center, not to capitulate to such rot. But one would be wrong to expect principled positions from any Con Inc. org.

Opportunistic and prone are the only principles known to the D.C. media types. For they have no philosophy to speak of. Whatever political raiment he happens to be cloaked in—defeatism, hypocrisy and betrayal are the default positions of the D.C. “conservative” swamp dweller.

And so, July 7 saw Geoffrey Ingersoll, Daily Caller’s editor in chief, assume the supine position in a Twitter exchange, which ceded the terms of debate to the Democrats and their most diabolical proxies.

The Twitter entity before which Mr. Ingersoll was kneeling metaphorically in contrition was an account called “Sleeping Giants.” “They’re the worst,” attests Steve Bannon. They appear to be attached to a shakedown hub of cancel-culture activism. Illiteracy precludes any manifesto, but the constant nattering on a Twitter account has earned these cyberthugs a Wikipedia page.

To thrive, thugs need enablers. Enter Mr. Ingersoll.

First up on my Twitter feed, July 7, was a tweet from gutsy reporter Patrick Howley, founder of Big League Politics.

Geoff Ingersoll, best known for ranting sexist slurs at @CassandraRules, … wants everyone to know he does NOT know Ilana Mercer

Lol. Ilana is out of your league, pal

Chimed in the clever and combative Cassandra Fairbanks of the “Gateway Pundit”:

I don’t know [ilana], but if Geoff is denying knowing her to save his ass, she must be super interesting.

Cassandra quickly rendered her assessment of Mr. Ingersoll :

I really really like a bunch of people at Daily Caller, but Geoff is probably the most dull and basic neocon bitch in any dc newsroom.

All the while, I’m thinking: How odd. I certainly know Mr. Ingersoll. But since I’m hoping against hope that this is not about the fabulous segment written about me by the aforementioned SPLC, the “hate group hedge fund,” on August 16, 2017, I keep it light.

So, I jest:

Dear Patrick and Cassandra: What is this about? Thanks for spelling my name correctly. No idea why Mr. Ingersoll can’t. He did in his correspondence with me. LOL.

Beneath Patrick’s feisty throwdown is Mr. Ingersoll’s nervous tweet to his tormentors, the “Sleeping Giants”:

… Illana [sic] Mercer? Never stepped foot in our offices. Who else? [Scott] Greer? He left BEFORE we found out.

Titled “The Daily Caller has a White Nationalist Problem,” the SPLC’s hit piece is an asinine collection of non sequiturs, easily refuted in a society that values reason. But that’s no longer America.

And that’s not the Con Inkers—the con artists formerly known as neoconservatives and Establishment Republicans before that, whose aim is to pacify the Left and deceive the Right.

In fact, what the SPLC wrote about me was high praise—all the more reason for the Daily Caller to keep my animated copy on its anemic op-ed page.

You see, since the firing of former opinion editor Robert Mariani, the Caller’s op-ed page has been festooned by Israel First, neocon boilerplate. Retread rot, really. Its line-up of writers consists of unoriginal, Johnny-come-latelies to the America First position, which has been held by the dissident Right for decades. We do it best.

Principles aside, any op-ed editor whose op-ed page is littered with such insipid fare should warm to the rave review given to me by the SPLC.

Alas, only cowards shove principles aside. For the Southern Poverty Law Center is “America’s left-wing hate machine.” Its members advocate “urban Marxism” and “Third World Communism.” Why, “Weather Underground” terrorist William Ayers used to manage a website sponsored by the SPLC. “Tolerance.org” was its name.

In any event, my cordial correspondence with Mr. Ingersoll commenced on December 7 of 2017. The Daily Caller had been featuring my weekly column for some time, under the editorial leadership of young Mariani, who liked to mix it up. Mariani had just been shown the door, and my column, “Flynn’s Sin Was Lying To Liars, Not Colluding With Russians,” had been rejected.

A POLITE MR. INGERSOLL EXPLAINED the new, Daily Caller editorial policy. It would, seemingly, revolve around pacifying the Southern Poverty law Center:

From: Geoffrey Ingersoll <geoffrey@>
Sent: Thursday, December 7, 2017 10:57 AM
To: ilanamercer@
Subject: Re: ILANA MERCER On Michael Flynn Injustice

Hey, Ilana,

Frankly, I love your copy, but we’re going to hold on publishing you for a little while. I’ll ping you when I want to start running again.

Thing is Eric is the new guy fitting into this new role, and we’re right in the middle of coming at SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] about their baseless smear, and I think it’s in everyone’s interest to hold off for the time being.

