Lawfare! Mechanism! of! Surrender!
Benjamin Wittes just published a historically illiterate piece in Lawfare about Judge Richard Leon’s ruling enjoining Defense Secretary Hegseth from retaliating against Senator Mark Kelly’s retirement pay.
Kelly’s offense was none at all, reminding service members that illegal orders do not have to be obeyed. Leon, a Bush appointee, found retaliation against Kelly obviously unconstitutional. He issued a forceful injunction.
Wittes spends most of the piece childishly mocking the use of exclamation marks.
Ho! Ho! Ho!
He catalogs fourteen exclamation-mark sentences. He uses a mob-like reference by saying his Lawfare staffers joke about searching for them. He proposes “exclamation mark density” per page. He acts like a spoiled child while calling others “unbecoming,” “adolescent,” and “not intellectually compelling.” Then he pivots at the end to say he’s actually sympathetic when he compares Judge Leon to the Portland frog protesters. That’s not sympathy, that again is mockery.
The net effect is Lawfare trying to undermine a substantive ruling. A conservative judge smacked the executive branch for unconstitutionally retaliating against a sitting senator’s First Amendment rights. This is not a time for office jokes about punctuation quirks.
The actual legal substance gets about two sentences of engagement, mainly to plant the seed that the D.C. Circuit might reverse on ripeness grounds. That flag is being planted to pre-legitimize a potential appellate rollback while pretending to do neutral legal analysis.
Wittes normalizes an outcome in advance. He’s not saying “I hope this gets reversed.” He’s saying “don’t be surprised if it does.”
And the comparison to his own dog shirts and building light projections is revealing. He’s putting his mindless wardrobe choices in the same bucket as a federal judge blocking unconstitutional conduct. Leon issued an injunction. Wittes says he puts on novelty shirts. These are not equivalent activities.
The Wrong Audience
Wittes and the Lawfare class are optimizing for the current legal establishment’s approval, maintaining their credibility within a professional culture that has been valuing restraint while Trump ignores them.
Professional culture was built for professional times. When the executive branch is retaliating against a sitting senator for exercising congressional oversight of the military, “restraint” in response is far from neutrality.
Now it’s capitulation dressed up as sophistication.
History of “responsible” legal commentary in a constitutional crisis tells us what this does: tone-policing the people who are actually using their institutional power to resist, while the people dismantling constitutional governance get analyzed with chin-stroking seriousness about their legal theories.
The Archive
The judges who mattered during authoritarian consolidation in history weren’t the ones who avoided raising heat. They were the ones who used whatever tools they had, including rhetorical force, to make the record absolutely clear about what was happening. Leon is writing for an archive as much as for the litigants.
“Horsefeathers!” reads as undignified now. Give it time. It will read very differently in retrospect when the record shows what the executive was actually doing and how few people with institutional power said so plainly.
When Papen seized Prussia by emergency decree in July 1932 (two-thirds of Germany’s territory and its police) the Staatsgerichtshof under Erwin Bumke issued a meticulous split decision. Technically the seizure was improper. Practically the Reich commissioners kept power. Three months later Hitler inherited a centralized police apparatus already under Reich control. The court’s restraint handed the Nazis the infrastructure of repression with a veneer of constitutional legitimacy. Bumke himself later joined the Nazi party. He killed himself in 1945.
Gustav Radbruch, the legal philosopher and former Weimar Justice Minister, wrote his famous 1946 essay arguing that positivism and procedural fastidiousness of the German legal profession had left it defenseless against exactly the kind of capture that Trump is using today. The profession’s commitment to formal correctness over substantive confrontation wasn’t neutral.
It was the mechanism of surrender.
The judges who broke tone as “unbecoming” left a record that couldn’t be misread later.
The exclamation marks aren’t the story. The fact that a legal commentariat thinks they are is the story.
Vance: Depicting Black People as Apes is Not a Real Controversy
Vice President JD Vance, asked about a video President Trump posted on Truth Social depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, told reporters:
It’s not a real controversy. We have much, much more real problems to focus on.
The dangerous, racist video was up for twelve hours.
The White House claimed a staffer posted it without watching it.
Trump claimed he only saw the beginning.
Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called it “an internet meme” about “the King of the Jungle” and told reporters to “stop the fake outrage.”
Vance is not denying racism. Instead he’s saying this specific instance of racism doesn’t count. It’s just social media. You post something that causes huge reactions and harms, you take it down. No accountability.
This is more strategically useful than an open denial. It promotes racism as an abstract concept while ensuring it can never be identified when deployed in practice.
Every concrete case gets covered up and reclassified: this one has a hood on, this one’s a meme, that one’s a staffing error, the other one’s fake outrage. Vance knows when applied consistently he produces a white nationalist system where racism is always harming Americans while “officially” never actually occurring.
