Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

– Albert Einstein

"Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases."

– John Adams

"Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared."

– Eddie Rickenbacker

1. American Society Was Built for Populism, Not Elitism

2. Trump’s first-week strategy: ‘Flood the zone.’ Repeat.

3. The Laws of War Are Not Recommendations

4. Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over.

5. Ex-spies say suburban D.C. casino would put nation’s secrets at risk

6. Trump Leaves Democrats Dazed and on the Defensive

7. Narco Tribunals: Gender-Based Violence as a Tool of Power in the Favelas

8. 'The Cartels' are Not Foreign Terrorist Organizations

9. 39 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America

10. From Z to X: How Russian Information Warfare Primed the World for Trump and Musk

11. C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins

12. Musk Plan for Retooling Government Takes Shape, but Big Questions Loom

13. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 25, 2025

14. Iran Update, January 25, 2025

15. Neither War nor Peace: The China Challenge of Now

16. More DEI fallout: Air Force scraps course that used videos of Tuskegee Airmen and female WWII pilots

1. American Society Was Built for Populism, Not Elitism

Damn right. We do not need the technocrats and elites "controlling the means of production" (or perhaps the means of controlling information):-)

We need to reflect on De Tocqueville's writings

De Tocqueville remains perhaps the most insightful commentator on American life since its inception. Above all, he marveled at the American dedication to equality. Remarkably, his reflections—published in a pair of volumes titled Democracy in America—continue to resonate nearly two centuries later, not merely for their historical insight but for their uncanny relevance to contemporary American society and civic life.

De Tocqueville dissected the American psyche with surgical precision, revealing the persistent tension between populism and elitism, prosperity and poverty, and the propensity for rugged individualism alongside communal responsibility.

As he traveled across the young nation, de Tocqueville encountered a society unlike that of his native France or indeed any other European country—defined by rigid class hierarchies. Instead, Americans were passionately committed to the idea that every person, regardless of birth or status, should have the opportunity to succeed.

This commitment to equality was not without its paradoxes and imperfections—slavery still tainted the landscape, and Indigenous peoples were mistreated and displaced—but the relentless drive toward equality was unmistakable. For de Tocqueville, this was the essence of America’s greatness and its unique spirit: a society striving toward a more just and equitable future, even if it stumbled and stuttered along the way.

https://rabbidunner.com/lessons-from-alexis-de-tocqueville/

American Society Was Built for Populism, Not Elitism

Technocrats and elites insist that centralized control is best. Nature and history prove them wrong.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/american-society-was-built-for-populism-not-elitism-nature-and-history-prove-technocrats-wrong-cf9e7a2f?mod=hp_opin_pos_5#cxrecs_s

By Karl Zinsmeister

Jan. 24, 2025 1:37 pm ET

New York Jets fans cheer against the New England Patriots at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Sept. 19, 2024. Photo: Sarah Stier/Getty Images

Political, economic and cultural power have become concentrated in recent decades. Public-health officials, activists, tech executives and others press everyday Americans to let “experts” and “authorities” control decisions that affect all of society. Technology allows unprecedented monitoring and steering of civilians’ actions.

Throughout U.S. history there have been periodic backlashes against potentates attempting to hoard influence. In 1968 presidential candidate George Wallace said Americans were fed up with “pseudointellectuals lording over them . . . telling them they have not got sense enough to know what is best for their children.” This won Wallace nearly 10 million votes and shocked grandees of the Boston-Washington corridor who thought they had foreclosed arguments over who should run America.

Ronald Reagan recognized that Americans were chafing against intellectual authoritarianism. His administration collected mounds of evidence that bureaucratic central planning was having disastrous results. He pumped the brakes on impositions from Washington and discredited its manipulations of economy and culture.

Reaganism proved most effective as an economic force. Its cultural victories were rarer and didn’t last. A monolith of liberal activists, judges, educators, entertainers and media continued to overshadow our public square. The range of “acceptable” worldviews narrowed dramatically from 1988 to 2024.

During those years, America’s budding socialists shifted their efforts from economic Marxism to cultural Marxism. Their new causes ranged from racial grievances and environmental alarmism to hatred for America and the West.

The left’s new social mandates weren’t only an abstract threat to liberty. They wreaked practical damage on American society. With culture as with economics, consolidated decision-making produces inferior results. Big, centralized regimes are generally surpassed by freer, more local efforts.

Data scientists will tell you that even a process as routine as emptying a football stadium of 80,000 fans in a few minutes is an intractable computational problem—if you try to solve it from a master position. You could cover the stadium with hardware and programmers directing fans, and you’d never be able to empty the stands as quickly as fans manage on their own. There are simply too many variables.

Yet leave each slob to himself, and he’ll be opening the door to his Chevy before the scoreboard lights are cool. He may not realize that he’s “exhibiting large-scale adaptive intelligence in the absence of central direction,” as behavioral mathematician Art De Vany puts it, but he is. Even New York Jets fans can do it.

Stanford biologist Deborah Gordon spent years studying a large ant colony in Arizona’s desert. Her goal was to discover how these thousands of creatures coordinate their work so that essential tasks get done. No one ant or group of ants has any idea of the complexity of the entire colony. So who’s running the show?

The answer is nobody. Each colony “operates without any central or hierarchical control,” Ms. Gordon reports. “No insect issues commands to another.” These complex societies are built on countless simple decisions made by individual ants responding to local needs. These micro-decisions meld together to yield a highly efficient macro-result. This pattern of complex problems being solved by small actors working without direction is, Ms. Gordon states, “ubiquitous throughout nature.”

Emptying stadiums and running ant colonies are simple compared with questions of how our economy should be structured or which schools our children should attend. How can smart people imagine that an imperial class ensconced in Washington can decide such matters better than people on the ground?

Many of the Brahmins who push for top-down management of society recognize the clumsiness of their approach. They proceed anyway. Why? Because they prefer the security of control to freedom. Grass-roots decision-making may work better, but it cedes power to unsocialized mavericks who resist orchestration and tasteful outcomes. That’s the nightmare of every officious princeling.

Americans are skeptical of nostrums that promote intellectual castes and monopolize authority. We raised to new heights the concepts of autonomy, local independence and self-determination. During the Battle of King’s Mountain in 1780, American Col. Isaac Shelby instructed his men, “When we encounter the enemy, don’t wait for the word of command. Let each one of you be your own officer.” Europeans visiting our new nation were consistently struck by the unordered bloom of independent businesses and associations.

The first quarter of the 21st century has brought political winds and technical tools that allowed a class indoctrinated in universities to grab unprecedented power. But millions of Americans eventually recoiled against manipulation from above. As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence, there’s renewed resistance to centralized control and constrictions of opinion and action.

To recover sovereignty among everyday citizens, we should crimp the institutions of master command. Then hand off a slew of federal prerogatives to private institutions, local governments, families and individuals. Do this over and over, in as many sectors as possible. Leaders should offer Americans choices rather than edicts.

If our current populist rebellion can move the U.S. away from smug superintendence, we will enjoy a new burst of flourishing and freedom. Because American society was brilliantly constructed to thrive without rulers.

Mr. Zinsmeister is author of “Backbone: Why American Populism Should Be Welcomed, Not Feared.” He served as the White House’s chief domestic policy adviser, 2006-09.

Trump’s first-week strategy: ‘Flood the zone.’ Repeat.

It was all part of a plan to begin with a bang and follow a detailed policy blueprint, although key administrative posts remained stuck in a hiring bottleneck and many of his directives lacked immediate effect.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/25/trump-week-one-flood-the-zone/?utm

January 25, 2025 at 3:53 p.m. ESTToday at 3:53 p.m. EST

President Donald Trump speaks with reporters and signs executive orders in the Oval Office on Thursday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Isaac Arnsdorf and Clara Ence Morse

President Donald Trump spent his first week back in office flooding the zone. He pardoned hundreds of supporters who assaulted police on Jan. 6, 2021, revoked security clearances for critics and floated dramatic proposals such as eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

It was all part of a plan to begin with a bang, follow a detailed policy blueprint and be better organized than eight years ago.

Trump’s ambitions for his first hours in office fell short in some ways, including hiring bottlenecks for key administration jobs, court challenges to executive orders that had eluded legal vetting and directives that lacked immediate effect.

Some agencies are at less than one-third strength in their “beachhead” teams, according to three people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

But the president was pleased with his first week, especially after Friday night’s confirmation of one of his most controversial Cabinet picks, Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, a top adviser said. His team welcomed headlines about the military deploying to the southern border and live television coverage of a bipartisan roundtable where he sparred with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) over wildfire recovery.

Pete Hegseth appears during a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. He was confirmed as defense secretary late Friday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

“Monday you hit, you flood the zone. Second week you’ll flood the zone,” said Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s first White House chief strategist who now hosts an influential online talk show. “It’s working. It’s just stunning to me what they’re doing, and it’s not getting covered because it’s too much. They’re overwhelming the system.”

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During the campaign, Trump made more than 40 distinct promises for Day 1 actions, and one of his top priorities ahead of his inauguration was to show his supporters that he meant it. Trump on Monday said he rejected advice to spread executive actions out over the first week, insisting on signing 26 on Inauguration Day.

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White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller led policy preparations during the transition and personally drafted or coordinated most of the executive orders Trump signed Monday evening, according to White House officials. Miller did not respond to requests for comment.

Many of the actions overlapped detailed preparations by right-wing think tanks, including the policy blueprint Project 2025. Out of 52 presidential directives (excluding pardons and appointments) that Trump signed by Friday, 28 contained language resembling text published as part of Project 2025, according to a Washington Post analysis. They include withdrawing from the World Health Organization and Paris Climate Accord. Trump rescinded a Biden administration executive order creating a gender-focused advisory council and a 1965 executive order on contracting discrimination that were specifically identified in Project 2025.

Similarly, the new administration started firing senior civil servants citing career officials using a legal theory gaining popularity among right-wing lawyers and advocated in Project 2025. The firing notices cited the president’s inherent power under the U.S. Constitution rather than any specific legal authority.

Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, arrives at a New York courthouse Wednesday for a pretrial conference hearing in his fraud case stemming from a fundraising effort to build a border wall. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

“It’s called Project 2025, but it’s bigger than that,” Bannon said, crediting Miller for the ambitious policy agenda along with budget director nominee Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America and agriculture secretary nominee Brooke Rollins’s America First Policy Institute. “This was a vast effort to think through the executive actions. We’ve had four years, and this is what you see.”

Trump and his advisers repeatedly disavowed Project 2025 during the campaign as it became a frequent target for Democratic attacks. But several top incoming officials, including Miller, Vought and “border czar” Tom Homan, contributed to the Project 2025 coalition. The first White House official said the think tanks were taking signals from the Trump campaign’s stated agenda.

“Good ideas are good ideas, it doesn’t matter where they originated,” a second White House official said.

Democratic senators emphasized Project 2025 in criticizing Vought’s nomination, with 15 mentions and two poster boards during a half-hour news conference on Thursday. Vought did not respond to requests for comment.

The extensive policy prep did not head off legal challenges, in part because they did not go through the conventional policymaking process, which typically includes input from across the executive branch, including legal counsel.

A federal judge on Thursday issued a two-week restraining order blocking Trump from moving forward with an effort to restrict birthright citizenship. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Judge John C. Coughenour wrote. “Where were the lawyers when this decision was being made?”

Washington state attorney General Nick Brown speaks at a news conference Thursday after a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump's executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship. (Lindsey Wasson/AP)

The ruling echoed the court orders during Trump’s first term that blocked his ban on travel from Muslim-majority countries. The travel ban was eventually revised and upheld by the Supreme Court.

The first week of Trump’s second term did not see the large-scale demonstrations of resistance like eight years ago, from the Women’s March the day after his first inauguration to the vigils at courthouses and airports during the chaotic implementation of the travel ban.

School systems around the country have been notifying nervous parents about contingency plans in the event of immigration arrests. Government agencies stopped public communications, environmental lawsuits and foreign aid spending. The Pentagon began sending infantry and combat vehicles to the border.

“People feel frozen,” Rep. Val Hoyle (D-Oregon) said. “All the guardrails are gone.”

The White House doesn’t necessarily see court challenges as a setback. On birthright citizenship and some other new policies, officials were expecting to provoke legal challenges, hoping to test even more sweeping arguments with a federal bench that Trump has dramatically shifted to the right.

Still, many of Trump’s early directives lacked immediate effect, instead calling up reviews and reports that could lead to changes later on. For instance, he directed agencies to propose ways to address inflation and asked for a plan to release secret records on past assassinations.

Trump tours Swannanoa, North Carolina, on Friday, an area devastated by Hurricane Helene, to assess recovery efforts. (Leah Millis/Reuters)

As Trump toured disaster-stricken parts of North Carolina and California on Friday, he told aides that he wanted to eliminate FEMA. Advisers researched the question and came back with a proposal to form a working group to study the agency and make recommendations in three to six months with the benefit of more information, White House officials said.

A small group of White House advisers including Miller are closely directing policy and hiring across the administration, similar to how Trump’s top aides managed his 2024 political campaign. The White House is taking a more targeted approach to place smaller teams of people in positions where they could be more effective, according to an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“In the past, there were a lot of people that went initially and were temporary ‘beachhead’ with no intention of remaining permanent,” another White House official said, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal strategy. “We took a different approach installing people that would remain in the agency. So those who have gotten hired are staying.”

But the close hold has led to bottlenecks, especially in hiring. The holdup in deploying loyal staff to take over the machinery of government refreshed a frustration from Trump’s first term that many alumni were determined not to repeat.

The White House personnel office was slow to vet appointees and process background checks, leading the president to fast-track provisional security clearances on his first night. Some officials started to grumble that the White House personnel chief, former Fox News booker and Trump book publisher Sergio Gor, could have better used the time he spent traveling this month to Greenland, the Danish territory in the North Atlantic that Trump has said he wants the United States to take over. The first White House official said Gor’s trip lasted less than 24 hours.

Gor told Fox News that the administration set a record for 1,300 people hired on the first day and is continuing to vet for the rest of the 4,000 political positions throughout the executive branch. The White House official said Gor gave the interview at the request of the communications team.

Many of the initial executive actions dealt with government operations, such as the language used on federal websites and federal materials, or changing federal hiring and contracting practices. Others restored policies from the end of the first Trump administration that Biden had changed in the intervening four years.

