Klara keeps referring to things “back home in America.” I have not been able to impress upon her that we are currently also in America.

JP Lindsley went on Ben Shapiro. Please listen because this is a conservative American journalist in Ukraine, and there’s no better coverage than what he provides.

JP’s segment starts at 00:15:00 and goes until 00:25:30.

This is excellent journalism. If you aren’t following JP Lindsley, you should.

I haven’t been in this area since 2022, and it turned pretty much completely Hispanic since then. It’s to the point where a customer at the 7/11 said “Please go ahead” in English, and I jumped because I wasn’t expecting it.

Miami was like this years ago but in FMB this is new.

In her thirties, overwhelmed with work and struggling with the debts she’d inherited from a gigolo loser she used to date, Sarma finally met a mega-rich, powerful man who liked her and could have solved her problems.

In response, she immediately found a fresh gigolo user, moved him into her place, ditched the stable, wealthy suitor, and wasted the next several years of her life on servicing the needs of the gigolo.

Finally, the gigolo dumped her. Guess what she did then?

Yes. Found a new gigolo loser.

The most fascinating part of the memoir is that none of this seems to have led Sarma to any insight. I’m 30% into the book, and I’m yet to see a single sentence where she’d recognize that ditching good men in favor of the trashiest loser bastards imaginable was something she kept doing with the dedication of a crazed woodpecker.

The really funny part is that Melngailis wrote her memoir The Girl with the Duck Tattoo to counteract what she thought was an unfairly negative portrayal of her character in the Netflix documentary Bad Vegan.

Of her own free will, she shared that horrid “falafel in, baby out” story in order to – get this! – make a good impression on people. She thinks this is a story that will endear her to strangers. She’s hoping to rebuild her brand as a result of these efforts to restore her reputation.

She could just simply have avoided sharing the story. Or pretended to not be a horrible person about it. This is completely self-inflicted.

Think about it. She believes “falafel in” is going to make a good impression.

I’m fascinated by Sarma Melngailis’s memoir (the one with the abortion story I quoted yesterday). It’s identical to the novels of neoliberal femininity that I discuss in my new book. Their heroines can have every economic advantage, fantastic careers, connections, achievements, riches – and they’ll throw it all away to pursue the dream of being enslaved by a low-quality dude. They all either reject the possibility of having children or dump the children they already have in order to be free to get bossed around and humiliated by some random guy. And not by some very manly, alpha type but a hyena-like degraded loser. I’m not talking Shades of Gray. This isn’t women prostituting themselves in inventive ways. That wouldn’t be an interesting development because that always existed.

I’ve been observing this phenomenon for as long as I have been a literary critic. There’s no medieval or Victorian heroine that would dream of being as slavishly and abjectly subservient to a man as the modern liberated woman. And look at Melngailis who is not writing fiction but narrating her life. It’s still the exact same thing. Total self-abasement for some utterly worthless dude. Or a bunch of dudes. In these stories, a successful, serious man who offers respect, equality and parity gets rejected in favor of some antisocial, emasculated loser gigolo. Melngailis discarded a wonderful husband who gave her everything to pursue feminized (in her own description), much younger men who sucked her dry and spat her out.

Nobody is talking about this because we are stuck on the idea that female liberation in real life should result in literature that celebrates said liberation. But what actually exists in accounts of women’s lives (be they fictional or not) is a wasteland of such horror that no 19th-century female character upset with the expectations of being the Angel in the House could even imagine.

Melngailis is completely liberated of all societal expectations. Highly successful in very masculine jobs (she worked for Bear Stearns and Bain Capital and made a packet, then founded a successful restaurant in NYC). Not burdened by family and children. Free from any form of morality. Sexually promiscuous with zero societal stigma. The dream has been fulfilled! Yet read her memoir and you’ll see what abject misery this dream brought her. This isn’t my interpretation. Melngailis doesn’t claim that how her life unfolded is anything short of catastrophic.

“I feel like I’m under occupation,” said N, closing the door to the room where I was doing my Duolingo exercises.

Another great conservative publishing project is Bulkington Books. They take historical texts that have been unfairly forgotten and bring them back to life. One example is this book:

Kermit Roosevelt was the son of President Teddy Roosevelt. This book is his account of fighting in WWI that was published in 1919. Kermit served in Mesopotamia and left this fascinating description of what he saw and experienced. He was a book lover and used every opportunity between battles, skirmishes, and sitting in trenches to read Xenophon and Plutarch. It’s quite extraordinary how well-read this young man was and how dedicated to improving his mind by the practice of ceaseless reading. There are some absolutely stunning stories in War in the Garden of Eden of the lengths Kermit would go to procure reading matter.

Kermit Roosevelt’s quiet dignity and an unhurried gift for observation make this book a gem. It reads extremely easily. I even read parts aloud to my 9-year-old, and she liked them. Still, publishing this slim volume today takes courage. Kermit Roosevelt was erased from literary history because his writing reflects the sensibility of his time. It’s not politically correct according to today’s norms. Kermit speaks in a way that we can no longer tolerate. And while he read ancient Greeks and easily tolerated their difference from his early twentieth-century sensibility, we are not nearly as strong. Even somebody from only just a century ago wounds our tender psyches that collapse under the realization that in the past people thought and spoke differently.

Bulkington added photos and newspaper clippings to Kermit’s narrative to help the reader get a feel for the time when he lived. We can all be proud of Kermit and a great culture that produced such an impressive young man. Bulkington Books wants us to make place in our understanding of American history for edifying and fascinating stories like that of Kermit Roosevelt. This is a wonderful goal, and I wish this publisher every success.

Finally, I have figured out a way to attract a boatload of profane, vicious replies without referring to IQ or race.

— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) July 8, 2025

To recap a day-long fountain of vitriol, Murray got in the way of people feeling sorry for themselves, and they can’t get over it.

What Murray doesn’t understand is that it’s precisely because life is easy and good that people need to pretend everything is terrible. If there were real hardship, they’d do the exact opposite.

This is from a memoir of a childless woman who got pregnant at 39 and had an abortion. The events described take place immediately after the abortion:

When I reached Twenty-First Street, the truck was there, as expected. I ordered my all-time favorite comfort food. Not raw, but still vegan: a Mediterranean platter with a pile of silky hummus, pickled cabbage salad, tabouli, and the most delicious falafel with tahini sauce. I took it home to my cozy backroom office, sat at my desk, and scanned through new emails, while devouring the food. Almost as if I was trying to quickly fill the space that had just been otherwise occupied. Baby out; falafel in, I thought. Then I got back to work.

The Girl with the Duck Tattoo: A Memoir

Of course, after this the woman proceeded to self-destruct in the most egregious ways. You can’t lie to your psyche. It knows when you do violence to it and repays you severely.