Republicans – ILANA MERCER

Tucker Cancels GOP, So Should You: ‘Republicans Have Done Nothing To Defend YOU’

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 20 May 2022 06:15:31 +0000

In his June 20, 2020 J’accuse, Tucker Carlson, for all practical purposes, cancelled the Republican Party: “When the moment of crisis came, Republicans ran away,” he roared. “Major American cities were looted and burned on television. Citizens were beaten and murdered. Works of public art were destroyed by the score. America’s history, those shared experiences that bind us together as a nation, was plundered and complete rewritten by illiterate vandals. Everywhere, as they watched, Americans were afraid—afraid not simply for their safety but afraid for their jobs, their reputations, afraid for their families….And the question that hangs in the air is: where are our protectors?…The president of Heritage wrote an op-ed accusing America of being irredeemably racist…so many on the Right did exactly the same thing.”

Jack Kerwick has been anatomizing just such failures and betrayals dished out by the ConOink establishment for over a decade, writing in January of 2021, of virus-related tyranny that,

…the country bequeathed to us by the generation that, in the midst of a smallpox epidemic, fought and defeated the most powerful empire in the world in order to be a self-governing union of sovereign states—subjected itself to a nationwide internment.
The United State of America became the Interned States of America as the Constitution of the Old Republic was indefinitely revoked, the economy crushed, and ‘the little platoons’—as Burke referred to those buffers between the individual and the State, those forms of community constitutive of civil society and in the absence of which human flourishing would be impossible—were radically undermined. … And all of this occurred in a country with a Republican President, a Republican-controlled Senate, a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees, and a majority of whose state legislatures and governors are Republican. [Emphasis added.]

As captivated as voters on the right may be by the promise of the primaries, they’d be wise to remember the nature of the Republican Racket—the duopoly or uniparty swindle, for that matter.

You’ve been here before. Elections in our country are a national bipolar mood disorder that sees our side, the right, swing from halcyon highs under the Stupid Party to nadir lows under the Evil Party, except that there never is long-term, real relief.

With a difference. Something huge happened in our country in the past few years. It is not hyperbole to say the republic has been lost. To paraphrase the great Naomi Wolf, we are at a civilizational crossroads, still living under emergency law, the Constitution suspended. We’ve adjusted to tyranny and no one is the wiser.

Certainly not any Republican.

Some of us have long held that the republic of blessed memory was lost ages ago. Others still hold out hope for a small “r” republican revival. Even the most Panglossian among us must acknowledge that a tipping point was reached during COVID.

THE DEMOCRATS have always set the terms of debate; Democrats stand tall for their core principles, as atrocious as these manifestly are.

Consider: How does the illiberal left deal with Republicans? They leverage against their political opponents the full force of the managerial, permanent state, which they’ve captured. They galvanize the DOJ (Department of Justice), the Security and the Surveillance State to destroy as many conservatives as possible. Rivulets of words like “treason” and “white supremacist” soon run through the Democrat-dominated media and through other intellectual means of production captured. Subpoenas are issued. Congressional hearings are hastily begun; impeachment proceedings set in motion. The criminal arm of the Democrat Party is marshaled in quick succession. These vampiric operatives—BLM, Antifa, demented distaff—are soon staking out, stalking and canceling conservatives making life intolerable. Simultaneously, and in addition to utterly demonizing their opposition, Democrats typically plug away at making the country ungovernable, lawless, diverse to the point of distrust.

Against the potency of the Democrats, Republicans offer only impotence. The GOP strives to fit in. The typical ConOinksters—the con artists formerly known as neoconservatives, as Establishment Republicans, as ConInc, or the “Big Con”—their existence consists in pacifying the left and deceiving the right.

Blunt is better: Republicans live like you would in a gay bathhouse: on their knees. At every turn, they apologize and expiate for their principles. Their feeble reaction to Democrat depredations, in general, has the effect of normalizing decadence, degeneracy, lawlessness, and breakdown of all standards—the systemic institutional rot that is convulsing the country. Republican reaction to a steady stream of brazen invaders breaking the Southern border, in particular, is to whinge ever-so occasionally and oh-so softly.

By Republican telling, it is the Democrats who made immigration enforcement impossible. Not so! George Bush would still wrestle a crocodile for an illegal immigrant. Collaboration between the parties over the years codified into law that no invader could be turned back. By mutual agreement between the parties, no sooner do these criminal aliens cross into the Unites State and plonk themselves on our side of the Rio Grande—than they must be “processed” and released, never booted. The Wall was always meant as a cheap election ploy to excite the febrile imagination of the voter. That, Donald Trump understood. So, instead, the former president did an ingenious workaround: Trump “erected a bureaucratic wall that expelled unauthorized immigrants on the southern border,” forcing them to bunk-down in Mexico.

Back to COVID: Is there one GOPer running in the primaries who has promised and comprehends how to ensure that no centrally or locally directed lock-down will ever occur again? Any conservative campaigning on a serious examination of lockdown crimes against the citizens and travel restrictions on the unvaxed? Has even one of the Republican candidates traipsing through Fox News’ green room addressed the creation of an unvaccinated underclass (villains all) and a vaccinated upper-class (virtuous)? Who among these contemptible clowns clawing their way to D.C. has even mentioned the fact that we the unvaxed are still being denied access—based not on active aggression we’re committing, but rooted in our peaceful rejection of the corporate, State-mediated aggression against us: We won’t take the Hemlock.

Is a single Republican moron proposing to ensure that never again will the medical idiocracy—bona fides established during the pandemic—come between a dying patient and his family?

