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The Woke Universe is about inverting reality—turning truth, morality, ethics, and aesthetics on their heads, and destroying every categorical imperative bequeathed to us by the ancients. The goal? To make The World safe for Ugly, Evil, Idle and Aberrant ~ilana
Grammys 2023: The end of art, techno-porn caterwauling, and indecent exposure masquerading as music; an erogenous-zone centered extravaganza ~ilana
Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (Russian), Elgar, Fauré and more—they embody The Best of The West, not the Woke pornographers and perverts, the Covid goons; rap, reparations, and the critical race bile ~ilana
Symbolically, the decaying Empire unveiled some of its most putrefying, pornographic cultural products in the week in which Burt Bacharach, composer of sublime pop-music, departed to the heavens. The beastly bacchanalia unfolded at the 2023 Grammys and the Super Bowel (sic) halftime hump-along, showcasing zero skill, 0 imagination, 0 talent and 0 beauty. Those vaguely familiar with my prose recognize that I’m being charitable.
Unfortunately, conservative commentators minimize the impetus and significance of this cultural foot-and-mouth, superciliously giggling over, and misdiagnosing, it.
The postmodern shift in the culture is positively tidal. But with their good-natured, bemused, crushingly stupid reactions to the most meaningful of events and situations, conservatives normalize, even aid and abet the decay. In this instance, the 2023 Grammys—techno-porn caterwauling, and indecent exposure masquerading as music.
The staple response I refer to are the reliably diffuse and vapid “insights” offered up by The Tucker Carlson Show’s giggly guest, Chadwick Moore.
Why is this perennial conservative confusion so important to correct? For one, because thought mediates action. And fuzzy, foolish thoughts about important matters give rise to fuzzy, foolish actions about important matters.
Chadwick Moore protested the Pfizer sponsored (alleged), Grammy performance of one Sam Smith on the grounds of “satanic panic”; that it was “devil-themed.”
Moore’s other redundant banality was to “reveal” that Smith is a grotesquely ugly transsexual man whose aim is to grab world attention.
You don’t say! As if my lying eyes told me otherwise!
THE ONLY SUBSTANTIVE CONSERVATIVE CASE to make over the Grammys is that it signifies the complete loss of immutable artistic standards. For while artistic taste is subjective and personal; artistic standards are everywhere and always objective.
Nobody looking at, and listening to, the 2023 Grammys should dare talk about beauty—of melody or movement—harmony (as in consonance and counterpoint), chord progression, and a facility with musical instruments, for these were nowhere apparent. Better melodic progression is to be found in “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” and “Three Blind Mice.”
Nobody watching these erogenous-zone centered extravaganzas, for which the celebrity Idiocracy clapped like clapped-out whores, should dare conclude anything but this:
The Grammys were about the end of art—about the loss of all meritocratic, objective standards in art.
THE TRUE MEANING OF THE WEST is not to be found in the staged acts of ugly exhibitionists and filthy pornographers who bedeck our cultural and sporting events, the likes of loud, lousy Lizzo, a mountain of meritless flesh, and the Sam Smith Sicko— demented degenerates who are all engaged in publicly tolerated indecent exposure and tuneless yelping, that not even the Auto-tune magic software, the “holy grail of recording” technology, can correct.
THE MEANING OF THE WEST is not in this ghastly culture, in which our kids, liberal and conservative, are allowed to wallow, or in our ugly, grubby, tit-for-tat politics.
IT’S NOT in the Woke, postmodern perverts degrading the language, literature, music, art and sciences.
IT’S NOWHERE IN THE COVID CARTEL and its army of goons, medical and bureaucratic, devoid of intelligence and bereft of proficiency in anything but the use of force.
The aforementioned are imposters, interlopers; frauds, freaks and fetishists.
Beethoven is The West. It’s men like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (a Russian homosexual, whose manly music could never be queered), Elgar, Fauré and more—they embody The West. They and the many young performers furthering their work, the work of the Lord, are examples of the best of the West.
“Ode to Joy,” inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s eponymous poem, is but the soundbite in Symphony No. 9. Sublime as it is, “Ode to Joy” is the popular tune in a more magnificent whole.