In contrast to last week’s deluge of executive actions, eight years ago Trump signed only one executive order on Inauguration Day and none on his second day. But like the first time, Trump’s initial executive actions have immediately run into legal challenges.

Presidents often treat their first 100 days as their best chance for landmark policy achievements on the immediate heels of electoral mandates. The time pressure is historically more acute for second-term presidents, whose political clout typically peaks as they become lame ducks after Year 2.

But it is not clear how those patterns will apply to Trump, who returned to power after a four-year hiatus with unified control of Congress and a party firmly behind him.

“Clearly, they had done some prep work this time in a way that didn’t happen in 2016 and early 2017,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor at Bowdoin College who has studied executive actions. “You had a whole group of pretty well-funded entities able to focus on what they wanted to do if they could wrest control and could implement Trump’s policies immediately.”

Jacqueline Alemany, Marianne LeVine, Dan Diamond, Matt Viser and Warren Strobel contributed to this report.

3. The Laws of War Are Not Recommendations

Scathing commentary.

The Laws of War Are Not Recommendations

Justin Malzac

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/laws-war-recommendations-justin-malzac-jkj2c/?trackingId=vyeav9YniKfO5rHznxZ91g%3D%3D

January 25, 2025

I’ve finished THE MELTING POINT, and I will have some broader views soon. But for now, I wanted to highlight what I found to be perhaps the most disturbing passages in the book.

In Chapter 5, Gen. McKenzie discusses the lead up to the attack on IRGC Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani. In this section, there many erroneous conclusions with regard to the legality of a series of concurrent actions at this time.

The problematic understanding of this complex situation becomes quickly apparent when Gen. McKenzie describes the legal authority for the strike on Soleimani himself. He correctly identifies POTUS Article II authority and the 2002 AUMF as the domestic legal authority for the strike, which is what OLC argued in their legal memo. However, he completely ignores international law. This is a problem, since the US Constitution makes treaties “the law of the land” which are “equivalent to an act of the legislature.” These obligations cannot simply be ignored. This ignorance or disregard for international law proceeds to develop into concerning judgements. Which brings me to the two issues in question.

The first, informed by external sources, is less egregious. In building courses of action to respond to Iran, one that the CENTCOM team comes up with is to attack the Iranian intelligence vessel Saviz. However, as Gen. McKenzie describes in the book, this ship was only an intelligence ship. Under international law, it would be wholly unlawful to attack such a target without additional justification. Intelligence collection is not prohibited by international law. Most (if not all) states have domestic laws making espionage a criminal act, but that simply allows for states to arrest spies who are within their jurisdiction. Under the UN Charter, force may only be used in self-defense, and intelligence collection on its own does not trigger self-defense. Moreover, the Saviz was a civilian vessel. This means, even at times of war, you must be able to demonstrate Direct Participation in Hostilities before it can become a lawful target. Obviously, you must actually be engaged in hostilities before you can affirm this conclusion. There is information suggesting that the Saviz may have been providing active targeting data to belligerents, which would certainly make it targetable, in a conflict to which the US was also a belligerent. None of this is discussed in the book, and the narrative strongly suggests CENTCOM was going to strike an intelligence vessel, without legal justification, primarily to send a message to the Iranian regime, not because there were any self-defense concerns.

The second issue is worse, and to be frank, inexcusable. As described in the book, as assets were overhead waiting to strike Soleimani, an unknown aircraft enters the battlespace. CENTCOM scrambles a pair of fighter jets to shadow the aircraft and potentially shoot it down, concerned that it might disrupt the prepared strike on the Quds Commander. As reported by Gen. McKenzie, “We also learned that the jet was a much-delayed civilian flight. There were probably at least 50 innocent people on board. Upon learning this, I told the chairman that I recommended that we not consider shooting it down [emphasis added]. … Not even Soleimani it was worth that loss of life.”

Anyone who has even a basic knowledge of the Law of Armed Conflict should be screaming in their skulls. Killing civilians in order to prevent an inconvenience to military operations is a war crime, plain and simple. It is especially egregious when you have other clear options on the table, such as having your fighter aircraft escort the plane out of the operations area. The only proper response in such a case is, “Had I been given the order to shoot down the airliner, I would have not actioned it, as it was my duty as a military officer to not obey blatantly unlawful orders.”

Though he does often try to give some of his narrative a Hollywood veneer, I would like to believe that Gen. McKenzie is not embellishing the details to make his book more exciting. This leads to only two possible alternatives. First is that he doesn’t accurately remember the events, or worse, did not fully understand them at the time. I highly doubt someone reaches the most senior ranks of the DOD being ignorant or forgetful. That only leaves that his staff did not give him the accurate and honest advice he needed for this situation. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for military staffs to accept “find a path to yes” as an absolute. I have even worked with JAGs who would twist themselves into pretzels to argue a “yes” when there wasn’t one. And that’s the important bit, sometimes there is no path to yes. Sometimes the staff needs to have the courage and integrity to say, “No, sir, you can’t do that.” The occasions where there is no possible way to yes, even reaching all the way up the chain for permission, are certainly rare, but NOT non-existent. Is the duty of a commander's staff to provide timely, accurate, and candid advice to the boss, not bend over backwards to give him what they think he wants.

This issue only comes back to the fore with emergent news that the Army is trying to get the Civilian Harm Mitigation Response program in the DOD rescinded. This program is quite literally brand new, with a surge of hiring actions for these essential positions throughout last year. It was mandated by Congress, because the DOD has proven poor at both justifying the use of force and accounting for civilian harm afterwards. These positions are neither redundant nor unnecessary. The CHMR officer is a member of the commander's staff who performs a function similar to, but separate from, the operational law JAG. The CHMR officer does advise on legal issues and civilian concerns related to targeting and military operations. But more importantly, the CHMR officer manages the investigations process that comes after civilian casualties are identified, which has so far been an ineffective and haphazard effort. That the former commander of CENTCOM seems to believe there is any way the DOD or US Government would actively consider shooting down a civilian airline for operational expediency is only a sign of how much the CHMR program is needed.

4. Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over.

Good. Let's stop the madness. Resistance is not the way we should be conducting our politics. Parties should be making the case for their policy preferences to the American people and then they need to be hashed out in Congress.

Every elected leader's oath should include the sentence, "I pledge to make the Constitution work." (I know my naivete is showing).

Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over.

Where has the anti-Trump energy gone?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/magazine/trump-hyperpolitics-resistance.html?

By Ross Barkan

Jan. 25, 2025

When Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, it was too cold to go outside. An arctic chill had enveloped much of the country, and Trump, this time, joined history in the Capitol Rotunda. Thousands of supporters huddled in a nearby arena to watch him address the nation on a screen; there was no outdoor parade. The streets were mostly empty of his critics, and the weather could be blamed for that as well.

But if Washington had been so frigid eight years ago, it’s easy to imagine that liberals would have been willing to risk frostbite. Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, was countered by the Women’s March, which brought nearly 500,000 people to Washington alone, making fleeting icons out of its chief organizers and standing, at the time, as the largest single day of mass protest in American history.

Trump was a crisis and an obsession back then, and the “resistance” to his administration represented the high-water mark for a certain kind of liberalism: one that was sincere and totalizing, full of fury and a thirst for action. Almost every Democrat, from the ex-presidents to the junior staffers, had a blockbuster opinion on how Trump won, why Hillary Clinton failed and where the party had to migrate. They meted out blame: James Comey, the Russians, Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, the white working class. Every Democrat seemed to have a plan for resisting Trump, too — for ensuring his presidency would never have the patina of normalcy.

Just a few months into Trump’s presidency, Al Green, a representative from Texas, called for his impeachment, and rank-and-file Democrats reveled in the speed at which the new, incendiary president might be undone. Not a day went by, it seemed, when there wasn’t a mass march or calls for a fresh demonstration. Twitter and Instagram were hothouses for anti-Trump activism. Causes were minted quickly: standing up for immigrants (which morphed into the drive to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement), or defending women (which fueled the Women’s March and, later, #MeToo), or sustaining Black Lives Matter (which reached its apogee after George Floyd was killed in 2020).

The 2010s resistance to Trump — that sprawling, seemingly irrepressible mass movement that joined everyone from Bush Republicans to Bernie socialists — was like little else in the modern era. It seems even more remarkable in retrospect than it did at the time. This was a period during which there was debate over whether Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary, should even be served at a restaurant.

The Trump movement could be equally fervent. There were obvious policy components that attracted his supporters — nativism, protectionism, railing against elites — and Trump was wise enough to jettison unpopular parts of the old Republican platform, like slashing Social Security and waging new wars overseas. But much of his appeal is personal; to be MAGA is almost to inhabit an identity category. Ardently following Trump can mean caring, suddenly, about all his particular predilections and mounting a fight against the enemy wherever possible — in product boycotts or on street corners, on social media or in NASCAR chants, in school board meetings or at election sites.

There is a term, coined by the leftist writer and academic Anton Jäger, to describe this era: hyperpolitics. It denotes the period between the mid-2010s and the early 2020s, when politics engorged much of the public discourse. This was the moment of all-encompassing, high-stakes political stances, in which people looked out to see good always fighting evil — the far right taking up its tiki torches or antifa roving the streets — and culture turned into a perpetual tinderbox. It was, at times, a performance art, and notably mimetic. Its MAGA caps and pussy hats belonged to the same lineage of letting absolute strangers know exactly what your values are.

In 2025, everything is different. The protests are relatively muted. Few Democrats talk about impeachment or sustain their alarm over incipient fascism, even with Elon Musk possibly gesticulating like a Nazi. For all the spectacle of Trump, this inauguration was, ultimately, a rather ordinary one.

Democrats do not seem as anguished or animated by this Trump Restoration as they were by his ascension; neither are they howling about their own party’s future. The left — looking up after eight years of resisting Trump and finding that in fact, he has expanded his vote share in each general election — is recalibrating. Some progressives have signaled their willingness to work with Trump if he embraces their policy aims, while centrists fret that the Republicans have outflanked them on too many cultural issues. Border policies that were decried as fascistic in Trump’s first term are gradually being embraced, or at least no longer resisted. The old discourse around the “normalization” of Trump is dead; businesses that once stood at a remove from Trump giddily treat him as an ordinary president now.

Republicans, for their part, are still engrossed by Trump, but even their politics feel more muted — at least compared with the 2010s ascendance of the alt-right, back when Milo Yiannopoulos was preening for the cameras. As the Republican coalition has expanded, it has found it harder to hold onto its spirit of righteous insurgency. Americans are no less polarized now. But the sense that the political was entirely personal, that performing politics was vital, seems to be fading. We are exiting the era of hyperpolitics.

All flames — even the hottest and most spectacular — eventually burn out.

Perhaps the most important way to understand the causes that dominated the hyperpolitical era is that they each, in their own ways, could be seen in Manichaean terms. They were moralistic; they possessed heroes and villains. Chief among them was the struggle against Trump, which was framed first and foremost as a struggle against fascism. In the early days of 2017, there was fear over what Trump might do to the country, but this fear mingled with a certain thrill: Those resisting him could feel they were making history, taking up a cause as heroic as the last century’s antifascists had.

To be on one side and against the other was to be consumed with a style of activism that demanded righteousness. Fervor was the currency and “moral clarity” the catchword. Nuance was discarded; against Trump, the world-historical menace, who had time for it? By 2020, stopping Trump was the overriding theme of the election, with the pandemic as the inescapable backdrop. In that same year came the killing of Floyd, triggering the largest mass protests in American history.

Conservatives, too, mobilized fully on the cultural terrain, fighting over school curriculums and library contents, bashing any corporation that seemed too socially liberal, treating the consumption of ivermectin as a form of political resistance.

But those same pathologies did not take over the 2024 presidential election. It had its culture-war fodder and circumstantial peculiarity — the 11th-hour Kamala Harris ascension, Trump’s third straight nomination — but in the end it proved rather ordinary. Its discourse was dominated by inflation, immigration and even trade policy. Some post-election analyses homed in on cultural issues, especially Trump’s attack on trans rights, but the consensus, in the end, was that the electorate had cared more about material concerns, like the cost of living or the state of the southern border.

Now that it’s done, with relatively few on the left genuinely shocked by Trump’s win, accommodation and acceptance are the new watchwords. There is chatter about deal making, whether it’s from Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor who is a probable 2028 candidate, or Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts progressive who was a leading light of the 2010s resistance. (Senate Democrats who said similar things in 2016 tended to be drowned out by those promising resistance.) Hardly anyone is being tagged as a fascist collaborator for openly musing on how to work with the second Trump administration; the old psychology around complicity, from back when visiting the White House could be equated to lunching with Goebbels, has melted away.

It’s remarkable, in fact, that despite all its fervor, the era of hyperpolitics did not leave behind much that was durable. Many of its leaders have fallen out of public view; there is no equivalent of a 1960s “civil rights generation” to carry the work forward. Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March do not stand, in 2025, as well-wired, fully functioning political organizations, able to organize mass marches at a moment’s notice.

In that hyperpolitical time, Jäger wrote, very few people were “involved in the sort of organized conflicts of interests that we would once have described, in a classical, 20th-century sense, as ‘politics.’” There were arguments about morality, not policy or governance. There was talk of expanding the welfare stare, certainly, but Sanders’s Medicare for All was not at the heart of these fights, nor was rolling back globalization, as with the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization. The hyperpolitical left wasn’t even reliably excited by the Biden administration’s concrete actions — its industrial policy or its tranches of cash for roads, bridges and public transportation.

The drama surrounding antifascism faded; now it can seem tired and alarmist to warn that Trump will end free elections. Another standard reflex, under hyperpolitics, was to attribute much of Trump’s popularity to racism, but that argument has struggled to sustain itself: Trump has, in each successive general election, increased his vote share with nonwhite working-class voters, flipping majority-Latino counties, attracting far more Asian voters and even making inroads with Black men.

The corporations and politicians that once paid lip service to the values of alarmed liberals now feel free to reverse course. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, went on Joe Rogan’s show to express his desire for a corporate culture that celebrates masculinity and “aggression.” After the election, the Massachusetts Democrat Seth Moulton reacted to the clash over trans rights — which Trump’s campaign appeared to successfully exploit — by declaring that he didn’t want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” He was, of course, condemned by some. But the backlash he faced was nothing akin to what he might have encountered a few years ago. The activist energy has leaked away.

