Did you hear that a Texas politician, and current CIA Director, John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow this week? The Wall Street Journal, then Politico and CBS, stated the purpose was to warn Russia against attacking NATO. CBS added that he also went to talk Iran, threatening sanctions unless Hormuz reopens. Peskov said contacts were only made between intelligence services, as Putin stayed out of it. Trump, always the one to state the inverse of reality, called the unusual trip “semi-routine.”

The same day AP quoted a U.S. defense official in Europe and a NATO official calling Patriot interceptor inventory in Europe “beyond critical,” drained by Hegseth without anything to show for it. The U.S. official said Europe has “very limited” capability against even a single ballistic missile. The Pentagon and NATO of course deny the Hegseth-folly on record. Meanwhile, CSIS puts U.S. inventory at 2,330 interceptors before February 28 and roughly 800 today, which suggests 65 percent may have been spent on Iran. In other words, at least sixteen U.S. military sites were hit, personnel pulled out of the ones too exposed to hold, and intelligence hardware from a Riyadh CIA station to the TPY-2 radar in Jordan was lost, while Hegseth threw away the “defense” capabilities of America. Beyond all the misfires he didn’t plan ahead and so his brevity code is Winchester.

Inside the service, the cash shortage is no secret. “They’re just not speaking publicly about it,” said Todd Harrison, a defense analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “And I suspect that is a deliberate decision of the civilian leaders in the Pentagon, starting at secretary, that this is for political reasons, that they don’t want to look like they’re damaging future military readiness over a war that is becoming increasingly a political liability.”

Let’s synthesize the headlines. A warning delivered from an empty magazine is America disclosing its response ceiling being dramatically lowered. Remember how Biden sent Burns to Moscow in November 2021 to warn against invading Ukraine? It’s a lesson in lowering the ceiling. He wagged a finger at Moscow about sanctions and Ukrainian aid, with U.S. troops ruled out in public. Putin gleefully and stupidly invaded four months later. Ratcliffe’s apparent worry is a ballistic missile strike on NATO. AP’s own sources place this years away at best while Russia bombs Ukraine nightly. So an effect of a CIA director personally arriving to say please don’t ballistic Germany, means everything below that line is allowed by Trump? That Leipzig drone bearing GRU hallmarks to blow up Ukrainian aircraft, eighteen drone disruptions at one airport since January, the Vulkan campaign knocking out critical infrastructure that Dobrindt calls daily hybrid warfare while insisting Germany is “not at war”, are the real question now.

Moscow’s hybrid warfare expansion is undeniable. In February I described three failure modes converging on the Russian economy this summer. The Iran war postponed them. Urals went from $55 to $125 and Bruegel counts 1,184 billion rubles of windfall through June. The structure held underneath. July’s deficit was 724 billion rubles, seven months at 2.8 percent of GDP. Ukrainian refinery strikes converted the export windfall into fuel queues in 66 regions, wage delays, cash withdrawals, and anger that DW’s respondents say points at… the West. A regime in that condition craves a cheap external conflict. Germany foolishly banked on American Patriot launchers and now can’t get the missiles to load in them. That’s why it’s so, so important to read this detail: the C-17 staged through Riga, sat on the Vnukovo apron for eight and a half hours, and Washington had to ask Kyiv to suspend strikes until it left. The ally briefed in advance was the one told to stop shooting. Whether Berlin heard anything before the motorcade footage hit social media is a question for Henrichmann’s oversight committee to get on the record.

In usual Trump style, his men went begging for help on Hormuz from the country that is profiting most from Hormuz staying shut, having already granted Russia a 30-day oil waiver in March. The Kremlin put some people in the room to listen, and what they heard confirmed Germany is on the table.

I guess my real outstanding question is, while Germany was getting the boot, was Snowden given any offers? CBS noted that Ratcliffe personally negotiated the Karelina release in April 2025, and Moscow freed a former Marine earlier this month. Detainee trading is his usual beat.

The category of antisemitism that Republican State Sen. Peter Oberacker practices has a name in German scholarship: Schuldabwehr-Antisemitismus or “guilt defense”.

Adorno’s 1959 lecture and Schönbach’s 1961 study made this clear, so it’s no surprise to anyone. The defining move is the defense of the perpetrators’ memory at the expense of the victims’. Oberacker posted a photo of Hitler’s soldier on Veterans Day 2015 with the caption “gave his life for his country,” and when the post resurfaced in August 2026 he added “war sucks,” “veterans of all conflicts,” and “didn’t have a choice.” Each sentence exists to unfairly place the Wehrmacht dead on the same ledger as the people the Wehrmacht killed.

