For months, the domestic terrorist attack on the US Capitol was planned in plain sight on social media. So why weren’t we ready for it? This week, former FBI special agent Michael German explains why the bureau deprioritized the threat posed by white supremacists… and why the Department of Homeland Security says they pose “the most persistent and lethal threat to the homeland.” Then, historian Nell Irvin Painter breaks down how a legacy of racism in the United States brought us to this moment. Can we change our trajectory? She argues that the Black Lives Matter Movement of 2020 could bring lasting, positive change to this country.
20 January 2021
WorldAffairs: Strongmen From Mussolini to Trump
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has spent her career documenting the stealth strategies authoritarian leaders use to gain power. In her new book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, she outlines the “strongman playbook” used by authoritarian leaders including Donald Trump. She says that the January 6 insurgency by far-right extremists, meant to facilitate Trump’s self-coup, lays bare how much the 45th president has in common with autocrats like Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin. When President Trump incited his followers to storm the US Capitol, some were shocked, but Ben-Ghiat saw this coming. She joins Ray Suarez on the podcast to talk about last week’s events and warn us of what could come next.
The Guardian: The mystery of the Gatwick drone
The airport had been closed for 33 hours. More than 1,000 flights had been cancelled, and more than 140,000 passengers affected. “It showed the serious risk of drone intrusion, and how quickly that could bring an airport to its knees,” said John Strickland, an aviation consultant. In total, 170 drone sightings were reported, 115 of which were later deemed “credible” by police. But neither Mitchell, nor any of the news crews camped out for two days, had managed to get a photo or video. Neither had any of the thousands of passengers and airport staff on site; no one who reported a sighting had captured an image on their phone. [...]
Military drones such as the Reaper or the Predator are capable of flying hundreds of kilometres and staying in the air for more than 24 hours at a stretch. But most drones do not have anything approaching this capability: they vary in size, but most are, even with their arms extended, no bigger than a laptop. They struggle to fly in wind or rain, and have limited battery life. Top-tier consumer drones can travel for up to five miles, but have a maximum flight time of about 30 minutes. Custom-built drones might manage up to a couple of hours, but not much more: larger batteries add weight, which uses up more battery. “If someone were flying drones for hours, they’d need a carload of batteries,” Ryan told me. [...]
When Hudson first heard about Gatwick, “I thought this was some absolute idiot and I wanted them caught.” But then he realised “the basic facts don’t add up”. Sussex police had mentioned lights in the corroborated sightings. But if someone had planned the attack, to the extent that they had procured scores of batteries and hacked the drone’s in-built geofencing software – which uses GPS to stop drones from flying into restricted zones such as airports or prisons – then why would they leave the lights on? “You’d disable them,” said Hudson. [...]
Hudson looked at publicly available information: photographs taken during the incident, and statements by Sussex police. Since then, he has identified inconsistencies that he believes undermine the claim that there were drones at Gatwick. Soon after we first spoke, Hudson sent me a long email, including a timeline of tweets and photographs posted during the incident, highlighting contradictions. (“Did he send you four A4 pages with closely typed text and diagrams?” another drone-flyer joked. “It’s one of Ian’s pet subjects.”) The photos he included showed military counter-drone systems being set up on 20 December, the second day of the shutdown – and tweets by Sussex police mentioning sightings after this point, right into the early hours of 21 December. This included one cluster by “credible” witnesses – airport staff and police officers.
DW News: The emergence of a third party is among us' - Interview with Lincoln Project Co-Founder Rick Wilson
Joe Biden won the US presidential election with 306 electoral votes. But incumbent President Donald Trump has yet to concede, and the Republican Party seems to be at a crossroads after four years of Trumpism. What direction will the GOP take going forward?The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson offers a very bleak outlook into the GOP's future. He says 'the Republican party has sold out itself to Trump' and what follows Trump will be more dangerous, because it will be more sophisticated.
UnHerd: Poland’s rise to cultural power
Last month, CD Projekt Red released another game, Cyberpunk 2077, to critical and commercial success (if marred, on some consoles, by technical bugs). Even before its release, Poland, surprisingly, was the world’s fourth largest exporter of video games, behind only China, Japan and Hong Kong. [...]
That seems to be changing. Over the past few years, Polish cinema and literature, as well as video games, have earned international acclaim — bringing modern craftsmanship to the nation’s history, and welcoming people to landscapes as brooding and mysterious as Scandinavia’s, cities as beautiful as France’s, and industrial wastelands as poetic as the North of England’s. [...]
None of this has come without controversy. As Polish art has achieved more international recognition, Poles have been divided on the image of their nation that is being portrayed. Take Ida: many conservatives were troubled by the film’s dwelling on the complicity of some Poles in the persecution of the Jews. Activists campaigned for text to be inserted to emphasise that countless others struggled and suffered to protect Jewish people. [...]
One could hardly pass over the political implications of art but one should avoid being incorrect, or condescending, or opportunistic. Filip Mazurek, a Polish critic, has written that “English language reviewers have ignored or even denied” the “metaphysical, quasi-religious” elements of Tokarczuk’s work, choosing to focus on “Tokarczuk as an anti-nationalist.” (Polish critics, Mazurek argues, did the opposite.) Again, this is not a criticism of Tokarczuk, but one can hardly be shocked that conservative Poles have been less than enthused about her international acclaim when it is premised, to a large extent, on her status as a symbol of opposition to their beliefs.
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