The lack of grandiose rancor between Trump and the Democrats may also be manifesting within the party itself. Remarkably, there is little outward agonizing over what comes next, and what the party should resemble in the coming years. The Democratic National Committee will be the locus of opposition to Trump and chart the party’s future, but the contest for its chair has, to the surprise of many, been tame. It pits Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, against Ken Martin, the chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The two have much in common and few ideological disagreements. They clash on mechanics and how beholden they might be to national consultants or other state party chairs. Otherwise, beyond their ages and home states, it is difficult to tell them apart.

Such a tepid matchup is another thing that would have been unimaginable eight years ago. Back then, Keith Ellison, a congressman and Sanders acolyte, was in a seismic struggle with Tom Perez, a former Obama administration official, for leadership. Each side spoke of the existential. It was time to save the country, which meant the ideological direction of the party was freighted with importance: Would Democrats embrace uncompromising progressivism or establishmentarian liberalism? Try to reach working-class voters by railing against corporate power, or dominate the suburban vote as the party of conventionality? Across Trump’s first term, we saw an internecine war that boiled down to an argument on how best to defeat Trump himself. This was the shadow that hung over the 2020 presidential race and the upstart primaries that brought leftist superstars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the public eye.

Ken v. Ben lacks those kinds of stakes, barely captivating the 450-odd D.N.C. members who will actually decide the outcome. Despite a clear sense that the habits of the last era have failed the party, some of them seem hard for Democrats to kick. Wikler recently posted on X that he would lift up the Democratic Party’s “full coalition,” checking off “Black, Latino, Native, AANHPI, LGBTQ, Youth, Interfaith, Ethnic, Rural, Veteran, and Disability representation.” It was a throwback to a kind of politics that soothed Democrats throughout the 2010s but could not halt the progression of the Trump right — the kind of identitarian inclusiveness that does more on a moral, symbolic, hyperpolitical level than it does to offer anything of political substance to the groups in question. Perhaps it was comforting to some, but for voters — and those who couldn’t decode every abbreviation or wondered why the “interfaith” were their own subset of the coalition — it was surely perplexing.

What lies ahead, it seems, is a cooling, characterized less by dejection than by a sober realization that whatever was tried before simply didn’t work. It is challenging, after all, to maintain a perpetual state of alarm and tell voters that every election might be the last one. The anti-Trump resistance, on its own terms, was a failure. Trump is here, yet again, and he’s a popular vote champion this time.

What comes next might be a more conventional politics — one still grounded in resistance, but perhaps of a quieter type. When Trump signed his executive order to end birthright citizenship, the governors and attorneys general of more than 20 states sued to stop him. Mass protest wasn’t required, nor were calls for a fresh antifascist movement. The work was merely done. Democrats seemed to be saying, implicitly, that this was enough: action without performance.

The cyclical nature of American politics promises that even Trump’s moment in the sun will last only so long. If he stumbles, 2026 may see more Democrats in Congress and an end to the G.O.P.’s ability to pass significant legislation. What is probably not soon returning, regardless, is the white-hot activism of the last decade. Politics will be the static, crackling in the background. It won’t be everything, anymore.

See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, U.S. Politics, Democratic Party, Republican Party, X (Formerly Twitter), Keith Ellison

5. Ex-spies say suburban D.C. casino would put nation’s secrets at risk

NIMBY. :-)

Ex-spies say suburban D.C. casino would put nation’s secrets at risk

Valerie Plame and more than 100 other former CIA, defense and intelligence figures say a Tysons casino would be a too-convenient temptation.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/01/20/virginia-tysons-casino-spies-plame/https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/01/20/virginia-tysons-casino-spies-plame/

January 21, 2025

9 min

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A group of ex-spies says a casino in Tysons could create a national security threat. (Alex Brandon/AP)

By Laura Vozzella and Teo Armus

RICHMOND — Forget what you’ve seen in every James Bond movie: Spies and casinos don’t mix. At least they shouldn’t mix, according to real-life agents fighting a proposed Fairfax County casino as a national security threat.

Home to CIA headquarters, the National Counterterrorism Center, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and countless supersecret defense and intelligence contractors, the D.C. suburb probably boasts more security clearances than anywhere else in America, says a group of ex-spies, who warn in a letter to state and local officials that building a casino in Tysons could lead those secret-keepers astray.

“The proximity of a Tysons casino to a significant population of government, military, and contract officials with access to highly secretive government intelligence, diplomatic, and defense information will not only attract organized crime — casinos always do — but also adversarial intelligence services looking to recruit those with such access whom they hope to blackmail,” reads the letter, sent to Fairfax officials Thursday and to state officials late last month by a newly formed group named National Security Leaders for Fairfax.

Among the 109 signatories is one of America’s best known ex-spies: Valerie Plame.

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State Senate Majority Leader Scott A. Surovell (D-Fairfax), whose bill to allow the county to consider a casino advanced out of a Senate subcommittee Monday and will go before the General Laws and Technology Committee on Wednesday, dismisses that argument as “NIMBYism dressed up like spy warfare.”

He says the nation is in big trouble if convenient gambling can corrupt Fairfax-based spies, noting that gaming options that are already within easy reach.

“We already have a massive slots parlor 45 minutes west in West Virginia, MGM [casino] right over the river [in Maryland] and sports gaming on every phone in the state,” he said. “So I guess the Chinese already know everything.”

Casino foes concede that any Northern Virginian with both a security clearance and an itch to gamble need not go far to scratch it. But they say the temptations would be magnified if a casino rises right in the heart of Tysons — an area so thick with secrets that digging for a Metrorail extension years ago seemed to unearth top-security cable lines.

“You could go on your lunch break, right? Or happy hour after work,” said Sen. Jennifer B. Boysko (D-Fairfax), a leading opponent whose district abuts a potential site near the Spring Hill Metro station.

Fairfax County was famously home to at least one turncoat spy, Robert Hanssen, who used Foxstone Park near his home to dead-drop the secrets he sold to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds. Casinos were not part of his saga, but gambling debts drove at least seven Americans to sell government secrets to the Soviet Union, according to a 1992 report by the Defense Technical Information Center, which the National Security Leaders for Fairfax noted in their letter.

“Problem gamblers who go into deep debt and/or fear losing their clearances and jobs if their gambling problem comes to light are prime targets for compromise and recruitment by Russia, China and others who would do us ill,” Sally K. Horn, former senior director of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, said in an email to The Washington Post.

Horn is co-chairwoman of National Security Leaders for Fairfax, along with Anne Gruner, former deputy director of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center.

National security is hardly the only basis for objection to Surovell’s bill, which would allow Fairfax’s Board of Supervisors to call a referendum on a casino and give county voters the final say.

Virginia was one of the nation’s last holdouts against casinos, opening the door for them just four years ago as a way to create jobs and tax revenue in economically distressed communities. So far three are up and running — in Bristol, Danville and Portsmouth — a fourth was approved but remains unbuilt in Norfolk, and a fifth got the green light from voters in Petersburg in November.

Tysons would make for a vastly different No. 6, smack in the center of the state’s economic engine and home to 10 Fortune 500 companies, more than anyplace else in Virginia.

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“What we’ve done in Tysons is, we’ve tried to create the commercial hub of the commonwealth of Virginia,” Fairfax Supervisor James N. “Jimmy” Bierman Jr. (D-Dranesville) said at a news conference with casino opponents in Richmond on Wednesday. “The Tysons strip — just like the Las Vegas Strip — threatens that plan. It takes what is working in Virginia and it throws it out.”

Comstock Holding Cos., a real estate development company, is pushing for the project, though it would be up to the Fairfax board to issue a request for proposals (RFP) and choose a specific plan before putting it to voters.

Comstock chief executive Christopher Clemente told The Post in an interview Friday that his company would respond to such an RFP if the bill passes. “I would be surprised if anybody could compete with us,” he said.

A two-page flier circulated in the Capitol by Comstock lobbyists proposes a casino as part of a mixed-use development of 6 million to 8 million square feet, including a 6,000-seat concert venue, a 600-room luxury hotel and spa, a convention center, dining, and a mix of luxury and workforce housing.

A state study conducted in 2019 estimated that a casino in Northern Virginia could generate as much as $155 million in annual tax revenue and create at least 3,200 jobs. Clemente offered a higher tax revenue estimate, predicting $400 million to $500 million a year from the casino alone. On top of that would be revenue from real estate, room, sales and ticket taxes, he said.

Clemente said that he would not seek public financing for the project and that the thousands of construction and casino jobs would be unionized. Critics question how he can make that promise for the casino jobs since the operator has not been selected.

Comstock Hospitality Holdings and a political action committee primarily bankrolled by Clemente, Building a Remarkable Virginia PAC, have given lavishly to legislators on both sides of the aisle: more than $835,000 since 2023. The company has five registered lobbyists working the halls of the Capitol, while MGM Resorts International, which operates the MGM National Harbor hotel and casino in National Harbor, Maryland, has a half-dozen lobbying against the bill.

Surovell’s bill does not explicitly limit the casino to the Tysons area but effectively makes it possible to build such a project on only a few potential sites, including property Comstock controls but has not yet purchased.

A spokesman for Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who has an estate in Great Falls, signaled that the governor takes a dim view of the casino’s prospects.

“There’s a strong and vocal opposition to the idea of a casino in Northern Virginia,” Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez said in an email to The Post. “The Governor would be surprised if any local legislators ignored that.”

It is also unclear how the proposal would fare if it makes its way out of the General Assembly and to the Fairfax board, which would need to sign off before voters could have their say.

Fairfax Board Chairman Jeffrey C. McKay (D-At Large) declined an interview request but pointed to a letter he sent to General Assembly leaders about a similar bill last year which he intends to recirculate in coming weeks. He wrote then that the county generally welcomes any additional legislative authority from Richmond but “did not seek” out the ability to hold a casino referendum.

“Since a community engagement process was not conducted prior to the bill being introduced as it was in other jurisdictions, we believe the bill in its current form is likely to result in strong community opposition to the future referendum,” McKay’s letter said.

Casino backers have pitched the project as a way to diversify Fairfax’s sluggish tax revenue streams, which were hit hard by empty offices during the pandemic and have increasingly relied on higher property taxes paid by homeowners.

But Virginia — not Fairfax — would collect about 70 percent of any tax revenue from a casino, McKay wrote. Other potential uses for likely casino sites, such as the new class A office space and performing arts or sports facilities nearby, could generate more tax revenue for county coffers, critics say.

Other local leaders appear to have taken a similar tack as McKay. “The majority of our community hasn’t weighed in yet because it hasn’t come to us yet,” said Supervisor Dalia A. Palchik (D-Providence), who represents much of Tysons.

Supervisor Pat Herrity (Springfield), the body’s sole Republican, said he was “still in what I call an evaluation stage. There is a great PR battle being waged in Fairfax County between the casinos on this side of the river and the other side of the river.”

Herrity, who is seeking the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor this year, said he once had top-secret clearance as a government contractor and was asked during screening if he had gambling issues or had spent much time in casinos. And, he noted, “the fact is we have casinos within a very short driving distance of Tysons Corner already.”

But casinos might also cause other kinds of security issues, he said, bringing crime and human trafficking as well as transportation challenges.

“Part of the problem for me, as somebody who doesn’t gamble, who’s somewhat morally opposed to gambling, is the horse has left the barn” with the rise of mobile betting, he said.

In the time he spent laying out his stance, Herrity added, it would have been possible to place a dozen bets from the palm of his hand.

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By Laura Vozzella

Laura Vozzella covers Virginia politics for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, she was a political columnist and food writer at the Baltimore Sun, and she has also worked for the Associated Press, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Hartford Courant.follow on X@LVozzella

By Teo Armus

Teo Armus covers people, issues and politics in Northern Virginia for The Washington Post. He joined The Post as a staff writer in 2019.follow on X@teoarmus

6. Trump Leaves Democrats Dazed and on the Defensive

Shock and awe.

Revolutionary shock and and awe.

Trump Leaves Democrats Dazed and on the Defensive

Locked out of power in Washington, the party is struggling to agree on a unified message of opposition. Some of its lawmakers are even telling Republicans they want to work together.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/us/politics/trump-democrats-republicans.html?smtyp=cur&smid=bsky-nytimes

Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, a Democrat, used his annual State of the State speech this week to defend immigrants. Many other Democratic leaders have been quieter in their pushback to the new administration.Credit...Morry Gash/Associated Press

By Reid J. Epstein

Reporting from Washington

Published Jan. 24, 2025

Updated Jan. 25, 2025, 10:09 a.m. ET

Sign up for the Tilt newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, makes sense of the latest political data. Get it in your inbox.

Follow our live coverage of the latest news on President Trump.

As President Trump pushes aggressively to reshape the federal government, Democrats have retreated into a political crouch that reflects their powerlessness in Washington.

Far from rising up in outrage, the opposition party’s lawmakers have taken a muted wait-and-see approach as Mr. Trump tries to end birthright citizenship, halt diversity programs in the federal government, undo foreign policy alliances and seek retribution against his perceived political enemies.

In some cases, Democrats are even making a show of working with Republicans.

Scores of them voted for the Laken Riley Act, which allows the deportation of unauthorized migrants who are accused but not yet convicted of crimes. Others volunteered to work with Republicans on a border security bill. And while Democrats are fighting the nominations of Pete Hegseth as defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard as national intelligence director, Mr. Trump’s other cabinet appointees appear on a glide path to confirmation without much vocal resistance.

It is telling that in the opening days of the new Trump administration, the loudest pushback to the president’s policies has come not from an elected Democrat but from the bishop at Washington National Cathedral, who asked Mr. Trump directly during a service to have mercy on immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q. children.

“We’re no longer trying to win a news cycle,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat who has become an outspoken messenger for his party on social media. “We’re trying to win an argument, and that’s going to take time and patience and discipline.”

A group of 70 progressive House Democrats and six Senate Democrats gathered at the Capitol on Thursday to try to settle on a single message of opposition to Mr. Trump as he takes aim at myriad liberal constituencies and priorities. The assembled Democrats concluded that their best course of action was to focus on economic concerns, which they believe led to the party’s November defeats.

