…well, that was a surprise

With just hours to spare, House Republicans and Democrats on Saturday struck a surprise deal to fund the government and avert a shutdown that would have inflicted economic pain on millions of American families.

The House voted on an overwhelming, bipartisan basis, 335-91, for a short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution or CR; 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans voted yes, while 90 Republicans voted no. Just one Democrat, Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois, voted no over a lack of Ukraine aid.

…huh…lack of aid to ukraine…in a “clean” bill?

The stunning deal came together after McCarthy reversed course and put a so-called “clean” 45-day CR on the floor, with billions in disaster aid but none of the new Ukraine aid in a separate Senate deal, after insisting for days that any short-term funding bill would need to include deep spending cuts and tough border security measures.

By putting a clean bill on the floor, McCarthy dared Democrats to vote against it and shut down the government. Democrats raised objections to the lack of Ukraine aid and bitterly complained that they had not had time to read the 71-page bill, with leadership stalling by using procedural tactics and giving lengthy speeches so they could study the details.

“We are on the brink of a government shutdown. And at the 11th hour legislation is dropped on the American people,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said in a 52-minute floor speech. “And we’re told that you have 5 or 10 minutes to evaluate legislation that is more than 70 pages long and expected to simply trust the word of our extreme MAGA Republican colleagues.”

…so…a clean bill playing dirty pool…maybe not such a surpise

Gaetz, a conservative bomb-thrower and top ally of former President Donald Trump, had said he would file a motion to vacate, or a vote to overthrow McCarthy. After the CR vote passed, Gaetz tried to get Rep. Steve Womack’s attention in the chair, but the no-nonsense Arkansas Republican didn’t acknowledge Gaetz, gaveled out and adjourned the House until Monday.
[…]
After the vote, McCarthy lashed out at reporters asking questions about a potential effort by Gaetz to depose him, underscoring that a funding deal was always going to have to be bipartisan.

“There’s no bill that can pass with one party or the other,” McCarthy said, his voice becoming animated and louder. “When are you guys gonna get over that it’s alright that you put America first. That it’s alright if Republicans and Democrats joined together to do what is right.”

“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it,” he said. “There has to be an adult in the room.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/government-shutdown-saturday

…well, you’d think…when the room is congress…but…what are the odds?

There is really only one way out of this jam. Spoiler alert: It’s not reducing funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It’s also not increasing the economy’s growth rate. That’s a good goal, but as we can see, the red ink has poured out over the past year even though the economy has been at or near full employment.

The solution is more tax revenue. Namely, more effective collection of taxes from people and companies that aren’t paying what they owe, coupled with higher tax rates on corporations and individuals. And not just on the very rich. The financing problem is big enough that taxes will have to go up on a sizable chunk of people in the top half of the income distribution.

You don’t hear this from either Republicans or Democrats because calling for higher taxes is seen in Washington as politically fatal. As I said, it requires imagination. When you step back from the daily tit for tat, it’s hard to imagine any way to fix the nation’s finances in the long term that doesn’t involve more tax revenue. As Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Congress, alas, is more focused on assigning blame for a shutdown right now than employing Holmesian logic. “We are now firmly ensconced in a system where we are budgeting by crisis,” Shai Akabas, the executive director of the economic policy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told me. “There’s really no oxygen in the room to talk about the underlying problems and figure out constructive solutions. It’s all eaten up by ‘Are we going to default?’ or ‘Are we going to shut down the government?’”
[…]
I have never been a deficit hawk. I think balanced budget amendments are silly. It’s smart to run big deficits when the economy is weak; the government’s spending makes up for the shortfall in private consumption and investment, minimizing the loss of jobs. It’s good to run small deficits even when the economy is healthy to offset contractionary forces elsewhere. If the growth rate of the economy exceeds the growth rate of the debt, the ratio of debt to gross domestic product will shrink, making the debt more and more manageable.

The problem now is that big deficits are structural, not just cyclical. They exist even when times are good. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that they will get much larger[…]

To be sure, this isn’t necessarily an impending crisis. Even if it reached 180 percent or so, America’s debt-to-G.D.P. ratio would be below where Japan’s is today. “It’s more of a problem that’s kind of insidious, that gets a bit worse every year,” Michael Strain, the director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told me.
[…]
I’ll skip past the Pentagon except to say that deep cuts in military spending seem unlikely, given rising threats from China and Russia. As for nonmilitary discretionary spending, it has already been shrinking as a percentage of G.D.P. Trying to get all the cuts there would devastate much of what we think of as government, from air traffic control and national parks to food safety inspection and the passport office. Then there are the growing interest payments on the national debt, which are off the table because if they aren’t paid, the government defaults.