Remember how Republicans, during COVID, would prattle about religious exemptions (state granted!) and natural-immunity based exemptions (state granted!)—but had not the faintest urge to defend the natural, God-given right of self-ownership? I do. You should, too! Almost to a man, did most of the Republicans we endured on TV during COVID prance onto the set, boasting self-righteously: “I’ve had the vaccine, I’m for science, but I support the rights of my rube-hick constituents to reject it.”

Anyone running to permanently restore due process of law lost by so many Americans, especially the Jan. 6 dissidents? Show me the Republican lout who is able to articulate that, no, we don’t need new laws. No other country has as many laws as the United States Code. (Attempts to count the number of laws scattered over upwards of 23,000 pages have failed.) How about electing people who understand how to uphold rights already instantiated in the founding documents, and forcefully enforce the laws that ensure ordered liberty?

In this context, has Rep. Chris Stewart heard about the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution? Tucker Carlson invited this prototype Republican to talk up legislation to outlaw the Surveillance State (National Security Agency spying on us), all TV theater and farce. The Fourth Amendment already does that.

Lastly, what, if anything, have Republicans done to stop policy and society from taking on an anti-white hue? They rabbit on about Critical Race Theory (CRT), framing it as Marxism, when it is, as I’ve pointed out for years, unadulterated anti-white agit prop.

For Republicans, moreover, it seems impossible to mention white suffering without dragging in the “black experience.” Republicans just can’t seem to protect or stick up for besieged whites and are forever searching their brains for ways to show off how black-focused they are. Channeled by conservative TV windbags, CRT is said to be bad not because it’s pure and simple anti-white racism tinged by ethnocide—not Marxism—but because it demeans the nobility and abilities of blacks. Likewise, black violent crime conservative bobbleheads lament because it hurts blacks the most, rather than because it rips through 87 percent of the rest of society.

The provenance of the current COVID and anti-speech corporate tyranny—with business free to screen out and reject employees based purely and solely on their COVID vaccine status or on the thoughts they express—is the Republican Party.

On HARD TRUTH, David Vance and I speak to Jack Kerwick about the irreparably hopeless Republican Racket. RIP, GOP.

WATCH: “Tucker Cancels GOP, So Should You: ‘Republicans Have Done Nothing To Defend YOU.’
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Also on Odysee and BitChute if those platforms float your boat.

WND , May 19
Unz Review, May 19
The New American, May 20
CNSNews.com, May 20

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Republicans’ Main Focus: Showing Off How Black-Focused They Are

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 04:22:58 +0000

“For Republican leadership it is impossible to mention white suffering without dragging in the ‘black experience.'”

For the longest time, the American People—an inchoate concept that sadly no longer means much—have endured great wrongs. Examples of these wrongs are legal and illegal mass immigration, open-borders, the kind of multilateral trade deals that immiserate, impoverish, and hollow out communities once staid and settled. And now, vaccine mandates: Take the State’s hemlock or lose your job.

As a rule, private property—corporations—once shielded the individual from the State. No longer. American Big Business now gleefully enforces the State’s regulatory despotism. There is nowhere left to run.

Ubiquitous black-on-white crime inflicted by a coddled criminal class, native born and energetically imported, is high on the list of State and corporate crimes against the citizenry.

Whether he postures on tv or on the Hill—the arguments advanced by the typical Republican front man against these expanding depredations are, however, empty.

The “objections” put forth by Republicans in defense of their constituency are all theater and farce. It is essential to alert the voter to this void, foretold, for example, in this columnist’s February 2019 warning that, “Every time a manifestly racist, anti-white event goes down, which is frequently, conservative media and politicians can be relied on to dub it ‘identity politics.’ ‘The left is playing identity politics,’ they intone. “They are dividing us,” they’ll lament.

However, “Whatever is convulsing the country, it’s not identity politics, but anti-white politics, pure, simple and systemic.

Identify the bogus argument—and you will have exposed the frauds who want you to send them to live off the fleshpots in Rome-on-the-Potomac. (Actually, as one wag perspicaciously pointed out, “The comparison to Rome is unfair. After all, Rome built two great civilizations and is a site of enormous cultural significance.”)

Although not exclusive to him, my example today comes from Fox News’ Jesse Watters. When speaking loudly over his guest—why invite them on, if you intend to drown them out?—Mr. Watters made the usual Republican straw argument against black crime. You hear it routinely from Sean Hannity, Candace Owens and the rest:

Democrats “only care when a white person takes a black life. If a black person takes a black life, they don’t even care at all.”

Likewise, it can be said that Republican don’t much care when a black person takes a white life.

Seldom mentioned in Republican argumentation is the real hate crime in the room: black-on-white crime which is invariably not reported, underreported, or if reported, masked as something other than what it really is, which is systemic, institutionalized, white-hot hatred of whites.

Republicans just can’t seem to protect or stick up for besieged whites and are forever searching their brains for ways to show off their Abe Lincoln pedigrees.

“Democrats are the real racists” has become a popular, mocking meme. Having originated it back in 2014, I’d argue that the line, “Democrats don’t care that blacks are killing blacks,” is a species of the “Democrats are the real racists,” black-centric fatuity.

In this way, by showing how black-focused and caring they are—Republicans hang on to institutional respectability, and on to the good graces of the Dominatrix Party by the hairs of their chinny chin-chins. The empty “arguments” of Republican frontmen are a way to stay in the political game.

The latest in this political genre comes courtesy of Johnny-Come-Lately conservative J. D. Vance, who had shunned Trump, but found religion on the president’s populism, when it became politically expedient:

“I don’t care if we are talking about a little black girl in 1965, or a little white girl in 2021, telling a little girl that she is evil because of her skin color is disgusting and vile.”

