“Ninety-two years ago this month, on Monday morning, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we will see, mattered. Hans Frank served as Hitler’s private attorney and chief legal strategist in the early years of the Nazi movement. While later awaiting execution at Nuremberg for his complicity in Nazi atrocities, Frank commented on his client’s uncanny capacity for sensing ‘the potential weakness inherent in every formal form of law’ and then ruthlessly exploiting that weakness. Following his failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, Hitler had renounced trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic by violent means but not his commitment to destroying the country’s democratic system, a determination he reiterated in a Legalitätseid—’legality oath’—before the Constitutional Court in September 1930. Invoking Article 1 of the Weimar constitution, which stated that the government was an expression of the will of the people, Hitler informed the court that once he had achieved power through legal means, he intended to mold the government as he saw fit. It was an astonishingly brazen statement. ‘So, through constitutional means?’ the presiding judge asked. ‘Jawohl!’ Hitler replied.” (Timothy W. Ryback/The Atlantic)
“Wind-fed wildfires have turned swathes of the nation’s largest city into what looks like Dresden after World War II. Tens of thousands of evacuees are relying on handouts for basic needs, sleeping on cots or sleeping bags. Millions are struggling to breathe in smoky air. Did you expect MAGAs to care? Did you expect the President-elect and his political minions to offer a word of comfort and support? The Second MAGA Reich hasn’t even commenced and we are already peering into the abyss. The signature quality of MAGA, the sine qua non of membership in the cult, is an absence of empathy. Where the milk of human kindness exists in most people, there’s a bottomless reservoir of suspicion, scorn, and flintiness in Trump and his MAGAs. Remember Trump tossing a roll of paper towels at hurricane survivors in Puerto Rico, Melania sporting an ‘I don’t care do u?’ jacket to visit the border where children were being caged, separated from their parents. Remember Trump telling states desperate for ventilators at the beginning of the COVID pandemic to compete for them, because that’s how markets work? Many politicians are rank opportunists. But the signature tactic of MAGA leaders is to use disasters immediately as a means to score political points, vehicles by which to spread conspiracy theories and increase distrust in government and experts.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“One of the things that future historians will note about this war is that it is the first one where drones have had such a significant impact on both tactical and strategic activities. Drones, in the air and on the ground, have been around since the Second World War, and have been used in nearly every significant conflict since. But, since the large-scale Russian invasion of 2022, there has been an unprecedented acceleration in the number of drones used, the breadth of missions they perform across the air, land and maritime domains, and the range of counter drone systems being produced and deployed. While Russia had good loitering munition solutions before the war, early Ukrainian battlefield experimentation during the Battle of Kyiv appears to have cemented in units an operational culture of using drones, and constantly learning and adapting about the best missions, tactics and technology. Largely, the Ukrainians have led the way with innovation, and the Russians have been fast followers. This is not the case in all types of drones however, particularly with Russian loitering munitions, and some forms of uncrewed ground combat vehicles and short and mid-range strike drones (sourced from Iran and now produced in Russia). But it has been Ukrainian innovation that has featured most heavily in the adaptation battle between Ukrainian and Russian drones. In 2024, Ukraine had a competition to identify the best interceptor drones. Several solutions have already been deployed include one with a stabilised shotgun. Ukraine’s drone manufacturers have also developed some indigenous alternatives to widely used Chinese drones. The substitution of Ukrainian for Chinese drones is a strategic imperative given how reliance on Chinese drones in the Ukrainian armed forces has left them dangerously exposed to disruptions in supply chains.” (Mick Ryan/ Futura Doctrina)
“China’s 2018 white paper on its Arctic policy makes the case that non-Arctic countries, including China, have rights in the region. China has actively pursued the right to scientific research, navigation, overflight, fishing, laying of submarine cables and pipelines, as well resource exploration and exploitation. Beijing is well aware of the challenges and high costs associated with Arctic development and research. Some 80 percent of Arctic resource research and development is already under the exclusive control of the circumpolar states, presenting further obstacles for new entrants like China. Historically, the Arctic represented a model of cooperation among the eight circumpolar nations. However, on March 3, 2022, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the United States issued a joint statement announcing the suspension of their cooperation with Russia within the Arctic Council, leaving Moscow in need of new partners to develop the region. Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has been making unprecedented concessions to China when it comes to Arctic affairs. In March 2023, the two countries agreed to establish a joint working group to advance the Northern Sea Route project. The following month, they signed a Memorandum of Understanding to enhance cooperation in maritime law. In May, within the “Arctic Thinking – Global Thinking” project framework, BRICS country representatives convened to formulate a unified Arctic agenda. The Arctic is poised to become a vital energy hub for Russia.” (Junhua Zhang/GISReportOnline)
