I finally saw some US news coverage of the war in Ukraine for the first time since the beginning of the war. It was a Fox News show with a host called Brian, I think. Senator Tom Cotton appeared. The coverage was surprisingly good. Nothing annoyed me. Sen. Cotton spoke eloquently about the failure of the Biden administration to provide the weapons that were promised to Ukraine weeks ago.

Speeches, schmeeches. Where are the suicide drones promised two weeks ago? Where is the heavy weaponry?

Then a retired General named Jack Keane spoke well about how Russia is trying to change its narrative after Ukrainians creamed them.

All in all, surprisingly good, sober, fact-based coverage.

A funny, life-affirming story that goes straight to the heart of the war in Ukraine.

Russian troops occupied a small Ukrainian village. An old babushka comes out. “My sons! Thank you for liberating us! Come to my house, I’ll feed you!”

The Russians follow her and the babushka serves them a nice, big meal. And the poor bastards are so in thrall to their own lies that they believe that the babushka whose village they shelled within an inch of its life is going to serve them anything that isn’t filled with rat poison.

Of course, babushka poisoned them. This is a great example of people literally choking on their own propaganda.

My conference talk made such an impression that I was immediately approached by an editor of an important journal in my field, urging me to submit it for publication to them as is. I have already promised this text to another journal but this editor is offering to publish it within two months. As I was pondering my options, another editor approached, asking if I’d let them publish this or any other text. The problem is that everything I write has already been pledged to journals and edited volumes for the next 2 years. But it’s great to be in such demand. It never happened to me before that people would want to publish my conference talks not in proceedings but in actual journals because talks are short and not nearly as finished as articles.

I’m now at the point where the only obstacle to publishing more is the speed with which I write. Another funny point is that out of the 3 co-panelists I had today, I’ve published something on the author two of them discussed.

Also, people now ask me to sign my books for them, which feels weird. Good but weird.

Is North Carolina considered the South? Because everybody is so friendly, it’s driving me nuts. I live in a very grumpy part of Illinois, and this overwhelming chattiness is alien to me.

The Indian food here in Chapel Hill leaves our Indian food back home in the dust. I ordered something called “potatoes with fenugreek leaves,” and now I want to marry it and have its babies. Please don’t tell my husband.

I’m staying true to my plan to hang out at the hotel all day. I’ve already been to the swimming pool. A little later, I’ll head to the gym. This will be the first time I go to the gym since the war started. The reason isn’t that I didn’t want to go but that my blood pressure was too high for me to go safely. I finally managed to get it down enough to be able to go to the gym today.

The gas prices (which I know about because I can see a gas station out of the window) are as high as back home and look like area codes more than gas prices.

In other news, our union got salary raises for some people but none for others. The raises are large and attractive, not to mention retroactive. But the logic behind some people getting them and others receiving nothing is not explained. The only explanation we get is “equity.” But I have access to all faculty salaries at my department, and the logic behind the raises is neither sex- nor race-based. Maybe it’s some other, new form of equity. You can imagine what the result is. People are suspicious of each other and nervous.

The New Right is self-destructing before our own eyes. And it’s doing so by embracing the very thing it was born to combat.

The New Right was born when it became clear that the Left completely abandoned reality in favor of fantasy, and the traditional Right was too weak, stupid or corrupt to do something about it. There should be a group in society capable of saying “men don’t give birth, women don’t have penises, diversity isn’t our strength, Kamala Harris was never racially oppressed, crime rates are growing, and inflation is bad.” If everybody else is too weak and so easily intimidated that even saying “a woman is an adult human female” becomes impossible, there should be a political force that doesn’t get scared this easily.

This political force was supposed to be the New Right. They were supposed to keep alive the important idea that reality exists apart from our wants and desires. And no matter how much we might wish for something to be true, reality doesn’t have to oblige.

But the Left’s wish-fulfillment mentality is very seductive. “I say something, and it magically becomes true” – what can be sweeter? Within only a few years of its birth, the New Right created its own alternative reality and convinced itself that it must be real. That reality is a totally fictional “trad Russia” that will stand up to Western degeneracy and defend conservative spiritual values.

