Gulliver’s Travels, credit Wikipedia
Rattus Republicanus
by Ilana Mercer
The defining difference between Democrats and Republicans is this: Republicans live on their political knees. They apologize and expiate for their principles, which are generally not unsound. Democrats, conversely and admirably, stand tall for their core beliefs, as repugnant as these mostly are.
The Left most certainly didn’t rush forward to condemn the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riffraff, as they looted and killed their way across urban America, last year. Instead, Democrats defended the déclassé, criminal arm of their party. “Riots are the language of the unheard,” they preached, parroting MLK.
What of the trammels of despair that drove the Trump protesters of January 6? Trust too many Republicans—goody two-shoes, teacher’s-pet types all—to trip over one another in order to denounce that ragtag of disorganized renegades, the protesters aforementioned, who already have no chance in hell of receiving due process of law.
Consider Nancy Mace. With the speed of a whirling dervish, the Republican representative from South Carolina rushed to make a name for herself posing as a heroic “survivor” of January 6. Following the incident on the Capitol, Mace quickly transformed herself into the young, go-to GOPer on the “hive media,” bad mouthing MAGA folks (to the likes of supercilious Don Lemon, of all people).
Shortly after the incident Democrats are likening to September 11, during a pit-stop on Fox News with the forgiving Martha MacCallum, miss congeniality attempted to redeem herself as a “constitutional conservative.” Oh, and how Ms. Mace had suffered. You don’t know the half of it.
Having joined the Democrats in peddling her “harrowing” experience during the Jan. 6 incident, Mace, a middle-class young woman, proceeded to use lefty language for political leverage to describe her familial situation. For the purpose of self-aggrandizement and drama, Nancy kept calling herself a “single mother.” A single mother is a term the Left, and now the thoroughly co-opted Right, has adopted to glorify unmarried mothers and fatherless “families.” It was meant to excise the father from the picture and undermine the nuclear family.
Mace’s biography mentions that “she is the mom of two children aged 11 and 13,” and a divorced woman (or womin), and thus, by extension, not a “single mother.” So, give it up, please for the man who made the Mace kids. He is her ex-husband, Curtis Jackson, whom Nancy Mace divorced in 2019.
Political pygmy Adam Kinzinger was another young GOPer to rush onto the “enemedia” to announce his hackneyed vision for reclaiming the GOP from the deforming clutches of Trump and MAGA America. Last month, Kinzinger voted to impeach President Trump. He further swelled the chorus by announcing that “the Republican Party had lost its way. If we are to lead again, we need to muster the courage to remember who we are.” So original. So inspirational.
“We need to remember what we believe and why we believe it,” Kinzinger continued. “Looking in the mirror can be hard, but the time has come to choose what kind of party we will be, and what kind of future we’ll fight to bring about.” (CNN) With his Country First initiative, Kinzinger evinces his inability to comprehend that, for him, the “Country” ought to comprise of his constituents, the people he represents. It is the lead of his constituents that Kinzinger is obliged to follow, not his own political métier.
Kinzinger is a spawn of the military. While we’re at it, let us dispatch for once and for all the conservative mythology surrounding the philosophical fabric of the military, these days (in Kinzinger’s case the reserve). Isn’t it obvious that the military is a morass of leftism, statism, feminism, reverse-racism, interventionism, propositionalism, and other poisonous creeds? If nothing else, the Trump years have made it clear that the military brass has aligned with the Left.
As for Nancy Mace’s bona fides: “I have spoken out strongly against the president and my own colleagues,” bragged Ms. Mace smugly. “[W]e have a Constitution as our guide. The vote to certify the Electoral College is in our Constitution,” she said of the political battle that precipitated the January 6 riot. “That was a ceremonial vote to certify all 50 states that were legally certified.” Spoken like a Beltway Babe.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Parler, Gab, YouTube & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook and throttled by Twitter.
Still Addicted to that Rush
President Trump with Rush Limbaugh
Still Addicted to that Rush
Ilana Mercer, on the late king of radio
Rush Limbaugh died on February the 17th. In the encomiums to conservatism’s radio king, mention was made of his 2009 address at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. CPAC for short, or CPUKE before Trump.
“Addicted to that Rush,” the March 6, 2009 column’s title, came not from Rush’s brief addiction to painkillers following surgery, but from an eponymous hit by the band Mr. Big. (It, in turn, came from a time when the American music scene produced not pornographers like Cardi B, but musicians like Paul Gilbert and Billy Sheehan). Nevertheless, that title alluded to one of Rush’s missed opportunities: speaking against a war into which he was involuntarily drafted and by which he was almost destroyed: the War on Drugs.
