I read a sad article in the Daily Beast entitled “Anti-Woke Dad Who Fled With Family To Russia Sent To War Zone,” written by Josh Fiallo, which was published on July 18 and updated on July 20.
As I read the article, I concluded that the anti-woke dad, Derek Huffman, was grossly misinformed about Putin‘s Russia and the epitome of a stupid and naive American. I am disinclined to blame his wife because I strongly suspect that the Huffman family is highly patriarchal. However, I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
The Daily Beast never specified where Huffman‘s family used to live in Texas, which is a mostly Republican, anti-woke state and the second largest state in the U.S. Relocating his family to another Texas city would have been infinitely more logical, less risky, and certainly less expensive than moving to Russia.
I strongly suspect that both Huffman and his wife may be idealistic ultraconservative Christians lacking common sense, although I again have no proof. Something just does not pass the smell test with this father, mother, and their three young daughters (12, 11, and 10), along with their Husky dog named “Baby.”
Huffman, 46, stated that his family happily emigrated last May to Istra, Russia, which is located 25 miles west of Moscow. He emigrated in order to “escape from the LGBTQ ‘indoctrination’ in America.”
I wonder if this father of three had ever considered homeschooling or a private school? I wonder if he ever considered a charter school or simply moving to another, less “indoctrinated” school district within the Lone Star State?
According to Texapedia, there are “more than 1,000” Independent School Districts within Texas. Surely, Huffman could have found one district suitable for his children.
Unfortunately, the chances of his family moving back to Texas are probably nil at this point or close to it because they appear to be financially distressed.
My big question is who or what organization influenced this man’s family to emigrate to Putin’s Russia during a major three-year war with Ukraine backed by both the U.S. and NATO? That tragic question was never directly answered in the Daily Beast, other than Huffman and his wife briefly stating that they had once honeymooned in Moscow.
When this occurred, I do not know, but I suspect it was most likely fifteen years ago, in 2010 or a few years later, when Russian-American diplomatic relations were better, and based on the ages of the Huffmans’ daughters.
Instead, Huffman foolhardily decided to move to despotic Putin’s “Holy Russia” with its rubber-stamped Duma or parliament and a Constitution having no Bill of Rights, which has been desperate for volunteer soldiers in the meat grinder of eastern Ukraine. Unbelievably, he volunteered to join the manpower-starved Russian army to obtain citizenship after the government authorities initially “told [him] that his job in the military would be as a correspondent or … welder,” according to his nervous wife, DeAnna.
Fat chance.
If Huffman had casually perused Russian history after the Cold War ended in 1991, he would have quickly realized that four to five million Russians had emigrated from the former Soviet state since 1992. That would have certainly been a red flag.
He also would have learned that 51% of Russians, with some estimates as high as 70% in 2019, still unbelievably regarded the tyrannical and genocidal Joseph Stalin, who ruled Communist Russia from 1924 to 1953, with great respect and admiration. That would have been another troubling red flag.
What is deeply scary in 2025 is that most Russians are still woefully ignorant of their own bloody and brutal history in the 20th century. Despite Stalin’s thirty-year reign of mass murder, many modern Russian and non-Russian historians believe that the sociopathic and paranoid Georgian may have been worse than the satanic Hitler himself, if not his equal.
Stalin’s mass murders and executions, which were reminiscent of the unmerciful Genghis Khan in the 13th century, were primarily conducted from 1933 to 1945 because of Stalin’s forced Ukrainian famine in the early 1930s. His agrarian policy to collectivize the Ukrainian farms to guarantee a food supply for the Red Army resulted in the death of at least four million Ukrainians.
Stalin’s bloodthirsty purges in the late 1930s also resulted in the death of millions of innocent people, especially the Red Army officer corps above the rank of captain, along with the establishment of his slave-labor death camps as depicted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
Huffman completely failed to do his historical homework about 20th or 21st century Russia, which still venerates the embalmed arch criminal Vladimir Lenin on display in Red Square.
Stalin, whom Putin greatly admires, was evil incarnate and ultimately responsible for the death of tens of millions of innocent Soviet citizens in creating his “evil empire,”as correctly described by President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1983.
Plus, according to the Kyiv Independent, 1,046,270 Russian soldiers have been either killed or wounded since Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The Kremlin has become so desperate that they have recruited over 10,000 North Korean soldiers to fight on Ukraine’s eastern front, resulting in “4,700 casualties, including 600 deaths” since April, according to South Korean intelligence.
Most likely these high casualty numbers among North Korea’s soldiers as with the Russians and other poor ethnic minorities have been the result of massive, suicidal human-wave attacks and military incompetence not seen since World War I under Tsar Nicholas II or the Battle of Stalingrad (July 17, 1942 to February 2, 1943) as graphically depicted in the movie Enemy at the Gates (2001).
I am certain that the average affluent Russian, who lives either in metropolitan St. Petersburg or Moscow, has little knowledge of the high body count occurring in Ukraine, including Huffman, because of the absence of a free press and the Kremlin’s highly censored television stations and internet access.
Now, Huffman is at extremely high risk of becoming another Russian soldier to be used as expendable cannon fodder in Putin‘s war. And now his wife is at an extremely high risk of becoming a widow in a foreign land with three young daughters.
According to his wife, Huffman “has no prior military experience.” To make matters worse, he was only given an unbelievable two weeks of unpaid military training with all his instruction in Russian, which was a language that he did not understand, further ill-preparing him for combat.
Welcome to Putin‘s Russia.
The Daily Beast stated, “Huffman naïvely joined the military in the hope of gaining Russian citizenship for his family through an expedited process,” and “gain the trust and respect” of his fellow Russians.
That is truly the epitome of a stupid and naive American.
He honestly and unabashedly told “Russian state media” in June that “‘the point of this act for me is to earn a place here in Russia, … If I risk myself for our country, no one will say that I am not a part of it.’”
Now, Huffman is about to fight or is fighting NATO-backed Ukraine, which the U.S. has been financially supporting for over three years with sophisticated high-tech weaponry. Since 2022, the U.S. has “allocated $182.8 billion in emergency funding” to Kyiv with more lethal offensive weapons promised in the future, even if peace negotiations begun on August 15 in Anchorage, Alaska fail.
And Trump hopefully has no intention of allowing Ukraine to become a Russian puppet state like Belarus or Mongolia. However, that especially includes the NATO countries of Europe.
As a former high school Latin teacher, one observation I learned very quickly is that you cannot fix stupid. May God or the U.S. State Department help Huffman and his family if he ever were to become a Ukrainian prisoner of war.
Otherwise, dasvidaniya or goodbye, and I hope that Derek Huffman enjoys his new life in Russia, but most likely Moscow will soon give him a fitting Russian Orthodox burial similar to the fate of deceased 21-year-old American Michael Alexander Gloss.
Robert L. Maronic
