“In America, if you leave something, it’s gone!” That’s one of the first things you hear from Deanna Huffman, a mother with a Texan drawl, recording a video for Russian Road, a propaganda outlet for the regime. Russian Road explains, “Did you know an American village has emerged near Moscow? The first settlers are the Huffman family: Derek, Deanna, their three cheerful daughters, and a Siberian Husky with multicolored eyes.”
Many of Deanna’s complaints will sound familiar to Trump supporters: in the United States, it was impossible to escape messages about LGBT lifestyles, and their children were constantly exposed. She’s a MAHA mother, telling Russian Road, “When you’re living in America, everything is poison. I hate to say it like that, but it’s true. There’s GMO in all the vegetables and the fruit, you’re getting chicken, but they’re bleaching the chicken.”
They believed they had to move, and Russia was the only solution.
To expedite their residency and citizenship, Derek, the father, enlisted in the Russian military. Despite being told he would remain far from the front lines, the Russian army, desperate for conscripts to keep fighting its war in Ukraine, had other ideas.
In what is likely her only honest video posted on their YouTube account (which has since been deleted), Deanna explained, “When he signed up, and had all of that done, he was told he would not be training for two weeks and going straight to the front lines.” But it seems as though he’s getting one more week of training, closer to the front lines, and then they’re going to put him on the front lines,” she said. “We’re praying really hard that he can be used for his skills and not be just be put as a fighter.”
With little command of Russian, Derek was sent into the Russian meatgrinder. Recently, the internet rumor mill had prematurely declared him dead, but a video recorded for the family’s YouTube video of a long phone conversation between the couple dispelled those rumors. In their conversation, Derek attributed the rumors to maliciousness and hatred.
The Huffmans hope more Americans join them in their new American village in Russia, which they view as their escape from unsavory elements in the U.S.
Talking to Russian Road, Deanna explained what led them there, “We did a lot of research when it comes to Russia because America was just going downhill. There was a lot of things happening … that we were not comfortable with our [three] daughters being around. The agenda for the LGBTQ+ was insane, it was in all the ads and in all the TV shows. … The safety factor was insane, down to kids being taken right in front of you … cars being stolen and people being beat up in the street. … We moved from Arizona to Texas to try to get better family values around us. … But unfortunately, a lot of people were moving into Texas and changing the dynamics of the family values around us.”
Deanna explained they began to look around to other U.S. states and Europe, but there, too, were problems.
“Every other place we looked in Europe were having the same issues that America was having, being overrun by immigrants, so much crime, and so much theft. … So Russia was really our only option.”
This isn’t satire. This is where the rhetoric of total cultural pessimism can lead.
The America the Huffmans describe is one where children are routinely snatched off the streets, every meal is toxic, and public safety has completely broken down. It is a cartoon version of reality, shaped more by social media doomscrolling than lived experience. It’s the kind of dystopian narrative you fall into when your worldview is curated by an algorithm, not actual neighbors. The family moved from Arizona to Texas, not exactly crime-ridden war zones, and yet they speak of their environment as if it were Mad Max. Their depiction says less about the state of the country and more about how online echo chambers can distort perception until even the most ordinary American suburb feels like enemy territory.
For years now, conservative voices have rightly criticized the Left’s rewriting of American history and its tendency to cast the country as irredeemably racist, sexist, or colonialist. But too often, the Right has fallen into a mirror-image error, portraying America as lost, ruined, overrun by immigrants and drag queens. The Huffmans are simply taking that logic to its natural conclusion. If America is truly that far gone, why not flee?
Former world chess champion and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov addressed this mindset in a recent piece for The Next Move, warning that families like the Huffmans are falling for a dangerous illusion. Anti-woke Americans in Russia are following a dark historical path, he argued. They are following in the footsteps of a long line of Westerners who once fled to the Soviet Union, believing they were escaping the moral rot of the capitalist West. Most were destroyed by the very regime they embraced.
The Huffmans are not unique. Videos are circulating online of other Americans (and some Germans) promoting life in Russia as a wholesome, anti-woke alternative to the West. The Kremlin heavily curates these clips, part of an effort to project Russia as a moral refuge while whitewashing its war crimes, censorship, and repression.
What these Americans don’t realize, or choose not to see, is that their new country poisons its dissidents in hotels, jails political opponents, kidnaps children from Ukraine, and disappears journalists. On this, Kasparov writes, “Back then, people also weren’t carrying around small computers in their pockets; they lacked the instantaneous access to information that today would have given many pause before setting off for the supposed proletarian paradise on the other side of the Atlantic.”
The Huffman family and their fellow travelers have no such excuses. Video, photographic, and written testimonies from Putin’s KGB regime are readily available on the internet and social media. American news outlets across the political spectrum, from Fox News to CNN, regularly report on conditions inside the Russian Federation and in the occupied territories of Ukraine. Going in the face of overwhelming evidence is a choice motivated by ideological blindness.
But the Huffmans didn’t move for foreign policy reasons. They moved because they believed they had no place left in their own country. They believed that America had become irredeemable.
That’s where we, as conservatives and patriots, need to take a long pause.
It is possible, indeed necessary, to criticize the cultural Left without hating our country. There’s a vast moral difference between saying, “America is on the wrong path” and “America is trash.” We have to be able to walk and chew gum: acknowledge our deep concerns while still expressing gratitude for the freedoms and blessings we enjoy here.
The Huffmans lost sight of that. And while their story is extreme, it’s not isolated. Many in the MAGA movement, frustrated by cultural overreach and elite hypocrisy, have adopted a rhetoric of despair: “The West is dead.”
That kind of hopelessness is spiritually corrosive. Worse, it’s un-American.
This country was built by people who didn’t give up. It was defended by generations who didn’t run. The impulse to withdraw, to escape, to give up on America is not the conservative tradition.
Do we have real problems? Of course. The Left’s capture of key institutions, media, academia, and the bureaucracy is real and urgent. But so is the resilience of the people. The fights over parental rights, school curricula, gender ideology, and free speech have only gained momentum because we are still a free enough country to push back. And we are winning, little by little, school board by school board, state by state.
You can’t do that in Russia.
In Russia, you cannot criticize the war in Ukraine without risking prison. You cannot start a charter school that teaches your values. You cannot run for office to change the laws. You cannot build a political movement around restoring your country’s founding ideals. The Huffmans fled America because they believed they were powerless here, ironically, to a place where they truly are.
If we want to preserve what makes this country great, we can’t walk away from it. We have to keep building, keep voting, keep parenting, keep teaching, keep pushing back — but with love. Not blind optimism, not naïveté, but clear-eyed commitment.
What’s most striking about the Huffmans’ decision is how unnecessary it was. The very freedoms they claim to value so deeply, freedom of speech, religion, education, and enterprise, offer countless paths in America to live according to one’s values. Concerned about indoctrination in schools? Homeschooling is legal and flourishing, with thriving networks and resources in every state, especially where they were living. Worried about food safety? Millions of Americans opt out of industrial agriculture by shopping at farmers’ markets, joining CSAs, or growing their own food. The tools to opt out, resist, and rebuild exist in abundance here, because this is a free country. The tragedy is that the Huffmans exercised their freedom not to create a better life in America, but to abandon it entirely.
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In many ways, the Huffmans are victims, not just of Russian propaganda, but of American cynicism. They were sold the lie that we have already lost, that there’s nothing left to fight for, that the only honorable choice is exile.
America is still the greatest country in the world. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s free. And if we remember that, if we teach our children that, it won’t be Russia building “American villages.” It will be Americans rebuilding America.