One should not seek out exclusively the Ode of the Finale—the fourth movement—without assimilating the typically ballsy build-up by Beethoven throughout the preceding Allegro (first movement), scherzo (second movement) and Adagio (third).
MUSIC IS MAN. These men, to be precise.
Like nobody today, Beethoven instantiates this truth in all his Symphonies. Listen to No. 5 here, conducted by the great Herbert von Karajan, and tell me this is not the original headbangers ball.
To share with you, I have a fine performance of “Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 ‘Choral’ (1824).” It is that of The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim.
Barenboim’s intensity during the performance and the perfection he wrung so effortlessly from these young, eager musicians—beautiful in face and form, hailing from far-flung countries across the Middle East and North Africa—led me to suspect this setting was more than just a celebrity conductor, one of the greatest, for sure, parachuted in for a night.
Indeed, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a product of the vision of Maestro Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual. The impetus of their collaboration, I imagine, was to foster peace and transmit immutable beauty through music.
Done.
To speak colloquially, not theologically, neither Allah nor Elohim has ever inspired the transcendence of a Beethoven or a Bach. Christianity begat the glory and genius of Bach and Beethoven. They are The West, not the Woke perverts trying to drown Western glory with no more than pelvic and genital thrusts parading as music.
A sad, but inspirational, anecdote: Beethoven had composed the sublime work, the Ninth, utterly deaf.
‘According to one account of the event, the audience applauded thunderously at the conclusion of the performance, but Beethoven, unable to hear the response, continued to face the chorus and orchestra; a singer finally turned him around so that he could see evidence of the affirmation that resounded throughout the hall.’
AND that’s The West, too. Alas, it has become anathema in Neurotic Nation USA to be stoic and heroic like Beethoven.
I shall close with guidance neither fuzzy nor diffuse: Honor Western civilization, not Kanye West: Do it up, parents.
**
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece 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 on Twitter (barely), Gab, Gettr YouTube & LinkedIn; banned by Facebook, and has a new video-podcast.
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You are correct, as usual. Nothing good is coming from the relentless negro-ization of our “culture.”
Your average whitey, even a conzo, cares more about rap music than classical.
Thank you, Ilana, for saying what needs to be said and repeated over and over and over — every day, everywhere …
And it’s not just our music — but all of our Western Culture and Civilization that is so very worthy of saving and protecting — the music, the literature, the art, the architecture, the history … even the various languages and traditions that exist throughout European nations and elsewhere.
Homogenization may work for milk (and even there it’s quite debatable) … but it’s anathema to having civilization and culture and history for more than a moment.
Keep up the good work, Ilana … and, please, don’t be so scarce …
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When I was in my teens I had already learned Liszt’s sonata in b minor and played Bk. I of Bach’s well Tempered clavier. By the time I turned 30, I had learned most of the active piano repertoire. I also did math Olympiad and learned Lebesgue integration, probability and all that modern stuff before I was a freshman. I knew the entire undergraduate curriculum in math already and so majored in physics instead. I couldn’t graduate fast enough, most of it was not challenging and dull. I should have went straight to graduate school.
Anyway, you think I’d end up a massive success, right? Didn’t work out that way. While I certainly didn’t fail, I didn’t really succeed either. Most of Academia DOES NOT VALUE what I can do, especially now. I couldn’t function in Academia and so just got a regular job, did it well, saved money, invested, moved ahead slowly but surely.
When my kids were young, they loved my piano playing. I’d have little dancers accompanying my music. Now, I can’t compete with that nasty rap music. Children’s peer override their parents eventually. I live in a nice little New England town and the young ladies, ostensibly feminists prefer misogynistic music by Dr. Dre “bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks” stuff like that. Their friends are always very impressed when I play but they can’t pay attention for very long. It’s a world they cannot enter.