Still, how petty does that war, in all its depredations, seem now! How unimaginably remote do the issues Rush spoke to, in 2009, seem in the light of a country that has come a cropper in the course of one year, due to an unprecedented consolidation of state power around COVID, compounded by an amped up, institutionalized campaign against white America. And, in particular, against white Trump voters.
Other than champion tax cuts and globalization, the Rovian cadre of the GOP had been doing what it has always done: calling for a more upbeat, inclusive and diverse party. Michael Steele, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, today an “analyst” for MSNBC, had derided Rush as a mere entertainer, describing “The Rush Limbaugh Show” as incendiary and ugly. Then as now, Steele’s main concerns were not those of main-street Americans. Rather, Steele’s cares were “conciliatory.” The Rovians, like the Never Trumpers of the Lincoln-Project, believed in the urgent need to broaden the Republican Party’s base and “appeal” to traditionally hostile minorities, when in fact the GOP had been courting traditional Democratic constituents with every trick possible, with little success, all the while sticking it to the base.
The Steele-Limbaugh spat fell into Barack Obama’s lap. The former president was losing it— throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the thing he called “the economy,” but which is really no more than the trillions upon trillions of voluntary, capitalistic acts individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this synchronized spontaneous order, and it starts to splutter. The economy responds poorly to economic planning and planners. BHO thought that he could walk on water. America facilitated his fantasy. The former president was realizing that he was not the magic man he imagined that he was. Desperate times called for desperate distractions.
In short succession, Democratic henchmen—Paul Begala, Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Robert Gibbs — began picking on Limbaugh. Strong-armed too by the Obama administration, CNBC reporter Rick Santelli led a revolt from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange against the bailout billions for mortgage delinquents. Little wonder, then, that the contents of Limbaugh’s speech at CPAC garnered less attention than the characters involved.
Rush spoke stirringly. He railed against the enormous expansion of government in the first few, frightening weeks of the Obama presidency. But, as I noted at the time, not a word against the man who began what Barack was just completing. George Bush set the scene for Barack. Stimulus, bailouts, a house for every Hispanic—these were Bush’s babies. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights had been abandoned well before the fist-bumping Obamas moved into the White House.
“Contrary to popular myth,” wrote James Ostrowski, President of Free Buffalo, in 2002, “every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government’s size, scope, or power—and usually all three. Over the last one hundred years, of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans.”
“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.”
As rousing as his speech was, Limbaugh did not devote a word to the Warfare State, every bit as corrupt, corrupting, and bankrupting as the Welfare State. As we observed at the time, over $1 trillion was being spent yearly on imperial expeditions that were awash in American blood, but offered few benefits to the sacrificed, stateside and abroad. Besides, we asked, “what kind of a nation neglects its own borders while defending to the death borders not its own?”
Rush rightly denounced the State’s failed war on poverty. It failed not because fighting poverty is not a noble cause, but because, given the perverse incentives it invariably entrenches, government is incapable of winning such a war. The same economic and bureaucratic perversions also make the State’s stalemated War on Drugs equally unwinnable and ruinous.
Lysander Spooner, the great, American 19th-century theorist of liberty, defined vices as those acts “by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which a man harms the person or property of another.” Government has no business treating vices as crimes. If, for harming himself, a man forfeits his freedom, then he is not free at all.
Limbaugh accused Obama of wanting to transform America. This was obvious then, as it is today. But what of George W. Bush, who had wormed his way into the affections of conservative leaders like Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham (who used to call Bush a patriot). What was Bush’s insistence on unfettered, open borders if not an expression of his disdain for “America the way it had been since its founding,” to quote commentator Lawrence Auster (also since deceased). The former president refused to enforce immigration law. That was his way of converting America into something quite different. Just like Obama, Bush harbored a death wish for America of the Founders. Added Auster: “Until conservative opinion makers render unto Bush the censures he richly deserves, especially for the same things for which they now excoriate Obama, their criticisms of Obama will have the [odor] of rank partisanship.” It took Trump to dispatch Bush.
At the time, I expressed the hope that conflagrations such as the one between Steele and Limbaugh continue and deepen. “It’s good for the GOP ─ the party needs to be gashed good and proper if a coherent articulation of ordered liberty is to be forged from the current philosophical chaos.” Come to think of it, that this tract began with Rush Limbaugh, of blessed memory, and ended with Trump, is in itself significant. For it took the “Donald’s creative destruction” to finish off the Republican Party.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Parler, Gab, YouTube & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook and throttled by Twitter.
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