So I talked with the far-right Ukrainian publisher. To be clear, all Ukrainians I have been talking to are conservative by US standards but this guy is really what I wanted him to be.

The connection is for shit because people insist on using the stupid WhatsApp, so we were yelling at each other across oceans, “Mass migration! Gender lunacy! Soros grants! Nation-building!” It was so good.

“How could you not have found me sooner?” he vociferated.

We are talking again in two hours.

Taylor Swift is this generation’s Elvis. Or if you are younger, she’s this generation’s Beatles. Or if you are even younger than that, Michael Jackson.

Yes, you don’t get her music. I don’t either. Just like your parents didn’t get your love of Elvis or Rolling Stones. Shitting on Taylor Swift is an automatic turn-off for the 7 to 20 year-old crowd. You’ve got to be an absolute dum-dum to antagonize these future voters over something so utterly insignificant.

Klara and her friends LOVE Taylor Swift. There are Taylor Swift birthday parties. The kids write out the entirety of Taylor Swift’s lyrics. By hand. Our house is littered with stacks of paper with these handwritten lyrics. The kids know all of the lyrics by heart. This is a good thing because it’s memory practice plus handwriting practice.

Waging war on Taylor Swift, what are you, mentally impaired? And then there will be decades of moaning. Why don’t kids have any interest in our conservative ideas? Because you shat on their childhood idol and were old and uncool, you irredeemable loser.

Look at Mattel, elegantly disarming feminists and turning a feminist bête noire into a feminist icon. That’s marketing brilliance right there. If you can’t market like that, just shut the ef up and let the people without the oldster mentality do it. I’m not converting students to conservatism by giving boring speeches about how their interests suck. I’m doing it by being cool and fun and unusual. When I say in class, “and now let’s listen to my music”, I turn on Rammstein or Tupac and their eyes pop because they don’t expect it from a lady in color-matching outfits and with designer handbags.

Young people like things that annoy the oldsters because that’s how they become their own person. It’s their nature to be transgressive. We need to show them that conservatism is the biggest actual transgression these days.

EXCLUSIVE: Montana Family Loses Custody Of Teenage Daughter After Expressing Opposition To Her Gender Transition

https://reduxx.info/exclusive-montana-family-loses-custody-of-teenage-daughter-after-expressing-opposition-to-her-gender-transition/

I saw this headline, and it was immediately obvious that this is not the whole story. You need to walk in this direction for a long time to make a kid eager to get rid of you in such inventive ways.

By paragraph 2 in the article, things start getting clear:

Krista, the child’s step-mother, explains that their nightmare began in August of 2023 after they received a call that their 14-year-old daughter, Jennifer*, had expressed suicidal ideations while at school.

A chatty, narcissistic stepmother, a disengaged father, and an absent mother. It’s an absolute mystery why the kid would be miserable.

Where is the mom in all this? She checked out a long time ago:

Jennifer’s birth mother, Christine, currently lives in Kitchener, Ontario with her new husband. After Jennifer was born, Christine reportedly left the child with Todd, and has never been involved in her care since.

What a peach of a family. It must have been a total shock when the daughter of such excellent, loving parents suddenly became deeply unhappy. It’s almost as if kids needed their parents, or something. Unimaginable.

Despite experiencing some real-world hardships, Krista claims Jennifer also had some undiagnosed mental health concerns, including attention-seeking behavior.

A teenage girl wants attention. What an utterly unheard-of situation. Stop the presses. A teenager seeks attention. I wonder whose attention she seeks in this particular family set-up. Of course, the stepmom steps into the breach and announces that the girl is “mentally ill.” It would not be right for anybody but the stepmom to seek attention.

The article repeats the words “Krista says” 16 times. And that’s not counting the synonyms, such as “tells”, “claims”, “explains”, and “recounts.” I imagine the life with the chatty stepmom Krista and the non-existent actual parents, and I want to snip my body parts off to stop the madness.

“Bad government agencies and doctors didn’t fix what I’ve broken, so I’m going to pout” is not a good look. Let’s not be chatty Kristas. Let’s take responsibility at least to some tiny extent.

So there’s this guy in Ukraine, very right-wing. A Ukrainian Matt Walsh but he’s not a content creator. He’s a publisher. He created a publishing house for conservative literature that publishes all of our favorite books in translation. Friedrich Hayek, Roger Scruton, Niall Ferguson, Andy Ngo, Debrah Soh.

People keep asking him, what kind of patriot are you that you only go for translated stuff. Why is there nothing that’s originally in Ukrainian? And he says, well, it’s not my fault that you, doofuses, don’t write any serious, intellectual, conservative stuff. Start writing, and I’ll be happy to publish.

Of course, I wrote to him back in October, saying, me, I’m the author you’ve been waiting for. Publish me.

But he never responded, and I was thinking, what a shame, my book is perfect for this mega anti-woke publisher.

Then, today I get an email from him, saying, God, I can’t believe I missed this message when you first sent it. Can you please get in touch?

And I’m thinking, drat. It’s too late. I already went with somebody else.

It’s great that I attracted what now is the total of 4 really great publishers but I so wanted to be with this one.