So what to do? Well, maybe farming. I’ve been gardening as a side interest for over a decade now. I love trees, flowers, plants, despite difficult allergies so I need to be careful. I also grew up raising sheep so maybe I could try that again. Learn to cook properly from my chef friend who recently closed his business which was destroyed by the lockdowns? He couldn’t hire competent people. He couldn’t even find incompetent people to work! Maybe I should have applied for a job but I didn’t want to screw up and lose a friend. In hindsight, I wish I took the risk.
Now, I’m visiting colleges to send my youngest and last child. I can pay her way and am not happy at all by what higher education has become. Still, I have to send her because everyone does it and Mrs. Competent Physicist seems to feel it is the ticket to success. While visiting a college I found a rather inspiring inscription on the sciences building. I will not repeat what it says out of fear some woke retard will insist it be taken down. Beautiful words which for now are completely meaningless to nearly everybody, safely hidden away. It will be my secret. I’m not being melodramatic, remember the monuments torn down by BLM? I’m tempted to make a pilgrimage out of those inscribed words. When I feel the need, go for a drive, pay homage, go back home. Maybe someday people will get their act together. I hope so.
If your daughter has to work for a living, have her learn a trade.
I’d recommend heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, complete with gas fitter and electrician endorsement.
She’d always have work, and time for an avocation that’s in her heart.
Beethoven & Bach ARE what the WEST used to be, Not Cardi B, Kanye, Rihanna
FIFY
And that is a travesty.
Excellent choice-Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9
But all are white…except a few Asians…how is that?
This kind of thing has been going on for longer than the Republic has existed, but before modern times it was not considered ‘Culture’.
‘ I should have went straight to graduate school. ‘
I strongly suspect that if you were as ‘brilliant’ as you say you are, you’d know better than to type a sentence like the above.
What’s this supposed to be? Oh, I get it, your fave singer.
She is singing “What have they done to my song?” That is precisely the subject of the essay. (“Get it?”)
Additionally, I felt it is not sufficient to compare rap music with only classical music; A comparison with recent musical artists is also warranted, and she is a good one.
I don’t care. If it’s good it’s good; if it stinks it stinks.
the Jewess neglects to mention that it’s (((Arnold Schoenberg))) and 60 years of his
– and his accolytes –
12-tone sonic poison that drove away 95% of the audience that
White “classical” music used to have. When the Jews
– and their well-paid shabbatz goyim –
complete the liquidation of White Western Civ,
every artifact – art, literature, and music – will be completely destroyed:
not even a memory.
This is the West
Ewwwwwwwwww
I _do_ think Kanye’s more talented than your typical rapper and he’s got the cojones to take on the true gangsters of the music industry.
I always thought if Beethoven had been alive in the nineteen fifties, he would have written a song called “Roll Over Chuck Berry”. Of course, Kanye and Rihanna aren’t as good as Bach or Beethoven. Who is? The surprising thing to me is how much pop music has declined in sixty years. Ilana mentions Burt Bacharach. In that same era, you also had the Beatles, Stones, Kinks etc. in Britain. In New York you had the Brill building songwriters and folkies like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. From Detroit and Memphis, you had all the great soul music on the Motown and Stax labels. In Los Angeles you had Phil Spector and his wall of sound and also surf music like the Beach Boys. You also had new music from artists from a slightly earlier era like Presley, Sinatra, Johnny Cash and various jazz artists.
Pop music started a decline in the disco sucks seventies and then the decline accelerated in the eighties as the dysgenic effects of the welfare system started to show itself. Kanye and Rihanna are hardly the worst of what’s out there. Most middle-class whites normally wouldn’t even hear the worst unless they make a wrong turn and end up driving through an inner-city ghetto where they would hear it blasting out of a nearby car.
Rap is all ooga-booga to me, but I digress.
Why is (((defenestrated))) Kanye the specific target of your parting shot?
Could it be more than his rap that offends (((you)))?
The sad truth, which I’ve recently realized myself, is that book/technical intelligence will get you only so far. This produces a decent, comfortable life, but that is all.
The people who really make it seem to be wired for additional levels of emotional and social intelligence.
The other way to accumulate enough money to no longer worry about material needs and wants is to invest in the ground level of, “the next big thing.” These would be things like Netflix stock from 2008-2018, the Tesla IPO, or Bitcoin circa 2010-2011.
