Hey fam: I’m at the beach next week, so no Triads. Please don’t email me? I’m hoping to come back to an inbox with > 1,000.
To make it up to you Sarah and I did a super-sized Secret Pod this morning that’s choc-a-bloc with awesome. We talked about tariffs, the new White House ballroom, Hunter Biden, Kamala, Vegas, and Sydney Sweeney. There’s even a bonus K-Pop conversation.
The show will be up later. See you on the other side.
1. How Bad Is It?
The other day Garrett Graff wrote an essay about fleeing one step ahead of fascism. He’s working on a book about the making of the atomic bomb and part of that story is the rise of fascism in Europe:
Today, we immediately associate the atomic bomb with Japan and the war in the Pacific, but it is actually rooted in the war in Europe and the threat of Adolf Hitler. The advances of physics through the 1930s were inseparable from the darkening clouds of far-right fascism on the European continent. The rise of Hitler and his National Socialist Party in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy destabilized much of Europe’s scientific progress, particularly as anti-Semitic politics and pogroms targeted many of the biggest names in physics. . . .
Over the years that followed, even as they helped lead groundbreaking discoveries around the structure of the atom, many of Europe’s top scientists watched with remarkable clarity as German democracy turned itself over—often much too willingly and easily—to Hitler, and they scoffed at their colleagues and friends who assured them, “Don’t worry, Hitler won’t be so bad—he won’t actually do the things he says he will.”
Any of that sound familiar?
Graff’s book is an oral history where he assembles interviews from the various figures explaining, contemporaneously, what they were seeing. Here are some nuggets for you to chew on:
Werner Heisenberg, theoretical physicist, University of Leipzig: The end of the First World War had thrown Germany’s youth into a great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger one drew together in an attempt to blaze new paths, or at least to discover a new star by which they could guide their steps in the prevailing darkness.
The summer of 1922 ended on what, for me, was a rather saddening note. My teacher had suggested that I attend the Congress of German Scientists and Physicians in Leipzig, where Einstein, one of the chief speakers, would lecture on the general theory of relativity. The lecture theater was a large hall with doors on all sides. As I was about to enter, a young man pressed a red handbill into my hand, warning me against Einstein and relativity. The whole theory was said to be nothing but wild speculation, blown up by the Jewish press and entirely alien to the German spirit.
At first I thought the whole thing was the work of some lunatic, for madmen are wont to turn up at all big meetings. However, when I was told that the author was a man renowned for his experimental work I felt as if part of my world were collapsing. All along, I had been firmly convinced that science at least was above the kind of political strife that had led to the civil war in Munich, and of which I wished to have no further part. Now I made the sad discovery that men of weak or pathological character can inject their twisted political passions even into scientific life. . . .
Leo Szilard, physicist, Berlin, Germany: I reached the conclusion something would go wrong in Germany very early. I reached in 1931 the conclusion that Hitler would get into power, not because the forces of the Nazi revolution were so strong, but rather because I thought that there would be no resistance whatsoever.
Is this too much? Is it as bad as all that in America, right now?
The answer isn’t an unequivocal No but a provisional No.
It’s not “No, that’s ridiculous and it could never happen.”
It’s “No, not as of this minute and the odds are that we’ll avoid it. Hopefully.”
Sometimes it’s the little things that stand out.
This week we got word that Donald Trump is spending $200 million to create a presidential ballroom at the White House to rival the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago. Does this strike you as something a man would do if he intended to leave office in four years?
Another little thing: The Smithsonian’s Museum of American history has an exhibition on impeachment. This week the museum removed references to Trump from the exhibit. The regime intends the citizenry to pretend it does not know facts it clearly does know.
Does that strike you as something a liberal, democratic regime does?
One last thing: Lawfare’s Anna Bower had a remarkable thread yesterday about the harassment of judges. Judges are not like elected officials; they work in relative obscurity. Unless you are a legal professional, you have probably never heard of judges John McConnell or Robert Lasnik. But some people out there are paying close attention to these men.
After McConnell issued a ruling against the Trump administration in one of the (many) lawsuits against its extra-legal maneuvering, he began receiving death threats.
Lasnick is overseeing another Trump case. What happened to him is even more sinister. Pizzas were delivered to Lasnick’s house and to the residences of two of his adult children. All three deliveries were made to the name “Daniel Salas.”
Daniel Salas was the child of another judge, Esther Salas. Daniel was murdered in 2020.
You do not need a decoder ring to get the message. There are people paying close