A strong nation has effective public services and takes care of its neediest. By that simple standard, the United States is being weakened by its failure to raise the revenue it needs. The expiration of the expanded child tax credit is an example. According to the Census Bureau, the credit’s expansion in 2021, to fight the economic effects of Covid, lifted 2.1 million children above the poverty line. To save money, Congress allowed the expansion to expire last year, and many of those children fell back below the poverty line. That’s unconscionable.
[…]
I interviewed two economists, Kimberly Clausing and Natasha Sarin, who worked in the Treasury Department during the first two years of the Biden administration. They wrote a paper released this month by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project on a blueprint for tax reform in 2025, the year many provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 are scheduled to expire. They wrote: “Our message is to use the opportunity of T.C.J.A. sunsets to set ambitious revenue-raising targets, given the fiscal needs facing the U.S. today. And it is important to do so in a progressive way, given increased inequality and wealth concentration.”

“It turns out you can get quite a lot” of deficit reduction by raising the corporate tax rate back to 28 percent, imposing a corporate carbon fee and other measures, Sarin said. She and Clausing estimated that if everything on their list was enacted, it would raise enough revenue for the primary budget deficit (i.e., the deficit excluding interest payments) to be cut in half over 10 years, which, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, would be enough to keep the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio from continuing to rise.

It’s easier and more equitable to raise money on capital income (profits) than on labor income (wages), Clausing told me. And it’s easier to raise money on capital income at its source, from the businesses that earn it, than after it’s paid out to shareholders in dividends and capital gains. “The corporate tax base is concentrated in a couple thousand companies, many of whom have a lot of market power,” Clausing said. “These measures would be a big down payment on deficit reduction.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/opinion/government-shutdown-national-debt.html

…that sounds like something that adult in the room would probably be able to follow…but how do we explain it to the children?

After President Biden won the election nearly three years ago, three of every 10 Americans believed the false narrative that his victory resulted from fraud, a poll found. In the years since, fact checkers have debunked the claim in lengthy articles, corrections posted on viral content, videos and chat rooms.

This summer, they received a verdict on their efforts in an updated poll from Monmouth University: Very little has changed. Three of every 10 Americans still believed the false narrative.
[…]
Ms. Nalon’s organization, one of the leading operations of its kind in Brazil, started in 2015 as attention to the fight against false and misleading content online surged. It was part of a fact-checking industry that bloomed around the world. At the end of last year, there were 424 fact-checking websites, up from just 11 in 2008, according to an annual census by the Duke University Reporters’ Lab.

The organizations used an arsenal of old and new tools: fact checks, pre-bunks that tried to inform viewers against misinformation before they encountered it, context labels, accuracy flags, warning screens, content removal policies, media literacy trainings and more. Facebook, which is owned by Meta, helped spur some of the growth in 2016 when it started working with and paying fact-checking operations. Online platforms, like TikTok, eventually followed suit.

Yet the momentum seems to be idling. This year, only 417 sites are active. The addition of new sites has slowed for several years, with just 20 last year compared with 83 in 2019. Sites such as the Baloney Meter in Canada and Fakt Ist Fakt in Austria have gone quiet in recent years.
[…]
The work continues to draw interest from new parts of the world, and some think tanks and good-government groups have begun offering their own fact-checking services, experts said. Harassment and government repression, however, remain major deterrents. Political polarization has turned fact-checking and other misinformation defenses into a target among right-wing influencers, who claim that debunkers are biased against them.

…have they tried not talking utter bullshit?

Yasmin Green, chief executive of Jigsaw, a group within Google that studies threats like disinformation and extremism, recalled one study in which a participant scrolled past a fact check shared by a journalist from CNN and dismissed it out of hand. “Well, who fact-checks the fact checkers?” the user asked.

…sorry…forgot that was a trick question for a second

Social platforms where false narratives and conspiracy theories still spread widely have scaled back anti-disinformation resources over the past year. Researchers found that fact-checking organizations and similar outlets grew gradually more dependent on social media companies for a financial lifeline; misinformation watchers now worry that increasingly budget-conscious tech companies will start reducing their philanthropy spending.

