Sen. Kamala Harris talks a lot about “our American values.” Ditto the rest of the female candidates who’ve declared for president in the busy Democratic field. They all lecture us about “values.”

“Our American values are under attack,” Harris has tweeted. “Babies are being ripped from their parents at the border …”

As her own proud “know your values moment,” the Democrat from California pinpoints the U.S. Senate Supreme Court confirmation proceedings inflicted on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

To manipulate Americans, politicians have always used the values cudgel.

With respect to immigration, the idea is to impress upon gullible Americans that the world has a global Right of Return to the U.S. Fail to accept egalitarian immigration for all into America, and you are flouting the very essence of Americanism. (Or, to use liberal argumentation, you’re Hitler.)

When politicians pule about the importance of preserving “our values,” they mean their values: Barack Obama’s values, Hillary Clinton’s values, Angela Merkel’s values, Chucky Schumer’s values, Jeff Bezos’ values, the late John McMussolini’s values, Lindsey Graham’s values, and Jared and Ivanka’s values (but not Trump’s).

When a politician preaches about “the values that make our country great,” to quote Mrs. Clinton, chances are they mean multiculturalism, pluralism, wide-swung borders, Islam as peace, communities divided by diversity as a net positive and the Constitution (it mandates all the above, just ask Ruth Bader Ginsburg) as a living, breathing, mutating philosophical malignancy.

For them, “protecting” the abstraction that is “our way of life” trumps the protection of real individual lives. “We must guard against a weakening of the values that make us who we are,” dissembled Obama in the waning weeks before he was gone. The empty phrase is meant to make the sovereign citizen – you – forget that government’s most important role, if not its only role, is to protect individual life.

In his last few addresses, Obama promised to speak up on “certain issues,” in times when he imagined “our core values may be at stake.” Likewise, in delivering her Control-Alt-Delete speech against the Deplorables, Clinton had asserted that “our country is great because we’re good. … Donald Trump disregards the values that make our country great.” The two’s groupthink notwithstanding, only individuals can be virtuous, not collectives.

Self-government, and not imposed government, implies that society, and not the State, is to develop value systems. The State’s role is to protect citizens as they go about their business peacefully, living in accordance with their peaceful values.

When you hear an appeal to “permanent values” – “the values that make our country great,” to quote Clinton and the current crop of Democratic candidates – know you are dealing with world-class crooks. These crooks want to swindle you out of the freedom to think and believe as you wish. For in the classical conservative and libertarian traditions, values are private things, to be left to civil society – the individual, family and church – to practice and police.

The American government is charged purely with upholding the law, no more. Why so? Because government has police and military powers with which to enforce its “values.” A free people dare not entrust such an omnipotent entity with policing values, at home or abroad, for values enforced are dogma.

When incontestable majorities call on government to curb Islamic and other in-migration because this imperils American lives, President Trump’s unswerving opponents (within his party and without) and their media mafia will invariably intone, “That’s not who we are.”

When you hear that manipulative mantra, tell them to zip it up, mind their own business, and stick to their constitutional mandate to protect the people, not police their minds.

Remember that through an appeal to values, the State aggrandizes itself.

A limited government, serving an ostensibly free people, must thus never enforce values. It follows that, because our form of government is incompatible with the enforcement of values, the American People can’t and mustn’t admit into their midst civilizations whose values are inimical to the survival of their own.

​Every time a manifestly racist, anti-white event goes down, which is frequently, conservative media call it “identity politics.” “The left is playing identity politics.”

Whatever is convulsing the country, it’s not identity politics. For, blacks are not being pitted against Hispanics. Hispanics are not being sicced on Asians, and Ameri-Indians aren’t being urged to attack the groups just mentioned. Rather, they’re all piling on honky. Hence, anti-white politics or animus.

The ire of the multicultural multitudes is directed exclusively at whites and their putative privilege. Anti-whitism is becoming endemic and systemic.

Take “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett. Smollett deceived the country and the Chicago Police Department about having fallen prey to a hate crime, which, it transpired, he had crudely orchestrated.

The Chicago Police Department superintendent expressed the requisite righteous indignation that a black man (Smollett) would desecrate symbols of black oppression in the process of framing innocent Others. (A noose had been purchased at Smollett’s behest.)