Representative Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat who is the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, convened the meeting. He said Mr. Trump’s control of the federal government, combined with his allies’ ownership of major social media networks, meant that Democrats must be in lock step, with a focused message of opposition for voters.

“It’s going to be really critical for Democrats to point out what Trump’s real intentions are, which is to screw people over on pocketbook issues in service of the mega-rich,” Mr. Casar said.

Image

Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan said that fellow Democrats “can’t be in a constant state of hysteria,” but added, “We also don’t want to be Pollyanna.”Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

The Democratic stance is a stark change from the last time Mr. Trump came to office. That period, in 2017, was defined by public demonstrations of resistance, a flurry of new liberal groups and a palpable anger over an election outcome many in the party saw as illegitimate.

This time, Mr. Trump won the popular vote and there have been no murmurs of significant foreign interference in the election. And he has unleashed so many new policies and executive orders that Democrats have been left in a daze.

“It feels like we’re battling the L.A. fires, and the wind is 100 miles per hour, and it’s zero percent contained,” said Matt Bennett, a founder of Third Way, a center-left think tank. “We’re just going to have to wait for the wind to die down a little. It’s going to be a minute before Democrats can mount an effective response.”

Some Democrats do believe Mr. Trump has already made significant mistakes that will cause political damage for him and Republicans.

Trump Administration: Live Updates

Updated

Jan. 25, 2025, 1:28 p.m. ETJan. 25, 2025

His far-reaching pardons for people convicted of attacking police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have already led to uncomfortable responses from Republicans. Democrats are also quick to point out that few of Mr. Trump’s early actions have addressed inflation or grocery prices — top issues for voters that he pledged during the campaign to prioritize.

And in a sign that substantive pushback to Mr. Trump’s policies is likely to come from state capitals rather than from Washington, 22 state attorneys general sued the federal government to block Mr. Trump’s executive order directing the government not to recognize U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants as citizens. (However, not all of these left-leaning attorneys general wanted to talk about their legal challenge — in Washington, D.C., the typically voluble top prosecutor did not issue a news release and declined to discuss it.)

In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, devoted 11 paragraphs in his annual State of the State speech on Wednesday night to defending immigrants’ contributions to Wisconsin — though he did not mention Mr. Trump by name.

“Wisconsin, we cannot allow reckless decisions in Washington to stymie our economic momentum,” Mr. Evers said. “I will not compromise on our Wisconsin values of treating people with kindness, dignity, empathy and respect.”

And in Newark, Mayor Ras J. Baraka on Thursday denounced an immigration raid in which he said a U.S. military veteran was detained.

“Newark will not stand by idly while people are being unlawfully terrorized,” Mr. Baraka said.

Democratic officials whose constituents are being directly targeted by Mr. Trump’s actions are less willing to give the party time to think about how to respond.

Cristóbal Alex, a former Biden administration official who is now the chairman of the Latino Victory Fund, ticked through Mr. Trump’s early moves: binding himself to billionaire tech executives, ending Biden-mandated caps on insulin prices, pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters and seeking to end birthright citizenship.

“It’s prime time for Democrats to step it up,” Mr. Alex said.

And yet plenty of Democrats want to make it known that they are trying to work with the new Trump administration. Thirteen Democratic senators signed a letter to Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican majority leader, asking to be involved in Mr. Trump’s proposed legislation to crack down on the nation’s immigration system.

“We stand ready to work with you,” the senators wrote.

Some Democratic officials ascribed the party’s hesitation and confusion in part to a lack of clarity from their voters.

While anger — and money — drove the so-called Resistance of 2017, Mr. Trump’s second coming has been met by liberal resignation. No one in the world of politics or culture has emerged with a cogent and consistent anti-Trump message since his victory over former Vice President Kamala Harris, and the social media platforms that hosted many of the influencers of eight years ago are now owned by Mr. Trump’s billionaire allies.

Patrick Gaspard, the president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group, said the lack of Democratic mobilization was not surprising, given that few in the party were shocked by Mr. Trump’s 2024 victory. Democrats, he said, must take time to decide how best to oppose him and Republicans.

“This guy is throwing loads of chum in the water, and we can’t go after all of it,” Mr. Gaspard said.

One think tank’s thoughtfulness is another’s hesitation. Rahna Epting, the executive director of MoveOn, a liberal advocacy group, said elected Democrats were trying to determine what their voters want them to do.

“I see Democrats still trying to figure out where to plant their feet on the spectrum of pure opposition and bipartisanship,” Ms. Epting said. “It’s up to constituents and outside groups like MoveOn and others to hold their feet to the fire.”

Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. More about Reid J. Epstein

7. Narco Tribunals: Gender-Based Violence as a Tool of Power in the Favelas

Conclusion:

Overcoming this cycle of violence requires a collective effort that goes beyond punishing those responsible. It is essential to implement policies promoting gender education, economic autonomy, and social inclusion for women in vulnerable territories. Only by addressing the structural roots of this violence, including machismo and state neglect, can we construct a scenario where such practices no longer find a place to exist.

The case of women with shaved heads serves as a stark reminder of the urgency to rethink power dynamics perpetuating gender inequality. Let this tragic episode act as a catalyst for a deeper debate about women’s rights across all spheres of society.

Narco Tribunals: Gender-Based Violence as a Tool of Power in the Favelas

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/01/24/narco-tribunals-gender-based-violence-as-a-tool-of-power-in-the-favelas/

by Júlia Quirino

01.24.2025 at 10:33pm

The recent release of videos showing women subjected to a degrading act of violence, with their hair forcibly shaved in the Serrinha community in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone, has sparked a necessary debate about the power dynamics perpetuating gender oppression in the favelas.

Similar practices have occurred in other historical contexts, such as in post-World War II France, when women who had relationships with German soldiers were publicly humiliated with the same type of punishment.[1] These practices reflect the intersection of social control exercised by Illegal Armed Groups (IAGs)[2] and the structural machismo that dominates urban violence. Furthermore, they expose power dynamics that normalize oppression against women in these territories.

Criminal Governance and Gender-Based Violence

Criminal governance practices are structured to maintain territorial control and discipline bodies and behaviors. This criminal governance, as discussed by Júlia Quirino in her dissertation “Crime Panopticon,”[3] draws on Michel Foucault’s reflections on biopolitics, describing how power regulates the lives and behaviors of individuals, shaping their choices and conduct.[4]

In territories controlled by drug trafficking, this governance assumes a peculiar form, blending elements of sovereign and disciplinary control. It employs tactics designed to maintain internal order, often rooted in patriarchal norms that perpetuate the marginalization of women.

The case in question involves the so-called ‘trafficking tribunal’ in which gang leaders judge and punish those who violate their rules. Women, in particular, are frequent targets of punishments exploiting their physical and social vulnerabilities. This dynamic reflects a patriarchy that limits women’s choices and reinforces their subjugation. The act of forcibly shaving a woman’s hair symbolizes not only submission but also an attempt to publicly dehumanize them as a tool of oppression, reinforcing the hegemonic masculinity that dominates these spaces.

Shaving a woman’s head as punishment for alleged betrayal or gossip is an extreme manifestation of machismo and misogyny, deeply rooted in society. This form of gender-based violence reflects not only the internal dynamics of IAGs but also broader structural issues. Practices like these demonstrate how women are often treated as the “property” of men, subject to imposed norms that limit their autonomy and freedom. In this context, IAGs regulate not only the economic activities and flow of goods within their territories but also the individual choices of residents, shaping their daily lives entirely.

Women in Drug Trafficking: The “Pink Belt”

Historically, women in communities controlled by Illegal Armed Groups (IAGs) have been relegated to passive or supportive roles. This dynamic reflects not only gender oppression but also the hierarchical structures imposed by these groups, which employ disciplinary practices to legitimize their authority within the community.

However, in recent years, there has been a rise in female participation in leadership roles, such as managers, “drug lords,” or bodyguards, although still limited compared to male representation.[5] Despite this increase, women’s involvement in leadership positions in trafficking remains heavily shaped by gender inequality. Data from the National Secretariat of Penal Policies (2022) reveal that 54% of incarcerated women in Brazil were arrested for drug-related offenses, compared to 27.65% of men.[6] These figures highlight the disproportionate impact of criminalization on women, often involved in lower-profile activities within criminal organizations.

The expression “Pink Belt” (“Faixa Rosa”) refers to women directly involved in drug trafficking, especially those carrying rifles. The term alludes to the sling used to hold weapons. The term “Black Belt” (“Faixa Preta”), on the other hand, is used to describe men involved in drug trafficking who carry rifles. Here, “belt” also refers to the weapon sling, while “black” evokes associations with skill and danger. Just as a black belt in martial arts symbolizes mastery, respect, and a high level of expertise, the term conveys an image of armed men as highly skilled and dangerous combatants within criminal organizations. In contrast, “calicas” (“calicos”) represent a different group: women not directly involved in trafficking but connected to the local culture. They attend funk parties and maintain relationships with members of armed groups (IAG).

Rayane Nazareth Cardoso da Silveira, known as “Hello Kitty,” is a prominent example of female leadership in drug trafficking.[7] Described as “beloved,” “vain,” yet also “courageous” and “violent,” she challenged stereotypes associating women in crime with masculinization. The Pink Belt often maintain an appearance considered “feminine,” personalizing weapons with vibrant colors and shiny adornments while adopting active roles in a male-dominated and conflict-ridden environment.

Another striking case is that of Gabrielly Pantoja Machado, known as “Faixa Rosa.” Killed in 2023 during a police operation, she served as a bodyguard for Leonardo Costa Araújo, known as “Pará,” an uncommon role for women in such a high-risk environment. Photos depict Gabrielly holding a rifle, wearing a vest, and adorned with gold chains, reaffirming her influence within the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) and breaking stereotypes associated with passive female roles.

These cases highlight the complex gender dynamics within Illegal Armed Groups (IAGs). While they challenge the traditionally submissive roles of women in these contexts, these figures also reveal how gender inequality persists, even when women occupy leadership positions. Furthermore, the media visibility of these women raises questions about how they are represented, either perpetuating or challenging narratives that link gender, power, and criminality.

The Responsibility of the State and Society

Although these practices are carried out by IAGs, they are not detached from state failures. The absence of effective public policies to ensure women’s safety and rights creates a vacuum filled by groups like the Red Command. Moreover, the stigmatization of women in these communities as “accomplices” or “property” of traffickers reinforces narratives of blame that hinder social mobilization in defense of their rights. Society must break away from this reductionist perspective and recognize that women are often victims of multiple forms of systemic violence.

Conclusion: The Path to Change

Overcoming this cycle of violence requires a collective effort that goes beyond punishing those responsible. It is essential to implement policies promoting gender education, economic autonomy, and social inclusion for women in vulnerable territories. Only by addressing the structural roots of this violence, including machismo and state neglect, can we construct a scenario where such practices no longer find a place to exist.

The case of women with shaved heads serves as a stark reminder of the urgency to rethink power dynamics perpetuating gender inequality. Let this tragic episode act as a catalyst for a deeper debate about women’s rights across all spheres of society.

Sources

Michel Foucault, Vigiar e Punir: história da violência nas prisões. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1995.

“Police investigate video of women whose hair was forcibly shaved in a Rio community.” G1 (Globo). 7 January 2025, https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2025/01/07/policia-investiga-video-de-mulheres-que-tiveram-cabelos-raspados-a-forca-em-comunidade-do-rio.ghtml.

“Senad discute situação de mulheres encarceradas no contexto de drogas no Brasil.” Brasília: Ministério da Justiça e Segurança Pública [Ministry of Justice and Public] Security, 2022]. 5 December 2023, Referring to National Secretariat of Penal Policies. Report on the situation of incarceration in Brazil. Brasília: Ministry of Justice and Public Security, 2022, https://www.gov.br/mj/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/senad-discute-situacao-de-mulheres-encarceradas-no-contexto-de-drogas-no-brasil.

Júlia Quiino, “Crime Panopticon: the criminal governance of the Red Command in Rio de Janeiro.” Unpublished dissertation. 2024.

Fabrice Virgili, La France “virile”: des femmes tondues à La Libération. Paris: Payot, 2000.

Alba Zaluar, “Mulher de Bandido: crônica de uma cidade menos musical [Bandit’s Woman: chronicle of a less musical city].” TFeminist Studies, Vol.1, no. 1, pp. 135–142, 1993. Available at: http://educa.fcc.org.br/pdf/ref/v01n01/v01n01a08.pdf.

Endnotes

N.B. An earlier version of this research note appeared on the author’s blog, Júlia Quiino tagged under Governança Criminal on 11 January 2025. See: https://juliaquirino.com.br/tribunal-do-trafico-violencia-de-genero-como-ferramenta-de-poder-nas-favelas/.

[1] Fabrice Virgili, La France “virile”: des femmes tondues à La Libération. Paris: Payot, 2000.

[2] Illegal Armed Groups (IAGs) or Grupos armados ilegais (GAI) in Portuguese are also known as Criminal Armed Groups or Grupos armados criminosos (CAGs). See John P. Sullivan. “Crime wars: Operational perspectives on criminal armed groups in Mexico and Brazil.” International Review of the Red Cross. IRRC No.23, June 2023, https://international-review.icrc.org/articles/crime-wars-operational-perspectives-923.

[3] Júlia Quiino, “Crime Panopticon: the criminal governance of the Red Command in Rio de Janeiro.” Unpublished dissertation. 2024.

[4] Michel Foucault, Vigiar e Punir: história da violência nas prisões. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1995.

[5] Alba Zaluar, “Mulher de Bandido: crônica de uma cidade menos musical [Bandit’s Woman: chronicle of a less musical city].” eFeminist Studies, Vol.1, no. 1, p. 135.

[6] “Senad discute situação de mulheres encarceradas no contexto de drogas no Brasil.” Brasília: Ministério da Justiça e Segurança Pública [Ministry of Justice and Public] Security, 2022]. 5 December 2023, Referring to National Secretariat of Penal Policies. Report on the situation of incarceration in Brazil. Brasília: Ministry of Justice and Public Security, 2022, https://www.gov.br/mj/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/senad-discute-situacao-de-mulheres-encarceradas-no-contexto-de-drogas-no-brasil.