As far as my limited perception as a slightly above average engineer can tell, the possible next big things are improving AIs like what we’ve seen with ChatGPT and compact molten-salt nuclear reactors.
I don’t disagree at all with your thesis here, but I have to question putting a deaf composer at the head of your list while entirely overlooking Haydn, who belongs in first place.
Yes it did but you failed to mention the cause of that, which certainly wasn’t Disco, but certainly was Punk.
Beethoven never wrote anything like this…
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Bee Gees – How Deep Is Your Love
I would say there is a third way, and that is the political ‘back room’ deals. Maybe that is subsumed into your ’emotional and social intelligence’ concept?
Yes, I would include backroom deals and nepotism in the social portion of my concept.
My, “next big thing,” concept could also be generalized as the ability to recognize opportunities as they appear in any field of endeavor.
One thing I did leave out is that being in the right place at the right time, in physical as well as more abstract terms, is also crucial.
They play vile nigger music everywhere now. Especially in the workplace and suburban eateries. It’s psychological warfare designed to humiliate and demoralize the masses, much like the stomach-turning circus pornography that relatively few porn users actually watch but all have seen. (All porn, even the vanilla variety, is degenerate poison, of course.)
American Hispanic youth once had their own brand of low culture and fiercely despised the blacks. Now, as Hispanics have assimilated into the American mainstream, the youth listen to rap and allow their sisters to fuck niggers, which wasn’t happening just thirty years ago.
Rap is lowest-common-denominator performance art, hence its appeal to the masses unwilling to expend the mental effort required to process and appreciate the higher forms. I’m not sure the term “music” applies but it has a beat and you can dance to it.
Love the Brothers Gibb, I especially enjoy playing your choice of their songs. It’s one of those 3-4 minute mood enhancers that we have come to love.
I agree that Haydn deserves a higher rank, some of his symphonic efforts are among the best. He had lots of practice writing those…100+ of them.
However, IMHO the Beethoven 9th, 2nd movement is one of the high points of western orchestral music, ever.
And then, there are his various piano-centric compositions, each one a source of pure joy. These musicians are grooving to it:
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They’re what The Jolly Heretic calls spiteful mutants. In small manageable numbers they add variety and interest to a society. When their numbers become too great, they hinder the ability of a society to function smoothly and contribute to its eventual demise.
I liked the Bee Gees even before Saturday Night Fever.
“Fanny Be Tender With My Love” & “Nights On Broadway” were a couple of great tunes.
Truth be told, MOST people are not huge fans of classical music. Maybe long, long ago.
The 1970s were loaded when it came to belly rubbing songs aka smooth love songs. Some great slow grooves.
More Than A Woman, Fanny, Love So Right -Bee Gees
If I Can’t Have You, Hello Stranger*cover Yvonne Elliman
Sailing, Tonight’s The Night Rod Stewart
Lady Blue-Leon Russell
Sharing The Night Together-Dr. Hook
Please Don’t Go-KC & The Sunshine Band
Long, Long Time, Different Drum, Tracks Of My Tears*cover-Linda Ronstadt
Man, sheeit, the list is endless.
Cue: Here You Come Again by Dolly Parton
Really?
Ilana is a beautiful woman, but never let a woman make strategy for the defense of your country, let alone civilization.
She’s just pointing to the icons that need destroying. Enjoy Beethoven in peace. Make him a target at your expense.
Never let a deceitful Jew decide what is best for Whites and their nation. It was wrong to bring Blacks to America and Europe and Jews as well. Both groups have done nothing but destroy our nations. Neither group can be trusted and both are anti White to the core.
Disco produced lots of great music while Punk produced (((degeneracy.))) The MAJORITY of the anti-disco crowd were socially awkward, couldn’t dance, haters, mental cases, etc. There were some normal people who didn’t like disco or dancing but they still hung out in the clubs. Seventies produced all types of great music from classic country and rock, disco, love songs, funk, rhythm and blues/soul, pop, but punk rock wasn’t one of them.