Nobody, Superintendent Eddie Johnson included, said sorry to the accused group, whose reputation had been sullied: “Trump supporters or white persons.”

“Trump supporters” is indeed a proxy for “white persons.” The conflation of “white” and “Trump supporter” was made, for one, by an anti-white, anti-Trump, professional agitator: Trevor Noah of the “Daily Show.” Noah is neither funny nor very bright, but he is right, in this instance.

Conservatives, for their part, persist in skirting the white-animus issue. The Smollett libel fit the “progressive narrative,” they intoned. (Overuse has made the “narrative” noun a bad cliché.)

It was a right vs. left matter, insisted others.

Smollett was sick in the head, came another obfuscation. What would public expiation and excuse-making be without the rotten habit of diseasing misbehavior?! His antics might still make him a big-time actor, but Smollett is a small-time crook, a common criminal of low character. To disease immorality is a corruption of traditional conservative thinking.

We have here a politicization of crime, reasoned other compromising conservatives.

Come again? What is the hate-crime category if not a politicization of crime? With the hate crime designation, we are essentially saying that a murder committed with racial malice is worse than one committed without it. Is that a normative call or a political one? I’d say the latter.

Some conservatives remarked that the Smollett affair occurred against the backdrop of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Is TDS not a proxy for the white-hot hatred of whites?

Four minutes and 13 seconds in, a video filmed at the Washington State Evergreen College gives way to softly hissed, but deranged, diatribes by faculty. Theirs is unadulterated, anti-white agitprop. Yet the TV host who screened this pedagogic incitement chuckles lightheartedly about secondary, lesser issues like victimhood chic. Never once is the thing called what is it:

Incessant and dangerous incitement to hate innocent whites for their alleged pigmental privilege.

A recent and jarring anti-white incident involved the curriculum imposed on students by the Santa Barbara Unified School District. As if public education is not sufficiently corrupt, “educators” now contract out to an educational black op. These tax-paid mercenaries come to schools as social levelers to put your kids through an indoctrination boot camp. However, it’s not egalitarianism that the schools are increasingly teaching, but anti-whitism.

“Just Communities Central Coast” (JCCC) is such an “educational” black op. The reported outcomes of the “Just Communities” initiative tell us a lot about the impetus behind the course.

“JCCC’s discriminatory curriculum has led to increased racial animosity toward Caucasian teachers and students,” reported Eric Early, a Republican candidate for California attorney general.

American kids can barely read properly or speak and write grammatically. They’ll never know the wonders of the Western literary canon (banished because produced by the pale patriarchy). But they’ve committed to consciousness ugly, nonsensical, stupid, decontextualized grids that tabulate the ways of white oppression.

Talk about “The Closing of the American Mind”!

Yet, the litigant, a Republican candidate for California attorney general, had a hard time coming out with it. JCCC’s anti-white teachings were merely anti-American, he told Fox News apologetically. Is that all you’ve got, sir?

I read Esquire’s Feb. 12, cover story featuring Ryan Morgan, of West Bend, Wisconsin. Fox News’ Martha MacCallum called it “provocative,” before inviting U.S. Army veteran Darrin Porcher and activist-actor Rumando Kelley to trash “The Life of [this] American Boy at 17.”

The only reason the humdrum story of poor Ryan Morgan was deemed “provocative” is because he’s white. As it transpired from the disjointed “thoughts” disgorged by MacCallum’s two black supremacist guests, “There is [sic] more important people in the world than white middle-class.” (Ryan is not wealthy. He holds a job for which he rises at 6:30 a.m., before school. I’d put him in the working-class category.)

While the one unedifying black supremacist conceded that, “We do need to lend some credence to what a Caucasian man goes through,” the irate Rumando roared that, “Esquire dropped the ball on this.”

Rumando could not quite explain why the experiences of white boys deserved to be expunged, in the era of anti-whiteness and suicide rates rising among this very cohort: white American males.

Indeed, the suicide rate is declining everywhere in the world except for America, where it is 12.8 per 100,000, “well above China’s current rate of seven.” Dubbed “deaths of despair,” white Americans and native Americans are the most suicidal populations in the U.S.

This piece originally appeared on IlanaMercer.com on Feb. 28, 2019.