[7] Rayane Nazareth Cardozo da Silveira was a Brazilian gospel singer with links to the Comando Vermelho and evangelical Christianity. She was killed in a police action on 16 June 2021 in São Gonçalo, Rio de Janeiro.

Tags: Brazil

About The Author

Júlia Quirino
Júlia Quirino is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ); she holds a master’s degree in Strategic Studies from the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), and a bachelor’s degree in Defense and International Strategic Management from UFRJ. She is an associate researcher at the Center for the Study of Citizenship, Conflict, and Urban Violence (NECVU) at UFRJ. She is also part of the regional civil society network for the implementation of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime in the Americas. Her research focuses on the governance practices of the criminal gang Comando Vermelho in Rio de Janeiro.

8. 'The Cartels' are Not Foreign Terrorist Organizations

So I guess if the criminalization of certain commodities is the problem we should just "uncriminalize" them (I know decriminalize is the correct word but "uncriminalize" just felt right for sarcastic effect).

Excerpts:

This perspective fails to account for the reality of globalization, where organized crime transcends national borders and operates in a fluid, decentralized manner. The notion of ‘foreign gangs’ (much like that of ‘foreign powers’) as the primary assailants is increasingly irrelevant in a world where criminal networks are often translocal and interconnected - in my latest work I am calling it ubiquitous.

Such a framework does not adequately capture the nuances of contemporary organized crime, which often exists in a gray area between legitimate commerce and illegal activity, complicating our understanding of their impact on security.

Additionally, attributing an agency of 'dangerousness' to these organizations overlooks a critical factor: the criminalization of the commodities they trade. Many of the activities associated with these groups, such as drug trafficking, are driven by demand in the market rather than an inherent malevolence of the organizations themselves - even when their individuals are ‘bad’ or ‘evil’, the drives around organized crime remain structural, thus limiting the agency of individuals involved (think, for example, the necessity for organized crime groups trading in cocaine via seaports to ‘choose’ their seaport of choice - they have to go with the market!).

'The Cartels' are Not Foreign Terrorist Organizations

https://annasergi.substack.com/p/the-cartels-are-not-foreign-terrorist

Why Donald Trump's latest order on designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations is Misguided.

Anna Sergi

Jan 21, 2025

This is Donald Trump during his inauguration speech announcing an executive order to designate cartels and ‘foreign gangs’ as terrorist organisations.

The White House has already published the order and you can find it here titled DESIGNATING CARTELS AND OTHER ORGANIZATIONS AS FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS AND SPECIALLY DESIGNATED GLOBAL TERRORISTS.

This is a very bad idea.

The designation of ‘international cartels’ and certain transnational organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) raises significant concerns, particularly regarding the conflation of organized crime and terrorism. While both phenomena involve violence and illicit activities, they are fundamentally different in their motivations, structures, and implications for national security but more crucially for human security.

First, the inflation of the term 'terrorism' in this context dilutes its meaning.

Terrorism is typically characterized by acts intended to instill fear for political purposes, often targeting civilians to achieve ideological goals. In contrast, organized crime - and the cartels Trumps is talking about are ultimately organized crime groups (but I’ll come back to that) - primarily seeks profit through illegal activities, such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, or extortion.

While the violence perpetrated by criminal organizations can be brutal and destabilizing, it does not inherently carry the same political intent or ideological underpinnings that define terrorism. By labeling these groups as terrorists, we risk oversimplifying their complex motivations and the socio-economic conditions that give rise to their activities. And more importantly we risk confusing the responses to mitigate the harm they cause.

Moreover, the rhetoric surrounding this executive order echoes outdated notions of security that address threats in a binary framework of 'us' versus 'them.' In Trump style of course.

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash

This perspective fails to account for the reality of globalization, where organized crime transcends national borders and operates in a fluid, decentralized manner. The notion of ‘foreign gangs’ (much like that of ‘foreign powers’) as the primary assailants is increasingly irrelevant in a world where criminal networks are often translocal and interconnected - in my latest work I am calling it ubiquitous.

Such a framework does not adequately capture the nuances of contemporary organized crime, which often exists in a gray area between legitimate commerce and illegal activity, complicating our understanding of their impact on security.

Additionally, attributing an agency of 'dangerousness' to these organizations overlooks a critical factor: the criminalization of the commodities they trade. Many of the activities associated with these groups, such as drug trafficking, are driven by demand in the market rather than an inherent malevolence of the organizations themselves - even when their individuals are ‘bad’ or ‘evil’, the drives around organized crime remain structural, thus limiting the agency of individuals involved (think, for example, the necessity for organized crime groups trading in cocaine via seaports to ‘choose’ their seaport of choice - they have to go with the market!).

The harmful effects of these commodities on society, including addiction and violence, can often be traced back to systemic issues such as poverty, lack of opportunity, and ineffective governance. By focusing solely on the organizations and their ‘attacks’, we risk ignoring, again, the broader socio-economic context that fuels their operations.

Furthermore, this approach may lead to counterproductive policies that prioritize punitive measures over comprehensive solutions. A singular focus on designating groups as terrorists may result in increased militarization of law enforcement and border security, diverting resources from addressing the underlying issues that drive organized crime. Instead of fostering cooperation and dialogue to mitigate these challenges, such policies could exacerbate tensions and lead to further violence.

In conclusion, while the threats posed by organized crime and cartels are real and significant for today’s US as other parts of the world, conflating them with terrorism is a misguided approach that oversimplifies a complex issue. It is essential to recognize the distinct nature of organized crime and terrorism, understanding that effective policy should prioritize human security rather than solely focusing on international security frameworks.

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9. 39 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America

This is from 2018/2023 but I think it is worth reading again.

The USSR/Russia has been playing the long game of political warfare. We thought we won it in 1991 but they just continued to play while we took a knee.

39 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America

bigthink.com

The Present — January 13, 2023

A disturbing interview given by a KGB defector in 1984 describes America of today and outlines four stages of mass brainwashing used by the KGB.

Key Takeaways

A former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov claimed in 1984 that Russia has a long-term goal of ideologically subverting the U.S.
He described the process as “a great brainwashing” that has four basic stages.
The first stage, he said, is called “demoralization,” which would take about 20 years to achieve.

This article was first published on Big Think in July 2018. It was updated in January 2023.

In 1954, early on in the Cold War, the Soviet Union created the Committee for State Security, more commonly known in the West as the KGB. The group came to oversee the Soviet Union’s internal security, secret police, and domestic and foreign intelligence operations.

Across the world, the KGB did whatever it could to thwart pro-Western and anti-Soviet political movements and figures. The group would assassinate political leaders with cyanide and other weapons. It would fund and arm leftist groups, especially those in developing nations. And the KGB successfully established moles in U.S. intelligence agencies, though the exact number still isn’t — and may never be — known for sure.

Also unclear were the group’s long-term plans involving the U.S. One glimpse, however, comes from a former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, who defected to Canada in 1970. He claimed to know details of a Soviet plan to undermine the U.S., not on the battlefield but in the psyche of the American public.

In 1984, Bezmenov gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin from which much can be learned today. His most chilling point was that there’s a long-term plan put in play by Russia to defeat America through psychological warfare and “demoralization.” It’s a long game that takes decades to achieve but it may already be bearing fruit.

Bezmenov made the point that the work of the KGB mainly does not involve espionage, despite what our popular culture may tell us. Most of the work,85%of it, was “a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare.”

What does that mean? Bezmenov explained that the most striking thing about ideological subversion is that it happens in the open as a legitimate process. “You can see it with your own eyes,” he said. The American media would be able to see it, if it just focused on it.

Here’s how he further defined ideological subversion:

“What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”

Bezmenov described this process as “a great brainwashing” that has four basic stages. The first stage is called “demoralization” which takes from 15 to 20 years to achieve. According to the former KGB agent, that is the minimum number of years it takes to re-educate one generation of students that is normally exposed to the ideology of its country — in other words, the time it takes to change what the people are thinking.

He used the examples of 1960s hippies coming to positions of power in the 1980s in the government and businesses of America. Bezmenov claimed this generation was already “contaminated” by Marxist-Leninist values. Of course, this claim that many baby boomers are somehow espousing KGB-tainted ideas is hard to believe but Bezmenov’s larger point addressed why people who have been gradually “demoralized” are unable to understand that this has happened to them.

Referring to such people, Bezmenov said:

“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”

Demoralization is a process that is “irreversible.” Bezmenov actually thought (back in 1984) that the process of demoralizing America was already completed. It would take another generation and another couple of decades to get the people to think differently and return to their patriotic American values, claimed the agent.

In what is perhaps a most striking passage in the interview, here’s how Bezmenov described the state of a “demoralized” person:

“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore,” said Bezmenov. “A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his balls then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.”

It’s hard not to see in that the state of many modern Americans. We have become a society of polarized tribes, with some people flat out rejecting facts in favor of narratives and opinions.

Once demoralization is completed, the second stage of ideological brainwashing is “destabilization”. During this two-to-five-year period, asserted Bezmenov, what matters is the targeting of essential structural elements of a nation: economy, foreign relations, and defense systems. Basically, the subverter (Russia) would look to destabilize every one of those areas in the United States, considerably weakening it.

The third stage would be “crisis.” It would take only up to six weeks to send a country into crisis, explained Bezmenov. The crisis would bring “a violent change of power, structure, and economy” and will be followed by the last stage, “normalization.” That’s when your country is basically taken over, living under a new ideology and reality.

This will happen to America unless it gets rid of people who will bring it to a crisis, warned Bezmenov. What’s more “if people will fail to grasp the impending danger of that development, nothing ever can help [the] United States,” adding, “You may kiss goodbye to your freedom.”

It bears saying that when he made this statement, he was warning about baby boomers and Democrats of the time.

In another somewhat terrifying excerpt, here’s what Bezmenov had to say about what is really happening in the United States: It may think it is living in peace, but it has been actively at war with Russia, and for some time:

“Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime,” said the former KGB agent. “False. United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system.”

You can watch the full interview here:

https://youtu.be/bX3EZCVj2XA

In this article

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10. From Z to X: How Russian Information Warfare Primed the World for Trump and Musk

Quite a read.

You can decide whether to read this entire piece or not based on this excerpt:

So, to use a handy analogy from Lord of the Rings, Musk has become a kind of digital necromancer, like the white wizard Saruman, using his privileged position in the West to channel the dark autocracy of Sauron in his Kremlin towers to the east. (Perhaps, as in Tolkien’s epic, Musk deploys an all-seeing ‘Palantir’ courtesy of his tech ally and fellow South African Peter Thiel – whose surveillance company shares that name).

From Z to X: How Russian Information Warfare Primed the World for Trump and Musk

“Money and information are the twin tactical nukes of modern politics” according to Steve Bannon. But the the seeds for this tech dystopia were sown more than a decade ago

https://bylinetimes.com/2025/01/25/how-russian-information-warfare-primed-the-world-for-the-tech-autocracy-of-trump-and-musk/?utm

Peter Jukes

25 January 2025

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Digital Barbecues

The invitation came out of the blue: “His Excellency Ambassador of the Russian Federation requests the pleasure of the company of Mr Peter Jukes at a Digital BBQ.”

Back in December 2015, I had no idea why Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko was inviting me to talk about “social media vs mainstream media” at his sumptuous residence in Kensington Palace Gardens, except that it would have something to do with the fact I had live-tweeted the entire phone-hacking trial from the Old Bailey, and become an advisor to a new start-up journalistic crowdfunding site called Byline.com.

I was wary. I had been to Kyiv just after the Maidan revolution the year before, and was publicly opposed to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. But I was also curious and planned to go, resolving not to take my phone or talk to any attractive Russian women at the event.

Then, something I now look back on with a mixture of regret and relief, I promptly forgot about it.

Thanks to working with Carole Cadwalladr on Project Citizen’s new Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring podcast, I now know the significance of these ‘digital barbecues’ and the role they have played in the decade-long information warfare Vladimir Putin has deployed in the UK, the US, and Europe.

These glamorous events were organised by the first political secretary, Sergei Nalobin, whose activities in trying to funnel money to the Conservative Party are detailed in the podcast by the tireless whistleblower, Sergei Cristo.

Nalobin was behind the scandal-hit ‘Conservative Friends of Russia’ group – a front for the Kremlin’s ‘active measures’ campaign to influence Tory politicians. When that was shut down, he set up the ‘Westminster Russia Forum’, which mainly focused on Nigel Farage’s UKIP and pro-Brexit right-wingers.

Nalobin was a familiar figure around Westminster and interacted with senior Brexiters such as the Vote Leave campaign chief executive Matthew Elliott and its figurehead Boris Johnson.

But Nalobin’s diplomatic visa was rescinded in 2015 and he left under a cloud.

By the time I was invited to this digital barbecue another character, Alexander Udod, had replaced him as political first secretary.

Udod was himself expelled from the UK after the Salisbury Novichok attack three years later. To discover more about Udod’s role in Brexit (no spoilers!), you’ll have to listen to the second half of our podcast series. Suffice it to say, the underlying story of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report is explained by it, and the reasons why Johnson wanted to suppress the report.

But back to those digital barbecues.

Thanks to open-source intelligence, and the testimony of attendees like Steve Lacey (an advertising executive who is the second key whistleblower in our podcast), we now know that the Russian Government wasn’t only trying to pour money into UK politics – it was hoovering up expertise and contacts in the world of social media.

Many influential tech leaders attended these embassy events, including the leading right-wing blogger Paul Staines of Guido Fawkes, whose Messagespace advertising company won a contract to work on Russian Government campaigns.

As Carole Cadwalladr reveals in Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, the Kremlin-funded media company RT (formerly Russia Today) was, at this point, dominating YouTube, having ‘juiced the algorithm’ with disaster videos. It would pay and promote Nigel Farage as a Member of the European Parliament. Along with its sister Kremlin outlet, Sputnik, RT would be a major influencer in the EU Referendum debate, with a reach bigger than ITV News or Sky News.

Sergei Cristo. Photo: Sheridan Flynn

Meanwhile, in plush offices in a St Petersburg suburb, the oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin was starting up his notorious troll farm, hiring hundreds of foreign-language Russian students to troll English-language social media and news commentary.