Such a move could “really turn the screws on fact checkers,” said Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, which is now known as X.
[…]
Tests are also being run using A.I. to quickly parse the enormous volume of false information, identify frequent spreaders and respond to inaccuracies. The technology, however, has a shaky track record with truth. After the fact-checking organization PolitiFact tested ChatGPT on 40 claims that had already been meticulously researched by human fact checkers, the A.I. either made a mistake, refused to answer or arrived at a different conclusion from the fact checkers half of the time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/business/media/fact-checkers-misinformation.html

…so…is ChatGPT generating their impeachment strategy, then?

Though there are some dissenters among them, many House Republicans have persuaded themselves that Biden is a disreputable president who deserves to be impeached — the leader of a corrupted family that has traded on his name and position. The problem is they haven’t produced conclusive evidence to prove how the president has benefited financially or in other ways abused his power.

Two weeks ago, McCarthy authorized an impeachment inquiry, an ill-defined instrument. The first hearing was held Thursday before the House Oversight Committee, under the direction of Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.). It did not go as planned, despite featuring some Fox News favorites as expert witnesses.
[…]
Bruce Dubinsky, a forensic accountant, told the committee that the evidence to date does not show abuse of power on the part of the president. “I am not here today to even suggest that there was corruption, fraud or wrongdoing,” he said. He added that Republicans need to gather and produce something more compelling before he would go that far.

Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, ridiculed the Republicans, calling the hearing a fraud. “If Republicans had a smoking gun or even a dripping water pistol, they would be presenting it today,” he said. “But they’ve got nothing.”
[…]
Trump appeared in Detroit on the same day as the Republican debate — and a day after Biden joined with striking members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and endorsed their demand for a 40 percent pay raise. Biden’s appearance made him the first president ever to join a union picket line.

Trump, who attracted union members and nonunion blue-collar workers in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, spoke at a nonunion auto parts facility. He urged UAW members — not many of whom were in attendance — to encourage their leadership to endorse him for president. “I’ll take care of the rest,” he said, claiming he would engineer a turnaround in manufacturing and save the auto industry from what he said was certain decline under Biden’s administration.

Trump called for a revival of economic nationalism, the same pledge he made in 2016, and renewed his attack on foreign countries for what he said had been the looting ofthe American economy. He has said the same for decades. He promised to “rebuild the industrial bedrock of this country.” He did so without offering ways to do so, and without acknowledging that he had failed in his four years as president to reverse these trends.

Squabbles, missteps and failure to govern: The Republican week that was [WaPo]

…kinda brings a whole new meaning to the term “false economy” really

Although the White House said Ukraine needed $20.6 billion in aid to fight Russia’s invasion, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) stripped all funds for the U.S. ally from the government spending bill, under immense pressure from a GOP caucus that has increasingly turned against Biden’s handling of the war. The Senate had advanced a bipartisan bill to send roughly $6 billion to Ukraine, but Democrats wary of being blamed for a government shutdown were moving to approve the House version with only hours to go before federal appropriations expired.
[…]
Ukraine’s supporters in the House, Senate and White House say they will not give up despite the defeat, emphasizing that most members of Congress still support the additional funding. They also note that the stopgap spending bill moving Saturday will only fund the government until mid-November, providing another opportunity for pushing again for money for Ukraine.

But the failure to push the aid through Saturday could still have consequences for the war effort, emboldening Russian President Vladimir Putin, giving America’s European allies an excuse to pare back their own financial commitments and widening Ukraine’s dangerously large budget deficit, analysts say.
[…]
The spending deal, approved by the House in the afternoon and still awaiting a final vote in the Senate, extends government funding past a midnight deadline and provides domestic disaster relief sought by both chambers. The White House had begun preparations for a funding lapse that would have left millions of federal employees without pay. After House Republicans folded Saturday on demands for sharp spending cuts, they dared Democrats to shut down the government over financial support for a foreign country.

…FFS…do these chucklefucking numbnutted fuckwits genuinely not grasp the concept of a proxy war…or is there just no such thing as a quiet part now & they think supporting the kremlin is literally the party line?

“If you’re telling the American people with a straight face you will shut down the American government over Ukraine, then shame on you,” Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) said on the House floor early Saturday.

