By Ilana Mercer
December 9, 2025
As Candace Owens likes to say of things known intuitively, some things ' we don't know-know, but we know.' The same with the natural law. It's why, as mentioned in Block V. Mercer, courtesy of Tom Woods TV , I'm a natural-rights libertarian, not a national-interest statist. The national-interest debate is only ever over whether the U.S. government should or shouldn't act on its divine rights as transnational judge, jury and executioner; seldom over what's morally right and what's wrong." ~ilana
Stateside, people speak of genocide as though it were an item of foreign-policy, albeit-small mercies-an unwelcome foreign policy event.
Absurd, of course!
Whether such crass utilitarians like it or not, the Anglo-Israeli-American genocide in Palestine is a moral matter, not to be subsumed within the confines of foreign policy, but transcending it.
"Genocide for Israel" is Trump's de facto Middle East foreign policy. Enmeshed, the American and Israeli cabal, two self-appointed world powers, are presently and shamelessly still engaged in genocide. Israel acts to "disappear" the Palestinians as individuals, as a people and as a polity. Trump, who respects Israel's wishes to the letter, appoints people who do the same. He pursues and imposes policies that dovetail with what Israel demands.
Israeli-American devilry has entailed the decimation of Palestinian habitat, the salting of their earth for decades to come; the despoiling and theft of their rightfully owned resources, the elimination of their historical artifacts and records; of thousands of their bloodlines. Gone are Gaza's institutions of law, of learning of healing; their churches, their mosques, their leadership.
All ongoing. We are 790 days into Israel's relentless bloodletting.
Trump, corporate media and the political ring leaders sashaying up and down both aisles may call the "new" dispensation under which Palestinians live a " ceasefire." In point of fact, the so-called ceasefire is just Trump's " engineered new normal: a slow-paced genocide. " For Israel.
The future of Gaza, Trump has made clear, would " be pretty much up to Israel." When Israel declared its intention to take over Gaza, Donlad Trump had shrugged and egged them on. " Ramp it up," he whooped. Having long since slipped between the sheets with Bibi Netanyahu, Trump gave the Israeli prime minister the go-ahead to " fight and finish the job."
Under Gaza's weeping winter skies, massacres continue. Drones, killer quadcopters and other Israeli shelling implements come scudding at Gaza from the north all the time. The " destruction of remaining homes, property and land, and the prevention of the entry of food, humanitarian aid and basic infrastructure materials" had never ceased, only let-up slightly. Genocide hums along now at the rate of more than eight human beings murdered a day, and at more than 20 injured, also each day, attest the Euro-Med's human-rights monitors, on the ground.
By no unfortunate coincidence, Trump had normalized this mindset during his first administration. I was hardly being a crusty cynic when, in a January 3, 2018 column, "How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism," I foresaw the vanquishing of Venezuela:
Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump's foreign policy.
A couple of months back, Bloomberg's Eli Lake let it be known that he was in neoconservative nirvana: '... for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. 'The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,' Trump said. 'We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'
'For a moment," swooned Lake, 'I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting.' (" How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism," Ilana Mercer, January 3, 2018)
"Onward to Venezuela!" I wearily wrote. It was not a mysterious sense of foreboding. I was just following facts.
Then, I watched the fibs with fascination. Now, I know all the tricks. Of course Trump was bound to normalize genocide for Israel, albeit at a slower pace.
Another of Trump's hombres is Florida Representative Randy Fine. No sooner did the "Hebrew Hammer," as he fondly calls himself, advise the Palestinian collective to "starve away"-than Trump rushed to pose by Fine's side. The pair of them, two mountains of flesh as soft as sin, giving themselves over with passionate intensity to criminal complicity. That was in July of 2025. Come October of 2025, Trump endorsed Fine's candidacy.
Having gotten their hostages back, the inviolable Israelis, for their part, have settled into a different rhythm of genocide. The only thing that has come to an end in Israel are mass hostage protests. Since the Israeli-dictated "ceasefire" took effect on 10 October, upwards of 352 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel and over 900 injured. "Gaza is a living necropolis," reports the Glia organization, also on the ground in Gaza.
Having kept up its standards, the majority of the casualties inflicted by the "most moral army in the world" are women, children and the elderly. You might look at these two diminutive brothers, small for their ages (for obvious reasons), and think kids. IDF terrorists, with far greater acuity than you, were able to discern "two suspects who crossed the yellow line," and were conducting "suspicious activities on the ground."
What kind of "activities" ? The children Israel murdered, two among " more than 50,000 kids killed or injured in the Gaza Strip" (that we know of), were foraging for sustenance for their crippled father, who was likely unaware of a new rule. The rule is the offshoot of the tolerance evinced by Trump and the "civilized" West toward Israel's Hunger Games production, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in which IDF terrorists and hired hands played at culling starved Palestinians, lured to "food"-collection sites.
The new rule is that Israelis shoot to kill anyone who sets a barefoot beyond the giant ugly yellow cement blocks with which these terrorists have deformed the Strip of land they've stolen.
Yes, the IDF has bisected the Gaza Strip again. Whether it is into west and east, north and south or both, or into still tinier grids, I cannot quite say. All we know is that Israeli high revelry in murder and in the deformation of the landscape have not abated a bit after 790 days of it. All Israelis want you to know is that if Palestinians die; they needed killing, one and all.
Or, as one brilliant Palestinian thinker has averred, Palestinians are the only people who must negotiate an end to their murder and starvation.
The 'National Interest': A Statist Fiat Standard
Given the president's behavioral profile, how naive, then, is it to center the case against President Trump around the "national interest" and his betrayal of it!