To anybody who knows absolutely anything about Russia the idea is as ludicrous as “trans toddlers” are to anybody who knows anything about children. As Antonio García Martínez reminds us,

The Putin fans among the New Right—in temporary retreat, currently sublimating their views as Ukraine skepticism—really think Russia some anti-woke exemplar worthy of imitation. Never mind that the church-attendance rate in Russia is far lower than the U.S., their birth-rate as low as any childless European country, and their abortion rate one of the highest in the world. Seen from the “trad” conservative perspective at least, Russia suffers from all the ills of post-modernity even more than the supposedly degenerate West.

And now add to this a complete collapse of the traditional family – fewer children in Russia grow up with both their parents than kids on Chicago’s South Side – exploding drug use among the young, an endless stream of obscenity on TV, a complete legalization and exaltation of surrogacy, sky-high abortion rates, open borders, extraordinarily high illegal immigration rates, and a gigantic percentage of sex crimes that stem from this situation. It takes a much harder effort of fictional world-building to turn this real Russia into a trad haven of spiritual values than it is to pretend that Lia Thomas is a woman.

To quote Antonio once again:

This is analogous to the Berkeley leftists with whom, in my naive idealism, I often debated while in grad school 20 years ago. Whether older academics still under the influence of the 1960s, or younger students in the fashionable keffiyeh-wearing left, they all thought the communist Cuba that my family had fled was an egalitarian utopia that should serve as an example to America. In fact, the Cuban reality had about as much to do with egalitarianism as modern-day Russia does Christian values, both serving as little more than rhetorical cudgels in an America-centric discourse.

Of course, neither the Berkeley hippies nor the New Right seek out reality: Both stay snugly inside the bosom of the liberal capitalism they claim to despise, rarely venturing to their idealized Havana or Moscow.

The analogy is, indeed, there. I first lost several leftist friends whose eyes glazed over and they started babbling incoherently about BLM and “Trump is a fascist.” And now I’ve lost a couple of New Right friends who look at me pleadingly and beg me to confirm that “Russia is defending us from Soros.”

When my best friend died and I went to say goodbye at the funeral home, she was lying in the coffin looking so beautiful and almost asleep instead of dead. There was a split second when I wanted to believe that she wasn’t really dead and that this was all an elaborate practical joke. Of course, it wasn’t but that feeling of being able to escape from reality into fantasy was very sweet. Too many people are indulging in this escapism without thinking of the costs. We have now lost to it the only political force capable of pushing back against fantasy leftism.

Just so you understand what my husband is like, he printed out a sermon by a 19-century Unitarian priest, wrote up several pages of his own comments on the sermon, and gave it all to me, so that I can read it on the flight to North Carolina and then discuss with him to achieve greater emotional closeness.

To people who are wondering why I needed to travel to North Carolina to sit alone in a room all day, I can only say that this is how I know they are not mothers of small children.

All due respect to North Carolina, but there’s a swimming pool and a gym at the hotel, and wild horses won’t drag me out of here.

The moment I arrived in Chapel Hill, I went to a grocery store. My plan is not to leave the hotel at all tomorrow, and I needed food. And guess what? The cashier turned out to be from my small town in Illinois. Overcome by the joy of that and of me being from Ukraine, the cashier gave me a 10% discount.

Groceries are cheaper in NC than where I live. They are very fancy because this is a fancy college but still cheaper. Strangely, seafood is much cheaper. I have zero knowledge of geography, so I don’t know if there’s a body of water nearby but I bought an exact same-sized box of cooked shrimp here for $5 that I bought for $11 at home last week. (Please don’t judge me, I was desperate).

This is actually the second time that I go out of state for a conference and immediately meet somebody from my tiny town. Mind you, not somebody from St Louis, which wouldn’t be a big deal but from my unknown little place in the boonies. God, I love my Midwestern boonies.

One thing that’s weird is that everybody is masked. Back home, we forgot all that a while ago. Plus, I immediately started getting notifications on my phone that the state of North Carolina wants to inform me when I have “potential exposure to COVID.” I thought Illinois was COVID-nuts but we haven’t had that kind of silliness for 18 months.