What an excellent question.

You are absolutely right. I’m very neoliberal. Forget fluid borders, the whole texture of my life is neoliberal. I use the Forest app to track my productivity. I use Duolingo to learn German when I have no actual need to do that, and I have not broken my streak even on the day I had surgery. Or when I traveled internationally. Or on the day when I could barely speak after dental surgery. I’ll probably still be keeping the streak on the day of my funeral. This gives me great joy, and you won’t understand it if you aren’t completely neoliberal yourself.

I’m obsessed with my morning and evening routines, I have five trillion planners, I have a steps streak that is a whole performance. I have read every neoliberal self-help book and can wax poetic on deep focus for hours. I pursue several careers at the same time and change my opinions on everything regularly. What I don’t know about personal branding is not worth knowing.

Yes, I am neoliberal. I played against a much more ferocious form of neoliberalism than the one that has appeared so far in North America, and I won. Not only am I good at this shit, I love it. It is because I know and understand it so well that I say that for most people it’s the absolute death. Yes, you can win in the neoliberal game. But you need to be a very specific type of person with very specific kind of neuroses. Everybody else loses. Not because they are worse. Or better. But because that’s how this system works. Those 2,5 million nice, well-meaning, trusting people who watched the Candace Owens videos and took them seriously will not do well in it. Neoliberalism will chew them up and spit them out.

I personally am fine, though, yes.

Hulk Hogan, a famous wrestler and media personality, died a couple of days ago, and I wanted to share the story of his struggle against the scandalous website Gawker because maybe people don’t know, and it’s a truly shocking story.

Gawker published a sex tape with Hulk Hogan and refused to take it down. Hogan was broke and didn’t have money to fund a protracted legal battle with the website.

Billionaire Peter Thiel also hated Gawker because they had outed him as gay when he wasn’t ready to come out. It’s not ok to out gay people unless they hold political views that you don’t like. This is standard journalistic morality these days.

Thiel offered to fund Hulk Hogan’s legal battle against Gawker. After years of lawsuits, Hogan won an enormous amount from the website and from the CEO personally. Gawker went bankrupt, and deservedly so. When news appeared of Hogan’s death, the former Gawker journalists engaged in the most disgusting exhibitions of joy. To demonstrate the moral caliber of these members of the press, I want to post this little excerpt from the testimony given in court by the Gawker journalist who published Hogan’s sex tape:

It’s not surprising that people turn to the likes of Candace Owens for their news because, whatever her faults, she’s a huge improvement on these types of people.

RIP Hulk Hogan who, although not my kind of athlete, brought a lot of joy to people.

My kid scored in the 98th percentile on reading and vocabulary and the 99th on writing on the Iowa Standardized Tests. Her reading and writing are at 9th grade level.

This is not surprising given how much we talk. We went to the kids’ gym today, and we talked so much, my jaw almost fell off. And of course, when I talk, I use all of my normal professorial vocabulary, such as, “I admonished the lab worker for her unseemly conduct and implored her to abstain from such behavior henceforth.”

Forget 9th grade, I think she’d beat most of my college students in vocabulary skills.

Of course, it’s all funny until you remember how many people watched the Candace Owens’ series and thought what she said made sense. Many watched for entertainment purposes, like I did. But there were hundreds of thousands of sincere viewers who took it all completely seriously and nodded sagely when Owens said that Marie Claude was a suspicious name.

These people can’t help it. They were born this way. The intellect is a physical characteristic, like height. You can’t change it by any amount of exertion. And height doesn’t change your life in a fundamental way, not like intelligence does, unless you suffer from actual dwarfism. These are people who are very confused by things that you and I don’t even notice. The world is getting more complicated. There’s now AI that will require increasing levels of discernment. The whole structure of life is changing to benefit those who are better cognitively organized and can exert the greatest self-control. This leaves many people – good, well-meaning people – out in the cold. And it’s not their fault. They were simply born this way.

This is why I laugh at Candace who is rich and will be fine. But for her sincere viewers I feel nothing but kindness and compassion. We accept that “born this way” is real in everything but intelligence. But that’s wrong. It’s unfair and it hurts people. It hurts all of us because we engage with a falsified picture of reality.

Americans are very lovely people. They smile at strangers all the time. Because of my dental procedure, I currently can’t smile. People stand there, beaming at me, while I look at them morosely.

As a result, I have had to explain about my dental surgery to several strangers today. It’s nice, everybody is supportive and shares their own story of dental woe.

Wonderful, lovely people.

OK, people, I absolutely have to share this one because it’s too delicious. I hope we have French readers on the blog because they will truly appreciate this.

In the epilogue to her series about Brigitte Macron, Candace Owens tells the viewers that  Brigitte’s family has been acting suspiciously since the mid-1800. For instance, they gave all of the boys in the family names that had “Jean” in them. Jean François, Jean Michel, Jean-Georges. What other reason could there be for this if not to try to confuse people, asks Candace.

Truly priceless stuff.

But wait. This isn’t the worst.

Brigitte’s middle name, says Candace, is Marie-Claude. Claude! It’s a male name! This got to mean… something nefarious.

Every Francophone reader has at this point died of laughter because Marie-Claude is a very normal French female name. This reminded me of how when I taught at a language school many years ago, a student from Guatemala found the name Jessica to be hysterically funny. “Yessica!” he’d snort. “”Like  she always say yes! Yessica! Gringo names funny!”