Wehrmacht criminality was in evidence at Nuremberg in 1946 and tried separately in the High Command case in 1947 and 1948. The Hamburg Institute’s exhibition ran from 1995 and again from 2001. Germany’s own national Veteranentag, approved by the Bundestag in 2024 and first observed June 15, 2025, covers Bundeswehr veterans only. The Federal Republic declines to salute its predecessor army. An American congressional candidate applies a far weaker standard to the Wehrmacht than the German defense ministry does. And think about it in American terms. Memorial Day was created to honor the Union soldiers who died defending America against the Slaveholder Rebellion. To say an enemy of the state, the Wehrmacht or the Confederacy, should be memorialized the same as the people killed trying to stop them, is nonsense.

The Bundeswehr’s 2018 Traditionserlass states that for the armed forces of a democratic constitutional state the Wehrmacht as an institution cannot found tradition; individual Wehrmacht members may be included only after case-by-case examination that weighs personal guilt and requires an exemplary act, such as participation in the military resistance.

All that is to say we are looking at antisemitism as the scholarship defines it, met in the 2015 caption and three more times in just one interview about it. The IHRA examples include denying the mechanisms of the genocide. The Wehrmacht was a mechanism, and a defense of the Wehrmacht that never names what it did erases that mechanism and harms the victims. So the claim is exact: he committed an easily recognized form of antisemitism, in public, and then he defended it, which is itself another level of antisemitism.

How did he defend it? By falsely accusing others of antisemitism. Take a look at his methods of disinformation.

For Mamdani, an elected official, and Piker, a streamer who holds no office, they only have taken positions on Israel and Zionism; neither has a single documented statement expressing hostility to Jews as Jews, and the IHRA definition itself states that criticism of Israel like that leveled at any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Oberacker undermines the definition, as he fails to understand that his accusations only make himself look more antisemitic. It is antisemitic to make every Jew answerable for an Israeli government, which is what accusations do when they treat any criticism of Israel as the offense. Jews can live outside of Israel, and Jews everywhere criticize Israel. Zionism itself is of Christian political lineage that predates Jewish political campaigns by half a century. Restorationism, from Shaftesbury’s 1840 memorandum to Palmerston through Balfour, wanted Jews settled in Palestine partly to remove them from Europe, an aim it shared with the antisemites of the period. A political idea with that ancestry can and should be criticized, especially given the foundational hostility to Jews (treating them as disposable tools for political purposes).

And then look at Oberacker’s accusations against politician Platner. It’s almost too stupid to believe. The evidence is a tattoo Platner says he got it as a Marine without knowing and has since covered it. A skull resembling the Totenkopf circulates in military settings because of a culture that reads Wehrmacht and SS insignia as period detail rather than as antisemitism. That culture is the exact same one Oberacker practices when he reads an actual Hoheitsadler on his grandfather’s chest as circumstance. The accusation of Oberacker should be pointed at himself, because the standard he applied to Platner convicts himself first in 2015.

The antisemitism of Oberacker has no content about Jews, and that’s his whole game. He erases the people who are meant to be protected, because he uses it to enable himself instead. It is a designation he assigns to his opponents and withholds from allies and ancestors. Look at how he hired as campaign manager Bobby Walker, a Young Republican officer who took part in a leadership group chat that praised Hitler, and removed him only after Politico published the messages in October 2025.

A man who very clearly and openly practices antisemitism while prosecuting others on evidence he would never accept against himself is not some flawed opponent of antisemitism. He is antisemitic, an active participant, where he doesn’t need to help living or dead Jews at all, because his use of the term is only for his own political benefit.

Cory Doctorow, a great story teller, has written an essay arguing that there was a single “they” spending forty years killing the VCR, and that in 1998 “they” succeeded. It reminded me of Greek mythology, not least of all because I lived through the time and technology he speaks of and easily can check dates.

They disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don’t have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that’s not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded.

When I raised chronology concerns with him on Mastodon, his answer was that he was there. He attended the meetings, he reported the broadcast flag first, he worked on Grokster at EFF.

Just to be clear: I was at EFF when we argued Grokster. I worked on the case with Fred, who argued it on appeal, and helped strategize our SCOTUS appeal.