These words Vance thundered at a conference of self-anointed leaders of national conservatism, many of whom discovered national conservatism belatedly and opportunistically.

And what is my objection to what Vance said, you ask? It is very plainly this: It is not 1965! And the victims of white-hot hatred are white, not black.

For Republicans, however, it is impossible to mention white suffering without dragging in the “black experience.”

Again was this vintage Republican habit—using weasel words to preen politically and sound fair and impartial—on display in the Kyle Rittenhouse affair.

Even though Republicans assured us the Rittenhouse case was “not about race,” their quicksilver political instincts kicked in, telling them to reflexively bring in the “black experience.”

Republican Dana Loesch thus proved incapable of defending white Kyle on Fox News, without inserting the blandest of bromides about “black businesses” being burned in Kenosha during BLM riots, on that day.

Wearily familiar, then, was the substance of Loesch’s tweet, last week, which was echoed on Fox News to Watters, as she called for, “Justice for the black business owners whose businesses were burned to the ground by people like white convicted pedophile and racist Joseph Rosenbaum screaming slurs on camera or white domestic abuser Anthony Huber, or white Antifa member Grosskruetz brandishing a handgun?”

In Republican vernacular, white kid Kyle just doesn’t cut it as a cause absent the moral padding of the “black experience.”

WATCH: “Republicans’ Main Focus: Showing Off How Black-Focused They Are”:

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND , November 18
The New American, November 19
American Greatness, November 20
Unz Review, November 18
CNSNews.com, November 19
American Renaissance, November 22

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Ron Paul Should Take the Lead on Immigration

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

On his website, tricky Dick Morris, former adviser to Bill Clinton, claims comically to be fighting for the soul of the Grand Old Party. Morris has dubbed a potential contest between Republican presidential contender Ron Paul and President Barack Obama as “the biggest [Republican] wipeout in American history.”

Less dramatically, the Des Moines Register conceded, in the aftermath of the “the first contest of the 2012 election season,” that, while “many Iowa caucus-goers connected with Paul’s belief in less government spending and regulation, in free trade and private property rights and in opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”—they nevertheless “worried about Paul’s prospects in the general election.”

With 21.4 percent of a volatile vote, Rep. Ron Paul came in a strong third in Tuesday’s Iowa Republican caucuses. Assuming second place, and trailing Mitt Romney by eight statistically insignificant votes, was former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, the dark horse in this race.

Still, what separates Dr. Paul from his Republican rivals is this: Whereas their national appeal is likely to plateau—coffined by militarism and social conservatism—Paul’s appeal, by contrast, has the potential to transcend the confines of the Republican Party.For one, Ron Paul can woo Obama’s sizeable anti-war base which is sick and tired of the killer drone. (One definition of a drone is “an idle person who lives off others; a loafer, a drudge,” a Barack Obama. Another definition of a drone is “a pilotless aircraft operated by remote control,” frequently utilized by the aforementioned “idle person who lives off others” to kill others.)

For example, Ron Paul is far more likely to work with a hero of this anti-war faction, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Kucinich’s opposition to counter-productive, unconstitutional, unjust forays abroad goes back to the Balkan war (in the course of which he stuck up for the much-maligned Serbian population of Kosovo, and forewarned about empowering the Jihadist Kosovo Liberation Army).

Although a national Rasmussen Poll, conducted in December (27-28), placed Romney ahead of Obama by 45 to 39 percentage points, at 43 to 35, Obama bests Ron Paul by only eight percentage points. Another December poll (16-18), taken by CNN/ORC, revealed that Paul was already outperforming Obama among independents (48% to 47%), rural folks (52% to 45%), white voters (51%-46%), as well as among consistently reliable voters older than 65 (47%-46%). As against Obama, Paul was making strides among moderates (42% to 56%) too, and inching up with the youth cohort (47% to 53%). (PDF.)

Like it or not, this election is about the economy, subsumed within which is the issue of mass immigration.

“More than eight in ten likely Republican caucus-goers—81 percent—think it is not acceptable to allow illegal immigrants to obtain in-state tuition.” This according to a December 2011 NBC News/Marist Poll. (PDF.)

As the Center for Immigration Studies has consistently demonstrated, “enforcement approaches with no increase in legal immigration” were the most popular policy options among a majority of all voters. “Seventy percent of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who wanted to double legal immigration.”

Since he rightly celebrates the free, unfettered movement of goods across borders—trade—Paul’s protectionist detractors might have “deduced” that he must also rejoice in the free flow of people across our borders. As a man of the classical liberal, unquestionably American, Old Right, Rep. Paul would be wise to vigorously defend the idea of a sovereign America bounded by well-defended borders. Not only is a highly selective immigration policy an effective, non-aggressive tactic against terrorism—it is also the perfect complement to a peaceful foreign policy, predicated on the negative, leave-me-alone rights of the individual, and not on the positive, manufactured right of humanity to venture wherever, whenever.

However, positions that appeal to most ordinary Americans appall a noisy left-libertarian minority that has taken up residence in the country’s most influential newsrooms and television studios. These libertarians argue against the prevention of trespass on the grounds that restricting immigration amounts to the use of aggression against non-aggressors.

This is the case only if one rejects any form of ordered liberty; only if one believes that telling someone, “No, you can’t go there” is tantamount to violence. And only if one trivializes violence.

A well-policed barrier on the Southern border is the definitive, non-aggressive method of defense. You don’t attack, arrest or otherwise molest undesirables, who cost more than they contribute; you keep them at bay, away. Just the other day, “in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash,” Ron Paul slammed Santorum as “very liberal.” Before the surging Santorum picks up the scent of an incipient left-liberal immigration policy, and gives chase, Ron Paul ought to cement a strong, states’-rights centered stand on an issue that unites America.