…what’s the over/under on that being more shame than that dude should be feeling for how far up his ass that sounds like he’s got his head wedged?

McConnell made a pitch to Republican senators Saturday morning to approve the already drafted legislation that included aid for Ukraine, according to two people briefed on the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intraparty negotiations. McConnell, seeing he lacked the votes, gave up on the effort, but made clear the conference would need to take up additional funding for Ukraine soon, they said.

…when “moscow mitch” isn’t the biggest asshole in the room on an issue that’s guaranteed to put a smile on vlad’s face…how colossal an asshole do you need to be to push him down those rankings?

Blinken was in contact with lawmakers in charge of appropriations all week, as part of a “full-court press” to underscore the importance of Ukrainian aid, said a senior State Department official. Austin, the defense secretary, also made calls on Saturday. Besides reinforcing the need to keep the government open, he and other senior Pentagon officials emphasized to lawmakers the importance of helping Ukrainian forces defend themselves, said a defense official familiar with those talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door meetings. Austin has been personally involved with lawmakers for weeks, but those efforts increased over the weekend as the prospect of a shutdown neared, the official said.

And yet these pleas could not overcome opposition among the GOP’s most conservative members to U.S. support for the war — opposition that has been growing more intense as the war drags on.

In July, during debate over the annual Pentagon policy bill, 70 Republicans in the House voted to oppose all security assistance to Ukraine. On Wednesday, 93 House Republicans supported an amendment that would have blocked security assistance. Despite overwhelming bipartisan support for Ukraine funding, GOP leaders then forced another vote Thursday on a narrow $300 million account that funds regular activities with Ukraine — and 117 Republicans voted against that measure, more than half the caucus, while all 210 Democrats and 101 Republicans backed continuing the funding.

…it’s like they…don’t understand how any of this works?

For the Ukrainians, the lack of funding will prompt an immediate attempt to figure out alternative solutions. Biden’s request included $13.1 billion for military assistance to Ukraine, which also would go toward paying for the replenishment of Pentagon weapons stocks that have run low after more than a year of transferring weapons and ammunition to Kyiv. If the Pentagon does not have money for backfilling the items for even a few weeks, it could disrupt the Defense Department’s ability to meet purchasing and contracting deadlines that have allowed it to maintain its own arsenal and feed a steady supply of weapons to Ukraine since the start of the war early last year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/30/ukraine-aid-government-shutdown/

…seriously…do they even hear themselves?

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who is a close ally of Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, hosted a social media debate in which one participant argued that conservatives should cooperate with a hypothetical white nationalist dictator “in order to destroy the power of the left”.

Rufo, a Manhattan Institute fellow who has been a hugely influential figure in DeSantis’ culture war policies in Florida, did not disagree with the sentiments. Instead he commended speakers for their “thoughtful points” and presenting the discussion as a model for engagement with “the dissident right”.
[…]
Rufo hosted the debate on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter.

Participating in the debate was Charles Haywood, a former shampoo magnate who the Guardian previously reported is a would-be “warlord” who founded a secretive, men-only fraternal society, the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR).

The debate concerned Haywood’s promotion of a strategy he calls “no enemies to the right”, which urges people on the right to avoid any public criticism of others in their camp, including extremists.

Early in the Rufo-hosted discussion last Tuesday, Haywood raised the hypothetical possibility early in the discussion: “Let’s say a real white nationalist arose who had real political power … and therefore [could] be of assistance against the left.”

Responding to the hypothetical, Haywood said: “I think that the answer is that you should cooperate with that person in order to destroy the power of the left.”

…quiet part? …never fucking heard of that…what even is “quiet”?

Later in the broadcast, Haywood responded to concerns about rightwing authoritarianism by saying: “When we’re talking about people like Franco or Pinochet or even Salazar … they did kill people. They killed people justly, they killed people unjustly, and that’s just a historical fact.”

“But,” Haywood added, “they saved a lot more people than they killed.”

…did they, tho?

In closing the discussion, Rufo credited speakers with raising “some provocative points on all sides, some thoughtful points on all sides”, and told listeners: “I think there is a room for engaging the dissident right and the establishment right. I think we need to have a bridge between the two and engage in thoughtful dialogue.”

…those sure are…words, I guess…abysmally shameful when you string them together that way…but…they would technically qualify as being in the right language?

