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ILANA MERCER

Paleolibertarian author, weekly columnist and polemicist. Boston Globe:

In 1999, Mercer’s weekly column launched in Vancouver, Canada,. Her writing routinely is featured on WorldNetDaily.com, Quarterly Review , Townhall.com. and American Greatness.

Translated into German, Mercer’s column was a regular feature in Junge Freiheit, a German weekly. Other publications that have carried Mercer’s columns are Antiwar.com, The Ron Paul Institute , The American Thinker , The Daily Caller , The Mises Institute , and LewRockwell.com. Mercer's columns have fueled controversy. For example, referring to Mercer’s book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,”  Ben Mathis-Lilley, a writer for Slate, accused Mercer of racism, referring to her as "a real piece of work, racism-wise! ...Mercer thinks that getting rid of apartheid has been bad for South Africa—and that, broadly, white people shouldn’t support democracy in countries in which they’re a minority population, because they will be exterminated by nonwhite savages."

Mercer countered the Slate accusation in a Quarterly Review column, noting that “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” condemns apartheid, calling it “one of the world’s most retrogressive colonial systems (p. 65).” “Apartheid showed a gross disrespect for human rights and international law (p. 222)." Mercer further explained that what she condemns in the book is not democracy per se, but “unrestrained majoritarianism” or “simple majority rule.”

Such online jousts have earned Mercer legions of both strong supporters and bitter critics.