Ilana Mercer, part 1: Roots, writing, & resistance

The tagline at Ilana Mercer’s website is “Verbal swordplay for civilization.” Ain’t that the truth. The self-described paleolibertarian has been wielding words and fighting the good fight since well before I even thought about fleeing the clutches of feminism-atheism-socialism. She’s both provocative and poignant – a difficult thing to pull off anytime, much less in our postmodern dystopia.

I remember first stumbling upon Mercer at World Net Daily back in my neocon “daze” in the early 2000s. I recall being moved by not only her tenacity, but her cerebral style. Being such a prolific essayist, I then found her articles during my libertarian/ancap phase. And again, her writing spoke to me. Now, I’m what you’d call a paleoconservative/Southern traditionalist, and yet, there she is again: writing articles that say things we all want to say but don’t know how, or planting seeds for new thinking.

Now, I don’t always agree with Mercer. I’d say she speaks my language on most matters, but that’s really not what draws me to her work. When you read Mercer, you know that she’s coming to her conclusions through principled inquiry, deep research, a passion for justice, and an impatience with the insanity. In other words, she’s rational but on fire!

And Mercer can see through so many of the charades. Perhaps this is due to her years of experience or because, as Jack Kerwick says, “Ilana is in much greater supply of that ‘manly virtue’ than are most male writers today.”

As Southern stalwart Dr. Clyde Wilson explains of Mercer, “This is one libertarian who knows that the market is wonderful, but it is not everything.” Intellectual honesty like that is hard to come by these days, and that’s why Mercer’s writing is so damn good: it’s fearless and succinct. Bold and challenging. Accessible and engrossing.

Moreover, anyone who’s forever banned from Facebook, pegged as a hater by the SPLC, and given accolades by everyone from Peter Brimelow and Vox Day, to Tom Woods and Paul Gottfried, well, they’re pretty cool in my book. Plus, Mercer has become what I would call a mentor and a friend. So, for those of you who don’t already know her, please meet the never-to-be-duplicated Ilana Mercer. And folks who are already familiar with her and her independent streak, get ready to have your socks knocked off.

DISSIDENT MAMA: Let’s start with a little bio. Where are you from, why you left and came to the States, and how you got into dissident journalism?

ILANA MERCER: I was born in South Africa. My parents immigrated to Israel, where I grew up. Primary, secondary and some tertiary schooling happened in Israel. I returned to South Africa, which was never far from my heart. There, I married and had a daughter. My husband and I left South Africa in the late 1990s for obvious reasons, as “mobocracy” dawned. Our honeymoon was spent dodging riot pockets resembling the riots engulfing more than 2000 cities in America of 2020, an eventuality presaged in my 2011 book, “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons From America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” (The difference: South Africa still had an extremely tough police force.) 

Leaving was particularly difficult for me (not so for my husband, who wisely initiated the move). You never make up for a life and a homeland lost. Friends with whom I raised my daughter were left behind. Family, too. 

I did not enter “dissident journalism”; I’ve always been a dissident thinker. I recall a high school principal complaining to my mom that, “ilana has her own laws. She doesn’t make them up; she just has them.” 

I began writing in Canada. Writing in Canada was an exhilarating experience, as Canada – are you sitting? – was far more structurally conservative than the radical USA, where celebrity drives publishers, where writers are often not paid (joy, “that’s the free-market speaking,” I’ve been lectured by sorts who’re prepaid by special-interest think tanks); where plagiarism is just “flattery” and where ethics are passé and old-fashioned. 

Back in the day, Canadian op-ed pages were not dominated by empty celeb journos, and writers were compensated well for quality work, even if straight off the boat, as I was! Right away, I was writing opinion for Canada’s national newspapers about topics from Quebec as a beacon for secession (quoting Clyde Wilson), to intellectual property rights, to progressive rock. I soon began scabbing as an op-ed writer. 