“At a forum this week hosted by Politico, former top Trump strategist and current MAGA loudmouth Steve Bannon said insiders have a name for the first days of the incoming Trump administration. ‘We refer to it right now as ‘Days of Thunder,’’ he said. ‘And I think these Days of Thunder starting next week are going to be incredibly, incredibly intense.’ On the same day Bannon spoke about Days of Thunder, I was in a hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, watching the most extravagantly unqualified nominee I have ever seen. Pete Hegseth makes the closest runner-up, Harriet Miers, George W. Bush’s ill-fated Supreme Court nominee, look like Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hegseth has faced widespread and credible allegations of drunkenness on the job, financial mismanagement at the two small charities he ran, and sexual harassment and assault. (He paid a woman who accused him of assault while denying the accusation.) A former weekend host for Fox News, Hegseth never ran a large organization and held a junior rank in the military, and he has said women shouldn’t serve in combat and disparaged the Geneva Conventions, which govern the laws of war. He also appears to have no idea what he’s doing.” (Dana Millbank/WashPo)
“As the Democratic Party reckons with another loss to Donald Trump, no issue looms larger than its continued hemorrhaging of working-class voters. It’s not hard to find proximate causes for this crisis. Inflation—which rose from 1.4 percent when Biden took office and peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022—certainly eroded the party’s razor-thin 2020 margins in crucial states … Bidenomics is associated with three major pieces of legislation: the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the Infrastructure Bill. Together they amount to as transparently assertive an industrial policy as the US has pursued since the mobilization for World War II. The total package could reach $1.6 trillion, much of it directed toward green energy and advanced technology. Biden claimed that the IRA would ‘create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs and clean energy manufacturing jobs, solar factories in the Midwest and the South, wind farms across the plains and off our shores, clean hydrogen projects and more.’ The CHIPS Act, he said, could stimulate ‘more than 1 million construction jobs alone over the next six years building semiconductor factories.’ These initiatives have indeed drawn a remarkable level of private investment: over $1 trillion by this November, per the administration. Not for nothing did Bernie Sanders concede that ‘Joe Biden has been the most pro-worker president since FDR.’ What, then, explains the disjuncture? If Biden did so much to boost the economy and labor markets, why didn’t voters feel the effects?” (Brent Cebul/NYRB)
“As far as Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of Defense goes, Senator Joni Ernst was the ball game, and it was over in the second inning. Given her years of advocacy on behalf of women in the military and against sexual assault, Ernst was understood to be the only roadblock to Hegseth’s confirmation, and she capitulated instantly. She did not even bother to playact rigor in her questioning of Hegseth, who has been accused of rape and creating a hostile work environment for women and has called for women to be banned from combat roles in the military. There was no acknowledgment that this man’s record was an affront to the issues she has built her reputation on; instead, after the hearing, she and a Des Moines radio reporter joked about ‘breaking news’ that she would vote for Hegseth. Hegseth’s glide path to the top of the Pentagon, despite his being hideously unfit for the office, has contributed to a sense of inevitability in Washington, D.C., as it prepares for a week of inauguration festivities, replete with a Crypto Ball and billionaires from across various industries paying tribute to Donald Trump. Among them will be Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has recently spoken of the need for more ‘masculine energy’ in corporate America, a sentiment that was everywhere in Hegseth’s hearing as well. There was a steady drumbeat from Hegseth and his committee supporters on the physical differences between men and women and how difficult it is for women to carry heavy loads and run long distances. The vision of a soldier — or ‘war fighter,’ as Hegseth relentlessly referred to them — was clearly masculine, and one of the final questions he got was how many push-ups he could do. He’d done five sets of 47 that morning, he replied proudly, an obsequious nod to the 47th president of the United States, the improbable Ur–alpha male atop MAGA’s mountain of alpha males.” (Rebecca Traister/NYMag)
“Few worthy one-term presidents get the praise that they deserve, unlike lousy one-term presidents like James Buchanan, who do get the obloquy that they deserve. For the moment and for some years to come, pundits and other pseudo-historians as well as some genuine historians will jump all over Joe Biden for his gaffes, his authentic policy debacles (chiefly the withdrawal from Afghanistan) and more, above all, maybe, his failure to keep his pledge as a transitional president. With any luck, Biden, like Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush before him, will eventually receive his due, for his large legislative achievements won with razor-thin congressional majorities, his guiding hand in bringing the economy out of its post-Covid torpor into a full recovery, and, even more, perhaps, his rallying of NATO to support Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s vicious invasion. Should the nation’s luck finally run out, though, he will be remembered very differently, as the last president who observed the rule of law and who stood proudly as the indispensable leader of what was once the free world. Either way, there will be a tragic element to Biden’s presidency. ‘To be Irish,’ Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed, ‘is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.’ Irish Joe Biden, who understood that fate all too well, at least tried as president to sustain the core liberal values to which he devoted his life’s work.” (Sean Willentz/Politico)