As multiple FBI and congressional investigations have shown, Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency sent personnel to the US to set up fake Facebook groups and spent $50 million promoting discord in American society, backing the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

No such official investigation with legal powers has ever been conducted into Russian interference on this side of the Atlantic.

The 2018 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s final parliamentary report into disinformation and fake news did conclude that the Kremlin probably had attempted to swing the referendum vote.

But that is the extent of the investigation, apart from the heavily redacted Russia Report.

Meanwhile, whatever Nalobin learned at those digital barbecues didn’t hinder his career. He went on to run the Digital Diplomacy Unit at the Department of Information in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

From there, he was appointed as the chargé d’affaires at the Russian Embassy in Estonia in 2019 where, according to New Lines Magazine, “Nalobin interacted with many people in Tallinn and tried to dig his way into high society – just as he did in London”. He was deported from the Estonian capital in March 2022, soon after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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The ‘Secret Super Weapon’

From those early days of the digital barbecues, Russian understanding of online influence operations expanded, reaching a crescendo in 2016 when Kremlin operatives were active in both the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s exit from the EU.

As Nafeez Ahmed revealed three years ago in Byline Times, Brexit was a strategic objective of Russian foreign policy as Putin planned for his full invasion of Ukraine. But the role of Big Tech companies in enabling this kind of information warfare is the most enduring legacy of those days.

Part of the unwritten story of Russian propaganda is the role non-Russian companies and activists played in spreading its message and fine-tuning its technology.

Soon after the 2016 US Presidential Election, a deputy in the Russian Parliament, Konstantin Rykov – known as ‘Putin’s internet guru’ – claimed a role in Trump’s shock victory. He announced on Facebook that, as far back as 2012, he and his colleagues had the “insane idea” that they would “digitise all possible types of modern man” and “change their perception of reality” to elect Trump as President.

With a level of detail about the psychometric profiling which would have been hard to come by without intimate knowledge, Rykov explained that “British scientists from Cambridge Analytica” had succeeded by “making 5,000 existing human psychotypes” to create the “ideal image of a possible Trump supporter” and successfully target them with a “secret super weapon”.

Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm which used military-grade online targeting to run campaigns in more than 60 countries across the world. Its CEO, Alexander Nix, boasted around the same time on Sky News that his company held 5,000 data points on each US voter.

Coincidence? Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL, already had various tie-ups with Russia. Co-founded with Steve Bannon, with start-up capital from the billionaire hedge fund Trump donor Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica worked with the Russian fossil fuel giant Lukoil to gauge US attitudes towards Putin.

Its much-vaunted psychometric profiling – designed to model and predict human behaviour – was based on a big data and artificial intelligence project at Cambridge University, and led by one Aleksandr Kogan.

Born in the USSR (now independent Moldova), Kogan designed the app which allowed Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal details of up to 87 million Facebook users (including myself). He was also affiliated with St Petersburg University, which was the source of recruitment for Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency.

Kogan denied working with the Russian Government, but another Cambridge Analytica/SCL consultant, Sam Patten, formed a business with a GRU (Russian Military intelligence) agent, Konstantin Kilimnik. According to the US Treasury, “Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” prior to Trump’s election in 2016.

Tasked with investigating Russian interference in US elections, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence also concluded that “Cambridge Analytica, had a degree of intersection with and proximity to Russia, and specifically Russia’s intelligence services”.

Since both Kilimnik and Prigozhin were supervised by the GRU, it was always likely that Cambridge Analytica data could have been shared with the St Petersburg troll farm.

Indeed, the Senate Committee concluded that Cambridge Analytica and other companies “micro-targeted social media messaging techniques comparable to those employed by Russian information operatives with the Internet Research Agency”.

In light of this, Rykov’s boasts on Facebook about his “secret super weapon” look less and less unlikely. But, whatever the precise details of the data practices and strange alliances in the Trump and Brexit votes, a model had been created.

Apparently free at the point of use, social media giants such as Facebook and YouTube monetised themselves by turning us – their consumers – into the product, harvesting our attention and revealing data, siphoning up the ad revenue which once had funded legacy media.

As their rivals for news diminished, those same social media companies became political players themselves. They could influence Congress and other non-US law-makers with vast lobbying operations. And they weren’t just any other industry.

In Elon Musk’s words, these platforms became the ‘media’. They could directly target voters, profiling their likes and liabilities, and then inundate them with the most effective messages at mass.

So the stage was set for the next evolution of Big Tech – the full Matrix. Not only do these tech monopolies covertly feed off our data for energy and finance, they play back to us a tailored reality to disguise their real role.

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Cassandra and the Matrix

Only a few foresaw this fusion between Big Tech and full-blown oligarchical rule.

Those who did were often shouted down, ignored, or simply suppressed. This was a big win for Big Tech at the time, aided by battalions of lawyers and supine journalists. And now we are reaping the whirlwind.

After her exposé in the Observer, which led to the shutting down of Cambridge Analytica in 2018, Carole Cadwalladr went straight into the belly of the beast and challenged ‘the gods of Silicon Valley’ over the dangers of Big Tech.

In a TED talk delivered to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Oracle’s Larry Page, Google’s Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Cadwalladr depicted in vivid and urgent terms the “profound threat” to democracy when “a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology”.

For all her pains, Cadwalladr suffered severely from this prescient Cassandra-like warning.

A one-liner aside in the TED talk, referring to the Leave.EU campaign funder Arron Banks and his multiple undisclosed visits to the Russian Embassy, led to a costly and time-consuming defamation lawsuit that she had to defend on her own. Even though she had co-written these articles with me and they were published in the Guardian and Observer , neither I nor the newspapers were sued. Thanks to a judge’s ruling, her case had to rely on an inference that she meant that Banks had actually received Russian funding – a meaning she never intended and has regularly disavowed.

In this Kafkaesque manner, one of the clearest and most important voices about the danger to democracy from the ‘broligarchy’ was silenced for more than two years.

In the meantime, both the Kremlin and the ‘tech bros’ got busy. As revealed previously in these pages, Russia’s social media campaigns have evolved dramatically from the clunky techniques of the St Petersburg troll farm and Nalobin’s ‘digital barbecues’.

Funnelled through social media agencies, Putin’s presidential office directly supervises ‘doppelgänger’ sites that look like official Western news agencies and pump out disinformation, according to a 2024 FBI warrant.

The same warrant alleged that Russia has identified 2,000 social media influencers for its mission, with a further indictment identifying $10 million paid by RT to a handful of American and Canadian online commentators through a UK shell company.

And then there’s the biggest Matrix engine of them all: Elon Musk’s X.

Not only does his platform allow him to harvest data from 600 million users, he can train his artificial intelligence tech to analyse the most effective memes and themes – just as Cambridge Analytica did with hacked Facebook user profiles. Even better, Musk’s virtual reality can immediately replay back to users that machine-learned propaganda – like the Cambridge Analytica spin-off AggregateIQ once did – promoting and paying the relevant ads and influencers, and tweaking the algorithm to spread disinformation at scale.

In my 2012 book, The Fall of the House of Murdoch, I warned that the looming tech monopolies of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple would make Murdoch’s monopolies look like small fry.

“The News Corp story is a historic object lesson in the combined abuse of economic and political power,” I wrote. “As new media monopolies – from Facebook and Google to Amazon – form before our eyes, the lesson it provides is even more salutary for the future.”

A decade or more on and Murdoch’s Newscorp is valued at $16 billion – while Musk burned at least double that amount by purchasing Twitter, the foremost journalists’ social media platform in the world. Musk has already recouped that outlay with a $100 billion rise in the value of his shares and could buy out many Murdochs.

But, unlike Murdoch, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX doesn’t even pretend to believe in Thatcherite competition or free markets. Musk is a self-declared monopolist who happily inserts himself into government contracts and solicits state support to further both his commercial and ideological interests.

After spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Donald Trump’s re-election, Musk is now a senior member of his second administration. He has weaponised social media to an unprecedented degree, combining information warfare with global political clout. And a lot of his inspiration comes from the Russian President.

We know that Musk deliberately suppressed Ukrainian-based accounts and promoted Russian-funded propaganda on his platform. If his negative attitude towards President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian resistance wasn’t clear enough from his posts, The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Musk was in regular conversation with Putin.

So, to use a handy analogy from Lord of the Rings, Musk has become a kind of digital necromancer, like the white wizard Saruman, using his privileged position in the West to channel the dark autocracy of Sauron in his Kremlin towers to the east. (Perhaps, as in Tolkien’s epic, Musk deploys an all-seeing ‘Palantir’ courtesy of his tech ally and fellow South African Peter Thiel – whose surveillance company shares that name).

This all may feel like some far-fetched fantasy, but virtually every day the richest man in the world can be found targeting European democracies with his baleful eye; promoting the far-right AfD party in Germany; trolling the British Labour Government with Islamophobic lies and distortions about ‘grooming gangs’. And the consequences of Musk’s scorching worldview are real, immediate, and by no means fictional.

Elon Musk

X was a major vehicle of the disinformation that fomented the anti-refugee and Islamophobic violence which exploded in our cities last summer and Musk has defended the rioters – baselessly claiming that civil war is “inevitable” in the UK because of its tolerance towards migrants and different religious backgrounds – and questioning why the far-right activist who did much to whip up the hate, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’) is in prison (he was convicted under contempt of court laws last year).

Now, Musk seeks to institutionalise his threat to our multicultural society and its rule of law by attempting to extend his funding directly to a political party.

Reform UK’s Leader Nigel Farage recently met with Musk and, according to the Financial Times, its treasurer Nick Candy said that Musk is among several billionaires ready to raise more funds than “any other political party” to create “political disruption like we have never seen before” in Britain.

Farage’s old friend, Steve Bannon – fresh out of federal prison – concurs. Though he has ideological disagreements with Musk about immigration, Bannon recently declared that “money and information are the twin tactical nukes of modern politics” and celebrated the fact that Musk “can deploy both at an unprecedented scale”.

“There’s not a centrist left-wing government in Europe that will be able to withstand that onslaught”, Bannon recently told Bloomberg.

As the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica, Bannon knows what he is talking about. He was there at the beginning of this dark chapter of disinformation, recruiting British conservatives to the value of big data and online campaigning as far back as 2013 at a conference in Cambridge. And the Brexit connections keep on giving.

According to the Daily Mail, Musk is being advised on his UK targeting by none other than Dominic Cummings, the former chief advisor to Boris Johnson, who has for long evinced an admiration of tech ‘disruption’ and who, as campaign director of Vote Leave, used AggregateIQ to target voters with Islamophobic messages during the EU Referendum – just as Farage’s Leave.EU campaign did, boosted by RT and the Russian Embassy.

‘It is not just Elon,” the Mail claims from a source, “Dom is in constant contact with major Silicon Valley figures, who are becoming increasingly anti-woke”.

On his blog, Cummings himself has confessed that “something approaching [Carole] Cadwalladr’s worst nightmare — that she thought happened in 2016 but did not — is now technically feasible: effective automated personalised communication at scale.”

The facts of history are now hard to hide and deny. There has been a decade-long war against ‘one person, one vote’, and the concept of a transparent media to inform our citizenry. If we are ever to protect our democracies from this synergy of autocracy and tech, we will have to unravel these alliances of money and information and their traffic of hatred and falsehood.

But before we can fight the Matrix, we have to wake up from it. Only then, to combat the combined forces of Putin and Musk, can we build a fellowship with other people and other cultures to withstand the “onslaught” that awaits us.

‘Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring’ is available to listen to now

Written by

Peter Jukes

Peter Jukes is the Co-Founder and Executive Editor of Byline Times

11. C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins

C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins

A new analysis that began under the Biden administration is released by the C.I.A.’s new director, John Ratcliffe, who wants the agency to get “off the sidelines” in the debate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us/politics/cia-covid-lab-leak.html?smtyp=cur&smid=bsky-nytimes

John Ratcliffe, the new director of the C.I.A., has long favored the lab leak hypothesis.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

By Julian E. Barnes

Julian Barnes has been reporting on the intelligence community’s debates over the origins of the Covid pandemic since 2020.

Jan. 25, 2025

Updated 3:31 p.m. ET

The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.

But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.

There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift, officials said. Rather it is based on the same evidence it has been chewing over for months.

The analysis, however, is based in part on a closer look at the conditions in the high security labs in Wuhan province before the pandemic outbreak, according to people familiar with the agency’s work.

A spokeswoman for the agency said the other theory remains plausible and that the agency will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting.

Some American officials say the debate matters little: The Chinese government failed to either regulate its markets or oversee its labs. But others argue it is an important intelligence and scientific question.

John Ratcliffe, the new director of the C.I.A., has long favored the lab leak hypothesis. He has said it is a critical piece of intelligence that needs to be understood and that it has consequences for U.S.-Chinese relations.

The announcement of the shift came shortly after Mr. Ratcliffe told Breitbart News he no longer wanted the agency “on the sidelines” of the debate over the origins of the Covid pandemic. Mr. Ratcliffe has long said he believes that the virus most likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time.

In the final weeks of the Biden administration, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, ordered a new classified review of the pandemic’s origin. As part of that review, the agency’s previous director, William J. Burns, told analysts that they needed to take a position on the origins of Covid, though he was agnostic on which theory they should embrace, a senior U.S. intelligence official said.

Another senior U.S. official said it was Mr. Ratcliffe’s decision to declassify and release the new analysis.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, questions have swirled around whether the two labs handling coronaviruses in Wuhan had followed safety protocols strictly enough.

The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete.

Even in the absence of hard intelligence, the lab leak hypothesis has been gaining ground inside spy agencies. But some analysts question the wisdom of shifting a position in absence of new information.

Former officials say they are not averse to a new examination of the Covid origins intelligence by the Trump administration. President Biden ordered a new review of the intelligence early in his administration after officials told the White House they had still-unexamined evidence.

Mr. Ratcliffe has raised questions about politicization in the intelligence agencies. Mr. Ratcliffe, who was the director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration, argued in an essay for Fox News in 2023 that the C.I.A. did not want to embrace the lab leak to avoid geopolitical problems for the Biden administration.

“The real problem is, the only assessment the agency could make — which is that a virus that killed over a million Americans originated in a C.C.P.-controlled lab whose research included work for the Chinese military — has enormous geopolitical implications that the Biden administration does not want to face head-on,” he said in the piece, which was written with Cliff Sims, a top aide. C.C.P. refers to China’s Communist Party.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas and the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has long said he thought the pandemic originated in one of the Wuhan labs and praised the shift in judgment by the agency.