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Ron Paul: Stand Tall For Middle America

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 08:00:00 +0000

“Terrible,” “tricky” and “a phony”: Who was the incorrigible racist who thus described Martin Luther King Jr.? Was it the unknown author of the politically improper newsletters published under Rep. Ron Paul’s name during the 1980s and 1990s?

Not quite. Those were the words of the nation’s most engaging first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.

Audio recordings of Mrs. Kennedy’s historic 1964 conversations on life with John F. Kennedy were released in September of 2011. Conducted with the late historian Arthur Schlesinger—and delivered in her hallmark dulcet lilt and exquisite diction—the exchanges reveal Jackie as a dazzling conversationalist, and a forceful, thoughtful persona. This Jacky O held a low opinion of MLK, the man America has since deified, and was unafraid to say as much.

There were many reasons not racist for which to dislike MLK, not least of them was the man’s dalliance with communists. “His associations with communists” is why Jacky’s husband, hero of Chris Matthews’ latest book, ordered the wiretaps on King. Mrs. Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy—recounts Patrick J. Buchanan in his towering “Suicide of a Superpower”—”saw to it that the FBI carried out the order.” Among his other endearing qualities, the not-so enchanting Martin Luther King had “declared that the Goldwater campaign bore ‘dangerous signs of Hitlerism.”

Indisputably, MLK set the tone for “assailing America as irredeemably racist” forever after. Other brothers have built on MLK’s work to sculpt careers as professional race hustlers.

Faithful to this legacy, the media monolith has been fulminating over the reference in the Ron Paul newsletters to African American men as the instigators of the L.A. riots. The “Ron-Paul-Report” quote that has caused consternation is this: “The criminals who terrorized our cities—in riots and on every non-riot day—are not exclusively young black males, but they largely are.” Wikipedia all but seconds this characterization, writing that the “disturbances were concentrated in South Central Los Angeles, which was primarily composed of African American and Hispanic residents.”

The reality, as detailed in this writer’s book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is that young, white, and poor Americans are more likely than any other age group to be well represented among the reported victims of hate crimes. (They are also disproportionately victimized by the racial-spoils system of affirmative action across American universities, in corporations and government.)

On the other hand, as revealed by investigations conducted by the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCV) and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), blacks “are less likely than both whites and Hispanics to be targeted for reasons of racial hatred.”

In fact, “A significantly higher percentage of victims of violent racial hatred say their attackers were black. Nine out of 10 of them identify their race as the reason blacks targeted them.” More materially, “The number of black hate crime victims was so small—as in statistically insignificant—that it precluded analysis of the race of persons who victimized them.”

Courtesy of “Suicide of a Superpower” come the FBI’s crime figures for 2007: “Blacks committed 433,934 violent crimes against whites, eight times as many as the 55,685 that whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black-on-white, with 14,000 assaults on white women by African American males in 2007. Not one case of white sexual assault on a black female was found in the FBI study.” (Page 243.)

Yet, to listen to the media kibitz about the long-gone Ron Paul newsletters, you’d think that being maligned is more hateful than being maimed or murdered. Rather than have that honest conversation about race commanded by Attorney General Mr. Eric Holder, mainstream media prefers to make a mockery out of real racial hatred. Thus, although black-on-white crime is more common than the reverse, “Whitey” is invariably—and by default—viewed as the chief repository of racial malice.

Look, whoever wrote the controversial Ron Paul monthly newsletters during the 1980s and 1990s used language that is impolite, impolitic, cruel and crass. For this, Ron Paul might wish to express his misgivings—even apologize, although he has disavowed the letter and spirit of these bygone screeds.

However, the presidential contender has a chance here to show he can lead; to get off his knees, quit groveling, and strike a pose against the racial ramrodding Anglo-Americans have been subjected to ever since. Dr. Paul walked headlong into the political quicksand. He can, however, still do an about face.

By rising against—and rejecting—the racial tyranny that prohibits rational discourse about race, Ron Paul stands to earn the undying loyalty of most Americans, bar the traitors at the top.

Paul should stand tall for Middle Americans, who’ve been cursed collectively with the racist Mark of Cain.

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Ron Paul Rising

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 08:00:00 +0000

As of this writing, Rep. Ron Paul—the ultimate outsider and quintessential anti-establishment presidential candidate—is the favorite to win the Iowa caucuses, scheduled to take place on January 3, 2012. Polls such as Insider Advantage and Public Policy Polling place Paul in the lead, at 23 and 24 percent respectively, to Mitt Romney’s 20 percent and Newt Gingrich’s 14 percent.

From ignoring Congressman Paul, the Republican Party establishment and mainstream media have moved to strategizing on how to discount his lead, and likely win, in Iowa.Especially exercised is the Republican Party of Iowa. Its functionaries seem willing to delegitimize Iowa poll results—and the importance of the Iowa caucuses as harbingers of things to come in the national convention—if these don’t fall in line with the Party line. Apparently, caucus-goers who dare to “reward” candidates “who are unrepresentative of the broader party” deserve to be discredited.

What Grand Old Party apparatchiks cannot accept is that voters are coming around to reality dictated truths. And when “[t]hings fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Against this backdrop, I was interviewed, on December 15, by the Russia Today (RT) television network, a broadcaster that does not abide herd behavior. Topics covered: The rise of Ron Paul, his rivals, and the Representative’s chances of parlaying his accomplishments in Iowa (to be repeated, we hope, in the Granite State and South Carolina) into a national win.