Even a few instrumental tunes.
Pick Up The Pieces by Average White Band
Gonna Fly Now by Bill Conti* few lyrics (theme from Rocky)
Summer Madness by Kool & The Gang (also featured in Rocky)
The Hustle by Van McCoy
Rise by Herb Albert
etc., etc…
Even Jew boys (((KISS,))) biggest hit was disco. The only decent these assholes made IMO.
Cue: I Was Made For Loving You Baby by KISS
Over-intellectualizing an intuitively obvious idea is a common strategy used by those who cannot accept inconvenient truths. Descendants of Indo-European peoples have shown themselves to be more capable specimens of homo sapiens sapiens than any other line of modern man. Capable meaning the ability to carry the most adaptable and most evolved genetic architecture. We have proven to the world our superior capabilities in all areas. To argue against this is to intellectualize against an intuitively obvious and empirically demonstrable fact of existence.
I think you misread me. Not saying that Beethoven needs destroying.
I’m not a Jew. You can read my previous posts over 7 years or so on Unz. I clearly shows I’m not.
I think what Trinity is suggesting is that Ilana is Jewish and thus cannot be trusted.
I am not sure I agree in that there are many of Jewish blood which have opposed the decay of the Republic.
I don’t know if you have to go back as far as Beethoven to see this musical collapse.
It gets confusing, as people argue about definitions, but I think it’s generally correct to say ‘popular music’ carries an intentional appeal to a wide audience, not an elite one.
However loads of good stuff would still appear organically over the decades. Artists would still take risks and seem to be able to create some very impressive music that everyone knows today and for good reasons.
At some point, whatever restraints remained an the intentional appeal to a wide audience came off, moreover, execs realized the audience could be manipulated into accepting the kind of polished sludge noise soup of nothing that exists now.
My guess is this happened with a consolidation within the music industry. There are only three major record labels producing two-thirds of all output America apparently.
A suspect a lot of people don’t really think that even ‘dangerous edgy’ record labels are in fact owned by massive major corporations.
Sure anyone can set up a stream for their music these days but you still need the publicity machine. The hype. The marketing. The slickness. The polish. And whatever goes on behind the scenes to push a new artist.
I have many issues with black music, but I don’t know if the current collapse is entirely a negro problem, other than negroes have agreed to the demands of Jewish or gentile executives, or let themselves be used to churn out shit music to sell to other negroes.
Kanye West is interesting. I had heard his name but took no interest in him until the controversies last year. Out of curiosity I did try to listen to some of West’s music at the time.
I’m quite familiar with hip hop and R&B and so have other things I can measure it against. I honestly thought it was terrible. I was amazed this guy had got as far as he had on this stuff. To my ears West is mostly a creation of a corporate music machine selling blackness, but he’s a Golem that turned on his masters. And in so much as a lot of what he said is not untrue I supported his voice in this narrow context.
As for awards, I imagine mainstream music awards reflect the interests of this corporate monopoly.
Same thing has happened with cinema too. At some point executives realized they could churn out endless franchise movies, endless reboots/remakes/rewhatever and also the woke thing. To a certain extent you can coerce audiences into accepting something shitter than what was prior, especially to young people in their formative years, who’s brains are still developing, who don’t have so much to compare it to.
But you have prop it up with fake awards and fake reviews and so on but you can still sell. Corporations can de facto create this shifting baseline of taste to some extent. It is completely artificial, unnatural, inorganic, it’s ugly stupid garbage but if it’s sold and packaged people will still accept it.
I thought of that. But Trinity believes I’m a Jew. And Ilana’s suggestion would square with Trinity’s views from what I’ve seen.
Here is some black music from 1974, an instrumental, albeit with some synthesizer use. Very melodic. Not near as complex as classical…but very Kool.
Blacks are capable of producing high-art music.
Just their culture doesn’t encourage this sort of musical production anymore.
But then neither does European culture.
The Western well has run dry. Nietzsche and Spengler predicted this a century ago.
Already listed that smooth tune, playa. Cue: Rocky staring into the mirror. “What I got here is turtle food.”