I suppose all of that is true, which makes him a valuable source with a particular perspective. It means he was a participant. And the participant’s account is where a historian differs, because a source is a source: it records, for the position it was written from, to be compared against dated artifacts.

Doctorow’s position is even a well-known one. The EFF loudly litigated the topic for two decades. It has an activist style of libertarian counsel with a particular settled view of 1201. Their view is actually their argument, as a lobby, and a fair one. But the fair EFF argument he is making is a fairly different thing from someone giving a fair history of what happened. His whole essay presents one argument as if it is the same thing as everyone’s shared history. However, from my view, his telling diverges from history at most of the points where his essay is trying to sound the most confident about what happened.

Consider how a historian’s discipline works. Fix the chronology before trying to dig into analysis, let alone cause. Name the actors and check any shift, whether they stayed the course. Read the primary source rather than the (always suspect) summary of it. Test the story against the counterfactual the author dismisses.

I will tell you straight up, for example, his essay cites Wikipedia for a Supreme Court opinion that the Library of Congress hosts as a PDF. I mean, WTF. Wikipedia? As source? Everybody must know by now that Wikipedia is a disgrace to data integrity, with more breaches than there are ships on the floor of the ocean.

I said on Mastodon I’d post what I found, so here’s a quick list of where I found myself choking the most on his essay.

Claim	Record	Lapse
VCRs were “supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that’s not the case”	The alternative explanation is named in the second sentence and dismissed by assertion. Pioneer’s September 2004 release expected DVD recorders to outship VCRs in Japan that fiscal year. Buyers chose the successor that also recorded.	Counterfactual
One “they” pursued the VCR’s destruction from 1976 to today	Sony defended Betamax, bought Columbia in 1989, co-founded the DVD Forum, then sued Napster. One firm, changing portfolio.	Agency
“Cable operators sued over VCRs”	The Betamax plaintiffs were Universal City Studios and Walt Disney Productions. The caption names them.	Agency
The VCR “hit the market under a cloud of litigation”	Betamax went on sale in the United States in 1975. Universal and Disney filed suit in November 1976.	Chronology
Betamax “laid the legal foundation for all the digital tools that followed since”	Argued January 1983, reargued October 1983, decided 5-4 in January 1984. The Thurgood Marshall Papers at the Library of Congress record a first conference vote to affirm the Ninth Circuit, with Blackmun assigned the majority. Grokster added inducement liability in 2005.	Source
1201 in 1998 is what disinvented the VCR	1201 created a separate offense and left Betamax standing. §1201(c)(1) preserves every defense to infringement, including fair use. Reimerdes and Corley held only that Sony is no defense to a circumvention claim. The Federal Circuit read an infringement nexus back into 1201 in Chamberlain v. Skylink (2004); the Ninth Circuit rejected it in MDY v. Blizzard (2010). Macrovision filed its copy-protection patent on 17 April 1985, fifteen months after the ruling. Format control preceded the statute by thirteen years, and §1201(k), the one subsection that names the VCR, mandated that 1985 technology in every consumer VHS recorder sold from 2000. The statute converted strategy to code.	Chronology
“There was still no such thing as a home DVD recorder”	Pioneer announced the DVR-1000 on 25 November 1999 and shipped it that December. DVD-RW was a DVD Forum standard, set by the consortium he says banned recording. CSS blocked copying commercial discs. It never blocked recording.	Source
Modifying a device “could land you in prison”	The criminal penalty sits in §1204 and requires willful violation for commercial gain. Consumer exposure is civil. Triennial exemptions cover phones, vehicles and agricultural equipment.	Source
Early TiVos “only worked with analog cable” and broadcast	Philips and Sony shipped DirecTV receivers with TiVo in November 2000, announced by DirecTV on 2 November 2000. They wrote DirecTV’s encrypted MPEG-2 stream straight to disk. TiVo recorded digital pay television six years before CableCARD. The DirecTV release is no longer hosted; the date rests on contemporaneous trade reporting of it.	Chronology
The broadcast flag forced TiVo to accept anti-features	Adopted 2003, vacated by the D.C. Circuit on 6 May 2005. It never took effect. Standalone TiVo reached digital cable through CableCARD, an FCC order of October 2003 under Section 304 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which forced cable open to third-party devices. Carterfone, 1968, applied to cable. Unauthorized cable descrambling had been a federal offense under 47 U.S.C. §553 since the 1984 Cable Act, fourteen years before 1201, so CableCARD was the route in, and the 2007 integration ban forced operators to use the card in their own boxes. The same order’s encoding rules capped copy restrictions and required broadcast content to remain copy-freely. The flags he lists were ceilings the FCC imposed on cable, and the D.C. Circuit vacated those too, in EchoStar v. FCC, 2013.	Chronology
USTR traded anti-circumvention law for tariff-free access with “every American trading partner”	The obligation arrived through the multilateral WIPO Copyright Treaty of December 1996 and, for Europe, Directive 2001/29/EC. Bilateral trade-for-DRM deals (Australia 2004, Korea 2007) are the exception. This is the load-bearing claim for his Trump conclusion and it is undocumented.	Counterfactual
“The fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world”	Stated twice, sourced nowhere. The Census Bureau records television in 9 percent of households in 1950 and 65 percent in 1955. Its 1992 survey found VCRs in 68.8 percent of households, seventeen years after Betamax launched.	Source
Judges set the rules “long before legislatures come to grips”	The Statute of Anne preceded any judicial doctrine. The 1909 Act answered piano rolls. The 1976 Act answered cable. Courts and Congress alternate.	Chronology