WATCH THE INTERVIEW ON YOUTUBE.

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Who’s It To Be? Teddy No. 1 or Teddy No. 2?

Ilana Mercer — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:00:00 +0000

What are the odds that a Democratic commander in chief and his chief Republican rival declare their philosophical fidelity to the Progressive Theodore Roosevelt on the same day?

In an effort to better conjure Roosevelt, the shameless Barack Obama had flown to Osawatomie in Kansas, where, in 1910, Teddy delivered his “New Nationalism Address.” So radical was the Roosevelt political program that its author was condemned as “‘communistic,’ ‘socialistic,’ and ‘anarchistic’ in various quarters.”

On the day of this staged affair—in eerie synchronicity—Newt Gingrich, whose favorability among Republican “caucus goers” is at 33 percent and rising, described himself to broadcaster Glenn Beck as “a Theodore Roosevelt Republican.”

Back in the day, “the Eastern United States denounced [Roosevelt] as a ‘communist agitator.’” This was “the most radical speech ever given by an ex-President,” writes Robert S. La Forte in The Kansas Historical Quarterly:

“[Roosevelt’s] concepts of the extent to which a powerful federal government could regulate and use private property in the interest of the whole and his declarations about labor … were nothing short of revolutionary.” As La Forte chronicles, “Roosevelt had no interest in retaining the ideals of Jeffersonian ‘state’s right’ demagogues, as he called them. He was interested in a Hamiltonian concept of power which he described as the ‘New Nationalism.’”

Roosevelt’s speech, seconded White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, “Really set the course for the 20th century.” Yet to listen to the president in Kansas, a vote for “a Theodore Roosevelt Republican” is a vote for a Mad-Max dystopia, where “everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

Don’t look for a “square deal” from the characters on the other side of the aisle. “We want to avoid becoming a welfare state like the European states” is the stock phrase we get from GOP pointy heads. Truth is not their stock-in-trade. As they tell it, America has a long way to go before it turns as Rooseveltian as Europe.

Both sides flout the facts. America is Europe by any other name, a reality with which Peter Ferrara at Forbes.com has grappled admirably. “America’s welfare state is not a principality,” Ferrara has written. “It is a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world”:

Just one program, Medicaid, cost the federal government $275 billion in 2010, which is slated to rise to $451 billion by 2018. Counting state Medicaid expenditures, this one program cost taxpayers $425 billion in 2010, soaring to $800 billion by 2018. Under Obamacare, 85 million Americans will soon be on Medicaid, growing to nearly 100 million by 2021, according to the CBO.“But there are 184 additional federal, means-tested welfare programs, most jointly financed and administered with the states.

…The best estimate of the cost of the 185 federal means tested welfare programs for 2010 for the federal government alone is nearly $700 billion, up a third since 2008, according to the Heritage Foundation. Counting state spending, total welfare spending for 2010 reached nearly $900 billion, up nearly one-fourth since 2008 (24.3 percent).”

Yet, by 2008, Robert Rector of Heritage reports that total welfare spending already amounted to $16,800 per person in poverty, 4 times as much as the Census Bureau estimated was necessary to bring all of the poor up to the poverty level, eliminating all poverty in America. That would be $50,400 per poor family of three.

Indeed, Charles Murray wrote a whole book, ‘In Our Hands, A Plan to Replace America’s Welfare State,’ explaining that we already spend far more than enough to completely eliminate all poverty in America.”“The soaring welfare spending since 2008 is not a temporary increase reflecting the recession, as it is not projected to decline after the economy recovers.

By 2013, total annual welfare spending will have grown still more, to nearly $1 trillion. Over the 10 year period from 2009 to 2018, federal and state welfare spending will total $10.3 trillion. This does not include Obamacare’s massive expansion of Medicaid, or the massive new entitlement providing subsidies for families making close to $100,000 per year, and beyond. Together, this abusive entitlement spending will add trillions more.”

For a dose of reality, read on.

There is almost nothing that can reverse what the Progressives have wrought. The Ryan budget, viewed as radical by rival Rooseveltians Gingrich and Obama, will slow only the growth of the entitlement kudzu, not its invasiveness.

Whether Teddy Roosevelt wannabe No. 1 or No. 2 is elected—the American welfare state is unlikely to be dented. To repeat, the thing is “bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world.”

To answer the opening question: The dice were loaded in Teddy’s favor. The sitting Democratic president (Obama) and the Republican odds-on favorite for president (Gingrich) are in TR’s corner—in everything from executive power and the projection of American power abroad to property rights stateside.

* Image: Teddy 1, Theodore Roosevelt, was not happy unless he was killing something.

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Can the Incredible Hulk Strike at Socialism?

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:00:00 +0000

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may be planning to join the Republican presidential thrust and “Perry.” Toward the end of his address on Tuesday, at the Reagan Library, Gov. Christie chastised Barack Obama:

• for “telling those who are scared and struggling that the only way their lives can get better is to diminish the success of others”;
• for “trying to cynically convince those who are suffering that the American economic pie is no longer a growing one that can provide more prosperity for all who work hard”;
• for “insisting that we must tax and take and demonize those who have already achieved the American Dream.”

Although Christie didn’t quite put it this way, these are the base instincts to which Obama appeals. Alas, references to Ronald Reagan do not make a speech Reaganesque. To be Reaganesque, Christie will have to expose the spirit of socialism—envy, entitlement, aggression—and juxtapose it with the morality of capitalism: commerce, creativity, comity.