Please let me know your thoughts,

All the best,

Geoffrey Ingersoll
Editor in Chief
The Daily Caller

MY REPLY:

From: Ilana Mercer <ilanamercer@
Sent: Thursday, December 7, 2017 8:09 PM
To: ‘geoffrey@>
Subject: SPLC

Dear Geoffrey,

Thanks for explaining the shift toward my column at Daily Caller. I appreciate that.

And thanks for asking for my thoughts. Here they are:

I saw that [Southern Poverty Law Center] hit piece on me, Scott and DC. I was going to reply to it at the time. I should have.

I am not a white nationalist. I am a hard-right libertarian individualist.  I’m also an ex-Israeli, Jewish, daughter of a rabbi still residing in South African, etc. And, I’m wedded to reality. That, the SPLC can’t forgive.

The SPLC article is easily refuted. In my case, it frames colorful language as “raaaaacist.” There is no argument in the SPLC article, just ad hominem. I’m more than capable of dealing a devastating blow to the “writers.” The SPLC’s text is impoverished, factually and logically.

I refuted a “Media Matters” attack, in “One More Media Matters Con Man,” here. Picked to pieces, this man’s case against me crumbles.

I don’t think this individual, dealt with above, renewed his attacks.

The entire establishment is attacking the president on the same grounds as the SPLC. The president is lagging in the battle b/c he has not put up a person or persons to eloquently argue his platform, non-stop. Just playing defense and only barely won’t cut it.

If we lie low and allow the SPLC bullying (joined by mainstream pols and media), we lose the agenda of this presidency, as well as a spectrum of speech that won’t easily be recovered.

My column also seemed to be quite liked by DC readers, who, for the most, clearly do not see things through the SPLC prism.

So, would you consider giving me the opportunity to refute the SPLC smear against Daily Caller and myself?

Kind regards,
Ilana

CAME MR. INGERSOLL’S RETORT:

From: Geoffrey Ingersoll <geoffrey@>
Sent: Friday, December 8, 2017 6:33 AM
To: Ilana Mercer <ilanamercer
Subject: Re: SPLC

Sure, but not right now. We’re doing a series called “The New McCarthyism,” perhaps as a part of that. Right now, we have Pollock dealing with the SPLC directly. Then we’re going to post an oped he wrote that I already have as one in the series. After that, I’d be elated to get one from you.

Primarily, I don’t want SPLC to have any ammo when Pollock finally gets through to their board. If he does get through to them, and they check your byline, it would not help if you had recent posts there.

This is just a temporary measure.

Geoffrey Ingersoll
Editor in Chief
The Daily Caller

POSTSCRIPT: I reached out again, once or twice, in an attempt to reinstate a column that has been limited in its reach for 20 years by all spectrum of conservatism and libertarianism. (Again, highest praise, really. In this context, I am reminded of Alexei Sayle, a scrupulously honest British comedian, perceptive about human nature, too. When asked what he does when he watches a really talented satirist performing, Sayle replied: “I go back stage and tell him he’ll never make it.”)

In response, an ever-cordial back-stabbing Mr. Ingersoll lied through his teeth:

From: Geoffrey Ingersoll <geoffrey@>
Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2018 5:43 AM
To: Ilana Mercer <ilanamercer@
Subject: Re: Mercer column

We’re talking to SPLC today about removing Richard Pollock’s name from their smear on us. I will keep you posted.

Geoffrey Ingersoll
Editor in Chief
The Daily Caller

That was on January 9, 2018 at 5:43 AM.

So, there you have it.

Geoffrey Ingersoll, Daily Caller’s editor-in-chief (and a Marine), would sooner purge writers like me and the many who agree with me than stand up to the SPLC urban terrorists.

To his credit, Mr. Ingersoll was always respectful and cordial to me.

Against Mr. Ingersoll it must be said that he was utterly insincere. He told this columnist that her excising was “temporary.”

While reassuring a dissident it had every intention of reinstating her, the Daily Caller, apparently, was, hypocritically, negotiating with the SPLC heisters for a reprieve, striking a Faustian deal with the devil.

Over the authentic, dissident Right, Con Inkers and the Left converge: We must be cancelled.

 **

With appreciation To WND, The Unz Review, American Greatness, Cassandra Fairbanks, Patrick Howley, and others like them who man-up.

©2020 ILANA MERCER
WND, July 16
Unz Review, July 16
American Renaissance, July 20

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