Yes, crossing the picket line to make a living! Those were heady times. A few sessions with the best of editors set me on the right track to being ruthless with my own prose. In that old Canadian ethical journalistic scene, editors, following traditional journalistic strictures, didn’t use their position to publish themselves constantly as our own publications often do, in direct conflict of interest. They edited. Since these professionals had no conflict of interest – they had no incentive to oust competition so as to hog the page with their inconsequential pabulum – they recruited the best. That’s the way division of labor is meant to work. It enforces ethics, too. In American journalism, lines are blurred. It’s all very radical, non-hierarchical and, in the meta-sense, unconservative.  

Canada, sadly, always follows the US, whether it is in the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, taxation, or, I imagine, the corruption of its op-ed pages. 

However, while we Americans take some comfort in the fact that ours is a market-generated cancel culture – please! – Canadians, it has to be said, have state-generated speech codes and extrajudicial “human rights,” kangaroo courts. Bad news.

DM: Do you ever just wanna flee? If not, how do you stay so on fire?

IM: Flee? Oh, yes, every moment of every day. I want to flee, yet I stay on fire. The Fire is in me, in my makeup, tempered by reason, I hope. I have no idea how to tamp it down. A young man recently sought my advice about writing (quite a few young men do). He also asked how to acquire The Fire. You have to be born with it. 

However, there is something else young writers can do to help find their fire. Contrary to the message of America’s parents and pedagogues (“make everything fun”), skills that are worth acquiring are seldom fun and easy. You have to work hard to become tops (if you have it in you), or just competent (if that’s all you’ve got). 

Ignorance and a shoddy education that banishes the West’s literary canon from schools: this has robbed young minds of the source of idiom, the vocabulary, the range of expression, the imagination, the discipline and structure to channel whatever passion they may possess. Subpar or no drilling in English grammar compounds the problem. Like in music, technique is almost everything.  

How can writers channel passion or worthy thoughts the way the best writers do, if the only “words” they command are “amazing,” “incredible,” “OMG,” and “I feel like,” and if their syntax and grammar are fractured? They can’t.

DM: Can you give a primer of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” and is it a cautionary tale?

IM: Published in 2011, “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” used the tragic example of post-apartheid South Africa to forewarn Americans of the effects of a shift in their country’s founding political dispensation, a shift being achieved stateside through immigration central-planning. 

Immigrants arrive in a country, the United States, whose institutions already acculturate its own into a militant anti-West, anti-white politics. It’s the case of destruction from within and from without. You can hope to combat the first, if your demographics are stable. Destruction is irreversible when you’re importing political and cultural aliens by the annual millions (two, plus/minus) 

America’s political class has thus been tinkering with the country’s historical demographic composition for decades. The consequence of which is that, like South Africa, America is headed for dominant-party status, in which a permanent majority intractably hostile to the host culture consolidates power, and in which voting along racial lines is the rule. 

As sure as night follows day, the American democracy is destined to resemble that of South Africa, where a ruling majority party is permanently entrenched, and where voting is characterized by “a muscular mobilization of a race-based community,” with a marginalized minority consigned to the status of spectator in the political bleachers. The Trump revolution was the last chance for America’s historic, founding majority, and those who identify with it and value its legacy, to reverse the process.

DM: Is the deification of Lincoln similar to that of Nelson Mandela?

IM: No, the deification of Lincoln is not of a piece with the worship of Mandela. Mandela, for all his faults, was not a mass murderer or a war monger. Other than a minor intervention in Lesotho. Mandela opposed wars the likes of which America pursues. I’m not a fan, but Mandela does not deserve to be crudely lumped with Lincoln. 

In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” I provide a well-rounded and honest assessment of Mandela who, it cannot be denied, was a patrician and had “old-world courtesy.” As the distinguished Afrikaner historian Hermann Giliomee put it: “He had an imposing bearing and a physical presence, together with gravitas and charisma. He also had that rare, intangible quality best described by Seamus Heaney as ‘great transmission of grace.’”

I’m no fan of Mandela, but he was no Lincoln.

Be sure to check out part 2 of my interview with Ilana Mercer.