I feel absolutely rabid against anyone who tries to mar my kid’s perfect childhood innocence with unnecessary stories of horrors, injustices, racisms, Holocausts, genocides, pandemics, divorces, abusive parents, sufferings, etc.

There’s absolutely no chance she’ll fail to find out about all this. We all get to know about this crap for decades and decades of our lives. And the only thing that helps us bear the knowledge without being paralyzed by it is the strength and resilience we gather during that short time of childhood innocence when everything is perfect, simple and good. Every extra hour in that state of grace is valuable.

The short years of childhood innocence stand between us and crippling anxiety, fear of life, and an incapacity to feel safe. What kind of a perverted bastard tries to steal them from a child?

Limonov, the protagonist of Emmanuel Carrère’s strange book, is actually quite worth discussing. And so is Carrère’s attitude to him.

Limonov was born in my native city of Kharkiv, and in 1974 he somehow managed to emigrate to the US. I have no idea how he managed to do it unless he worked for the KGB and was sent to New York with the task of spying on the Soviet dissidents there. Limonov’s father was a low-level NKVD officer, so it’s not that out there. Nobody knows for sure how he managed to leave, though, and I’m as clueless as anybody on this account.

When Limonov got to New York, he experienced what every Soviet person did when encountering capitalism: shock and disappointment. What made him different is that he spoke about it openly. The other emigrés immediately hated Limonov for saying what they could never dare, which was that they were sorry they’d emigrated.

What shocked Limonov was that in a capitalist country you have to work very hard to have a regular, middle-class lifestyle. Not fabulous riches, not your own island with a castle and a private airplane but just a normal life. Limonov perceived the suggestion that he had to work his tail off with no expectation of owning a castle as an insult.

This absolute outrage at what life in a capitalist society was really like informed Limonov’s writing and politics for the rest of his life.

The funny thing is that Limonov did achieve success in the West. His books were all published and got translated into different languages. He had fans, interviews, and a following. But a writer in the West doesn’t make billions. (Unless she gets divorced from Jeff Bezos but that’s a different story). Success only made Limonov’s outrage grow. He was widely recognized as a talented writer but there was still nothing remotely resembling fabulous wealth coming his way.

He went back to the USSR, and when the USSR fell apart, he founded the National-Bolshevik party to bring the Soviet Union back. It was an openly fascist movement back in the time when the word “fascist” still meant something. It was also a very tiny movement. Limonov never had more than a handful of members in his party. Finally, Putin – who back then was pro-democracy, pro-West, and George W Bush’s best friend – got fed up and sent Limonov and all his party members to a prison camp.

Nobody ever took Limonov seriously because his dreams of Russia going to war against the West and the restoration of the USSR sounded nuts. But it turns out that his true following in Russia was bigger than anybody could imagine. That following rose, swept up the miserable weakling Putin, and is now doing everything Limonov ever dreamt of.

Carrère turns himself inside out trying to explain every war crime Limonov participated in (yes, real war crimes) and every expression of love for Hitler as something he couldn’t have possibly meant. “When he fired into a crowd during the war in Serbia, I’m sure he fired over the civilians’ heads. He’s a gentle soul, he didn’t mean any harm.”

These “gentle souls” are raping toddlers in Ukraine but there’s still a crowd of these officious Western intellectuals who are eager to explain how they don’t really mean it.

It is now the official position of my university that a student can only fail calculus or chemistry if the professor is consciously trying to keep that student out of the discipline for racist, sexist or classist reasons.

There are administrative measures being taken against these professors.

Has anybody heard about this on the news? It’s happening everywhere. It’s now unacceptable to say that some students are unable to pass calculus. No, it’s got to be the fault of the evil professors. We have accepted very easily that our colleagues in sciences are capable of something as psychotic as purposefully failing good students out of sheer nastiness.

Many professors will now give a passing grade to everybody just to avoid being called names and shamed in public. What this will do to the sciences can be imagined.

And I’m supposed to care about some mega snowflake in Florida feeling “unsafe”? Wake up, people. Academic freedom died a long time ago, and it wasn’t Ron DeSantis who killed it. We did it ourselves.

It’s beyond funny that people at some college in Florida are pouting that they’ll have to remove words like “whiteness” and “social justice” from their college syllabi. “Oppression! Censorship!” they shriek.

I’m still unable to name my course “Introduction to Hispanic Civilization.” I’ve been fighting for years but, apparently, the word “civilization” is offensive and so is “Hispanic.” There’s no field of activity in the US that’s more censored, controlled and ideologically manipulated than higher education. It’s always censored by the left, though, so it’s OK. And now, all of a sudden, the shoe is on the other foot, and the squealing is deafening.

My daughter goes to a Christian school but it so happened that the first-grade teacher retired. The school had to hire somebody out of the public school system, and this is already the second time that I catch her at channeling the race-obsessed woke worldview. I’m sure she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. This propaganda gradually molds you until you lose the capacity to see it from the outside and notice how strange and contradictory it is.

I shudder to think what I’d be hearing from my kid if she were at a public school.