Gov. Christie boasted that his “Executive Branch” showed the requisite leadership, not least in educating the public before enacting solutions to New Jersey’s problems. If Christie wishes to “educate” the rest of the country, as he claims to have done for New Jersey, he would have to first strike at the assorted zero-sum, socialist notions, whereby one person’s plenty is portrayed as another’s poverty.

Chief among these is the concept of “the American economic pie.” This pie-in-the-sky is perverse in the extreme because it feeds the idea of a preexisting income pie from which the greedy appropriate an unfair share. Wealth, earned or “unearned,” as egalitarians term inheritance, doesn’t exist outside the individuals who create it. Wealth is a return for desirable services, skills and resources rendered to others. Labor productivity is the main determinant of wages—and wealth. Most wealthy Americans produce what they consume—and much more; they don’t remove or steal it from poorer Americans.

Granted, Christie warned of America turning into “a nation that places entitlement ahead of accomplishment,” but claimed incorrectly that, with this message, Obama was demoralizing America. Polls prove Christie wrong; Obama is simply tapping into existing sentiment. Gallup recently revealed that the “majority of Americans generally favor increasing taxes on the rich as a way to increase revenue.” Sixty-six percent to be precise. “Forty-one percent of Republicans favor raising taxes on higher-income Americans.”

The September 20 survey also indicated that the majority of Americans like the state-expanding ideas offered-up in Obama’s Job Plan, grandiosely and deceptively titled “Living Within Our Means and Investing in Our Future: The President’s Plan for Economic Growth and deficit Reduction.” Americans “favor providing funds for hiring teachers, police officers, and firefighters, and providing funds for public works projects.” Contra Christie, a rearrangement of the income curve is not in the least “demoralizing” to most Americans.

Socialism is humanity’s second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes.

An experiment conducted at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford—and reported in this space, in 2003—provided more of a confirmation than an investigation of human nature. Ingeniously operationalized by Professors Andrew Oswald and Daniel Zizzo, this laboratory experiment demonstrated the lengths to which people will go to destroy the wealth of others—even if, in the process, they knowingly wipe out their own fortune.

The economists approximated reality by distributing cash unequally among their subjects, who were then told they could anonymously “burn away other people’s money,” with one caveat: they would be destroying some of their own funds at the same time. Incorrectly, our rational researchers hypothesized that little “burning” would occur. At the very least, Oswald and Zizzo expected “burning” to cease once the destruction of the opponent’s property became too painful to the player’s pocket. The professors were flummoxed when fully 62 percent of their subjects continued to “burn” others’ cash at a crippling cost to themselves.

Laboratory-to-life extrapolations can be problematic, but this experiment transports effortlessly.

As mentioned— and whether or not they are aware of indirect harm to themselves—66 percent of our slash-and-burn citizens would like to soak the rich. That’s a sizeable majority. Social determinists tend to blame extraneous forces for corrupting human nature—the State if they are libertarians; the free market if they are socialists. But implicit in a worldview that recognizes free will is an acknowledgement of personal responsibility.

Chris Christie prides himself on being a real leader. Amid calls for the wealthy to “pay their fair share”—newspeak for looting the rich—the Incredible Hulk ought to remind the inhabitants of Ronald Reagan’s “God-blessed” “shining city” that government-mediated robbery is still robbery.

Not for nothing for do the Ten Commandments prohibit theft: even coveting the belonging of another is considered a sin in Mosaic law.

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Media Top-Dogs Kick Underdog Ron Paul

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Republican and Democratic media whores briefly came clean about ignoring presidential hopeful Ron Paul. Then they promptly returned to ignoring him.

No sooner had Fox News’ Megyn Kelly and CNN’s Piers Morgan interviewed Dr. Paul about his untouchable status among their colleagues, than John King of the eponymous CNN show could be heard recounting the winners of the Republican 2011 Iowa Straw Poll, to the exclusion of the man who secured second place: Congressman Ron Paul.

Michele Bachmann won 4,823 votes; Texas Rep. Ron Paul 4,671. With 152 votes separating the two frontrunners, one might even say that, in Ames, Iowa, Paul jostled with Mrs. Bachmann for first place.

A slick Drew Griffin, also at CNN, cracked up as he instructed a cub reporter on the ground: “If you get a sound bite from Palin bring that back to us. You can hold the Ron Paul stuff.”

Following the Republican Poll, Politico.com ran an article about Paul, the caption to which read: “Ron Paul remains media poison.” The article featured an image of Ron Paul flanked by signs touting the stuff the press finds so poisonous: “Liberty and Freedom.”

As is often the case, satirist Jon Stewart stepped in to correct—and to make fun of—the farrago of misinformation spread by mainstream media. “Why are you treating Paul like he was the thirteenth floor in a hotel?” Stewart asked party operatives. Here Comedy Central cut to MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. On Meet the Press, Todd breezily announced his Republican top-tier contenders: Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.

A dude on Face the Nation did the same. The Perry, Romney, Bachmann trio was touted again by Brett Baer and Chris Wallace, both of Fox News.”Aren’t you forgetting an ideologically consistent congressman who came within 200 votes of winning the straw poll,” interjected a sarcastic Stewart. Another clip of Chris Wallace came up on Stewart’s screen.

For a moment, it looked as if Wallace was going to redeem himself: “We didn’t mention and we should,” he noodled. But no, it was “Rick Santorum” that the reporter went on to will from the political grave. Santorum “didn’t get half of what Ron Paul got,” the comedian apprised the nation. “He lost to the guy who lost so bad that he dropped out of the race.” (Tim Pawlenty) “Let’s not count out Jon Huntsman” said another no-name pack animal on CNN.