Asked whether Trump should apologize, Vance said:
For posting a video and then taking it down? No, I don’t think so.
What about for burning a cross and then taking it down?
Depicting Black people as apes is one of the oldest and most recognizable racial dehumanization tropes in American history.
It is not ambiguous.
It is not a meme.
It is not a controversy about social media management.
The Vice President of the United States knows this and is promoting racism by pretending he’s not denying it while denying the most obvious form.
His refusal to recognize it is the message: this is a white man’s country.
Blonde Greek Gods for Kids: Playmobil’s Nazi Aesthetic Explained
A Bavarian toy company called Playmobil is selling blonde haired Greek gods to children through a charity, and nobody seems to find the Nazism origin story strange?
Headquartered in Zirndorf the company launched its “History” line of Greek mythology figures in 2016. The series now includes all twelve Olympian gods, Alexander the Great, Achilles, the Argonauts, and Heracles.
Hermes – 9524: blonde.
Artemis – 9525: blonde.
Alexander – 70950: blonde.
Apollo – 70218: blonde.
Hera – 70214: blonde
Demeter – 9526: blonde
Aphrodite – 70213: blonde
The entire Greek pantheon are presented as Nordic blondes. Originally, the figures were produced exclusively for the Greek market, sold at the Acropolis Museum gift shop in Athens and Greek toy stores, allegedly with proceeds going to the Orama Elpidas (Vision of Hope) bone marrow donor association.
In case you don’t recognize that twist, there’s a known tradition of groups who weaponize charity. Their atrocities become harder to criticize. It’s the foot in the door to normalize harms.
That’s how this disinformation campaign pivoted from its start in Greece back to Germany, even though Germans should know better. The Pergamon Museum, for example, as a monument to German archaeological extraction from Turkey, Iraq, and the ancient Near East sells the blonde Greek gods alongside displays of the looted friezes and gates.
It’s an appropriation loop closed tight.
The architecture doesn’t change
The Nazis were addicts of such appropriation. They did not invent a “fair Apollo” trope, but they forever weaponized the existing ones. Classical studies of “whitened” antiquity became central and integrated into ideological education set forth by Hitler.
Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi regime’s chief ideological theorist, laid out the “blonde blueprint” in The Myth of the 20th Century (1930).
Playmobil perhaps knows: the Greek gods were appropriated and reframed to “represent the Aryan white ideal of their race.” Apollo symbolized Nordic virtues of “pure thought and rationality”. The fabricated “true Greeks” were the Achaeans and Dorians, who Rosenberg claimed were “of Nordic-Germanic descent” and “the ones who created the magnificent Greek culture.” He went so far as to say darker-skinned Mediterranean populations were, in his racist hierarchy, contaminated by “Pelasgian and Semitic origins.”
Rosenberg rewrote Heracles and Jason as “representations of the ideal Aryan Nordic masculine type” no longer Greek. The Nazi tribalist Gunther classified Plato himself as “a pure-blooded aspect of the northern blood of primitive Hellenism.” Friedrich Hildebrandt declared Plato “a teacher for our time” whose ideal state prefigured the racial hierarchy of National Socialism, completely ignoring Plato’s actual work.
This was an extremist racist fringe becoming state doctrine, taught in German schools, promoted by the regime’s most toxic intellectuals, and backed by the full apparatus of the Third Reich’s cultural production machine for genocide.
Did this German effect on classical studies experience denazification after Hitler’s suicide? No. While racial theory collapsed, the discipline infrastructure remained intact. Those who had served dutifully to enact genocide remained in position, continued teaching and curating the “blonde blueprint”.
Denazification screened for party membership cards, not for intellectual content.
Steven Remy’s The Heidelberg Myth (Harvard, 2002) documents how it actually worked: Karl Heinrich Bauer, an outspoken supporter of Nazi sterilization law, became Heidelberg’s first postwar rector — then used the position to reinstate compromised colleagues. The university remained dominated by former Nazis throughout the 1950s. Professors constructed what Remy calls “elaborate narratives of defense and justification” to absolve themselves, while continuing the same research programs, the same curricula, the same visual conventions.
At Göttingen, many professors simply lied on their questionnaires. A 2025 review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review concluded that the history of humanities at German universities under Nazism “was not a deviation from its true mission, but a continuation of traditions that had existed before.”
The traditions continued after, too.
Albert Norden’s 1965 Braunbuch documented 1,800 former Nazis still holding high-ranking positions across West German state, economy, administration, army, justice, and science.
Bettina Arnold’s research on Nazi archaeology documents that instructional posters produced under the Third Reich, depicting ancient peoples as tall, muscled, with blond hair and light eyes, continued to be used in Germany after 1945. The blonde Greeks weren’t flagged because they weren’t swastikas. They were just how the discipline depicted antiquity.