“On Wednesday night, President Biden delivered a farewell address from the Oval Office. After some hackneyed remarks invoking the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty, he started, as expected, to defend his record in office, but he then moved on to issue a warning about ‘some things that give me great concern’—namely ‘the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people’ whom he went on to describe as a nascent American ‘oligarchy.’ In particular, Biden decried the emergence of a ‘tech-industrial complex’—explicitly echoing President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, issued sixty-four years ago today. ‘Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,’ Biden said. ‘The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.’ This turn in Biden’s rhetoric perhaps surprised observers who had expected a more traditionally reflective speech, and Biden’s invocation of a tech-industrial complex did, indeed, feel like a weighty and memorable intervention. But it’s been clear for a while that the present technological and communications landscape, and its smothering of the truth, is on Biden’s mind; since the election in November, he’s invoked such themes repeatedly. Before Christmas, he publicly bemoaned the declining reach of traditional news outlets, asking, ‘Where do you get your news, and how do you know what you're getting is not just what you're looking for as opposed to what's happening?;’ in an interview with the left-leaning digital outlet MeidasTouch, Biden echoed his complaint about the disappearance of ‘editors’ and also appeared to criticize billionaire ownership of, and meddling with, well-known newspapers.” (James Goodale/CJR)
“In more than a dozen interviews with advocates trying to motivate women of color as well as white women to vote for Democrats, two top-line reasons stand out. First, abortion played out differently than many expected. During the campaign, Trump sought to neutralize Harris’s significant advantage on an issue that had been politically toxic for Republicans with his promises of moderation. Shadow president and billionaire Elon Musk brazenly invested $20 million in RBG PAC, named after the late liberal Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in order to spread the word that Trump had ‘softened’ on abortion. And it worked: ‘Abortion won big,’ Gretchen Borchelt, the vice president for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center, declared at a press conference the day after the election—but Harris, who made abortion rights and reproductive justice central to her campaign, did not. Seven of the state ballot initiatives to secure abortion rights passed, including in swing states like Arizona and Nevada that went for Trump—yet nationally, exit polls show that roughly a quarter of voters who said abortion was their top issue cast a ballot for Trump. In Arizona, 24 percent who voted ‘yes’ on the state’s initiative also voted for Trump; in Nevada, it was 28 percent. Voters in those states also elected to the Senate abortion rights supporters Jacky Rosen (in Nevada) and newcomer Ruben Gallego (in Arizona). ‘In 2022, the abortion issue was nationalized, and the economy was localized,’ Celinda Lake explains. ‘In 2024, it was the opposite.’ And it wasn’t just in Arizona and Nevada. Voters in other swing states felt that they could count on other protections. ‘Michigan [had] already passed an initiative [protecting abortion rights],’ Lake says. ‘Wisconsin had a Supreme Court decision [that did the same]. In Pennsylvania, nobody believed [Governor] Josh Shapiro would let anything happen.’ The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein looked closely at the exit polling of ‘pro-choice, economically pessimistic voters’ and found that most went for Trump. Among white women without a college education, two-thirds supported Trump, Brownstein reported, citing CNN’s exit polls.” (Joan Walsh/The Nation)
“In November, BIS directed TSMC to end all sales of its most advanced AI chips to China and has since blacklisted Sophgo, the Huawei cutout. Meanwhile, U.S. chip designers are pulling further ahead. Nvidia’s leading, TSMC-manufactured H100s and H200s and new Blackwell chips are substantially faster than China’s best. Experts generally assess China to be at least five years behind leading-edge chip producers, with export controls slowing Beijing’s catch-up effort. Nevertheless, the computing power gap has not stopped Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba and Tencent, and startups such as 01.AI, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and Zhipu AI, from releasing high-performing generative AI models. Chinese firms have capitalized on data centers equipped with Nvidia chips before the United States’ imposition of export controls, used downgraded chips not covered by U.S. controls, and optimized software to maximize less capable hardware. Crucially, many successful Chinese AI models rely on open-source models already released by U.S. labs or use outputs from U.S. models for training. Despite these achievements, U.S. AI labs likely remain one or two years ahead at the frontier, especially since many not-yet-released models are closed-source and therefore harder for Chinese companies to emulate. And as long as scaling state-of-the-art computing power remains vital for frontier AI progress, U.S. companies will expand their lead. As DeepSeek’s CEO Liang Wenfeng has acknowledged, China’s difficulties competing with U.S. AI firms boil down to Washington’s ‘bans on shipments of advanced chips.’” (Colin Kahl/Foreign Affairs)
“Surfacing from the ashes of Los Angeles’ raging wildfires is a plea from local entertainment industry folk gutted by the blazes: Bring production back to the region. ‘One of the biggest things you can do to help our city is to shoot here,’ wrote prominent cinematographer and director Rachel Morrison (The Morning Show, The Mandalorian) in an Instagram post making the rounds among behind-the-scenes film and TV workers. ‘We have some of the best crews in the world who need work now more than ever.’ Morrison’s message speaks to an unprecedented slump in local production. The pandemic came first. Then the strikes. And when it appeared as if filming in Los Angeles had bottomed out and would soon be on the upswing amid an escalating tit-for-tat battle among filming hotspots vying for Hollywood dollars, wildfires fueled by hurricane-force winds battered L.A. The city has seen its share of devastation in earthquakes, fires and civil unrest, but nothing like this in recent memory. Apocalyptic flames fortified by 100 mile per hour gusts destroyed upwards of 12,000 structures built over the course of more than a century in days, ushering in a cloud of uncertainty to a gloomy production landscape yet to recover from back-to-back crises that transformed the economics of Hollywood.” (Winston Cho and Katie Kilkenny/THR)