Brigitte’s brother Jean-Claude married a woman called Brigitte. Like his sister. “Very convenient!” exclaims Candace. Seriously, she says “very convenient.” “Is this confusion intentional?” she asks. Because it totally makes sense that Jean-Claude would choose his bride with the express purpose of confusing Candace.

This show is comedic gold. It’s no surprise late night comedy is dead. This is so much better.

Do you know who this is?

No, it’s not me. It’s the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset. When I placed these photos on FB a while ago, people who had known me my whole life, including my own mother, thought it was me.

I even used to wear this hairstyle back then. A writer, too. A Nobel Prize winner. And I’m an identically looking literary critic.

Clearly, somebody in my family line was Norwegian. It feels kind of likelier than somebody in Undset’s family tree being Ukrainian, although who knows?

This is why it’s ridiculous that Candace Owens finds it suspicious that Macron looks similar to Brigitte’s nephew. Yes, French people have a phenotype. A look. My friend married a Frenchman, and he also bears a great similarity to Macron. When that friend first saw N, she said, “Eeww, you are dating your cousin? I didn’t know this was a thing in your culture.” N is obviously not my cousin but our Slavic ethnicity does make us look alike to people from other cultures. I would think that an African American like Owens would be a bit more conscious of the “all of you people look the same” approach.

My father, by the way, looked so similar to the French actor Pierre Richard that once, when we were watching a comedy with Richard at an outdoor movie theater, the whole audience heaved with laughter, seeing my father’s very Richardian shadow.

This is Pierre Richard:

My father’s goofy, shy, endearing personality was also identical to the image Richard projected in many of his comedies. You could create a delicious conspiracy about my family based on these facts.

Interestingly, my parents and sister have jet black hair while I’m naturally blonde. I grew up amidst tiresome jokes about “have you ever wondered whether there was a neighbor who looked like you and your mom liked?”

Nobody seems interested in discussing my deep plunge into Candace Owens’ conspiracy theorizing but I’ll continue. My jaw doesn’t hurt anymore but I still can’t smile without pain. I walk around looking grim, and I need the most bizarre forms of entertainment to avoid feeling like a total sourpuss.

Owens finds it suspicious that one of Brigitte’s daughters didn’t know the date of her dad’s funeral. When I heard it, I realized that I couldn’t name the date of my father’s funeral either. I know when he died but even though my sister and I organized the funeral, I can’t say what the date was. I was crushed by his death, and everything was a blur. That a person would be fuzzy on the details of painful events is the opposite of suspicious. It’s the most normal thing of all.

Overall, Owens’ suspicions are awakened by the fact that people’s stories of their own lives aren’t consistent and clean. This is how all conspiracists think. They are deeply anxious people with low cognitive skills. They can’t accept that there are no easy, clean narratives. Life is messy and complicated. It’s not evidence of anybody’s evil design. It’s simply the nature of human existence. But for a high-anxiety person, it’s easier to believe that there is an all-powerful human agency that controls everything. Because of there isn’t, life becomes too scary.

Another important piece of proof that Brigitte Macron is a man bravely unearthed by Candace Owens is that….

…. hold on to the edges of your seats because this will shock your sensibilities…

… Brigitte’s fashion designer uses transgendered models. It’s very unexpected that a fashion designer would go for an androgynous look. All fashion designers are completely straight and love using feminine, voluptuous models. This is what makes Brigitte’s designer such a weird exception in the world of fashion.

With this kind of proof, who can possibly doubt the revelations?

We have a cognitively challenged person reading this blog, so I will clarify that I am being sarcastic. I do not, in fact, believe that fashion designers love feminine models and prefer them to androgynous stick figures.

Of course, no conspiracy arises out of nothing. The Macrons have been weirdly reticent about Brigitte’s life before she perverted her 14-year-old student as a 39-year-old teacher. There truly seem to be no photos of her from her entire 30-year marriage with her first husband and her life with him and their children. That she is a horrible person who preyed on children in her care is not even denied by the official story of the Macrons’ marriage. Conspiracy theorists are not picking on a wholesome, innocent couple in this instance. They are picking the rotten carcass of a story that stank to the skies long before any conspiracist got involved.

I had a very long and painful dental procedure done today. I mean, the procedure itself wasn’t that bad but when the anaesthetic wore off, it was rough. I wanted to numb myself to the pain and the best thing I could come up with was to watch Candace Owens’ series about Brigitte Macron. For those who don’t know, Owens is convinced that Brigitte is a man called Jean-Michel. She’s being sued for defamation by the Macrons.

The series is, indeed, very funny. Owens unearthed a video from the 1970s of a transgender person called Veronique who mentions Chopin and Verlaine. Owens takes this as proof that Veronique is Brigitte Macron. Because guess what? Brigitte once mentioned Chopin! Surely, that can’t be a coincidence. People don’t just walk around mentioning Chopin for no reason. Plus, Macron wanted to move Verlaine to the Pantheon. Would he even know who both Chopin and Verlaine are of he weren’t part of a transgender conspiracy? It’s not a normal thing for people to know, is it?

Say what you might, but as pain remedies go, comedy is not a bad choice.

And by the way, it’s beautiful to see how entirely devoid of racism right-wing people are. They watch Candace Owens say the dumbest things and not a shadow of a racist thought passes through their heads.