Heidi Beirich, an extremism expert who co-founded the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, called the discussion and its framing “a disaster” in an email.
[…]
Beirich also wrote: “Conservative cowardice on white supremacy is the road to losing a democracy and possibly much worse in terms of hate-driven political violence and autocracy.”

She compared the “no enemies to the right” doctrine to the situation in “Germany in the 1930s when conservatives worked with Hitler, seeing him as less of a problem than communists”.

Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence project, said: “There’s sizable segments of the right that want the best of both worlds, namely the energy and the vigor of reactionary far-right movements but without any of the baggage.”

Gais added: “The idea that the ‘dissident right’ – a sort of umbrella term used within the movement to refer to white nationalists and others on that political spectrum – could make some kind of viable political partner seems to be an extension of this line of thought.

“What disturbs me the most about these comments is it makes clear that some on the right are more than comfortable with the fact that the guardrails are off.”
[…]
The Guardian also previously reported that Haywood is a featured speaker at a “natalist” conference planned for December in Austin, Texas, where he is scheduled to appear alongside other far-right figures and advocates of eugenics.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/30/conservative-christopher-rufo-florida-twitter-debate

…it’s uncomfortable to contemplate

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/30/fascism-in-america-book-trump

…I had a professor once upon a time who liked to ask about the international eugenics conference the way that trivial pursuit question about time magazine’s man of the year for 1939 flies in the face of your expectation…so…it’s not like the MAGA thing was the first time it came up or anything…but…god damn

In 2021, 232 members of the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in summoning and provoking the mob that attacked and ransacked the United States Capitol on Jan. 6. Not long after, 57 members of the Senate voted to convict Trump. But because the Constitution demands a two-thirds majority for conviction in an impeachment trial, the considered decision of a substantial majority of Congress — backed by a substantial majority of the public — was thwarted by the veto of a self-interested, partisan minority.

A couple of generations earlier, in 1971 and 1972, a vast majority of members of Congress — 354 in the House and 84 in the Senate — voted to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and send it to the states. Most Americans, according to surveys at the time, wanted to make the E.R.A. the 27th Amendment to the Constitution. And within five years of passage in Washington, legislatures in 35 states — a majority of the nation’s legislators — had voted for ratification. But 35 states was three short of the three-fourths needed for the amendment to succeed. By the time the deadline for ratifying the E.R.A. came in 1982, the amendment was essentially dead in the water.

Decades before that, in 1922, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill passed the House, 230 to 119. It was supported by President Warren G. Harding, a Republican, as well as a large Republican majority in the Senate. But that majority was not large enough to overcome a Democratic filibuster — spearheaded by Jim Crow lawmakers from the South — and the bill died before it could come to a vote. It would take a full century after the death of the Dyer bill for Congress to pass and the president to sign an anti-lynching bill into law.

The American political system — with its federalism, bicameralism and separation of powers — consists of overlapping majoritarian and countermajoritarian institutions designed to promote stability and continuity at the expense of popular government. Not content to build structural impediments to change, the framers of the Constitution also insisted on supermajority thresholds for a number of key actions: executive and judicial impeachment, ratification of foreign treaties and the passage and ratification of constitutional amendments. The Constitution also allows for the legislature to make its own rules regarding its conduct, and both chambers of Congress have, at different points in their histories, adopted de facto supermajority rules for passing legislation.

Americans are so accustomed and acculturated to these supermajority rules that they often treat their value as self-evident — a natural and necessary part of American constitutionalism. No, we don’t want to subject our every political decision to simple majority rule. Yes, we want to raise the highest possible barrier to removing a president or changing the rules of the game.

Defenses of supermajority rules tend to rest on claims related to what appears to be common sense. The argument goes like this: Supermajority rules stabilize our political institutions, encourage deliberation, secure consensus for change and protect minorities from the tyranny of overbearing majorities. But as the political theorist Melissa Schwartzberg argues in her 2014 book, “Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule,” the story isn’t so simple, and the value of supermajority rules isn’t clear at all.
[…]
As for the question of minority protection from majority tyranny, one of the quirks of nearly all supermajority rules is that they make no distinction between different kinds of minorities. This means that they are as likely to protect and strengthen privileged and powerful minorities as they are to empower and defend weak ones. Looking at the American experience, we see much more of the former than we do of the latter, from the arc of the slave power in antebellum America to the specific case of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill to recent efforts to protect the civil rights of more vulnerable Americans.