Huntsman got 69 votes. If all of Jon Huntsman’s supporters met at the Iowa Ames Quiznos, the fire marshal would say, ‘That’s fine; no problem.’ Huntsman was the only Mormon running in the straw poll, and he came in second among Mormons.

So Stewart spoofed the media. “This pretending Ron Paul doesn’t exist has been going on for weeks,” he said. [Make that decades.] Ron Paul “is Tea-Party Patient Zero. He’s the real deal.”Comedy Central followed with an effective demonstration of the disconnect between the arch-plotters on the panel of journalists, and the audience in Stephens Auditorium, in Ames, where a debate between the Republican rivals preceded the poll.

The people roared with approval when Ron Paul condemned America’s futile misadventures abroad. The journalists responded with a smirk and an eye roll. (And somewhere, someplace, a coquettish Ann Coulter lent a helping hand by simpering sexually over her candidate, Gov. Chris Christie.)

Yes, freedom frightens the establishment. Paul is airbrushed out of the political picture because, as he explained, his candidacy threatens the “status quo” with respect to welfare, warfare and monetary policies. Paul’s ideas are predicated on a return to reality. Paul the politician has been attempting to smash the parallel universe through which the congressional-media complex filters reality for the fools who keep falling for them. This implies reversing 100 years of fairy tales; deflating an empire built on funny money and military predation back to a republic based on private property and production.

As usual, Ron Paul has been too magnanimous about America’s media.

No matter their brand of political prostitution (Republican or Democrat), media talking heads are props to the politicos; they mirror the political class, reflecting and reinforcing the opinions—and the reality—among the elites they serve. More often than not, the chattering classes are as privileged and protected as their masters. These “Demopublican Monopolists” sense that as long as they sustain their respective constituencies, they will retain their perches and their sizable salaries.

But things are a changing. The country is changing. These B-rate minds are paddling as hard as they can to save sinecure. Even if it means not facing reality. When Standard & Poor’s downgraded America from its status as best AAA borrower, Louis Story of the New York Times was as anxious as GOP devotee Ann Coulter. Both suggested the State take action against the rating agency.

S&P signaled that as the US government loses prestige and power around the world, so too will its many tiers of top-dogs be downgraded. The statist men and women of the media are up the creek without a paddle.

More than anything they fear losing their status. Ron Paul makes these vainglorious individuals face reality when all they want is to save face.

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Bachmann: Bling For Ron Paul?

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A day after the GOP debate in New Hampshire, mainstream media awoke to Rep. Michele Bachmann’s undeniable abilities and magnetism. Before June 13, this mummified lot had turned to Meghan McCain and Chris Matthews for information about the congresswoman from Minnesota.

Matthews’ mock-Bachmann routine is almost as notorious as the carnal excitement the host of Hardball displays periodically over Barack Obama. By Slate.com’s count, Rep. Bachmann, who is running for president, has been “discussed”—more like dissed—on 127 episodes of Matthews’ MSNBC show. In January, he accused Ms. Bachmann of looking dazed, hypnotized, and acting irrationally, all because she remained unrattled by the host’s hectoring.

At the time, I blogged that “to Matthews, a fully engaged female is someone like Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida), who talks up a storm in promoting statist schemes. Simpletons perceive a fulminating statist as ‘good,’ ‘caring,’ and certainly ‘smart.'”Bachmann’s “rational, steely quality drives Chris crazy.” After all, Matthews is the man who exposed himself to his viewers, having divulged that he had experienced something akin to a (daytime) nocturnal emission” while thinking about Obama.

No better were establishment Republicans. They dubbed Bachmann a kook—strategist Mike Murphy said she “makes Sarah Palin look like Count Metternich.” “The media scrum hates her with a purple passion,” I concluded, which is why “one hears very little about Ms. Bachmann’s intellectual aptitude.”

Rep. Bachmann catapulted to fame late in 2008. Yet not a thing was said in the muckraking media—Republican included—about her background. Just imagine what publicity Wasserman Schultz (or Sarah Palin) would receive had she provided foster care to 23 children in addition to raising five of her own! Bachmann, moreover, earned a Master of Laws in tax law from the William & Mary Law School. (Women lawyers tend to flock to the less-taxing field of family law.)

Not that you’d know it from the way she has been portrayed, but Bachmann is very clever. With a perfectly straight face, Lawrence O’Donnell, also of MSNBC (a fertile seedbed for mind-sapping stupidity), lapped up the sub-intelligent message issued by the “Snooki” of the commentariat: Michele Bachmann is “no better than a poor man’s Sarah Palin,” Meghan McCain announced. “I take none of this seriously,” our Meghan declared grandiosely, following Bachmann’s Tea Party address, delivered to great effect.

No conservative with clout (except for Glenn Beck) dared to eviscerate this licentious, self-adoring, dense libertine. (A response at BigGovernment.com was mild, at best.) In fin de siècle America, idiots proceed unimpeded—especially if blessed with a famous father and a moneyed mother.

Sarah Palin is Bush in a bra (with all the implications about brain power that implies). She’s nothing like Bachmann. Mrs. Palin has an area of expertise: energy. Instead of a role as an energy ace, Palin opted to be a generalist, whose rambling, run-off sentences (peppered as they are with gerunds), are almost as grating as Meaghan’s Valley-Girl inflection.

When Sarah Palin still thought QE2 was a ship set to sail from Alaska, Bachmann was sitting happily on panels with Ron Paul, Federal-Reserve-Bank slayer. By 2009, Bachmann was ready for that flotilla of fiat money the Fed Chairmen floated in support of his political masters. This representative was “beefing-up her knowledge of the Fed and was familiar with the works of libertarian economic historian Tom Woods,” I blogged.