The Fragebogen asked who you were in the party. It did nothing about teaching heavily corrupted classics.
What evidence actually shows
The proof of Nazis being wrong isn’t necessary, given their self-described supremacy over facts, but we do it anyway.
A 2017 study on the genetic origins of Minoans and Mycenaeans found both populations shared roughly 75% of their ancestry with early Neolithic farmers from Anatolia, with additional ties to the Caucasus and Iran. The Mycenaeans had a small northern European genetic contribution of around 10-15%, so their genetic makeup remained predominantly Mediterranean and Near Eastern.
Ancient Greek art consistently shows this. Mycenaean frescoes, Greek pottery, mosaics, and sculptures overwhelmingly depict figures with dark hair and dark eyes. Minoan men at Knossos appear with long dark hair and reddish-brown skin. In addition, modern research has shown Greek statues were vividly painted and not white.
Homer, just one of many storytellers, used “ξανθὸς Ἀχιλλεύς (“xanthos Achilles”). He was marking the man as exceptional and shocking. In other words, he’s saying Achilles is radiant as in light, heroically visible and physically striking. Calling something light therefore blond, is like calling a candle flame or the sun yellow. It’s not actually how anything works. Light isn’t yellow, it’s luminous across a rainbow. Homer was describing something in the way it draws attention because it catches light, something radiant. Imagine writing “he was brilliant” and having a toy designer make him blond because… brilliant means blonde. Nope.
Several Greek gods were explicitly described as dark-haired in ancient sources. Poseidon, Hades, and Dionysus were called kyanokhaitis — “dark-haired,” with the “kyan” referring to a blue-black color. Poseidon’s dark hair correlated with the sea. These weren’t peripheral figures.
Even the Antiquipop academic review of Playmobil’s Greek sets noted diplomatically that “the skin colour of the characters remain quite uniform and white for Mediterranean people.”
They could have said Hitler directly influenced their interpretation. Nazism unquestionably radicalized embedded Greek antiquity. Now Germany and Greece still retain this radicalism as an aesthetic convention. 
Mass-market products continue flattening Greek history through Northern European mysticism.
The transaction
| Period / Source | Aesthetic Signal | Ideology / Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 18th Century: Johann Joachim Winckelmann | White marble, “noble simplicity” | Emerging template of heroic “light features” in classical antiquity |
| 19th Century: Neoclassical painters & sculptors | Golden/blonde hair on Greek/Roman figures | Visual grammar spreads across European art and pedagogy |
| 1930s-1945: Alfred Rosenberg / Nazi theorists | Blonde, blue-eyed Greek heroes | Explicit racialization: “True Greeks = Aryans”; ideological education & propaganda |
| Post-1945: German textbooks & museum displays | Blonde classical heroes | Nazi ideology purged, aesthetic remains embedded in pedagogy and museums |
| 2016–2026: Playmobil Greek mythology figures | Blonde Olympians & heroes | Commercialized Nazi aesthetic; packaged as charity-friendly; displaces reality |
Rosenberg’s racial theory for Hitler stripped of its explicit ideology, laundered through ninety years of “that’s just what heroes look like” visual grammar sits unfortunately on a shelf next to the cash register at the Pergamon Museum.
Nobody at Playmobil’s Zirndorf headquarters needed to read The Myth of the 20th Century. The Nazi aesthetic was so thoroughly untouched in German cultural production that blonde-equals-heroic just feels natural. Unremarkable. Default. That’s how successful cultural appropriation works: it makes itself invisible.
The charity shield
The “Play & Give” branding is worth examining as a structure, not just a partnership. Playmobil Hellas has donated over €80,000 to the Orama Elpidas association through this program. The cause is real. Children with cancer need bone marrow donors.
But wrapping racially coded cultural products in charity branding creates a shield that deflects criticism. Who wants to be the person attacking a toy that helps kids with cancer? The structure is elegant: you can’t critique the product without appearing to critique the cause.
This is a pattern that repeats across institutional capture. Wrap the extraction in something nobody can oppose. Philanthropy as packaging. The charity is genuine; the deflection is structural.
What sits on the shelf
It’s 2026. A German toy company is selling blonde Greek gods at a building full of artifacts Germany removed from the lands where those gods were worshipped, and the packaging says it’s for charity.
The Playmobil figures aren’t just bizarrely blonde “for fun”; they exist inside a long, persistent visual grammar that Nazis weaponized, and which survived decades of postwar German cultural production.
The racial theory that made Mediterranean gods look Northern European is ninety-six years old, its author was hanged at Nuremberg, and his aesthetic choices are still moving product.
The product has changed. The architecture hasn’t.