Although it’s a table, for my own edification really, the sum of its parts reveals something bigger than the individual corrections. In every row the essay takes one actor only and says they are headed in one direction only. That’s suspicious on its own. Actual history is far, far more complex and interesting than this binary “good guy bad guy” perspective, with many actors moving around in many directions.

Betamax itself was decided by a Court that then flipped, they reversed on their own first vote. The DVD Forum that is said to have banned recording is who published the recordable standard. Record scratch? The broadcast flag was proposed by one arm of the government and then it was vacated by another arm of that same government. Cable was forced open by statute in 1996, and then it was held open by the FCC in 2003 and 2007, and then the D.C. Circuit vacated those FCC rules in 2013, with Congress ending the integration ban in 2014. That’s real history. Writing about the world you wish existed instead of the one we’re in is a different sort of skill.

None of the history lands as a simple and single will (bad guy) because the political landscape is a human contest. Imagine a soccer field with five teams on it and three goals. His essay writes team EFF’s view of the contest as being the whole thing, because it’s method to generate followers (e.g. subscribers, patrons).

This is where the participant versus observer framing problem returns. Doctorow is fighting for a side in the contest, calling people to adopt his view, by profession and by conviction. When a witness who fought the fight writes the history of the fight, the temptation is to record intent and defeats how it would serve one side. It’s natural to lobbyists, as that’s how they lobby. The historian is trained to watch for this exact thing, to seek a sense of balance.

What would mean balance here? It seems there’s a matter of dates. A mandate that was attempted in 2003 and vacated in 2005 reads obviously as the defeat of that mandate. There was a statute that preserved fair use in subsection (c)(1) and wrote a 1985 copy-protection scheme into subsection (k). Both of those belong in the account of VCR history.

Note what this simple observation gives the reader that a one-sided account did not. The essay tells us we are being pushed into a locked room. However, reading the artifacts tells us there were a whole bunch of big doors being opened: Carterfone in 1968 (hooray!), Section 629 in 1996, the CableCARD order and its encoding caps in 2003, the flag vacated in 2005, the integration ban in 2007. Each one of those is evidence of a regulator or a court forcing a device open over the objection of the incumbent. That’s not in the essay from the lobbyist who wants a world where the VCR can be built again. The archive already contains what we’re being told was taken away. But it’s still there.

His essay had a better place to go. Anti-circumvention law constrained formats that came after the VCR, and the industry drove us into that shit world within months of losing in court. That loss of freedom is well documented, and it is maddening, and should point us all at the remedy. While a forty-year grudge makes for excited mythology-telling to rabble-rouse (fund the EFF?) it’s not really what happened. I get the temptation to invent a battle of the gods with monsters and heroes and all that, but to be a historian is to dispense with the myths and tell the human story.

Doctorow’s memory of these years is a source for an archive, especially to show how the EFF thinks and operates. Historians are trained for a specific reason, to test the integrity of information, if not also respond and remediate the breaches. The archive as a whole usually shows something duller and more durable than any single source does: a licensing office, a standards body, a treaty annex, and similar giving us some options to work with, as boring as they are. The discipline of a historian treats Doctorow’s writing as just one source, and works to restore the whole picture based on facts, starting with a date.