Belatedly, The Wall Street Journal has awoken (as of June 11) to Michele Bachmann’s intellectual heft. She is conversant with “Human Action” and “Bureaucracy,” the works of classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises. Yet just the other day (January, 2011), the same outfit had patronizingly dismissed Bachmann’s challenge to the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul as “an interesting strategy to gain more attention.”

Masters at sweating the smaller, safer stuff, some Beltway libertarians asserted that Bachmann, one of the few people in Congress who understands and protests monetary policy, is a philosophical spender because of the “agricultural subsidies her family farm has [allegedly] received.” This case is not worth a straw.

Search and you’ll find minor blemishes in Ron Paul’s impeccable defense of the Constitution. But when it comes to the big issues—entitlements, monetary and foreign policy—Paul remains unbeatable, where Beltway libertarians (also known in some libertarian circles as The “Kochtopus”) have been inconsistent.

Bachmann is eloquent and is seldom fazed. As attractive as Sarah, she is also cerebral, a quality poor Palin is without. Bachmann is not yet a libertarian, but neither is she wedded to the warfare state, and is wise enough to recognize the political value of denouncing America’s forays abroad in order to bring moderates and independents into the fold. Given guidance (and a good kick), she is not beyond apologizing for her unforgivable vote for the Patriot Act.

Conversely—attests” NRO’s Kevin D. Williamson (a libertarian behind enemy lines)—Paul has gone from immigration hawk to toying with amnesty (with an asterisk or two). Bachmann will bring Paul back from the brink.

Americans inhabit a world of reality TV and other frivolity. To win the GOP nomination in this parallel universe, Ron Paul needs political bling—he will want the punch, pizazz and money bombs a Bachmann can provide. What do you know? In September of 2009, this column had already picked the GOP’s winning ticket: Ron Paul for commander-in-chief; Michele Bachmann as second-in-command.

Bundle Rand (Paul) and Michele Bachmann—and the opposition, both Republican and Democratic, will be vanquished. But that’s for another day.

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Economic Apocalypse Now

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The notion that not raising the debt-ceiling must necessarily result in the US defaulting on its debt is nonsensical. In so asserting, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is talking tripe. “Tim” has warned of an “economic catastrophe” should the government’s credit limit not be increased, and has guaranteed that a “failure to raise the limit would precipitate a default by the United States.”

“Tim,” whose capacity for economic reasoning is tiny, has confused “debt obligations” with “other expenditures.”

As explained by U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, in a January 19 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The amount of money required to continue to make payments on all the U.S. government debt is a small fraction of the amount of revenue the U.S. government raises.” Blogging for the Library of Economics and Liberty’s EconLog, David Henderson made quick work of the Geithner fallacy:

The treasury secretary “is effectively saying that if the government wants to spend x and has only enough money to spend 0.67x, then not spending on the other 0.33x is a failure to keep an obligation. In a political sense, that might be: the government has made a lot of spending promises to a lot of people. But in an economic sense, it’s not. On the narrow issue of whether failure to raise the debt limit would necessarily mean U.S. government default on its debt, Toomey is right and Geithner is wrong.” Here’s the simple math, courtesy of Rep. Ron Paul: “Interest payments on our federal bond debt likely will amount to about $500 billion for fiscal year 2011, an average of $41 billion per month. Federal tax revenues vary by month, but should total around $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion for FY 2011– an average of perhaps $180 billion per month. So clearly the federal government has sufficient tax revenue to make interest payments to our creditors. For now, those interest payments represent about 12 percent of the total federal budget.”

On reflection, the US Treasury takes in enough loot to pay down the interest on the debt as well as a portion of the principal. Matching federal spending with federal revenue: what a concept! And what a tonic to our moribund economy that would be!

To the soul of the subject: The engorged organisms (Anthony D. Weiner is a sample) that currently control the economy from DC can discharge their responsibility to creditors without authorizing more borrowing. To do so, however, they will have to cease their many unconstitutional endeavors, and break the promiscuous promises they’ve made to certain voters at the expense of the vassals, out of whose hides these “promises” are carved.

As it stands, Republicans—and a few Democrats, one of whom has even cosponsored an amendment to cap federal spending—have done no more than perform a budgetary Bonnie and Clyde: If Democrats want to continue the heist and run deficits and debts to eternity, they will need to promise—nudge-nudge; nudge-nudge, know what I mean? know what I mean?”—budget cuts, preferably in the trillions. Or, introduce, not necessarily pass, a balanced-budget amendment.

Another tactic taken by the competing gangs of lawmakers is to guarantee an economic apocalypse if the US government doesn’t continue borrowing apace. This is something the sniveling House Republican Speaker John Boehner has hinted at, but failed to parse. “Apocalypse Now” forecasts cannot be verified, which is why politicians, their in-house economists, and other vested interests make them.

Above all, the emperor’s experts want you to believe that the values and virtues ordinary mortals hold themselves to don’t apply to government; that macroeconomics and microeconomic are two separate solitudes, governed by different laws. But the laws of economics are natural, not political, laws. These very laws Thomas Jefferson was enunciating when he warned that “the greatest danger came from the possibility of legislators plunging citizens into debt.” (Excerpted in “Liberty, State & Union: the Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson,” by Professor Marco Bassani.) “We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.”

When Standard & Poor’s cut the American credit outlook to negative, the Financial Post’s Terence Corcoran mocked the credit ratings agency’s “special talent for arriving at the morgue and predicting the demise of the deceased.”

Indeed, the United States has already passed on as the world’s economic leader. Having flouted Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the “fore horse for oppression and despotism,” after which “taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.”

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