By Ilana Mercer
September 12, 2026
Conservative commentators-you know who I mean-persist in their promiscuous prattle about the uncontested superiority of what they call western civilization. This, when every single one of civilization's edifices has been attacked and collapsed by the... West.
Never do these western commentators, forever dishing sloppy seconds, see fit to reexamine their gag-making gush over the "uncontested superiority" they attach to the West, in the context of western genocidal policies metastasizing.
Any convictions previously held about certain elevated principles still being peculiar to the West-the libertarian non-aggression principle is one-and not surviving once Western Civilization is no more; these are, at best, rickety.
As America and Israel and their auxiliary states across the West make a bonfire of people's lives around the world, thoughtful individuals whose lives are not in rubble about their feet might wish to do us a kindness: Quit their compartmentalized, spasmodic outbursts about the supremacy of contemporary western civilization.
Remember the Descartes aphorism "I think, therefore I am" ? If you are not jaundiced about the West, you aren't thinking. If you are not thinking, well... you have my sympathies. All I can sincerely say is that this syllogism doesn't end well for you.
The noise-making about "western civilization's" primacy comes from the same prominent people-podcasters, mostly-who sugar the fact that they registered a vote for Trump without question in 2024. If not to questionable intelligence, such a vote, at the very least, it makes a person fit to be tied.
This, from a November 10, 2022 column I wrote: "A vote for Trump in 2024 is a vote for the Jarvanka organism, or familial mutations of it. The family will be back in the People's House, minus the MAGA agenda."
The years leading to November 2024 had taught the teachable that the next American president, like old skunk Biden before him, would continue to play procurer and pimp for Israel.
Well before Trump's last election, the Jewish State had effectively asserted its birthright to do genocide, with millions, maybe billions, of people in the front seat, watching that genocide take place. We still are, thanks to the "western civilization" block, which seconded the Israeli motion. For his part, Trump huddled even closer to the genocidal entity.
(And no, there is no authentic, actionable British-French-Canadian plan to sanction products exported by the terrorists who've annexed the West Bank. " Britain's settlement trade ban is cosmetic," "Kabuki theater." Truth is at the 31:06-minute mark of the Reason2Resist podcast.)
Three years on, and that birthright to genocide has been extended far and wide, with western imprimatur. Bibi and Trump, men of cold violence (fugitives from natural justice), and their western vassals have refined, standardized and normalized a system of theft, territorial asphyxiation, starvation and mass murder.
Conquest and extermination they call a foreign policy.
For this reason, the emissaries of this foreign policy, including the mincing Mr. Vance trying to act muscular; to pose as a friend to the American masses-have to dub Abdul El-Sayed a terrorist. Rather than plunder and pauper the universe, El-Sayed, an American medic, has served his Michigan locality. Doctor El-Sayed is now standing for election in the US Senate, having disavowed Israeli-backed money.
Once-upon a time, I'd have said, more serenely, that when an American politician preaches about "the values that make our country great," to quote Mrs. Clinton, and about "our ally Israel sharing these values," to be spread far and wide, chances are they mean not ordered liberty, but a libertine order, where the Bill of Rights is subordinate to the Security-cum-Surveillance State apparatus, and any common-law traditions remaining are treated as living, breathing, mutating philosophical malignancies that must be made to second and reinforce the murderous apparatus just mentioned.
Without qualm, I'll now venture that the contemporary version of civilization known as "western" has been repudiated to a great degree by the Axis of Genocide. "You can't pull too many bricks out of that wall before it caves in," to borrow from Louis Auchincloss (one of the great writers America once boasted).
The Axis of Genocide's modus vivendi is instantiated across the West in every single institution of state and civil society. The "perpetrator block" encompasses nearly all western governments and the most powerful economic actors. Its military and civilian squadrons have not only adopted Israel's inverted reality and morality, but have made it their own.
The thing, the West, is in a state of putrefaction.
You'd think, then, that the conservative commentariat-many of whom rose through the military- or media-industrial-complex-would finally quell their yelling about "western civilization," in the context of metastasizing, protracted western genocidal pursuits.
Not a bit. They continue to rabbit on about The (Christian) West vs. The Rest. They continue to figuratively remind us, with a sniff and a sneer, that The Rest once could not make iron or roll a wheel.
One notable exception to the warped rule, aside Jeffrey Sachs-a prince among intellectual and moral scullions-is Professor Stephan Walt, the intellectual in the famous pair that authored the seminal book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
During an August interview, Walt firmly but affably told Tucker Carlson that "people sometimes forget" about the "collapse" of norms against the use of violence, courtesy of the Super Power and its supremacist sidekick, Israel. In his words:
"...we've seen, a pretty dramatic erosion in the normative environment surrounding the use of force. And I'm a good realist, so I don't think norms in international law are everything, but they're not irrelevant. So, one of the things we've seen is essentially a collapse of the norm against assassination. For a long time in world history, governments didn't try to assassinate each other. Leaders of other countries didn't try and kill each other in conflicts.... this is a very dangerous road to go down because now it's becoming a much more common practice. Look at what the United States and Israel do at the beginning of the Iran War. They take out all of Iran's senior leaders....It also erodes any possibility of trust. I mean, how can you sit down and negotiate an agreement with a regime that has killed your senior leaders and might do something again subsequently"
With that one, Walt went on to further dig in. He refused to make pat overtures to his celebrity host, when the latter hinted at the monopoly Christianity has over charity.
The somewhat testy exchange began when Walt raised the matter of noblesse oblige with Tucker Carlson-that is the implicit moral duty that once attached to being of the nobility, to being of the hereditary landed aristocracy. Or, in young America's case, to being terrifically wealthy. Said Walt: "... about previous wealthy elites in the United States. [It's] not all, by any means, but many of them also had, along with the usual drive and ambition and you could even argue greed, also did have a certain public-mindedness."
Tucker Carlson: "It was called Christianity!"
"Well, no, it wasn't just Christianity." Further to this point, at the 1:32:17 mark, Stephen M. Walt dared to dish up a counterpoint:
"I think some of them were obviously devout and faithful in their own fashion. That may have played a role in it. But even those that weren't, or didn't wear their religion on their sleeve, there was a general sense that they were part of a larger society and that they owed-they had to sort of give back in some respects. And that appears to be largely absent in the wealthiest people I could name right now. You don't get the impression that they care very much about the collectivity. And that's not healthy. That's not a good situation."
Tension hung in the air. But Walt just fixed his host with a searing look. It probably won't make him the most popular podcast guest. Then again, another thing western supremacists tend to believe is that the democratic marketplace adjudicates the quality of a cultural product. It doesn't.
The mass market does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences enacted by consumers. Joe Rogan's PowerfulJRE podcast outdoes Dimitri Lascaris' Reason2Resist (my favorite). For some, this will be faith inspiring, for others deeply distressing.
In any case, the West's way in the world is war. War on civilians; warring for land and lucre; war to make the World woke à la America and the Middle East Israeli. War to merge both entities into a monster even greater than its constituent elements: That's the American foreign policy.
If it sounds absurdly simple and cartoonishly evil, it's because it is. But if you prefer, I'll dress it up:
The western warfare-woke worldview, the one under which we labor, is when a triumphant neoliberal and neoconservative global establishment arbitrarily imposes meaning on the phenomenological and the real world, as a function of its will to power. It then bullies and takes down all those implacably lined up in opposition, individual and state alike; stateside and abroad.
SUBSCRIBE to " ILANA MERCER'S FPV Resistance" on Substack.
ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com
ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com