“Now the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton said.

Mr. Ratcliffe said on Thursday, when he was sworn in, that a look at the origins of Covid was a “Day 1” priority.

“I think our intelligence, our science and our common sense all really dictate that the origins of Covid was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he told Breitbart. “But the C.I.A. has not made that assessment or at least not made that assessment publicly. So I’m going to focus on that and look at the intelligence and make sure that the public is aware that the agency is going to get off the sidelines.”

Senior intelligence officials in the Biden administration defend their process and methodology. They have said that no intelligence was suppressed and insist that politics did not play into their analysis.

These officials say that there are powerful logical arguments for both the lab leak and the natural causes theories, but that there simply is no decisive piece of intelligence on either side of the issue.

To boost the natural origins theory, intelligence officers would like to find the animal that passed it to a human or find a bat carrying what was the likely ancestor of the coronavirus that causes Covid.

Similarly, to seal the lab leak, the intelligence community would like to find evidence that one of the labs in Wuhan was working on a progenitor virus that directly led to the epidemic.

Neither piece of evidence has been found.

But Mr. Ratcliffe has promised a more aggressive C.I.A., and it is possible that he will order more actions to penetrate the labs in Wuhan or the Chinese government in a search for information.

It will not be an easy secret to steal. The senior ranks of the Chinese government do not know, and do not want to know, American officials have said. So if there is intelligence, it is probably hidden in a place that is hard to get to.

Intelligence officials interviewed in recent weeks say it is possible that such a piece of evidence exists in a lab in China, at least in theory. But, they said, it is still more likely that the answers to questions surrounding the virus’s origins will come through a scientific breakthrough, not an intelligence revelation.

Under the Biden administration, the intelligence community leaned toward the theory that the virus came from the market. But officials readily admitted it was hardly a sure thing.

Five agencies, including the National Intelligence Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency, assessed that natural exposure most likely caused the epidemic. But they said that they had only low-confidence in their assessment.

Until now, two agencies, the F.B.I. and Department of Energy, thought a lab leak was more likely. But their theories are different. The F.B.I. believes the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Energy Department put its bet on another lab, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control.

Officials would not say if the C.I.A. believes one lab or the other was the more likely source of the virus.

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades. More about Julian E. Barnes

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 26, 2025, Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: C.I.A. Says Lab Leak May Be Covid’s Origin. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: National Intelligence Estimates, Communist Party of China, President Joe Biden, William J Burns, John Ratcliffe, Donald Trump

12. Musk Plan for Retooling Government Takes Shape, but Big Questions Loom

Will DOGE be relegated to the dustbin of history like all the other attempts at government reform such as TQM (total quality management) or Donald Rumsfeld's attempt to reform the DOD civil service system?

Not to be Debby Downer: is this deja vu all over again? But of course none of these previous programs had Elon Musk and his direct authority from the President. Then again given all these programs and attempts that are in the dustbin of history it would seem like there would be strong bipartisan support for at least the intent to improve government efficiency (though our Constitution by design has created a government of inefficiency and friction and we should welcome than because it is designed to protect us from tyranny and to protect our individual freedoms).

Some history from the dustbin:

National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR): (1993) Launched in 1993 by Vice President Al Gore during the Clinton administration, this initiative aimed to make the federal government "work better, cost less, and get results Americans care about"

Civil Service Reform Act of 1978: Implemented during the Carter administration, this act aimed to improve government operations and productivity while protecting employees from unfair practices

Roosevelt's Keep Commission: (1905) Initiated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, this was one of the earliest government reform efforts

Hoover Commissions: (one in 1947-1949 and another in 1953-1955 to reorganize the executive branch)

Grace Commission: Active from 1982 to 1984 during the Reagan administration, this commission focused on reducing government waste and inefficiency

Clinton's Reinventing Government Initiative: Part of the broader NPR, this 1990s initiative aimed to streamline government processes and improve efficiency

Bush's President's Management Agenda: Implemented during George W. Bush's administration, this targeted specific areas for improvement in federal management

Obama's Campaign to Cut Waste: This initiative focused on reducing unnecessary spending and improving government efficiency

Trump's Government Reorganization Plan: Proposed in 2018, this plan aimed to reshape American government for the 21st century by modernizing and streamlining federal agencies and processes

Musk Plan for Retooling Government Takes Shape, but Big Questions Loom

The rebranding of a former White House digital office into the new Department of Government Efficiency signals its potential limits, budget experts said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/us/politics/musk-doge-government-overhaul.html?smtyp=cur&smid=bsky-nytimes

Elon Musk, middle, during President Trump’s inauguration at the Capitol on Monday. Mr. Musk’s project to overhaul the government will be based out of a onetime White House digital office.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

By Michael C. Bender Madeleine Ngo and Theodore Schleifer

Reporting from Washington

Jan. 24, 2025

The initial plan for retooling the federal government under President Trump started with three loyal billionaires: the banker Howard Lutnick, the tech leader Elon Musk and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

Now, it’s down to one.

Mr. Lutnick emerged as Mr. Trump’s pick to run the Commerce Department. Mr. Ramaswamy decided to step aside from the project just before Mr. Trump assumed office on Monday.

As a result, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, now has full command of the federal cost-cutting effort, which Mr. Trump has hailed as “potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time.” How exactly Mr. Musk wields his consolidated power to set the tempo and targets of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency remains to be seen. But his first moves suggest he will oversee something closer to an I.T. project than the sweeping operation to slash at least $2 trillion from the federal budget that Mr. Musk had once predicted.

The Musk-led project debuted this week with a bit of bureaucratic jujitsu: the takeover of an existing arm of the White House that, for the past decade, had focused on improving government technology. The office, the United States Digital Service, now renamed United States DOGE Service, was created in 2014 to fix failing computer systems that threatened the success of President Barack Obama’s health insurance overhaul.

Mr. Musk, who cut 80 percent of the jobs at Twitter after he bought the social media company two years ago, aims to conduct a review of at least some of the roughly 200 employees who work in the office before deciding whether to keep them in their jobs, according to two people familiar with his plan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal plans.

From this new perch in the administration, Mr. Musk immediately gains a road map to the federal bureaucracy, which could allow him to swiftly assess the technological capacities of agencies and departments and identify potential changes. He is also expected to maintain an office in the West Wing, which will help him keep crucial access to Mr. Trump and key White House aides. Mr. Musk’s allies, meanwhile, have secured key posts in the administration. Amanda Scales, who until this month worked at Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, is now chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, a powerful agency that oversees government hiring.

Mr. Musk posted a meme last week on his social media platform, since renamed X, that hinted at grand ambitions for his new project, comparing his looming effect on government to his company’s innovation of rockets that fuel space travel.

“What matters going forward is to actually make significant changes, cement those changes and set the foundation for America to be strong for a century, for centuries, forever,” Mr. Musk said at a Trump rally in Washington on Sunday.

In a post on X on Friday, DOGE said that hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of current or impending federal contracts had been canceled. “Initial focus is mainly on DEI contracts and unoccupied buildings,” the post said, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion-related efforts. A spokeswoman for the office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the particular programs that were affected.

Image

SpaceX Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, in November. Mr. Musk has compared his looming effect on the government to his company’s innovation of rockets for space travel.Credit...Callaghan O'Hare for The New York Times

But the decision to rebrand the former digital office into DOGE also signals the potential limits of the endeavor, budget experts said.

Mr. Trump initially said his government overhaul would “cut wasteful expenditures” and “slash excess regulations,” but those goals were not explicitly laid out in the order on Monday that created the new group.

DOGE has been tasked with recommending cuts to the federal work force in the next 90 days and playing a key role in overhauling hiring practices within four months.

But the office does not have the power to approve spending cuts — that authority remains with Congress.

Romina Boccia, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, said focusing on modernizing government technology could help address issues like improper payments. But she said that would be likely to save only a couple hundred billion dollars at most, far less than Mr. Musk had promised.

“The cynic in me says that DOGE realized that they were perhaps too ambitious and it would be much more difficult to accomplish their initial goals of reducing spending by $2 trillion,” Ms. Boccia said. “They’re narrowing their scope to something more manageable.”

A White House spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Musk declined to comment.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Mr. Musk said DOGE could cut the $6.75 trillion federal budget by at least $2 trillion, or about 30 percent. More recently, he has lowered his estimate to closer to $1 trillion. During the first Trump administration, spending jumped to nearly $8 trillion from about $5 trillion, an increase due in part to Covid-19 relief efforts. Heading into his second term, Mr. Trump has vowed to avoid cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which account for about a third of federal spending.

Still, some experts on the federal government said DOGE’s influence could be substantial because Mr. Musk and his allies will operate from within the federal government, rather than outside. Mr. Trump’s order called for “DOGE teams” to be embedded within federal agencies like the I.R.S., a change from Mr. Trump’s original plan to have the group based mostly outside the government to offer advice to White House budget officials. Most DOGE staff members will now be full-time government employees, according to a person familiar with the plans.

“It brings DOGE inside and connects it with every federal agency, in ways that could have sweeping impact,” said Donald F. Kettl, a former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

Simplifying government systems could also be a tool that results in substantial benefits for taxpayers, said Mina Hsiang, the most recent administrator of the Digital Service, noting that better technology could help people to file taxes or gain access to veterans’ benefits.

“If they choose to work on the everyday problems that impact all Americans, they could accomplish a lot,” said Ms. Hsiang, who was appointed to the role during the Biden administration. “If they work on programs that put them in a deeply adversarial position with agencies, I think they will be less likely to get important things done.”

Image

Mr. Trump initially said his government overhaul initiative would “cut wasteful expenditures” and “slash excess regulations,” but those goals were not explicitly laid out in the executive order that created DOGE.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

The full extent of how DOGE works and what it does may end up shielded from the public. Mr. Musk hopes to join the administration as a special government employee, according to a person familiar with his plan, a designation intended to avoid triggering a transparency law requiring government panels that include private citizens to conduct their meetings in public and make their documents available. It remains to be seen whether many other DOGE staffers will also have that designation.

An executive order Mr. Trump signed this week to institute a hiring freeze of federal civilian employees underscored how broad the group’s authority could be. DOGE will help work on a plan to reduce the size of the federal work force “through efficiency improvements and attrition,” according to the order.

Mr. Musk’s team is tightly integrated with the Office of Personnel Management, with some of his DOGE aides working out of the O.P.M. offices, according to a person with knowledge of the arrangement. Federal agencies have been asked to send Ms. Scales, the office’s new chief of staff, lists of all their workers who are on probationary status — and therefore easier to fire — by Friday.

Another Musk ally is also poised to join the administration: Michael Grimes of Morgan Stanley, a star Silicon Valley banker who helped Mr. Musk purchase Twitter, has told associates that he’s likely to come aboard in a temporary, fellowship-like role before returning to the bank, according to people briefed on the conversations. His interest was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

An early focus for DOGE appears to be the I.R.S., the sprawling agency with more than 80,000 employees that collected nearly $5 trillion in tax revenue last year.

People involved with DOGE, including the tech investor Baris Akis, participated in the transition team’s agency review at the I.R.S., with a focus on updating the tax collector’s technology systems, according to three people familiar with the work. Mr. Musk has criticized the agency on X as having outdated information technology.

A goal of the new administration is to reduce the number of I.R.S. employees by automating more work, the people said. An executive order from Mr. Trump this week temporarily freezing hiring across the federal government also empowered DOGE to keep the freeze in place indefinitely at the I.R.S.

Mr. Musk’s focus on technology was at the heart of a philosophical divide with Mr. Ramaswamy, the Ohio biotech entrepreneur, that ultimately forced him to walk away from DOGE.

Mr. Ramaswamy, a Yale-trained lawyer, had publicly spoken about a more policy-driven approach that revolved around regulatory rescissions to “dismantle the administrative state,” something he frequently pushed from the campaign trail.

A spokesman for Mr. Ramaswamy declined to comment.

The two men had publicly welcomed the chance to lead DOGE for Mr. Trump, and even floated the possibility of hosting a weekly podcast together. But their differences over how to set priorities quickly led to problems behind closed doors, according to transition aides.

Disagreements included minutiae such as which internal communications software to use. Mr. Musk’s annoyance became clear as he privately criticized Mr. Ramaswamy’s approach to the job to associates and kept a close hold on his plans for a more tech-based approach.

While Mr. Ramaswamy focused on conferring with budget hawks in Congress, several of Mr. Musk’s closest friends in Silicon Valley conducted interviews at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida resort, on behalf of the DOGE coalition. Some Ramaswamy allies now consider that a mistake, with one saying that Mr. Ramaswamy was “out-bodied” by Mr. Musk.

Image

Mr. Musk, left, and Vivek Ramaswamy visited the Capitol together in December. Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Musk were originally tapped as partners to run DOGE.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Some Trump advisers had also grown wary of Mr. Ramaswamy during the transition, concerned that the former presidential candidate was more interested in using his place in the administration to keep his name in the news and vault to political office.

Others argued that Mr. Ramaswamy’s interest in long-term budget cuts meant focusing on the political process to effect change.

As soon as Mr. Ramaswamy exited the presidential race in early 2024, he began thinking about a run for governor of Ohio. But the split over how to run DOGE hastened his decision to leave, according to Ramaswamy allies.

People close to both men said their differences were philosophical, not personal. Mr. Musk, for example, has told people that he plans to support Mr. Ramaswamy’s eventual bid for governor.

What was clear was that there was room for only one billionaire at DOGE.

Andrew Duehren, Maureen Farrell, Mike Isaac, Kate Kelly and David E. Sanger contributed reporting.

