Donald Trump has privately asked cabinet members in recent weeks whether he should replace his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, venting frustration that she shielded a former deputy who undercut his rationale for war with Iran, according to two people briefed on the discussions.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/02/trump-tulsi-gabbard-intelligence-chief

Finally! Aloha bimbo has got to go. Dumb, useless, zero achievements. Seriously, what exactly did she achieve in her job in all this time? She lisps, bats her eyelashes and does jackshit.

Me and my childhood friend Ira, now a nurse in Israel:

One thing that stunned me in Slezkine’s book is how extremely successful Jews were in the Russian Empire in finance, banking, business and manufacturing circles. We are talking the decades of 1870-1890s, and the numbers are insane. I had this image in my head of miserable, persecuted, long-suffering Jews in the Pale of Settlement, when in reality, the percentage of Jews among, for example, factory owners in Kyiv, Odessa and St Petersburg was insane relative to their percentage in the population.

Slezkine gives pages and pages of numbers, endless bibliographical references. It’s incontrovertible evidence, and I had absolutely no idea. Dude. This is hardcore. It is even more hardcore that the children of all these very successful Jews then went on to organize the Communist revolution. I thought they were reacting to poverty and misery but I was wrong. Oh wow.

I’m very glad I found this book based on a random Twitter post rubbishing Slezkine for being pro-Putin. But he’s part-Jewish himself and see what I wrote earlier today about that.

Slezkine offers the best explanation I have found so far why Jews are almost invariably pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian. If the goal of embracing national belonging consists of no longer feeling like an outsider and a loser, it doesn’t make sense to identify with a newly formed nation that is constantly aggressed against.

There’s a profound dislike of Ukrainian nationhood among Jews which can’t be explained by the history of pogroms which were near and dear to the Russian Empire at large. Slezkine’s explanation makes much more sense. It’s just a reflective “I don’t want to be with the victims anymore.” Ukrainian national identity, to my endless annoyance, is deeply tied to the feelings of victimhood. There are efforts to change that but they are recent and don’t yet dominate.

Jews were not the creators of modernity, Slezkine reminds us. To the contrary, they came to modernity late and unwillingly. They barely participated in the foundational events of modernity, such as the scientific and the industrial revolutions. They adapted to it extremely well but as latecomers and not as founders.

Jews embraced the nation-state, Slezkine says, because it made Christianity less relevant. Christianity in a nation-state is not THE thing. It’s A thing, one of many. It’s easier for a Jewto accept Shakespeare or Goethe as an expression of the most important values than it is to accept Jesus Christ. You can feel belonging over your admiration of Shakespeare where you can’t come together with others over the worship of Jesus.

In an aside, I want to mention that the destruction of the nation-state is accompanied by the devaluing of its canon of the Greats. The perjorative expression “dead white men” appears exactly at the time when Benedict Anderson publishes Imagined Communities, a book that became the Bible of anti-nationalist intellectuals everywhere.

One of the most provocative ideas in Slezkine’s book is that the nation-state is modeled on a Jewish community. It’s built out of alienated individuals who are attached to a larger group most of whose members they’ll never meet. It endows itself with ancient origins that are often entirely invented. The nation always sees itself as the Chosen people with a historic mission. It consecrates a bunch of national figures, writers, thinkers, etc whose existence proves that the nation is great. It also venerates a special way of eating that is specifically of the nation and is a source of pride and attachment that distinguishes its practicioners from everybody else. The fourth estate is crucial to the nation-state as are the professions that define the intellectual and the literary canon, and these are the most Jewish of all professions after bankers.

I thought I’ve heard every possible theory of nationalism but this one is new to me. The book was written in 2004, and I’d love to hear the author’s theory of the collapse of the nation-state model.

In modernity, everyone becomes a spiritual Jew, says Slezkine. The most prestigious professions are the traditional Jewish ones. Entrepreneur, doctor, lawyer, content creator who produces words. Everybody has a list of dietary restrictions from here to the Moon.

The concept of a soul falls out of fashion and loses importance, says Slezkine, so instead of hankering after the purity of the soul, modern people become obsessed with the purity of the food. Instead of going to confession, they take dietary supplements with religious fervor. To achieve eternal life, people look to technology instead of to the church.

I read so fast in Russian that I already read 100 pages of this 600-page book since this morning and in the midst of making breakfast, packing lunches, drop-off, grading and an hour-long taping. If I read more in Russian, I’d be really well-read because I can do a book a day easily.

Slezkine points out that every society since the beginnings of civilization had a group of migrant travelers who performed the functions that were necessary but considered inappropriate for the rest of the population. These were tradesmen and tricksters who cultivated their differences and were simultaneously needed and reviled for it. Gypsies and Jews are an example we know best but he gives a long list of examples from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Slezkine calls these outsider groups Mercurians and says that one of the characteristics they share is their interest in swapping gender roles within their groups. That’s why they are traditionally seen as not manly. They don’t fight in the armies of host populations. Their women are loud and pushy and their men don’t go to war to defend the homeland of the host society.

But what happens when the entire Europe becomes modern, that is, Mercurian? It starts loving gender-bending and gender-swapping for its own sake.

I haven’t seen such an explanation anywhere else, and it’s definitely original. This is a very interesting author, that’s for sure.

The EU stands with the people of Cuba in their hour of need.

We are stepping up our humanitarian aid to Cuba to help deliver food and safe drinking water, and to provide logistical support to humanitarian partners delivering urgent relief to the most vulnerable.… pic.twitter.com/rYIgMFjBCm

— European Commission (@EU_Commission) April 1, 2026

Cubans are fighting in Ukraine on Russia’s side. Helping the Cuban regime stay in power means prolonging the war. So who’s against Russia’s war effort in deed and not in words?

Modernity is when everyone becomes urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually complex, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake. It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling castes for the benefit of individuals, nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernity, in other words, is when everyone becomes a Jew.

Yuru Slezkine, The Jewish Century

The English translation is atrocious, so if you can read in the original Russian do that instead. I had to edit this quote to make it readable because the translation is so poor.