This gets to the most powerful point Schwartzberg makes about the impact of supermajority rules on democratic life. Democracy, she writes, “entails a commitment to the presumption of epistemic equality among its citizens.” Put another way: Democracy assumes an equal capacity to judge one’s interests — or at least what an individual believes is his or her interests. This epistemic equality is “manifested institutionally in formally equal voting power.” In a democracy, our political institutions should affirm the fact that we are equal.

In the United States, ours do not. The rules of the game here tend to elevate the views and judgments of some citizens over others, to the point that under certain circumstances, small, factional minorities can rule with no regard for the views of the majority in their communities. Whether it is the supermajority rules of the Senate or the countermajoritarianism of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court, our system makes it clear that some voices are more equal than others.

One might say, even so, that the wisdom of the framers and of past generations holds true. But as Americans struggle against their own countermajoritarian institutions and supermajoritarian rules to stop the ascendance of a wannabe authoritarian, I am not so sure that wisdom holds true.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/opinion/minority-rule-countermajoritarianism.html

…some questions feel like they have obvious answers

At this year’s [Ohio Valley Military Society’s annual] Show of Shows, which took place in February in the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, there were nearly 2,000 tables, and my best guess is that at least half had Nazi items — and often only Nazi items — for sale. There were Nazi flags, busts, helmets, Lugers, cutlery, batons, an autographed photo of Hitler. A small brass swastika pin could be picked up for $20; an SS serving bowl with gold engraving, $1,000; a yellow- and white-gold Luftwaffe Pilot Observer badge adorned with 170 diamonds, $130,000.
[…]
I’d gone to the Show of Shows, the largest military memorabilia show in the country, because I wanted to better understand the trade in Nazi artifacts, to try to get a sense of these collectors, their motivations. The market for Nazi mementos is thriving — annual sales are, according to one expert, as high as $100 million — and in the United States nothing about it is illegal. (Many other countries, particularly in Europe, do have regulations, though generally they have to do with the display of Nazi symbols, not trade or possession.) It isn’t conducted in the shadows or on the dark web or only at specialty shows or only in Kentucky. Nazi items are openly sold by dealers and auction houses countrywide, at trade shows and in storefronts and online.
[…]
For years I’ve seen up close the pull Nazi artifacts can exert. I’ve spent time with Polish treasure hunters seeking, and occasionally finding, any variety of objects left behind by the Nazis. But I hadn’t understood how pervasive the trade was — hadn’t understood, in fact, that it was a trade, how thoroughly these artifacts had been commodified. And I certainly hadn’t realized how the big the market was here, in the United States.

What opened my eyes was learning how much Nazi stuff there was on LiveAuctioneers, the pre-eminent online platform for antiques dealers. According to a Times Opinion analysis, the site has published more than 30,000 listings for Nazi memorabilia in the past 15 years, making it probably the biggest, and certainly the most mainstream, purveyor of Nazi artifacts in the country. Although LiveAuctioneers’ policy prohibits “items that glorify or otherwise capitalize on human tragedy with no regard or sensitivity to the suffering caused by such events,” genuine Nazi artifacts are generally exempt, as they’re considered “historical.” (Most other major platforms have enacted more stringent policies. EBay, for example, bars any item that bears a swastika, with some exceptions for currency, stamps, historically accurate models and dioramas and photos, books and art, as well as items that predate 1933.)
[…]
At the Show of Shows, I experienced an initial shock at seeing all that Nazi merchandise, and an ancillary shock at seeing all those ready customers, but once that wore off — which didn’t take long, it was what was normal there — something else disconcerting came into focus. In this huge hall so proudly dedicated to history, full of men so passionate about the past, so committed to its preservation, who pride themselves on their arcane knowledge of World War II, some of whom will unhesitatingly invoke “never again” as a justification to trade SS badges, the Holocaust was almost entirely absent. Or really any indication at all that the Nazis were guilty of anything beyond being defeated.

I realize a trade show doesn’t purport to be a classroom, but even so, the Holocaust’s absence is demonstrative of where the emphasis is being placed. I don’t mean to accuse the organizers of any sort of malice — in fact it’s a semi-enforced etiquette to not display anything considered “hateful,” like overtly antisemitic Nazi propaganda posters, and certainly no Holocaust items, which are widely considered within the community to be beyond the pale. (On my last day at the show I came across a yellow star, but was quickly informed that it was in fact unworn — it had come from an uncut roll seized by Allied soldiers straight from the factory and so was still technically a war trophy.) This is a well-intentioned boundary, but it puts into relief the void at the center of this approach to this history.

