Dear Kash Patel: Quit your job. Get help

This is not a defense of Kash Patel. His words, actions, beliefs, and political theater are, at best, reprehensible.

If I were speaking directly to him, I’d say: Quit the job. Get clearheaded. Get on a program, whether that means moderation or abstinence. Nothing is worth losing yourself over. No administration. No proximity to power. Stop this performance of toughness. Live your life.

The whole thing about making your bed and having to lie in it is true. And no one in that bed is going to tell Kash Patel the truth. The more powerful someone becomes, the less likely anyone is to tell them the truth. In cults built around domination, performance, and loyalty, vulnerability becomes almost impossible. Perhaps the saddest part is that no one around him seems to care enough about him as a human being to ensure he gets that help.

Patel is a highly valuable asset to this administration. He’s like an actor playing a man: a person of color supplying one of the most openly racist American movements in modern history with air cover while fitting seamlessly into the aesthetics of the modern right-wing manoverse — fintech bro posturing, performance masculinity, beer-shotgunning Instagram nihilism masquerading as strength.

Inside this cult, with its rigid ideas about whiteness, aggression, dominance, loyalty, and belonging, Patel’s position is increasingly precarious. This administration uses people the way it uses everyone: transactionally. Women become human shields until they are inconvenient. Loyalists become disposable the second weakness becomes visible. His weaknesses are now on full display. Reports now suggest Trumpworld is increasingly frustrated with Patel following security failures surrounding the White House Correspondents’ Dinner spectacle.

In recent months, the FBI under Patel became part of a grotesque right-wing media charade surrounding a trans custody dispute. This dispute involved allegations of gender-affirming care in Cuba that appear to have rested on shockingly thin evidence. The story was amplified into anti-trans propaganda almost immediately, with Patel publicly boasting about the operation before many of the underlying claims had even been substantiated. That combination of paranoia, spectacle, humiliation, and political theater now seems to define nearly every public crisis orbiting him.

Related: Kash Patel sued a reporter over drinking allegations. So she dropped another FBI alcohol bombshell

Of late, he has become consumed by increasingly erratic public battles over his own image. After reporting from The Atlantic described concerns inside the FBI about alleged excessive drinking, absences, paranoia, and management instability, Patel responded not simply with denials but with a quarter-billion-dollar lawsuit and reported pressure campaigns around leak investigations targeting journalists. And in this fever dream of denial theater and aggressive blame, Patel has opened himself up to what might potentially be one of the most embarrassing discovery processes of all time.

Earlier this year, Iran-linked hackers reportedly breached Patel’s personal email account and leaked photographs that felt almost painfully symbolic of the persona he’s spent years constructing: cigars, rum bottles, curated swagger, performative masculinity frozen into social-media-ready fragments. None of this would matter if Patel were simply a private citizen. But he is the director of the FBI, operating at the center of an administration obsessed with dominance and image control. A man in a position built to project stability now appears surrounded by chaos: legal chaos, political chaos, security chaos, reputational chaos, while the institutions around him grow increasingly desperate to suppress scrutiny instead of confronting reality.

Related: Did the FBI just post this propaganda video to save Kash Patel’s job?

A lot of people drink to disappear in high-stress environments. I know what it’s like to drink to find some numbness in the face of professional pressure. Years ago, I was involved in an extremely public lawsuit connected to my work. At certain points, I was operating on 12- to 16-hour days for months at a time, waking up to work and going to sleep still thinking only about work. At the same time, I personally went through discovery related to the lawsuit and had to live with the knowledge that teams of lawyers were combing through not only professional communications but private ones, too. That was a period in my life when I started drinking way too much, and part of the reason I ultimately left that job was that I realized it was time to find a little bit of control and moderation in my life.

Full disclosure: I do still enjoy drinking. But now it’s not a tool I use to hide from the world. Queer people especially understand the difference between social drinking, self-medication, addiction, survival, shame, and outright collapse because we’ve lived around all of it. Many of us have watched rehab save people we love. Many of us, myself included, have also buried people we love.

Related: The Atlantic calls Kash Patel’s $250 million defamation lawsuit ‘meritless’

That’s also why some of the reporting around Patel feels less shocking to me than deeply familiar. The exhaustion, the chaos, and the obsession with image control. The increasingly public unraveling. Like fraternities, cultures obsessed with aggression, masculinity, dominance, and belonging can turn drinking into part of the performance itself. Another way of proving you belong there.

The difference is that most people are lucky enough to hit a point where someone tells them the truth. I’m not sure anyone around Kash Patel is capable of, cares enough about, or is motivated to do that.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness @thedeadbetties

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