Kash Patel responds to the criticisms of his use of public money to take the girlfriend du jour on trips:

The disgustingly baseless attacks against Alexis — a true patriot and the woman I’m proud to call my partner in life — are beyond pathetic. She is a rock-solid conservative and a country music sensation who has done more for this nation than most will in ten lifetimes. I’m so blessed she’s in my life.

Attacking her isn’t just wrong — it’s cowardly and jeopardizes our safety. My love of family will always be my cornerstone, and you will never tear that down or keep me from them.

This is deeply, deeply embarrassing. We need the FBI to start doing actual work but here’s its director promoting the music career of some dumb bimbo.

By the way, nobody knows where Tyler Robinson’s furry boyfriend is. Once again, the FBI dropped the ball whole its leader is inflicting his private life on all of us.

Crowds of facile fools are re-posting this fake:

meghalni a fegyvergyárak profitjáért… pic.twitter.com/glkab6UG3M

— MALDOROR (@MaldororArt) November 3, 2025

The guy in the video is Russian, from St Petersburg. He couldn’t possibly be Ukrainian because such young guys are not drafted in Ukraine. It’s illegal.

This isn’t even about the war. It’s about the lack of self-control and the slobbering emotionality of people who respond only to displays of somebody else”s slobbering emotionality.

Whether it’s AI or human-based fake, it always appeals to people who have allowed themselves to be reduced to a quivering mass of vague “feels” and have switched off rationality and self-control.

I’m sorry, they have been married for 11 years and he is somehow still hoping she will change religions? And saying it in public?

If I’m her, I’m PISSED. https://t.co/UJKDl9NsQ2

— Ally Sammarco (@Ally_Sammarco) October 30, 2025

My husband and I will be celebrating our 16th wedding anniversary on the 13th. I’m hoping on day he will get baptized into the Orthodox faith. He knows I’m hoping for it. This is creating zero conflict between us. We’ve had a lot of great conversations about it. There’s literally no other issue that creates less conflict between us.

I don’t know what this woman’s marital history is but what she imagines a big stumbling boulder for a marriage is nary a small crack in the pavement.

When done the right way, marriage is a lot more resilient than many people think.

This book is an enormous missed opportunity. The trajectory and the results of the Soviet gender experiment are a fascinating topic. So much could be said. Such fascinating insights could be gleaned. But Ioffe is blinkered by her identity as a Russian liberal. This means that she has to massage a complicated reality of a completely different region into the limiting slogans of the tiniest of slivers of the Western left. The explanation she alights upon for the entire history of the Soviet and the post-Soviet space since 1917 is that men are bad and inflict genocides, totalitarianisms and wars on women who are always good and invariably wonderful and victimized. The only good man she has found anywhere on the planet is the neo-Nazi Navalny.

Liberalism produces monsters by attaching itself as a succubus to the already not too potent brains of people like Ioffe. I tried very hard to find some value in Motherland. I can usually find at least a couple of pages, a stray thought or two, something to give me food for thought in anything I read. This book, though, gave me nothing. It’s primitive, plodding, and very unimpressive.

It was very open-minded of me to read Motherland. I knew that Ioffe was very woke. Moreover, as a post-Soviet Jew, she is militantly pro-Russian and hates Ukraine. I was willing to look past all that in hopes that she had interesting ideas about the Soviet gender ideology. That, I guess, is the value of the book. I followed my instinct of open-mindedness that goes beyond ideological alignments and identities anywhere where the intellect has work to do. I did not find what I hoped in Motherland but my life is enormously richer than that of people who are terrified of encountering different beliefs.

Transgenderism is a fad of opulent societies. Saying that Venezuela is good because it has no transgenderism is dumb. Venezuela is starving. Obviously, there’s no money for boutique identities of bored, overfed people. Because there are almost no well-fed, let alone overfed, people.

The real victory over the tyranny of boutique identities is not to starve everybody to distract them from weird behavior. The victory lies in convincing the people who have the leisure and the money to pursue this path that it’s not good and doesn’t lead to any real flourishing.

We don’t need to give up any of our civilizational advances. We don’t have to embrace third-worldist privations and chaos. Our civilization can lead to normalizing “yeet the teets”, and yes, it already did that. But it can also lead away from that. All we need is to start exercising some self-control. We need to not venerate self-indulgence quite so much.

If there’s a scratch on your knee, you don’t saw off the whole leg. We can absolutely continue enjoying our civilization and correct its mistakes. There’s no need to ditch the whole thing.

“There’s nothing special about the Holocaust and it’s a right-wing ploy to claim that there was” has been the far-left position for at least 30 years. I’ve heard it expressed endlessly, recently in the context of promoting the interests of Gaza, at many academic conferences.

When I say that rightists promote lefty ideas, people pout but it’s a fact. You’ve got to know it to recognize it.

A reader on this blog was shocked by the existence of hijabi campus leftists. This incomprehension, as well as the confusion caused by “queers for Palestine”, stem from the utter incomprehension of the liberal project. Its goal is to erode the Western civilization. Everything that is Western-coded is bad in liberal view. Everything that is not Western is good. That’s all you need to know to understand it.

But yes, you need to try hard to be completely out of everything to find yourself in a place where hijabi leftists strike you as something new and unexpected.

Suddenly, you're 27.

You make your coffee, rush to work, come home around 7, and you're too tired to do anything except eat, scroll on your phone, and pass out.

Then you wake up, and do it all again.

And when Friday comes, maybe you go out, or maybe you're just too tired.…

— tree (@treeonchain) November 1, 2025

The same psychological problems get harder to carry with age. He sees how much harder it is for him to carry the burdens of everyday life at 27 in comparison to 17. But he knows that nothing special happened between these ages, so he concludes that lower energy is the normal aging process. But it’s not. It’s carrying the same sack of shit for a decade that’s doing it. At 37, it’s going to be worse yet if he doesn’t drop the sack of problems he picked up long before age 17.

Tonight is the best night of the year. We get one additional hour to read in bed.

I feel that this extra hour deserves some really special, kickass reading. It needs to be honored and cherished. It’s a magical moment that must receive its due.

Here’s one example why I say Ioffe is not very bright. She bases her entire argument in Motherland on autobiographies and interviews of relatives of politicians. It seems never to occur to her that people can describe their own lives in self-serving ways. She mistakes a tendentious autobiographical account for documentary evidence.

For example, she dedicates a whole chapter to discussing how desperate post-Soviet women were for strong, decisive men who were nowhere to be found. Right from that chapter, Ioffe segues into retelling the account of Putin’s wife on how strong and decisive Putin was since his youth. It never crosses Ioffe’s mind that Putin’s wife wasn’t sharing her intimate memories but that she simply put her name under whatever spin it was considered politically expedient to make public at that time. Wives of politicians currently in office do not spontaneously share anything. Especially in authoritarian societies where censorship exists.

And it’s all like that. “‘Stay strong, Misha,’ said Raisa to Gorbachev when they were alone.” But how can you possibly know that she said it? Because it’s in her memoir? What people put in memoirs rarely bears much relationship to what actually happened.

For lack of knowledge and insight, Ioffe goes on and on, retelling these autobiographies like they mean something profound. Emotional goo is offered to readers in lieu of analysis.