As a historical stance it’s toxic, and it seeps. Rampant in the collecting community, if to varying degrees, is something called the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, which posits that the Wehrmacht, Nazi Germany’s conventional armed forces, was just a regular military, no more or less ethical than other militaries, just doing regular military stuff, and it was the SS that did all the nasty work.

This is a reprehensible take, not only because it’s so spectacularly and famously inaccurate — the theory had a strong hold in Germany until the 1980s when the country began to come to grips with its own history — but also because at its core it’s a repudiation of moral responsibility. It’s whatever the opposite of “reckoning” is.
[…]
At the Show of Shows I watched a teenage boy, maybe 15 or 16 years old, browse a table of Nazi daggers. There was one he really liked, but it was expensive; he told the seller he wasn’t sure he could afford it. The seller nodded and pulled out a similar-looking dagger, which was half the price.

The boy was suspicious. “What’s wrong with it?” he asked. “Nothing,” the seller said. “There’s nothing wrong with any of them.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/opinion/nazi-memorabilia-market-liveauctioneers.html

…all or nothing…yeah…some questions are more open than others

It is 10am. Banks asks everyone present to imagine they are on the threshold of geopolitical catastrophe, somewhere a little beyond, though not that far beyond, our current perilous state. He fleshes out a scenario. Prolonged and humbling conflict in Ukraine as well as Finland’s recent accession to Nato has tested Russian pride to breaking point. Worsening matters, Nato has decided to press its advantage in the region by staging a military exercise on the Finnish-Russian border. China, Iran and India have made it plain: they’re not impressed by Nato. The Swedes are jangly, too. Spy planes, satellites and troop carriers are in play. A few wrong moves and all this posturing and provocation could ignite into something far worse. It is up to the players assembled in Bush House to try to war-game us back from the brink.
[…]
For centuries, people have used games to anticipate the future of war and to prepare for it. There was a 16th-century card game, or kartenspiel, that was used to teach basic military principles to the courtiers of Charles V, explains the academic Roger Mason in his 2018 essay Wargaming: Its History and Future. A dice game played in early 19th-century Bohemia simulated the management and movement of a large body of troops; another, played by Prussians of the era, involved the submission of written military orders to a neutral umpire. During the first world war, leaders in Britain, Germany and Russia used war games to consider new problems of mass mobilisation brought about by advances in transport; in the second, Mason writes, “the Japanese wargamed the attack on Pearl Harbor, the invasion of numerous targeted islands, the attack on Midway and a possible offensive in the Indian Ocean”.

According to Banks, analogue, in-person war-gaming fell away as a prominent military tool in the 1950s and 60s because of the rise of computers. Ever since, it has come in and out of fashion, Catherine explains, depending on the particular circumstances of an era: “Right now it’s the flavour of the day, because the problems of the allied nations are not black and white.” There’s counterinsurgency abroad. “Hybrid activities between near-peer competitors.” Almost-wars. There’s a lot of grey in the world, Catherine says, and war-gaming “is a method to perfect our ability to navigate these grey spaces”. Later, Banks quotes a line by the late economist Thomas Schelling: “One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”
[…]

Things almost went badly wrong today, Banks tells the players from the stage. The way he designed his war game, there was room for both sides to accumulate 115 tokens between them “without plunging the world into nuclear horror”. There are gasps when Banks says they accumulated 114 tokens today. “The game escalated precipitously at the end,” he explains. “You all got very eager. You missed crossing the threshold by the narrowest of margins the game will allow.”

Perhaps it counts as a sort of achievement. It certainly leaves us lots to ponder as we file out of Bush House. I glance up at the eighth-floor balcony, glad to be back on solid ground. I buy a pasty from Greggs and wolf it down, feeling obscurely grateful for the opportunity. A few days later, at the weekend, Banks sends me an email. He’s embarrassed. He made a mistake. Either he or one of his students botched the count. The final tally of escalation tokens in the game wasn’t 114, it was 116.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/30/what-would-happen-if-russia-invaded-finland-i-went-to-a-giant-war-game-in-london-to-find-out

…it’s not the winning, they say…it’s the taking part?