Michael C. Bender is a Times political correspondent covering Donald J. Trump, the Make America Great Again movement and other federal and state elections. More about Michael C. Bender

Madeleine Ngo covers U.S. economic policy and how it affects people across the country. More about Madeleine Ngo

Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering campaign finance and the influence of billionaires in American politics. More about Theodore Schleifer

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 25, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Musk May Use His Tech Skills To Pare Costs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

13. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 25, 2025

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 25, 2025

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-25-2025

Ukraine and Moldova continue to offer solutions to Transnistria's energy crisis as Moldovan President Maia Sandu met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on January 25. Zelensky stated at a press conference with Sandu that Ukraine can supply Transnistria with coal at low prices or even free of charge if Transnistria would supply Ukraine with electricity in return. Zelensky also stated that Ukraine is ready to send a team of specialists to help increase the Transnistrian power plant's electricity output such that it would far exceed Transnistria's domestic needs, allowing Transnistria to provide electricity to all of Moldova and Ukraine. Zelensky noted that Transnistria's cooperation with Moldova and Ukraine would help reduce electricity prices throughout all of Moldova by 30 percent. Transnistrian authorities have previously refused Moldovan and Ukrainian offers of help, instead turning to schemes that involve Moscow directly or indirectly providing enough gas to the breakaway republic to cover only its domestic electricity needs. Ukrainian and Moldovan officials have noted that Russia is trying to leverage its manufactured gas crisis to affect Moldovan public opinion before the Summer 2025 Moldovan parliamentary elections.[3] Transnistria's possible acceptance of Ukrainian and Moldovan offers of aid and Transnistria's subsequent supply of cheaper electricity to the rest of Moldova would disrupt Russian efforts to use the energy crisis to strengthen Transnistria's economic dependence on Moscow, to posture Russia as the breakaway republic's savior and benefactor, and to leverage Chisinau's turn to higher priced European electricity as part of Moscow's anti-EU narratives.

The Kremlin is continuing to leverage the prominent Kremlin-linked Rybar Telegram channel to cultivate increased Russian influence in Iraq. The Rybar channel claimed on January 25 that members of the Rybar team – including its founder Mikhail Zvinchuk – visited Iraq over the last week and met with Iraqi officials, including Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia Al Sudani. The channel claimed that Iraqi officials noted their openness to increasing trade and foreign investments with Russian partners and their interest in further developing Russian–Iraqi relations. The channel welcomed Russian businesses, media companies, bloggers, and investors to begin exploring opportunities in Iraq. Member of the Rybar team visited Iraq in August 2024, and ISW noted at the time that this was the first observed report of a Russian milblogger meeting with a senior foreign official. ISW-CTP previously assessed that Russia may be setting conditions to supplant the US as a security partner in Iraq in anticipation of the US possibly reducing its military presence there. The recent fall of the Bashar Al-Assad regime in Syria may be prompting the Kremlin to reconsider the contours of its relations with Iraq.

Key Takeaways:

Ukraine and Moldova continue to offer solutions to Transnistria's energy crisis as Moldovan President Maia Sandu met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on January 25.

The Kremlin is continuing to leverage the prominent Kremlin-linked Rybar Telegram channel to cultivate increased Russian influence in Iraq.

Russian forces recently advanced near Toretsk, Pokrovsk, Kurakhove, and Velyka Novosilka.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced on January 25 that the Russian government will allow veterans of volunteer formations (dobrovolcheskie formirovaniya) to receive "combat veteran status" without submitting a formal application.

14. Iran Update, January 25, 2025

Iran Update, January 25, 2025

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-january-25-2025

Israel announced on January 25 that it will prevent Palestinians from returning to the northern Gaza Strip because Hamas violated the ceasefire agreement. Hamas released four female Israeli soldiers as part of the second hostage release on January 25. Israel accused Hamas of violating the ceasefire agreement by releasing female soldiers before female civilians. Israel announced that it will only fulfill its requirement to allow Palestinians to move to the northern part of the strip once Hamas releases female civilian hostage Arbel Yehud, whom Israel expected to be released on January 25. An Israeli Army Radio correspondent reported that Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is holding Yehud in the Gaza Strip. A Hamas official said that Yehud is alive and will be released during the next hostage release on February 1. Israeli media reported that talks are underway to expedite Yehud’s release. A US National Security Council official told Axios that the United States is ”continuing to push” for Yehud’s release ”through negotiation channels.” Israel released 200 Palestinian prisoners, including 120 who were serving life sentences for killing Israelis, into the West Bank, Egypt, and the Gaza Strip as part of the hostage-prisoner release on January 25.

Key Takeaways:

Gaza Strip: Israel announced that it will prevent Palestinians from returning to the northern Gaza Strip because Hamas violated the ceasefire agreement.

Syria: The ISIS tried to attack the Sayyidah Zeynab shrine in Damascus, which a prominent Shia religious site, likely in order to stoke sectarian tensions in Syria.

15. Neither War nor Peace: The China Challenge of Now

Excerpts:

In 2025, the most immediate challenge China poses to peace and security is the gray-zone operations that Beijing conducts below the threshold of actual military conflict against countries around the world. But the most extreme and dangerous target of China’s gray-zone coercion and interference in internal affairs is Taiwan. Beijing is comfortable operating in the gray zone because this milieu is fully compatible with its conception of war and peace on a spectrum. While the United States desires peace with China, it is not only prudent for Washington to be prepared if necessary to wage war in defense of itself and its allies, but Washington also cannot ignore the China challenge of now: multipronged hostile gray-zone operations against the United States and a multitude of other countries around the world.

The United States ought to work closely with partners in Taiwan, the Philippines and elsewhere to push back against PRC coercion. Failure to do so could allow Beijing to effectively gain control of key territory in the Western Pacific and undermine U.S. partnerships. These steps would gravely threaten U.S. interests and weaken Washington’s ability to promote peace, democracy and prosperity throughout the region.

Neither War nor Peace: The China Challenge of Now

https://www.usip.org/publications/2025/01/neither-war-nor-peace-china-challenge-now?utm

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Countries around the globe exist in a nether world between peace and war.
This condition comports comfortably with how China conceives of peace and war and operates in the world.
Taiwan is ‘Exhibit A’ in understanding how China thinks and acts globally.

Thursday, January 23, 2025

/ READ TIME: 7 minutes

By: Andrew Scobell, Ph.D.

There is much talk of China girding for war, whether it is an attack against Taiwan, a great power conflict with the United States or some other scenario. These are frighteningly plausible possibilities. Yet, obsessing about the specter of a devastating high-intensity conflagration risks downplaying the serious day-in-day-out challenge that China poses right now, particularly to Taiwan, via an array of hostile actions and influence operations calibrated below the threshold of actual military conflict. If the United States and its partners do not effectively push back against this coercion and intimidation now, China may strengthen its position in a way that directly harms American interests and threatens to pull the United States into a war.

While far from tranquil, since World War II, the world has been mercifully spared the tragedy of a cataclysmic military conflict between great powers. Nevertheless, brutal and bloody smaller wars are ongoing around the globe, mostly internecine domestic conflicts. Interstate wars may be less common but can be just as costly in terms of the toll on human life and scope of destruction. The fierce protracted campaigns waged between heavily armed combatants and horrific suffering innocent civilians endure in conflicts such as the war in Ukraine deservedly receive extensive attention.

Yet, all too easy to overlook is that many states, while spared the horrors of full-blown war, are subjected to daily intimidation, coercion and even violence. Too many societies function in a nether world where there may not be outright war, but neither is there real peace. Lives are lost, societies disrupted and inhabitants live in a climate of constant fear. People around the globe dwell in a “gray zone” under persistent threat of violence. In 21st century global power politics, conflict can play out almost imperceptibly at a slow boil without great spectacle, massive carnage or the media spotlight.

War and Peace as a Continuum

China’s Communist Party (CCP) rulers, along with their civilian and military leaders, are completely at home in a gray-zone world. By contrast Americans find it challenging to operate in such ambiguity for at least two reasons. First, Americans tend to conceive of war and peace as dichotomous and clearcut: the United States is either at war or at peace. By contrast, most Chinese Communist leaders tend to think of war and peace as existing on a continuum: at one end is all-out war while at the other end is absolute peace.

Most Chinese Communist leaders tend to think of war and peace as existing on a continuum: at one end is all-out war while at the other end is absolute peace.

In Chinese thinking, the real world operates on spectrum somewhere in between a condition of permanent flux, with states in constant competition and conflict. In short, the distinction between war and peace is fuzzy. Indeed, this seems a normal condition for leaders in a Leninist party system in which individual actors must constantly struggle both internally and externally to survive or prosper. Beijing’s calls for a “harmonious world” are best interpreted as aspirational rather than reflecting any conviction that harmony is a natural condition in domestic or global politics.

Officially, since the 1980s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s assessment of the global security environment has been that “peace and development [are] the theme[s] of our times.” Yet, this does not mean that successive generations of China’s communist leaders believed that wars are obsolete, or conflict is no longer conceivable. Rather, this mantra signals Beijing’s belief that while a catastrophic global conflict no longer seems likely, Chinese leaders fully expect interstate conflicts to bubble up around the world. However, these “local wars” will be smaller, geographically contained and with little danger of vertical escalation. Moreover, interstate competition would persist with attendant tensions and confrontation albeit mostly playing out below the threshold of outright war. Taiwan has the unenviable distinction of constituting ground zero for Beijing in the wider global nether world that exists between outright war and real peace.

What does ‘Peaceful Reunification’ with Taiwan Really Mean?

Under Mao Zedong, who ruled the PRC until his death until 1976, Beijing was officially committed to liberating Taiwan by armed force. Since the 1980s, however, the PRC revamped its policy and strategy toward Taiwan and officially switched to “peaceful reunification.” Yet, this characterization is a complete misnomer. First off, since China has never controlled or ruled Taiwan, the policy is more accurately described as unification. Moreover, a more careful look at what Beijing means by “peaceful” reveals a very different understanding of the word.

China’s definition is more properly understood as conquest by coercion. Indeed, it is instructive that PRC analysts have drawn an explicit parallel between a desired “peaceful” resolution of the Taiwan Strait impasse and the “Beiping model.” This model refers to the 1949 surrender of Beijing (then named “Beiping”) by the Kuomintang mayor and military garrison to CCP armed forces besieging the city toward the end of the Chinese civil war. While occupation of the city was technically achieved by peaceful means, the episode is an example of bloodless capitulation under threat of overwhelming force. The garrison was fully aware of the fate that befell nearby Tianjin when the city refused to surrender and was captured after a bloody assault. In short, to the PRC, “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan really means first-time conquest by military intimidation and coercion.

To China, 'peaceful reunification' with Taiwan really means first-time conquest by military intimidation and coercion.

Indeed, even after the strategic rhetorical shift to “peaceful reunification” Beijing has never renounced the use of naked force to realize unification. In other words, the policy constitutes Orwellian doublespeak. This becomes clear once observers recognize that Beijing has been operating for many years against Taiwan in the gray zone in what has now become routine acts of coercion and intimidation. This persistent campaign of harassment and aggression has ramped up during the past two and a half years following then U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan.

Neither War nor Peace

In 2025, the most immediate challenge China poses to peace and security is the gray-zone operations that Beijing conducts below the threshold of actual military conflict against countries around the world. But the most extreme and dangerous target of China’s gray-zone coercion and interference in internal affairs is Taiwan. Beijing is comfortable operating in the gray zone because this milieu is fully compatible with its conception of war and peace on a spectrum. While the United States desires peace with China, it is not only prudent for Washington to be prepared if necessary to wage war in defense of itself and its allies, but Washington also cannot ignore the China challenge of now: multipronged hostile gray-zone operations against the United States and a multitude of other countries around the world.

The United States ought to work closely with partners in Taiwan, the Philippines and elsewhere to push back against PRC coercion. Failure to do so could allow Beijing to effectively gain control of key territory in the Western Pacific and undermine U.S. partnerships. These steps would gravely threaten U.S. interests and weaken Washington’s ability to promote peace, democracy and prosperity throughout the region.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping of China at the G-20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times)

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s).

PUBLICATION TYPE: Analysis

16. More DEI fallout: Air Force scraps course that used videos of Tuskegee Airmen and female WWII pilots

Sigh... So we are just going to erase and ignore history?

Is this actually directed or an overreaction to the directives? Or is it someone's attempt to show the absurdity of the anti-DEI effort. They can undo the radical extreme elements of DEI without disrespecting our history.

Recognizing and remembering the facts of our history is not about DEI or critical race theory.

More DEI fallout: Air Force scraps course that used videos of Tuskegee Airmen and female WWII pilots

AP · January 25, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Air Force has removed training courses with videos of its storied Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs — the female World War II pilots who were vital in ferrying warplanes for the military — to comply with the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

The videos were shown to Air Force troops as part of DEI courses they took during basic military training.

In a statement, the Air Force confirmed the courses with those videos had been removed and said it “will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President, ensuring that they are carried out with utmost professionalism, efficiency and in alignment with national security objectives.”

The problem may not be with the historical videos themselves, but that they were used in Air Force basic military training DEI coursework. However, the lack of clearer guidance has sent the Air Force and other agencies scrambling to take the broadest approach to what content is removed to make sure they are in compliance.

The Tuskegee Airmen, known as the “Red Tails” were the nation’s first Black military pilots who served in a segregated WWII unit and their all-Black 332nd Fighter Group had one of the lowest loss records of all the bomber escorts in the war.

They flew P-47 Thunderbolt, P-51 Mustang and other fighter aircraft to escort American bombers on dangerous missions over Germany. Before the fighter escorts began accompanying the slow and heavy U.S. bombers, losses were catastrophic due to getting dive-bombed and strafed by German aircraft.

In a statement late Saturday, Tuskegee Airmen Inc. the nonprofit foundation created to preserve the legacy of those pilots, said it was “strongly opposed” to the removal of the videos to comply with Trump’s order.

The stories of the Tuskegee Airmen and the WASPs “are an essential part of American history and carried significant weight in the World War II veteran community. We believe the content of these courses does not promote one category of service member or citizen over another. They are simply a part of American military history that all service members should be made aware of,” the group said.

President George W. Bush awarded the Tuskegee Airmen the Congressional Gold Medal in a ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda in 2007.

In 2020, in his State of the Union address, Trump announced he had promoted one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, Charles McGee, to brigadier general. McGee died in 2022 at age 102.

The WASPs contributed to World War II by learning to fly and ferry new bombers off the assembly lines to airfields where they were needed to ship off to war — freeing up male pilots to focus on combat missions overseas. They earned the right to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery just in the last decade.

The Air Force, like other branches, has recently tried to broaden the number of people they reach to consider military careers like aviation that historically have had few minority service members in their ranks.

AP · January 25, 2025

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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