Ilana Mercer

Who is she: Ilana Mercer is a US-based, classical liberal writer. Mercer pens a popular weekly column entitled "Return to Reason" for WorldNetDaily.com, and occasionally contributes to VDARE.COM, London's Quarterly Review and many newspapers. Ilana Mercer is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, an independent, non-profit economic policy think tank.

Ilana, who supported Ron Paul for president in 2008, was asked by the Paul campaign for a written endorsement. Here it is:

"Ron Paul stands alone among the presidential contenders for a solvent, sovereign America – he has the will to stop the squandering of men and matériel in Iraq and the intellectual wherewithal to salvage an ailing currency, fortify forsaken borders, and restore individual liberties."

Ilana is the founder, editor, and creative force behind IlanaMercer.com, which was ranked by the Intellectual Conservative as 61st out of the top 131 conservative-cum-libertarian political websites of 2007. She is also the proprietor of the weblog, Barely a Blog (BAB), to which prominent thinkers such as Tibor Machan, George Reisman and Thomas Szasz have contributed. (Mercer contributed a dust-jacket blurb to Professor Szasz's book, Coercion As Cure.)

Ilana has appeared on Russian TV (RT), and on the Public Network's television series, "America at War" (#434), where, in 2003, she debated the media's dereliction of duty during the invasion of Iraq. Her analysis of Martha Stewart's legal travails, "Convicted for Fearing Conviction," was voted among the best Mises.org articles of 2004. In the same year, she received the "Ron Paul Liberty in Media Awards (LIMA)" for the essay "Wartime Socialism."

Background: Ilana Mercer was born in South Africa, which her father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, decided to leave pursuant to harassment by the South African security police due to of his anti-apartheid preaching and activism. The family departed in the 1960s for Israel, where Ilana spent her formative years. She returned to South Africa in the 1980s, married and had a daughter. The family emigrated to Canada in 1995 and then went on to settle in the US.