Cue: Love’s Theme by Love Unlimited Orchestra circa 1974
1970s and 1980s were the golden age of music. 1990s last decent decade for music although artist like LeAnn Rimes and Carrie Underwood are great in post 2000.
Cue: Welcome To The Jungle by Carrie Underwood * G&R cover
So that’s where it came from… the one sampled by Will Smith. Summertime?? I think it was. Thanks for that.
I was actually thinking in relation to black music from 20 or 30 years ago.
I get the strong impression there’s been a musical collapse even within R&B / hip hop just as elsewhere. This consolidation of power and homogenization of output by a handful of corporations seems to be a huge factor in this. It seems very likely that today’s mainstream music awards ceremonies reflect that consolidation of power.
It does not matter who is West, it matters who is best. Bach and Beethoven composed great music, whereas the pygmies you named never did and never will.
Yes, as I said, it was released in 1974. It has subsequently become one of the most sampled R&B compositions ever. It pops up everywhere.
The two on the left look deranged and possibly dangerous. The one on the bottom right is a known financial fraudster that would steal your grandmother’s house. I don’t know the other one.
I agree with PeterMX. I know the upper-left (Greta Thumbellina), lower-right (part of the latest big Jewish financial swindle), vaguely the lower-left (some crap ‘educator’ IIRC, correction please if I’m wrong on that), but the one in upper-right looks like the very young Russian women’s figure skater Kamila Valieva.
If so, what wrong has the latter done?
True in Japan, too, at most ‘western’ style or ‘cool’ chain places. Even worse than the saccharine ‘RnB’ of now are the many copies of old pop songs by white performers and copies of their styles. John Legend is particularly revolting, but the Jews who run the industry in the U.S. seem to churn out an endless array of similar acts now.
I go to Wendy’s//First Kitchen for a burger and chips every two months or so, they don’t, at least not completely.
The new chairman at my office decided to install BGM, thankfully it’s always elevator music, so tolerable except pre-Christmas, where the endless repetition of (mainly) muzak versions of Jewish ‘Christmas songs’ forces me to use headphones so I don’t have to hear.
Also, as a listener to serious (early, baroque, classical, romantic, east Asian non-western classical) music, to include (((Mendelssohn))) as a contender is just a total joke, as is his best-known work.
Here comes the bride,
big, fat, and wide,
slipped on a banana skin,
and went for a ride.
The Bridal March, aka “Here Comes the Bride,” is from Lohengrin by Wagner, who despised Mendelssohn and his tribe.
Mendelssohn’s famous wedding tune is from his incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I took the writer’s essay to suggest that:
– Thinking is required to compose great music; and that thinking is also required to listen to great music; and that thinking has become passe’ over the last 50 years or so due to the intentional dumbing-down of societies around the world.
And that great music may never return since great thinking may never return; that Men-of-the Mind left when Nixon closed the Gold Window in ‘71, and that they will not return until they can be paid properly, and be appreciated for their intellectual contributions to the culture.
Since that seems unlikely soon, if ever, the great music we have, like the last great inventions we have, are probably all we may ever have.
Since I disembarked long ago, I can live with that.
Facepalm, shot self in foot, but thanks. Had heard both, but never listened to Lohengrin in full, so didn’t know the context.
She’s a kind of odd-looking female who doesn’t otherwise punch outside her class except in a heavily male environment like the La Vergne, TN police department. There, she becomes the sexual mascot. Anybody who’s served in the military has seen this phenomenon.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
Mudsharks deserve whatever they get. Zero sympathy.
From an article posted at The Fitzpatrick Informer’s Forum page.
https://fitzinfo.net/
Ilana Mercer and the Collectivity of the West
https://fitzinfo.net/forum/topic/ilana-mercer-and-the-collectivity-of-the-west/
Link here to the posting, if not able to read the article through FI’s “login” function.
https://articlesnotesreviewsrebuttals.blogspot.com/2023/03/ilana-mercer-and-collectivity-of-west.html
Kidist Paulos Asrat
https://wellpatterned.blogspot.com/