I cannot believe this. This would have been a huge opportunity for me to get in touch with precisely the people I need to reach.

I discovered that the English Department teaches Columbus’s Diaries in its course on early American Literature.

This is very annoying. Nobody would let me teach US literature with zero preparation or education in the field but it’s perfectly fine for the English Department to do this to everybody else.

As a result, students come to me with their heads filled with the most atrocious Zinn-inspired crap about evil Europeans who destroyed feminism and hay rights among Aztecs and Mayans. Of course, most students never come to me at all, and I have no chance to teach them what actually happened.

It’s beyond dumb that at a university people should be allowed to teach stuff far out of their field with zero knowledge of it. I’m sure the prof in the course blathers endlessly about evil imperialism while acting with far less respect for other civilizations than Spanish conquistadors.

The Ilhan Omar viral video is so shocking because it turns out that she fluently and joyfully speaks the language of nationalism and patriotism. Like most normal people, Omar is very patriotic. American nationalism and patriotism are the only ones that can’t be allowed to exist.

Diversity and inclusion are only to be imposed on Americans and Europeans. Nobody else is exhorted to efface themselves to benefit others.

We should all feel as free as Omar to love our country and express this love openly.

N and Klara are coming with me to Spain for the first time next summer. Neither of them has ever been! We are staying in Madrid for a few days and then going to San Sebastian for two weeks. I’ve started planning the trip, which immediately gave me long, complicated nightmares about trying to set off on the journey and running into all sorts of problems and delays. I will keep having these nightmares until the trip actually happens. But it’s a small price to pay.

At the executive meeting of the editorial board, we are discussing a possibility of dedicating a special issue of the journal to the literature of the Ukrainian Diaspora.

“And Russian!” somebody immediately pipes up. “That will attract more people!”

The expression “facepalm” never held more meaning for me.

I have discovered that people don’t know this, so I’ll say it here.

The reason why all these millions of migrants crawl through barbed wire and cross the border illegally is because, unless you are brilliant, highly educated or won the immigration lottery, there’s no other way to immigrate to the United States. We are forcing migrants to schlep across countries and cross the border illegally because that’s their only way to get their immigration case heard.

Hence, the only way to prevent people from doing that is to stop requiring it. The migrants sleeping on the floor of Logan airport could be sleeping in their own beds if we gave them the option to apply from home and wait for the resolution of their case at home.

That’s how I applied for immigration to Canada. I waited for two years for my case to be heard while living at home, making money, and not being a burden to Canadian taxpayers. That’s the only humane, normal and respectful way to do it. The only reason I emigrated to Canada and not the US was because the US doesn’t give you the option to do it without crossing the border illegally.

The border crisis is entirely of our own making. And it can be solved cheaply and fast. The politicians who pretend this is a huge, intractable issue are lying to us.

Please tell this to people you know. When I share this with normies, the reaction is that of stunned disbelief. People honestly, sincerely don’t know how badly they are being duped. Just talk about it. This will not become part of the national conversation unless we make it so.

I’m interested in the phenomenon of “the wife of a genius”. It’s a curious life strategy that is enlightening to observe. I thought that reading a biography of George Orwell’s wife by Anna Funder would be a valuable contribution to my collection of such stories but it turned out that Funder isn’t much interested in Orwell or his wife. She’s interested in talking about her own victimhood.

Funder shares that she always admired Orwell (which is hard to believe because Funder is very left-wing) but then she discovered that he was an “arsehole” to his wife and that admiration waned. It’s easy to judge Orwell’s imperfect private life. It’s harder to ask oneself what does it say about Funder’s character that she endlessly complains in the book about her husband not doing enough housework and stifling her literary genius or that her 9-year-old son is forced to condemn men for doing bad things to women to please mommy.

Orwell at least left great art to compensate for his personal shortcomings. Funder will not, and that’s not because she does too many dishes.

“I would have achieved so much if I didn’t have to do all the housework” is a statement akin to the ones endlessly issued by academics who are convinced they would have published a lot if only they had time. In reality, people use housework (or the academic daily minutiae) to hide from the realization that they have no capacity to achieve, publish, etc. And it should be fine. It’s only their over-inflated ego that makes them unhappy with what they have.

It’s almost embarrassing to see a woman complain that the unequal distribution of housework in her family stifles her intellectual gifts. What kind of an intellect is incapable of figuring out a comfortable domestic arrangement? Funder shares stories of her female friends, “powerful journalists” and “eminent historians”, who engage in feats of passive aggressive pouting against their family members who don’t do as much as they expect around the house. These are women my age and older, and it’s extraordinary to me that they have lived for 50+ years and still haven’t figured out how not to turn every load of laundry into the Battle of Austerlitz.

As a woman of an intellectual profession, I love folding laundry, a fascinating pastime I discovered in my mid-thirties by absolute accident.* I cook everything from scratch, and I love “soul-sapping grocery runs” that so frustrate Funder. I find all of these activities to be extremely restful. But if I didn’t, I would have found a way to solve this extraordinarily minuscule problem without having to write 500-page rants about it.

* I grew up in a strange family and had to learn many things in adulthood that people usually know by kindergarten.