Let me demonstrate what I mean, with the hope that you all see the madness for what it is:
Say a criminal profiler were drawing up a profile of prolific serial killer Ted Bundy. Say said criminal profiler then reported to his handlers that he found Ted Bundy deficient in patriotism. Considering that Bundy's signal and salient personality trait/habit was his serial killing-not his alleged lack of patriotism-you'll agree that the direction our profiler's inquiry took and his deductions were bonkers. Nuts.
Same here. Genocide is the Crime of all Crimes. It's the stand-alone, indefensible crime-of-all-crimes. Genocide, moreover, is not a war crime, or a once-off crime. To these, you can attach a set of mitigating or explanatory legal defenses. Not to genocide. There are no legal or moral defenses to attach to genocide. There are no extenuating circumstances, historical, legal or other, for genocide.
Therefore, to frame Trump's active proxy genocide in "national interest" terms-as a betrayal of his promise to his political constituency-is as irrational as accusing serial killer Ted Bundy not of mass murder, but of lacking in patriotism.
For if you partake in mass murder, why would we trust your patriotism, fellow feeling and fidelity to us, The American People ? Ideally, mass murderers ought to be dethroned and punished. Severe punishment for Israelis and their helpers will do the world a world of good. Crime and Punishment, yes ? Crime to be followed with punishment fulfills the requirement of ordered liberty. Leave grotesque crimes unpunished; and you'll get more of them.
Put plainly, if your political plank's default position includes openly aiding or committing genocide-then this puts you outside the human species, to say nothing of libertarianism, patriotism, or a national-interest focused, America First foreign-policy.
You've no doubt noticed that the national-interest debate is only ever over whether the U.S. government should or shouldn't act on its divine rights as transnational judge, jury and executioner; seldom over what's morally right and what's wrong. This is why, as mentioned in a debate, Block V. Mercer, courtesy of Tom Woods TV , I'm a natural-rights libertarian, not a national-interest libertarian. The latter is a thoroughly statist, fiat standard.
Trump, like Biden before him, is a co-belligerent in Israel's war on the Palestinians People. He thinks nothing of extra-judicially murdering people for personal aggrandizement, which he conflates with the national interest. Trump would have certainly told his voters, in 2020, that murdering Qassim Soleimani, an Iranian major general, was in our "national interest."
These days, the Trump administration adheres to the "monkey see; monkey do" principle. The president of the United States of America aims to do as Israel does. (Personally, I am tired of animals used as the source of metaphor for all things stupid and evil. "Animals, like children, are closer to God," proffered author Daphne du Maurier, in a novel. How about we substitute Israelis, who torture animals worse than they do Palestinians?)
Mimicking the kill-crazy Israelis in Gaza and the West Bank, Trump's own Israeli mini-me, Pete Hegseth, is b lowing up vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific international waters. Donald Trump has defended Hegseth, who, à la Israel, even authorized double-tap strikes: First, you hit a target. You follow up with another strike on survivors and rescuers. Barbarism in the national interest, of course.
While these violations of customary international law and the law of armed conflict provisions " have been incorporated into American domestic law"-they are never enforced against Israel. None of these American (and international) domestic legal provisions does America ever apply to Israel.
It's not in the national interest, you'll be told.
Taken to its logical conclusion; the "national interest" standard goes something like this:
If genocide is deemed in the American "national interest"; then, dot, dot, dot..."
Taken to its realistic reductio ad absurdum, the national-interest standard, as practiced by Trump and Biden, means "We do what Israel tells us to do."
Todd Huntley, "director of the National Security Law program at Georgetown University Law Center, who had previously served as a judge advocate in the Navy for more than two decades," reminds us, inadvertently, of the expansive and nebulous nature of violence in the "national interests":
"The President, as the Commander-in-Chief under Article II [of the US Constitution], has authority to use military force if it is in the U.S. national interest, and if it's for a limited duration, scope, and intensity....The domestic legal basis comes from a line of several Office of Legal Counsel (O.L.C.) opinions."
So, no thanks to the national-interest fiat standard. However dreamy this may sound to you, dear reader, I'll cleave to the Stoic doctrine of natural law, whose "interpreter and transmitter" was Cicero. "The lex nata is the law within us," said Cicero of natural law. (Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law, A Study In Legal And Social History And Philosophy, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1998.)
Or, as Candace Owens likes to say of things known intuitively: Some things " we don't know-know, but we know." The same with the natural law. It's why I'm a natural-rights libertarian, not a national-interest statist. To apply here another Candace coinage, the national interest " feels a little fake and gay."
Contra the national-interest fickleness, the natural law is a system of ethics knowable through reason, revelation and experience. Because it is anchored in the very existential nature of man and reality, natural law is the highest law known to man and is therefore deductively true and just.
Man knows right from wrong full-well. He knows he is perpetrating evil even as he does so.
Deep down we all know that there are no two sides to genocide; that there are no two sides to permanent military occupation; that there is no debate as to who gets to determine the future of Palestine other than the Palestinian people. We in the West act like permanent rulers of the world in absentia. We all know full well that's wrong-that Palestinians, not westerners, must be the authors of their future.
Libertarianism isn't dispassionate abstraction existing in the hermetic confines of theory. Rather, we are a community-albeit a small one-of passionate individuals who are on the side of those who are denied life, liberty and property in a systematic and systemic way.
Natural-rights libertarians should therefore be squarely in the Palestine Solidarity camp, and certainly skeptical of the national-interest standard, invariably set by Dr. Evil statists and their mini-mes.